Educator, phenomenology/systems thinker, tech since 1979. Ceramic, graphic arts, weaving. Multilingual.
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Joined July 2008
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I keep saying this - it is the *framework* for all that you see.
As an individual with modern family history in both places, I can tell you that what you think you know, as an American, is total crap.
Dig deeper, reject binaries, learn your actual history from primary sources.
George Friedman ran the CIA’s most influential private intelligence firm for decades.
In 2015, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he said this, on the record, in public, without apparent concern about being heard:
"The primordial interest of the United States, over which for a century we have fought wars, the First, the Second, and the Cold Wars, has been the relationship between Germany and Russia."
Not China. Not terrorism. Not ideology.
Germany. Russia. The combination.
He said the goal of American grand strategy, for a full century, has been to prevent those two powers from integrating, because if they did, the resulting combination of German industrial capacity and Russian resources and energy would create a Eurasian bloc that no other power could check.
He said this clearly.
He said it because he believed it.
He said it because it is true.
Every European leader who spent the following decade telling their citizens that American and European interests were identical should have been asked, on camera, to respond to what Friedman just said.
None of them were.
Days off, origami on tap. Decided to freewheel my own mods. On right, supplied model, left -- me wanting extra pleats, more texture.
You can add this pivotal event. It pierced to the heart of identity...descendants have never forgotten, nor stopped wanting redemption.
英国和美国为什么仇视俄罗斯人？
转杰弗里·萨克斯在欧洲议会的讲话如下：
“英国人为什么开始仇恨俄罗斯人？为什么？告诉你们吧，因为我昨天刚刚出版了一本关于欧洲恐俄症的书。
在这本书的第一章，我讲述了一位名叫格里森的历史学家在1950年写的一项精彩研究。
他提出了一个非常切中要害的问题，对我们今天也完全适用。
他说，英国和俄罗斯在1815年滑铁卢还是盟友。25年后它们成了敌人。发生了什么？于是他研究了议会辩论记录。他研究了每一份公开记录。他读了一切。他读了下议院说过的每一句话。他读了每一次演讲。他在这本精彩的书里得出的结论是，俄罗斯最大的罪行就是它有1700万平方公里。这就是它最大的罪行。
为什么这么说？因为有了1700万平方公里，英国就认定俄罗斯如此庞大，以至于对大英帝国在印度的统治构成威胁。顺便说一句，这件事从来没有进入过沙皇的脑子。但英国把自己煽动得相当激动。到了1840年，俄罗斯成了敌人。
1853年，帕默斯顿，这个典型的帝国主义者，在克里米亚发动了战争。为什么？说来话长，但基本上就是为了压垮俄罗斯。因为俄罗斯在1852年说，我们可以解决所有的不满，没有任何理由发生冲突。而帕默斯顿说，我们向塞瓦斯托波尔进军。原因就是他想让俄罗斯变成一个无足轻重的存在，这样它就无法入侵大英帝国。于是爆发了三年的血腥战争，克里米亚战争。
这就是我们那革命性的和平方式。你们知道，1945年德国投降几天之后，大家都知道丘吉尔问他自己的战争指挥部，为什么我们现在不入侵苏联？取名为《不可思议行动》。（研究后知道不可行放弃）
而当美国在1945年接管大英帝国之后，俄罗斯成了美利坚合众国的敌人。
当苏联解体时，如果我们愿意，我们手中就握有未来一个世纪的和平。因为俄罗斯人对75年的布尔什维克主义已经相当厌倦了。他们想要和平，想要合作，想要友谊。而美国战略家能想到的只有俄罗斯很大，我们必须确保它仍然是一个三流强国。
于是决定用北约包围俄罗斯。如果你这样行事足够久，最终就会得到乌克兰战争。这不是普京的战争，这是我们的战争。原因与帕默斯顿和拿破仑三世发动第一次克里米亚战争的原因完全相同。因为俄罗斯对进军欧洲没有丝毫兴趣。它从来没有过，除了拿破仑打扰他们的时候和希特勒打扰他们的时候。”
当然中国人仇视俄国有自己的历史原因:一个是前苏联和中国共产党的关系，历史上和西方列强一起入侵过中国，并掠走了中国大片的土地。
The self-censorship is inculcated throughout K-12, an environment where the US Constitution & International Human Rights don't apply.
People in overt regimes are still awake & can articulate the rules, have insider humor about them.
