The blur and distortion match the "groupspeech" of the world I live in which is blurred and distorted along with any right of reply. The framing is also intentional to reflect the marginalisation of the common "man".

Every child born is an equal inheritor of Planet Earth whatever "they" try to tell you to the contrary to shape and mould you to stop you from being all you can be, The freedom to hold and express own's own individual thoughts is a core part of one's identity. Tame that en masse and you clip the wings of the masses.

© slight clutter photography

I prefer this one in its original size. A little more detail in the wings.

digital art

this holiday neon was hanging in the window of a clothing store. i had to clone out bits of sleeves and stuff before adding green background and a sparkle filter.

westfield center

san francisco, california

Kayaking Bodega Bay with Amy yesterday. Found that if we got up to speed and stopped paddling 50 feet in advance and then glided into position, the shorebirds let you get very close (like pelicans). But at about 20 feet, a viral meme seems to reverberate through the crowd very quickly, and the Marbled Godwits all take off suddenly, en masse. I wondered what it must be like to live in their tribe, snacking from the marsh, living with the weather and the tides and the groupthink.

People often ask me what photographers I am most impressed by or inspired by. I have a weird answer in that I look at paintings more than photography. Don't get me wrong, there are hundreds of great photographers I admire, but I try not to look TOO much at their work in case I accidentally fall into a groupthink. Anyway, one of my favorite painters is Monet of course. We went to visit his home in Giverny, France, where I took this photo of his gardens and lily pads.

Kayaking Bodega Bay with Amy yesterday. Found that if we got up to speed and stopped paddling 50 feet in advance and then glided into position, the shorebirds let you get very close (like pelicans). But at about 20 feet, a viral meme seems to reverberate through the crowd very quickly, and the Marbled Godwits all take off suddenly, en masse. I wondered what it must be like to live in their tribe, snacking from the marsh, living with the weather and the tides and the groupthink.

In a world that increasingly demands thought, and expression orthodoxy by someone else's rules, we have to find a way to be true to ourselves, and reject groupthink, and conformity. Rise above the mediocrity of sameness. Be recognized for your true character. Stand strong. Stand tall. Even if you stand alone.

Earlier this week I was really upset over one particular situation. Let's say I was just trying to suggest a better solution, so all of us wouldn't look tone-deaf to what's happening and might happen. And I read that some people out there suggested the same thing and it was accepted where they are, so I knew this solution is very easy and somewhat common.

But...

No one supported it.

I was just being that one freak who always complains and no one backed up my decision. No one said "she's right, I'm gonna do the same thing". Everyone was just silent except for some people who said they don't like my choice of words (fair enough, my wording was bad) or that it's just nothing important. Even when I tried to apologize and exposed my weak point to explain why am I trying to make some change here and not anywhere else, no one said anything, though actually it was a cry for help.

I was so upset, I lied down at evening to cry, but when I finished crying, I was so exhausted, I couldn't get up at all, even to turn off the lights. Was the situation that much important? Of course, it wasn't! But I hate when I know that I'm doing the right thing, but I am the only one who thinks that way, and everybody else thinks it's just useless or not important or won't change anything or not worth the effort. I'm so tired of being the only restless troublemaker warrior in the field. There is safety in numbers, I just needed one person, just one - anyone! - to support my suggestion by joining me.

But no one did.

And it's always like that, whenever I go, over and over again, I'm always feeling like I'm the only person who really cares about something, while everbody else just doing their thing without paying much attention to others. How many times I asked people to do something just to hear that it's none of their business? It happened even when it was about helping a friend and the help in question was just to tell the other friend of theirs some important information. How many times I asked people to do something, but everybody was like "nah, it's not important"? Or worse, "no one owes nothing to nobody" (in the situation where "no one" and "nobody" in question were friends, or at least "nobody" thought so). Well, if everyone will live like that, the world will be a pretty shit place.

So I thought - whatever, this week's situation is dumb, it wasn't worth my tears, but there's one thing I know for sure. I don't want to turn into that stone-like people I see everywhere, who can't bring themselves to do even a slightest change, who just keep to pretend they see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

view large -> flkr.me/full/8201216603

In God We Trust…buhahaha!

