Franschhoek, South Africa
Joined July 2009
- Tweets19.4K
- Following4.1K
- Followers1.3K
- Likes15.9K
Joy Summers retweeted
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.
Joy Summers retweeted
The anger you feel toward the world is revealing something about yourself.
Most people see anger as something purely negative.
An emotion to suppress.
A weakness to overcome.
But Dr Steiner described anger as a force that plays an essential role in the development of human individuality.
Why?
Because before the human being can become truly free, he first has to develop a strong sense of himself.
And anger helps to awaken this consciousness.
Imagine witnessing an injustice.
Something within you rises in opposition.
You feel that what is happening should not be happening.
In this resistance, your individuality begins to assert itself against the external world.
Before we develop independent judgment, such resistance can help prevent us from becoming passive and dependent upon the world around us.
Anger can awaken self-consciousness.
But it cannot be the final stage.
The person who is ruled by anger believes himself strong.
Yet a single insult can destroy his peace.
A disagreement can control his mood.
He believes he is asserting his individuality, while in reality he is surrendering control of it.
His inner life has become dependent upon the very external influences he believes himself to be resisting.
This is why anger is a force that must undergo transformation.
The goal is not to destroy the strength that anger awakens.
Nor is it to suppress every emotion and become indifferent to injustice.
The task is to transform the forces of anger into conscious strength, understanding, and Love.
When someone wrongs you, the first impulse may be retaliation.
But between the arising of an emotion and the decision to act lies the possibility of freedom.
You can observe the anger without immediately obeying it.
You can understand its cause without allowing it to determine your actions.
And eventually, you become capable of confronting wrongdoing without hatred.
The strength remains.
But the unconscious compulsion disappears.
A strong individuality is not one that reacts powerfully to everything around it, but one that can determine its actions consciously.
Anger can help awaken the I.
But only through its transformation can the I become increasingly free.
Joy Summers retweeted
This man is a genius messenger. He a boils down the extent of White House corruption into easily digestible bites. His economy of language is extraordinary.
We are past the point of political disagreement. We are witnessing a catastrophic collision between unchecked narcissism and obvious neurological decay. It is the most dangerous intersection in American history: a man with the absolute power of the Presidency and the absolute cognitive failure of a person no longer tethered to reality.
Joy Summers retweeted
When the magic of the cello meets the soulful voice of Teddy Swims, music becomes something truly special.
Joy Summers retweeted
No matter how abstract or conceptual a photograph becomes, it still makes a quiet but powerful claim: this existed. This existed in front of a real human with a camera and lens. Light touched it. Time passed. A moment occurred.... Read more: richardbernabe.substack.com/…
Joy Summers retweeted
When the editor of the world’s most prestigious medical journal concluded that much of the clinical research it published could no longer be trusted, the problem was no longer abstract.
Marcia Angell, a pathologist who joined the New England Journal of Medicine staff in 1979, rose to executive editor and then served as interim editor-in-chief from 1999 to June 2000. She stepped down after more than two decades at the journal, formally to write a book. The deeper context was her growing conviction, formed from years of editing manuscripts, that pharmaceutical industry influence had compromised the independence of clinical research. She and previous editors had enforced strict conflict-of-interest rules, yet industry-sponsored studies continued to arrive with designs, analyses, and selective reporting that favored the sponsor’s product. Negative results were often suppressed, side effects minimized, and “academic” authors frequently carried undisclosed financial ties.
In a widely cited 2009 New York Review of Books essay, Angell wrote the line that crystallized her position: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” She described an industry that had shifted from discovering useful drugs toward marketing, co-opting academic medical centers, researchers, and even the journals that were supposed to serve as independent arbiters. Her 2000 editorial “Is Academic Medicine for Sale?” and later book The Truth About the Drug Companies expanded the critique, arguing that commercial priorities systematically distorted what research was done, how it was conducted, and what reached publication.