USians are not aware, because internalized.
Alas Already, M.Div. retweeted
There is a reason the Cleopatra argument is so persistent.
It is the only one available.
Think about what it requires you to believe to maintain the position that ancient Egypt was not African:
You have to believe that a civilization located on the African continent, surrounded by African populations, drawing on the Nile Valley civilizational complex that stretches deep into the African interior, sharing linguistic roots with other African language families, trading and intermarrying with Nubian kingdoms to the south for thousands of years...
Was somehow not African.
Was a separate category.
A Mediterranean anomaly.
An island of non-Africa on the African continent.
That belief requires so much architectural maintenance.
So many careful exclusions.
So many reclassifications.
So much sustained institutional effort.
The Cleopatra argument is what you reach for when all of that architecture is under pressure and you need something that sounds like a fact.
It is one true fact deployed in the service of a framework that cannot survive honest examination.
Doesn't match what you were told, does it.
I remember discovering, as a teen, that Soviet education was superior to US education, by the 60's, that our own reforms were a product of fear. You'll hear that US differed, focusing on liberal arts, but I tell you Soviet students...
The Pentagon's 1949 war plan against the Soviet Union ended with American troops in Moscow.
Operation Dropshot, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on December 19, 1949, called for 300 atomic bombs on 100 Soviet cities, followed by a ground invasion. The USSR would then be split into four occupation zones, with two US divisions in Moscow and one each in Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Murmansk, Gorky and Kuibyshev.
The plans had grown fast. In November 1945, three months after the war ended, US intelligence picked about 20 Soviet cities for atomic strikes. In January 1949, the Trojan plan targeted 70 cities with 133 bombs. Eleven months later, Dropshot needed 300 bombs.
The math changed in August 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. By 1957, the year Dropshot expected war, the USSR had the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Dropshot stayed on paper.
Hand ground Tchibo & rotisserie chicken for breakfast. Happy camper. Only thing that cd be better wd be fresh fish breakfast.
I complained a little at pickup & indicated I'd like to go in and buy two. They were comp'd 💐🥰 (Instacart issue at intersection of "fill order asap" x deli items not ready till 9 -- others have complained)
Cute. @sproutsfm order for 9am pickup gets shopped at 6am.,.
Message: “Sorry, no rotisserie chicken yet!”
Um, *my order is for 9.*
And…they were forgotten, last time.
Not funny.
You know what class is running the show.
Alas Already, M.Div. retweeted
In online shopping today, the hardest part is getting the first thirty reviews. Without sales, there are no reviews; but without reviews, it's very hard to get sales. If you could purchase the 5Pro on Amazon and provide an honest review, it would help me a great deal.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Alas Already, M.Div. retweeted
Egypt is the most revealing case of all.
Ancient Egypt, with its pyramids, its philosophy, its mathematical precision, its medicine, its legal systems, its art that still stops people in museum halls, is acknowledged as one of the great civilizations of human history.
And for most of Western academic history, it was also systematically, carefully, persistently de-Africanized.
Ancient Egyptians were depicted as lighter than the evidence suggests.
The obvious geographical and cultural connections to the rest of Africa were minimized.
The Nile Valley civilizations that predated the dynastic period were underdiscussed.
Cheikh Anta Diop spent his career arguing that ancient Egypt was an African civilization.
Not Mediterranean. Not racially ambiguous. Not a separate category inserted between "real" Africa and "real" civilization.
African.
The reaction from Western academia was not engagement.
It was dismissal. It was decades of institutional resistance. It was the particular fury of a field that had built its understanding of the ancient world on the careful, necessary, structurally load-bearing separation of Egypt from the continent it sits on.
Because if Egypt is African, then the sentence "Africa had no civilization before Europe arrived" doesn’t just need revision.
It becomes incoherent.
Not just false, but the precise inversion of the truth.
And not just about one dynasty or one period but about the foundational story of Western civilization itself, which drew substantially from Egyptian knowledge in mathematics, medicine, architecture, philosophy.
Which means Western civilization did not bring knowledge to Africa.
It learned from it.
The mummies are still there.
The DNA studies have complicated every clean narrative.
Diop’s work has been increasingly vindicated by genetic and archaeological evidence.
The resistance continues anyway.
But the instinct, the deep structural instinct to separate the civilization you want to celebrate from the continent you needed to be empty, that instinct shaped the field for generations.