The cryptocracy (illuminati) are manipulating the minds of the masses. They use Revelation of the Method to program the group mind—the collective consciousness. Indeed, humanity must be prepared for the New Luciferian Age. They initiate you into group think—mass formation psychosis. It is a rite of passage in which you acceptance their plans for humanity. Welcome to the group! They use open and subliminal messages in order to condition society. They use their esoteric knowledge (the so-called deep secrets of Satan; Revelation 2:24 NIV) to move you toward their goals. They push society into every nook and cranny of immorality and filth. In the end this immorality dehumanizes society, thus breaking it down. They have dehumanized and killed millions of the unborn. In Canada they have been pushing Medically Assisted Suicides for ever expanding reasons, as they continually decrease the legal age and time limits. The value of life continually decreases. That’s why, when speaking about the (soon coming) Tribulation Period, the Bible says: “I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God.”

The transhumanist tiptoe, the luciferian tiptoe—both will come to fruition under the Antichrist. You will be able to become a super human (a god) when transhumanism is normalized and openly accepted. You will be able to openly live out your lusts when luciferianism is normalized and openly practiced. At that time ritualistic orgies, rape, and human sacrifice will be done out in the public square.

Revelation 9:21 “Furthermore, they did not repent of their murder, sorcery, sexual immorality, and theft.”

Many people will take the Mark of the Beast (like many took the jab), because they have been demoralized. This ritualistic programming leads the public down a predetermined road, with a predetermined outcome; this not only dehumanizes us, but it also demoralizes us. Demoralized people end up being weak cowards. These people try to stay center of the road, as the road moves farther and farther down the road of depravity. This means: center also moves farther down the road—dragging you along with it. These people try to be virtuously nonjudgmental, yet they are immoral. They won’t stand up and speak for the truth, because they might get called a bad name. They don’t want to sacrifice their comfort or reputation to fight for the truth.

James 4:17 “So then, if we do not do the good we know we should do, we are guilty of sin.”

All such people have been unknowingly programmed into these symbolic ritual ceremonies. Yes, indeed! Satan, through the esoteric cryptocracy, has planted his seed, and his harvest is soon ripe.

Matthew 13:25 “But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed WEEDS among the wheat, and went away.”

“We can differentiate between types of initiations in two ways: types and functions.”

This is one of the reasons for/functions of initiations:

“It reveals a world open to the trans-human, a world that, in our philosophical terminology, we should call transcendental.” (Wikipedia: Initiation; read what it says under the subtitle: Psychological)

One day you will be initiated (baptized) into transhumanism (the Beast—666).

When Jesus Christ returns, He will say, “Collect the WEEDS and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.”

BTW Covid was an initiation into the Great Reset, and the Great Reset (Build Back Better) is a transitioning into the New World Order—2030: you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy (Just think: a nuclear war would fast track their Great Reset agenda). Do you see how covid has charged society thus far? The authoritarian tiptoe! Look at what’s currently happening in China. Do you get it? Do you choose to see it, or do you turn a blind eye and willfully fall into the trap of ritualistic cognitive dissonance (evil)?

Evil gains more of a foothold as wickedness increases, thus normalizing it.

Truth and freedom go hand in hand: if you lose one, you lose the other.

Authoritarianism thrives on lies and control.

If we trust in God, we will walk in His light.

John 8:12 “Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, ‘I am the light of the world! The one who follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’”

In God we trust?

Shinjujku, Tokyo, Japan

Nikon D500, Nikkor 24mm f/1.4G AF-S

www.charlesathomas.com

“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”

― Ernest Hemingway

I've been sorting through some old files and decided to finish this one, which I'd given up on months ago. I had apparently decided at the time that it wasn't perfect. The willow tree in the upper left corner had waved around during the long exposure, leaving an indistinct smudge that was pretty much irreparable. In fact, many of the trees in the photo had been moving in the wind. I had blown out the highlights in the park lamps and hadn't properly bracketed another exposure so that I could fix that. There were little light flares all over the place.

But the problem was that I still really liked the photo. Cathedral Park at night is beautiful. I liked the warmth of the streetlights and the way they lit the park's grass. The composition spoke to me. The blue-hour glow gave me a good feeling. I liked the photo when I took it, and I liked it when I tried to post-process it. But as I pixel peeped the file at 150%, I discovered to my horror that it wasn't perfect. So I gave up on it.