Angell’s departure marked the end of an era of tighter editorial resistance to industry influence at the NEJM. Her public statements afterward made clear that she viewed the problem as systemic rather than isolated: once the bulk of clinical research depended on commercial funding, journals could no longer function as reliable filters of medical evidence.
Joy Summers retweeted
This is truly unbelievable. What is going on?
JUST IN | City Power has confirmed that the central substation in Marshalltown has caught fire once again. This would the be fourth fire in two months. Emergency services have been spotted attending to the scene, which residents having reported seeing smoke from. @Sowetan1981
Joy Summers retweeted
I spent 15+ years investigating Russian secret services and organized crime. I know people who served with Putin in the KGB and sat in on his deals with St. Petersburg crime bosses. So let me explain the "diesel deal" the way they would — in gangster slang. Because that's the language Putin actually thinks in.
First, the facts.
Putin just raised Russia's 2027 military budget by 27% to a record 17.1 trillion rubles — about $203 billion. Who budgets that kind of money for a war they're about to end?
The FT reported yesterday that Western intelligence has warned the heads of European defense companies that Russia is plotting to assassinate them.
Since September, Tusk, Macron and the intelligence services of Poland, Czechia, Latvia, Belgium, France and Denmark have all warned that Russian hybrid attacks — including drone and missile strikes — will intensify in the coming months.
None of this looks like a country preparing for peace.
Who actually benefits?
🇺🇸 What the US gets: Every serious analysis I've read says the announced volumes won't move American diesel prices. This is a PR move for Trump before the midterms — a story about prices that will "very, very soon" come down once his friend Vladimir's tankers reach US shores, plus the chance to claim he ended another war (I've lost count). The only US "benefit" is Trump's rating.
🇷🇺 What Russia gets: billions of dollars to keep funding its genocidal war against Ukrainians. Sanctions relief. A demonstration of power to the rest of the world. A deeper rift between the US and its European allies. And a real chance to disrupt US weapons and intelligence flowing to Ukraine.
So what is Putin's actual goal?
Trump's disapproval is at record highs and polls show his party will most likely loose midterm elections. In less than a month his power will be badly weakened. Why would Putin sign a long-term peace deal with a lame duck whose signature will soon be scrutinized at best and annulled at worst?
He wouldn't. And here's where the slang comes in.
In the eyes of Putin and his siloviki, Trump is a baryga — a greedy, unscrupulous businessman who puts profit above law and principle. Gangsters despise barygas, but they love using them. The goal is always to turn a baryga into a lokh — a mark, an outsider who doesn't understand the rules of the underworld and gets played to serve the gang's interests.
By signing the diesel deal, Putin plays two scenarios at once:
A) The deal miraculously helps his lokh keep power — great.
B) The deal changes nothing, the baryga loses the midterms — but by then it has already done its job: inflamed US political tensions and acted as arson inside the American system.
Putin knows that the majority of Americans support Ukraine. He knows that by signing, Trump draws unprecedented criticism, including from his own party. And he knows a baryga won't give up power easily, because he will have to answer for everything he did in office — this deal included. That's classic gangster/secret-service method: tie a man to your organization, make him a partner in your crimes, so he can't walk away.
Pouring more oil — diesel, in this case — onto the most explosive fault lines of American politics, raising the stakes for Trump and pushing him past the point of no return serves Putin far better than a peace deal that could be voided within months.
Remember: Putin's goal in the West is chaos, not peace.
Joy Summers retweeted
Black magic begins with a change in the soul.
Not with symbols, rituals, or esoteric theatrics —
but with the conscious infliction of suffering combined with pleasure in that suffering.
Dr Steiner called this the “ABC of black magic.”
Most occult dabblers are harmless dilettantes.
They play with ceremonies and imagery without touching real spiritual forces.
The true threshold is crossed when a human being deliberately causes pain because the suffering itself gives him satisfaction.
Why is this so spiritually serious?
Because pain is not just physical.
It is an astral event — a disturbance in the inner life of a being.
And when someone begins to enjoy producing that disturbance, his own astral nature is reshaped.