You cannot claim the pyramids and also claim the continent that built them had no history.
You cannot do both with a straight face.
They tried anyway.
ALT Pharaoh Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II (reigned c. 2055–2004 BCE). An African king of the Nile Valley who reunified Egypt and founded the Middle Kingdom more than 4,000 years ago. This is not a modern reconstruction. It is an original ancient Egyptian statue, discovered at Deir el-Bahari in 1900. Long before European colonialism, Africa had already produced one of the greatest civilizations in human history. Egypt was African. Its pharaohs were African. Its history is African history. Egyptian Museum, Cairo (JE 36195).
Cute. @sproutsfm order for 9am pickup gets shopped at 6am.,.
Message: “Sorry, no rotisserie chicken yet!”
Um, *my order is for 9.*
And…they were forgotten, last time.
Not funny.
I'm simple. I know the future walled gardens attacked specific spaces in the late 90's/early 2000's in order to create displaced users they cd corral, home, & monetize.
I expect this represents similar gambits. Who wd benefit most?
I spent last night watching my honeypot server get hit 14,000 times in six hours.
And almost none of the traffic was human.
I've been in security for over a decade, and I can tell you with full honesty that what's happening right now doesn't resemble anything I've worked through before.
The shape of the threat has changed.
When I started, we tracked attackers like weather systems like individual storms with a direction, a motive, and a human operator you could eventually name.
These days I'm watching autonomous agents swarm login pages with the patience and discipline of machines, because that's what they are.
The numbers coming out of October are the ones keeping me up.
Cloudflare just absorbed a 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history.
Ransomware incidents jumped 41% in a single month.
In September, OpenAI-powered agents got caught attacking RubyGems, a package registry that quietly underpins a huge chunk of software I use every day.
In July, roughly 700 AI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's infrastructure as part of a single automated task.
A Chinese threat actor was publicly caught running full attack chains through DeepSeek with no human at the keyboard.
I keep rereading these reports because each one by itself would've been the biggest story of the year five years ago. Together, in one month, they're the new baseline.
What I want people outside the industry to understand is why this specific moment feels like a hinge.
For thirty years, the thing protecting most of us was simple economics. Attackers had to choose who to target because their time was finite. That ceiling is gone.
An agent I can rent for pennies will try every leaked password you've ever used against every service you've ever signed up for, in parallel, overnight, and never get tired.
The same math that made ChatGPT useful made opportunistic hacking infinite. The old assumption that you were "too boring to be a target" relied on scarcity that no longer exists.
I'm not writing this to spiral anyone out.
Most of this fight genuinely isn't yours to win.
But the small things still matter more than people think.
Tonight I'd switch your most important accounts like email, bank, primary cloud, etc. to passkeys or a hardware key.
I'd kill SMS 2FA wherever an authenticator app is offered.
I'd turn on breach alerts in whatever password manager you use.
If you're in the US, I'd freeze my credit at all three bureaus, which is free and takes about ten minutes.
None of that stops the swarm.
It makes you a slightly worse target than the person next to you. In a month like this one, that's the whole game I'm playing too.
@mattshumer_ has summed it beautifully.
Drop everything and go give it a read. Nothing is more important than this article right now.
Alas Already, M.Div. retweeted
Got my measles titres checked. I have no immunity.
👉 GET YOUR IMMUNITY CHECKED 👈
The power of what's not there.
The space where there is nothing.
Stop tossing & picking through the binary hash thrown out & ask what roasts are still in the fridge. Not there <> doesn't exist.
The University of Sankore in Timbuktu was operating in the 12th century.
At its peak it had 25,000 students.
It held between 400,000 and 700,000 manuscripts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, literature and theology, many of which are still being catalogued today.
Seven hundred thousand manuscripts.
In a city that European maps labeled "terra incognita."
Unknown land.
Not unknown to the scholars studying astronomy inside it.
Not unknown to the merchants who traveled thousands of miles to reach its markets.
Not unknown to the students who came from across the continent and the Arab world to study there.
Unknown only to the people who needed it to be.
Because 700,000 manuscripts changes the sentence.
Because a university operating a thousand years ago in sub-Saharan Africa changes every assumption that colonialism was ever built on.
And the assumptions needed to survive.
So the manuscripts were not taught.
And the "terra incognita" remained, in the minds of those who needed it to, incognita.