Over the past year I've been getting much more selective about the photos I post. At some point, despite being (in my own mind, anyway) a free-thinking and creative person, the Prevailing Attitudes of Modern Digital Landscape Photography had seeped their way into my head. The PAoMDLP names, among other things, the following commandments:

1. Though shalt focus stack so that every pixel of your digital photo is so tack sharp that you can make prints the size of small moons, even though you will never, ever make a print the size of a small moon.

2. If thou findest out that something in your photograph has moved or blurred, thou shalt clone it out immediately.

3. If thou cannot clone out said moving object, thou must delete the file in an expedited manner.

4. Self-expression shalt always play second fiddle to posting perfect photos and retaining a perfect online portfolio.

I could go on and on about the quest for "perfect" sunstars and the expensive lenses that must be used to achieve them, the tragedy of clipped shadows or highlights, the 500px groupthink that has left us with technically perfect but emotionally sterile photographs instead of creative art, the gearheads who claim that an extra 1.7685 stops of light will help them create "better" photographs...but I'll probably save those for a blog post that I started on months ago but still remains only partially written.

Instead, I'm just going to declare that I'm done with the pursuit of perfection, of only posting the most epic, wow-worthy photos. Don't get me wrong, my goal is to do my best to deliver high-quality images. But why hamstring myself by limiting my creativity to a bunch of "rules" that I never agreed to in the first place? Even in the most beautiful settings, I don't see a perfect world, so why would I attempt to convey perfection?

Your thoughts?

Until next time!

detail

Burn the witch

Burn the witch

We know where you live

Red crosses on wooden doors

And if you float you burn

Loose talk around tables

Abandon all reason

Avoid all eye contact

Do not react

Shoot the messengers

This is a low flying panic attack

Sing the song of sixpence that goes

Tap the photo for a larger version (once, even twice).

A Suggested Graduation Present (and an Essay)

I just refer to the programs that can now “write” (or assemble) college term papers as “AI.” I understand there are some other numbers and letters involved, but, as a retired professor, it makes me ill to think about the issue. I saw too many “students” work hard not to work, strive to just get by, to cheat, to rob themselves. I write this essay in May of 2023, a month when much of the world was taken with the ceremonies concerning the royal family in London. The idea of the monarchy also makes me sick. I really like my Mac computer and some programs I can run on it. I really like London. However, I’m glad I wrote all my assigned essays as an undergraduate on a machine like the one you see above, a Royal portable typewriter, a “manual” typewriter. I recently photographed this page from LIFE magazine, an issue dated 5-17-54. I’m also glad I assigned university students writing by the Marquis de Sade making a solid case for getting rid of the king and then God.

As I worked on revisions of my essays in college, I cut my typed-and-marked-up pages with scissors and spread these sections out and moved them around on the bedspread that covered my unmade bed. It wasn’t “cut and paste” like many see it in Word; it was “cut and tape.” I used Liquid Paper on my typos for the final copy, or, that is, for the best version I could create by the due date. (I was being taught process; a “final” version began to seem impossible.)

One of my first essays for English class was a paper advocating total victory for the United States through military might in Vietnam. Only a few weeks before writing this paper I’d told my draft board I was a “conscientious objector,” knowing full well they wouldn’t take my word for this, and I’d only started a process I didn’t want to go through to try to prove that status, and without any kind of pastor or priest to go with me and assert that I was for real, that I was “authentic”; and I was only a few months away from voting for McGovern, the peace candidate, for President. I had to struggle to write a paper advocating total victory in Vietnam through military might; but my professor in my expository writing course made us all take a position contrary to our own on some topic of interest to us and write a paper supporting that position. He wasn’t interested in reading some virtue signaling; he didn’t want to plow through whining; he didn’t want to hear the same old piece of Groupthink, no matter which group it came from. He set up an assignment that forced us to see our position from the opposite side, not to write a paper mocking our opponents in real life, but trying to figure out what their best argument was, thinking that we might grow in the process. He called on me to read my paper to the class. (I experienced quite a leap from my senior year in high school to my freshman year in college. In high school, I felt censored. But in college I was expected to read, to think, to speak, to stand and deliver as an individual. I was praised for working—i.e., reading, thinking, and writing—not expected to repeat some politically correct, secular Nicene Creed.)