Human evolution moves upward through the I:
instinct becomes conscious action,
desire becomes purified,
self-interest becomes Love,
and the astral body is transformed toward Spirit Self.
Cruelty reverses this movement.
The I no longer ennobles the astral body — it trains it to experience destruction as pleasure.
Violence alone is not black magic.
A surgeon may cut to save a life.
A person may harm another through ignorance, rage, or weakness.
These carry karmic weight — but they are not occult thresholds.
The threshold is this:
"I know I am causing suffering.
I want the suffering.
And the suffering gives me pleasure."
At that moment, cruelty becomes a practice.
And what we practice becomes part of what we are.
After death, the human being encounters his deeds from the other side.
The suffering we caused becomes something we must experience — not as punishment, but because the boundary between “my pain” and “your pain” no longer exists.
You are not simply acting on another being.
You are inscribing the deed into yourself.
Human evolution aims toward individuality that can consciously experience the inner reality of others.
Compassion is the beginning of a future faculty.
Cruelty trains the soul to meet another’s suffering and say: “Give me more.”
The danger is not possession by an external evil power.
It is that through countless acts of will, you build within yourself something that resonates with destructive spiritual forces.
That is the abyss — not “hell,” but separation from the evolutionary direction humanity is meant to follow.
“Only when a man begins to practice the ABC of black magic is he on the dangerous path to the abyss.”
Watch what gives you pleasure.
Watch what your will repeatedly chooses.
Watch what happens in you when another being suffers.
Because spiritual development is not measured by how much esoteric knowledge you accumulate —
but by what your soul is learning to love.
Joy Summers retweeted
The easiest person to deceive is the one who has never learned how they arrive at truth.
Every day, thousands of voices compete to tell you what is true.
On social media, endless accounts promise success, beauty, health, and meaning.
Religion is surrounded by interpretations and inherited claims.
Even the people around you speak in half‑truths — incomplete, distorted, or unconsciously false.
Some lies are intentional.
Others come from money, tradition, dogma, bias, or simple repetition of ideas never examined.
So we face a real problem:
How do you actually know what is true?
We have more books, experts, podcasts and posts than any civilization in history.
But more information does not bring you closer to truth.
It makes the ability to distinguish truth from error more essential than ever.
Instead of telling you what to believe,
Dr Steiner began with a deeper question:
How does a human being come to knowledge?
Perception + Thinking → Knowledge
But most people corrupt this process without noticing.
Imagine you message someone.
Four hours pass.
They've been online, but they haven't answered.
What did you actually perceive?
No response.
Your mind immediately adds:
"They're ignoring me."
"They're angry."
"They don't respect me."
You’ve turned an observation into a conclusion —
without noticing the step in between.
You think you are experiencing reality.
In truth, you are experiencing:
Perception + your own unconscious addition.
This happens constantly.
Someone criticizes you → “They’re jealous.”
An expert speaks → “It must be true.”
A post confirms your belief → “Finally, someone gets it.”
We confuse what is given with what we have added.
So how do you strengthen your capacity for truth?
1. Observe before judging.
Separate the percept from your interpretation.
2. Strengthen concentration.
Hold your thinking on one object instead of drifting through associations.
3. Observe your own thinking.
Notice how one thought produces the next.
4. Suspend sympathy and antipathy.
A claim isn’t true because you like it — nor false because you dislike it.
5. Seek the concept that belongs to the percept.
Think through the relationships contained in what you observed.
6. Test your judgment against reality.
If experience contradicts your conclusion, change the conclusion.
You begin to see how much of your “thinking” was never truly yours.
The goal is to produce judgments you have consciously penetrated.
The harder it becomes for unconscious assumptions, desires, and group opinion to determine your thinking, the harder it becomes for others to govern you through them.
A person who cannot govern their own thinking can be governed through it.
Learning how to know is not an intellectual exercise.
It is part of learning how to become free.
Joy Summers retweeted
A government that doesn’t know what it believes will be buffeted by events and achieve little.
Britain has been heading in the wrong direction because governments keep treating symptoms rather than causes - often trying to correct problems they themselves created.