My favorite philosophy professor wouldn’t have given a damn about whatever I might have presented as my “identity.” He probably would have wondered what I was yapping about. He was concerned with what I might become. How thrilling for me! I, too, was interested in the same thing. He was clearly on my team. He once gave me (and, yes, I did write “gave me”) the lowest grade I’d ever received on an in-class essay. And, when the shock wore off, when I showed up at his office, uncrumpled the essay I’d stashed in the pocket of my overcoat and asked him, “How can I beat this?,” he laughed hard and told me he wanted to get my attention, and he then gave me three hours of his time on a Friday afternoon. It was, for me, a great conversation, and I walked out of his office with a list of authors I was to go read. And I wanted to take on that task. These dead authors were people I was willing to work to hear. It would never have occurred to me to be so arrogant as to dismiss any of the thinkers my professor had alluded to as somehow beneath contempt because of their gender or race or age or whether, in their private lives, they’d ever stepped over a red line drawn by tight-ass gossips.

I wasn’t reading and thinking and writing for grades. How sad that would have been. I was doing that work for my life. Nothing could have done that work for me. I had to do that myself. I had to make something out of myself. That meant reading, thinking, and writing. That possibility for growth, that responsibility to grow, had nothing to do with making claims for myself that I could then force others to memorize so that I might then force them to tiptoe around me. That possibility, that responsibility, had everything to do with my earning credits through work in the fields of language, literature, philosophy, history, politics, music, art, film, science, etc.

I’m white. I’m male. I’m heterosexual. I’m not “proud” of any of these facts. I’m not embarrassed by them. I’m not ashamed of them. I have no need to apologize to anyone concerning these three facts. But “proud”? No, I think one can only take pride in what one has achieved, and not one of these three conditions of life is an achievement. These three aspects of myself I received in my DNA packet. I did not, however, inherit one ounce of royal blood. But what does royalty mean, especially now in 2023? It’s too hard for me to think of the history of kings and queens without laughing to myself and pitying the many people who so desperately prostrated themselves before or desperately needed that mommy and daddy figure. What did King Charles do that placed him on the throne? Don’t give me silly talk about a “life of service.” I can point to nurses who’ve done more and don’t earn the wages they’re worth. How does one “achieve” royalty? A sperm and egg meet; that’s it. What would that prince among men, Thoreau, say, seated on his pumpkin, about a “king”? Given an anecdote left to us from ancient Greece, it’s not hard to imagine how chilling the response concerning royalty would be today coming from the mouth of Diogenes of Sinope to King Charles III as opposed to Alexander the Great. The three conditions mentioned above—being white, being male, being heterosexual--I merely inherited in my DNA. A college essay is something one works on to build the self. Just because one can purchase an escape from an assignment, an excuse for an essay, and maybe get away with turning it in for credit, doesn’t mean one has accomplished something worth doing. It was Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who said, “If you would go high, use your own legs.”

Bus Stop

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality

The novel has been adabted into a film in 1963 and in 1990.

In august 2017 Warner Bros. announced an all-female remake of Lord of the Flies.

William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, stated that he intended to write a book about what we, today, would refer to as "toxic masculinities," a book he said could not be written of girls.

Chadwick School's Lord of the Flies (Girls' cast)

We're here visiting Your movie posters

This uber-rare Daewoo Video release of two "Max Headroom" episodes, including the premiere (?) "Blipverts" promises "special action" and a "shocking future." The ahead-of-its-time dystopian series ran from 1987 to 1988. Front cover announces the episodes had an "urgent" theatrical release in Korea.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig review – Mohammad Rasoulof’s arresting tale of violence and paranoia in Iran

The exiled director’s story of officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy in his home country may be flawed, but its importance is beyond doubt

Peter Bradshaw

Mohammad Rasoulof is a fugitive Iranian director and dissident wanted by the police in his own country, where he has received a long prison sentence and flogging. Now he has made a brazen and startling picture which, though flawed, does justice to the extraordinary and scarcely believable drama of his own situation and the agony of his homeland.

It’s a movie about Iranian officialdom’s misogyny and theocracy, and sets out to intuit and externalise the inner anguish and psychodrama of its dissenting citizens – in a country where women can be judicially bullied and beaten for refusing to wear the hijab. The Seed of the Sacred Fig begins as a downbeat political and domestic drama in the familiar style of Iranian cinema, and then progressively escalates to something extravagantly crazy and traumatised – like a pueblo shootout by Sergio Leone.

Iman (Missagh Zareh) is an ambitious lawyer who has just been promoted to state investigator – one step short of being a full judge in the revolutionary court. He gets a handsome pay rise and better accommodation for his family: wife (played by actor and anti-hijab protester Soheila Golestani) and two student-age daughters (Setareh Maleki and Mahsa Rostami). But the promotion almost immediately brings disappointment and tension: Iman, a thoughtful and decent man, is stunned to discover that he is expected to rubber-stamp death-penalty judgments without reading the evidence. He is told that he must now be secretive with friends and family who could be threatened and doxed by criminal elements as a way of pressuring him.

Most fatefully of all, he is issued a handgun for his family’s protection, apparently without any training or guidance as to how to use or store it. Naive Iman casually leaves it lying around the house and tucks it in the back of his trousers like a Hollywood gangster. (Are Iranian prosecutors really allowed to be so casual with firearms?)

When the anti-hijab protests explode in Iran, whatever liberal scruples Iman once had are suppressed. He coldly rebukes his daughters over dinner for their rebellious feminist views and accuses them of falling for the propaganda of enemies and foreign elements. “What foreign elements?” his daughters demand – but Iman sullenly refuses to elaborate. (Here is a flaw in the film, surely – in real life, Iman would make some very specific, ugly, paranoid claims.) When his wife and daughters help a terrified young female anti-hijab protester who has been shot in the face by the police, this too must be concealed from Iman. And then, catastrophe – Iman’s gun goes missing and, with increasing resentment and fury, he suspects one of the women of his family has taken it and is lying to him. His toxic outrage bleeds into the fabric of the film itself.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig starts out in the modern world of Instagram reels and YouTube, composed in the complex and oblique style that we have got used to in Iranian cinema in films by Asghar Farhadi: a world of subtle, realist implications that has arguably replaced the fashion in Iranian cinema for the poetic and the sublime. Rasoulof’s mysterious parable Iron Island from 2005 is a good example. It is possible to watch this movie and initially assume (as I admit I did) that the obvious prime suspect for the gun-theft is not a family member and their refusal to mention the probable culprit’s name is a symptom of their unease at having widened the circle of trust to someone outside the family – an indication of their repression and groupthink dysfunction.

But no. The answer lies elsewhere and emerges almost casually as the drama evolves into something almost jaw-dropping. We get a car chase, violence, and a final demonstration of Chekhov’s rule about what happens to a gun produced in act one. And yes, perhaps the point is that The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a film to be finally understood in precisely those enigmatic, poetic and symbolic terms that looked to have been superseded in Iranian cinema – and that the realist depictions of what Iran has become are to be found in the smartphone footage being shared on social media. The film may not be perfect, but its courage – and relevance – are beyond doubt.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig screened at the Cannes film festival, and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 7 February.

B l a c k M a g i c

It seemed like a good Idea at the time. Build a nice little dam in a short deep canyon and provide water and flood protection for nearby farms. That's the kind of stuff US Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps Engineers dream about. So, in the case of the Anchor Dam on Owl Creek in Wyoming, engineering desires and political expediency overrode the geologic reality. Farmers and residents knew that the canyon had caves and fractures. They knew that irrigation ditches in the area some times leaked or that water in creeks and ditches sometimes suddenly disappeared into gaping holes. But their warnings went unheeded. Geologists who studied the project were cautious but downplayed the risks. Some even dismissed the risks all together. They recommended further studies and investigations which were not conducted. Project engineering planning moved "full steam" ahead with most believing the engineers could and would solve any pesky problem the earth could throw at them.

In reality, though, the dam site had several inter-related geologic problems. It was located on the limb of the Anchor Anticline. Folding and faulting of the anticlinal structure resulted in a pattern of fractures and joints that would allow water to penetrate the rocks. The rocks of the area include 4 rock types known for dissolving or dissolutioning in water to form caves and or sinkholes: limestone, dolomite, anhydrite, gypsum. Gypsum layers and anhydrite layers in the Triassic Chugwater Formation and Permian-Triassic Goose Egg formation can dissolve in water and cause collapses called sinkholes. Dolomite and limestone are both carbonates chemically and are well known as cave prone lithologies. In the Anchor area, dolomite is found in stringers in the Pennsylvanian Tensleep sandstone while limestone and dolomite make up much of the Triassic Dinwoody and Permian Phosphoria. The last two inter-finger with stringers of Goose Egg red beds in the area. The limestone and dolomite dissolves along fractures forming cave networks. There were already open fissures and caves formed along the fractures. The area has several prehistoric sinkholes from the dissolutioning of limestone, dolomite, gypsum and anhydrite that were filled in with alluvium. These older sink holes can sometimes still actively take fluid.