The Right Way is the Conservative answer to this challenge.
Read it here 👇
Joy Summers retweeted
Not a miracle. It was awe-inspiring heroism and courage displayed during the attempt to hijack and crash Flydubai flight FZ1073 traveling from Dubai to Tel Aviv, Israel.
Hero: pilot and Indian national Smit Machchhar, who was attacked with a knife by his Omani co-pilot. While fighting his attacker, he was able to notify the crew and passengers (possibly by hitting the PA button). Lying in a pool of his own blood and still fighting, he was able to allow access to the cockpit while the plane was taking a violent nosedive, losing 17,000 to 18,000 feet in about two minutes. He fought like a lion and deserves so much respect and honor. @IndiaToday @ndtv @gauravcsawant @ShivAroor
Heroes: the ordinary Israeli citizens who did not hesitate a second and jumped to assist the crew in fighting their way into the cockpit and subduing the co-pilot. This level of heroism and courage cannot be dismissed. People often miss that Israel has a citizen defense force made up of doctors, artists, college students, grandparents, business owners who all serve to defend their homes and nation against attacks by other nations, terrorist armies, and decentralized terror campaigns.
Heroes: the flight crew who joined the passengers to get into the cockpit, subdue the attacker, and manage the passengers and chaos throughout the cabin.
Heroes: off-duty pilots on board who were able to get the plane under control and safely land it in Saudi Arabia.
It takes a village/tribe/community to keep each other safe, with people willing to fight evil when it comes to their doorstep. I have huge respect for all involved in this event.
NEW VIDEO: A passenger aboard the Flydubai flight describes the terrifying moments the plane suddenly plunged as an attack unfolded inside the cockpit.
He recounts the chaos as passengers realized something was seriously wrong and details the effort to reach the cockpit and regain control of the aircraft.
Officials say one pilot stabbed the other and the suspect appeared to try to crash the Tel Aviv-bound plane, which was carrying mostly Israeli passengers.
Another crew member ultimately stabilized the aircraft before it made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.
Joy Summers retweeted
Starship transiting the Sun this morning during Flight 14 — prior to this morning's mission, this has never been captured before with the world's largest and most powerful rocket.
I’ve ached over this shot for years, mainly for two reasons: what does methane exhaust look like silhouetted against the Sun, and how violent are the acoustic energy waves from 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster?
Well...now we have an answer.
📸 - @NASASpaceflight
Joy Summers retweeted
48%.
That is the effective tax burden on someone earning R30,000 a month in South Africa. Same rate as someone earning R432,000 a month in a top European country.
The numbers sound wrong. They are not.
Where the 48% comes from.
PAYE is what people see on the payslip. It is not the whole picture.
VAT - 15% on almost everything. Every swipe. Every fill-up. Most people do not think of VAT as a tax. It is the largest single source of government revenue after income tax.
Fuel levy - built into every litre. Petrol at R26.92 inland includes roughly R3.80 in fuel levy and Road Accident Fund levy. That is a tax on getting to work.
Then there are the charges that look like fees but function like taxes. E-tolls. Municipal surcharges. Electricity tariffs with embedded levies.
Add the visible and the invisible - you get 48%.
The key difference with Europe.
In the Netherlands. In Denmark. In Germany. High taxes come with a social contract.
Free tertiary education. Universal healthcare that does not require medical aid. Childcare subsidies. Paid parental leave that covers an actual year. Robust unemployment support.
You pay 45%. And you get services back.
In South Africa you pay 48%. And then you pay again - privately.
Medical aid because public healthcare is collapsed. Security because policing is broken. Private schools because public education cannot be trusted. Solar panels or a generator because Eskom cannot guarantee power. Water tanks because the municipality cannot guarantee supply.
The middle-class earner pays twice. Once in tax. Once in escape.
Who actually pays.
There are about 8.3 million personal income taxpayers in South Africa. A relatively small slice of the population. The top earners supply most of the revenue.