The subsurface geological studies that could have better defined the risks listed above were never done. In hind sight, these technical issues should have delayed or canceled the project. They did not, but the project was delayed by political issues that held up construction of the dam from the late 1940s till 1957. The project originally called the Owl Creek project and Embar project was delayed over water rights and US law that requires farms participating in the water from the reclamation projects to be less than 320 acres for 1 individual and 640 for a husband and wife. At high elevation in Wyoming's cold, dry climate, a cattle ranch of that size is not profitable.. Most of the ranches in the area were quite a bit bigger. The Wyoming Congressional Delegation, led by Senator Frank Barrett, came to the rescue. They got a bill passed that exempted the Wyoming landowners from the acreage restrictions. Finally enough ranches joined the irrigation district to justify the project.

In 1957 work commenced on the dam. Problems started right away. The original site had to be abandoned when large fractures and small caves were found in the dolomite inter-beds within the Pennsylvanian Tensleep Sandstone. The dam location was moved some distance upstream to near the head of the canyon. As they dug into the canyon walls at the new site, 2 large caves were discovered. The cavities were filled using more than 2,000 cubic yards of concrete. Several similar cavities were found both on the canyon walls and in the soon to be flooded valley and they too were filled. After three years and a price tag of 3.4 Million Dollars the 208 foot-high dam was completed on Oct. 26, 1960. The project was $116,000 over budget.

The reservoir started to fill the following spring but within a few days it started to drain through previously unknown sinkholes and permeable fractures. The Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) moved to seal off the leaks by pumping cement or building levees around them. This pattern would be repeated over the next few years. Finally after a decade of attempted remediation, the final price tag exceed over 7 Million dollars. Fifty-four sinkholes had been plugged or levied off and yet still the reservoir leaked and held very little water. The BOR gave up! The final score: Earth1, Engineers 0. To this day the reservoir still holds a very little water.

What is amazing to me is how few people know this story. Very few residents of the Bighorn Basin are aware of the reservoir's failure. The campground is gone, picnic area is gone; boat ramp is gone and most of the BOR signs except for those saying "no trespassing" are gone. The lake did partially fill one particularly wet spring when inflow was greater than leak out. A photograph was taken, and of course, became the cover photo for BOR documents about the dam. Though they admitted in private and in internal memos that the project failed, BOR personnel covered the story up in public. The even classified the project as research so they could hide some of the expenditures from prying congressional and public eyes. It worked. A white elephant sits in the Anchor Anticline Canyon and no one seems to see it. A monument to good intentions and government waste!

Ad infinitum, thought can bend ideas themselves as each pensive notion gets so deep that absolutes fall into the abyss. Eventually, our thoughts think thoughts of their own and the sideways spiral of ideology creates its self out of itself. Meaningless jabber or insightful reasoning worth considering as a wicked wisdom of this world. You be the judge.

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Wokeism: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

More and more people are changing; they are being replaced by something alien. On the outside they look the same, yet on the inside they are not. They have been taken over by an alien entity (cult) called wokeism. It’s an ideology that takes over individuals, replacing their original thoughts and values with an alien perspective/dialectic: the oppressed vs the oppressor.

These clones adapt to their surroundings by absorbing the memories and experiences of those they replace. These woke look-alikes adapt their dialectic to the society they want to infiltrate. They use their parasitic dialectic to absorb the identity of the culture, replacing its morals and values. The more they multiply, the more they disrupt the social order and challenge the established norms. Their goal is to undermine traditional Western values and attack the traditional family structure, until democracy and capitalism and the family are destroyed forever.

These body snatchers destroy the individual, thus destroying their individuality. These useful idiot’s are conformists—collectivists. Wokeism (neo-communism) revolves around a collectivist theology, which suppresses one’s own thoughts and opinions. Wokeism is a culture of groupthink, which is null and void of critical thinking and self-reflection. Wokeism destroys individuality, because collectivism prioritizes the goals of the group over the personal rights and freedoms of the individual. Wokeism creates a culture of fear, where individuals are called racists if they don’t conform to the cult’s dogma. Wokeism focuses on subjective experience, emotional validity, and social justice over objective truth. They like to say that truth is relative, yet they hold their ideology as the absolute truth. DEI: Discrimination, Exclusivity, and Inequality.