Corporations optimise. The wealthy structure. Offshore trusts. Semigration. Emigration. The R30,000 earner cannot escape - it comes out before they see the money.
The base is narrow. The burden is concentrated. The services are not.
Why it accumulated this way.
No one designed this system. It grew.
Income tax funds the general budget. VAT funds the general budget. Fuel levy funds roads and the general budget. Each mechanism made sense when it was introduced. Each one expanded quietly.
Raising income tax visibly upsets people. Raising VAT is less visible - it is embedded in the price. Raising fuel levy is buried in the pump price. Municipal charges are non-negotiable.
The objective was not fairness to the middle class. It was revenue extraction with minimum political friction.
The uncomfortable part.
This is not a policy failure. It is a policy success. The system extracts efficiently. It offends quietly. And the people who carry it do not have the means to opt out.
The question is not whether 48% is too high.
It is how long the R30,000 earner can pay twice - once in tax and once in escape - before something breaks.
Joy Summers retweeted
I was invited to address the @UN Security Council this afternoon to discuss the unprecedented threat posed by uncontrolled frontier AI agents.
Humanity has summoned the courage and wisdom to manage catastrophic risks before. This is one of those moments, far bigger than any personal, commercial, or national interest. The choices we make about this technology today will shape generations to come. We must act now.
Joy Summers retweeted
A teenager goes through one of the greatest transformations of their life completely unguided.
Puberty isn’t just biological maturity.
It’s a threshold in the life of the soul.
The child who once lived primarily through imitation, play, and outward experience suddenly meets an inner world filled with desire, emotion, comparison.
Dr Steiner calls this a “second birth.”
And it can be violent.
Before puberty, the astral body is still protected.
Then the threshold arrives.
Suddenly:
You feel how others see you.
You start questioning your parents.
You wonder who you're supposed to become.
The child-self dissolves.
The adult-self hasn't arrived.
You hang between worlds.
Ancient cultures understood this.
Across traditions, the passage into adulthood was surrounded by elders, stories, rituals, trials, symbols.
The young weren't expected to survive the transformation alone — they were given meaning.
They were told:
“You are entering a new world.”
“You will face difficulty.”
“You are responsible for something larger than yourself.”
Modern society gives the biological transformation without the symbolic framework.
Puberty arrives.
But where are the elders?
Where are the trials?
Where is the mythology?
Instead, the adolescent receives:
Social media.
Comparison.
Pornography.
Identity confusion.
The inner world explodes open —
and there is no container.
Adolescence becomes a lion’s den without a spear.
The lion is the awakened astral life.
The den is the modern world.
The spear is initiation.
And the young person fights alone.
Modern culture encourages constant inwardness:
“Who am I?”
“How do I feel?”
“What is wrong with me?”
Endless self-analysis becomes another prison.
The young need activity, art, relationships, challenge — not premature intellectualization of every inner movement.
They need to do, not only to analyze.
To strengthen the will.
To meet beauty.
To fail and try again.
To be guided.
Because the emerging adult feels as though he is losing himself:
Searching.
Fearing.
Inventing.
Destroying.
And this explains something visible today:
Physical adulthood happens automatically.
Inner adulthood does not.
Someone can be 25, 30, 35 — still reacting through adolescent patterns: seeking validation, avoiding responsibility, living through comparison, ruled by impulses.
The body matured.
The soul did not.
The answer is responsibility.
If traditional initiation has disappeared, then conscious self-initiation becomes necessary.
Seek mentors.
Study deeply.
Make art.
Strengthen the will.
Join meaningful communities.
Serve something beyond yourself.
Society won’t make you an adult.
You must participate in your own becoming.
Puberty opens the gate.
Walking through it is only the beginning.
The old world gave the young a rite of passage.
The modern world gives smartphones.
Our task is to rebuild the missing bridge — not by copying ancient rituals, but by recovering what they knew:
A human being entering a new stage of life needs meaning, challenge, guidance.
Without it, we shouldn't be surprised when millions reach adulthood without ever truly becoming adults.