“They are masters of censoring, blacklisting, scapegoating, deplatforming, ritual humiliation, doxxing, cancel-culture, ostracism, and disbarring.”

“Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—of those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda.”

These woke anti-racists hate the white race, because they hate the West. The West is predominantly white and has a democratic and capitalist system. Communists hate democracy and capitalism! Additionally, these anti-patriarchy feminists want a matriarchy. These sexists hate men and call masculinity toxic, because the West will fall easier if its men are weak and limp-wristed. These pro-woman advocates are anti-woman, because they support replacing biological women with pseudo-women—flipping women’s rights upside down: men in women’s sports, change rooms and washrooms. These subversive agents aren’t pro-life or pro-children. Instead, they pervert the minds of children. Children are very impressionable and their minds are easily molded. The brains of young children are not wired properly to process conversations about alterative ADULT sexual lifestyles. Their brains are not developed properly to process ADULT (+18; XXX; porn; adult entertainment) sexual fetishes like drag queens dancing sexually in front of them. These things teach children to think that sexual predatory behaviour is acceptable and normal. And now they give underaged (immature) teens puberty blockers and sex changes. Can anyone say: the mental, physical, and sexual abuse of children! The woke brainwash their young minds, destroying their innocence in order to control them. Indeed, the children are only pawns. If they can control the minds of the children, they can control the future. As their religious doctrine states: the end justifies the means. Moreover, these anti-bullies love to bully those who disagree with them: “A Regina-based LGBT group Queen City Pride has asked a stadium in the city to cancel an Evangelical Christian event called ‘Come Together’ over the organizing group’s promotion of Biblical views on marriage and sexuality.” “The issue is never the issue. The real issue is the (communist) revolution.”

These anti-police leftists are pro-criminal, and they want high crime and lawlessness. Then, when chaos breaks out, they can start their commie revolution. These anti-poverty activists loot and burn poor neighbourhoods. These anti-slavery crusaders never advocate against the modern-day slave trade. They only use slavery, which has long been abolished in the United States, as an excuse to bash and demoralize their enemy—America. Why? Because these liars don’t care about slavery, they only care about their reparations (money handouts) and their woke (communist) revolution. These anti-border zealots hate the West, thus the West is being overwhelmed by unsustainable mass migration. Globalism: open borders! We are being flooded with cultures that are incompatible with Western culture, so that our culture will be destroyed. How about all the unvetted criminals and terrorists being allowed to enter the US? How about all the unvetted gang and cartel members pouring over the border? Globalism: global citizens—immigration is a human right! Flood the West with cheap unskilled workers to drive down wages and living standards. Raise taxes and impoverish the native citizens in order to support the never-ending flow of illegal immigrants. Less housing! Less jobs! A strain on every system and on all infrastructures! These communists only care about destroying the West, so that they can have total power. It’s only about power dynamics!

Likewise, these climate activists are anti-human, and the Degrowth polices that are being implemented will lead to poverty and depopulation. BTW: these pro-palestinian protests around the West are being organized by communists and islamists. Both of these subversive religions are working together, because they hate the West and Western (Judeo-Christian) values.

How about we add another dynamic to the equation? Governments (and government funded schools), corporations, and the United Nations are using DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Social Credit Scores in order to indoctrinate and control the masses with their woke neo-communism. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Bank are pushing ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Social Credit Scores in order to control corporations with their New World Order agenda—“a new model of governance” (stakeholder capitalism/neo-fascism). Part of the ESG Social Credit Score system is CEI (Corporate Equality Index). CEI is the reason why Dylan Mulvaney and his lifestyle are being pushed on us. “At stake is their Corporate Equality Index—or CEI—score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world.”

A global Social Credit Score System is in the making, and it will control all people and governments, all businesses and corporations. So why is a woke commufascist (Anti-Christ/Beast) Social Credit Score system being built to enslave us? Why are we being prodded towards a system of Central Bank Digital Currencies, Digital IDs, Facial Recognition and Biometrics, Social Credit Score systems, and Fifteen Minute Cities? Furthermore, this will eventually lead to transhumanism—the microchipping of humanity (666). Now, do you think that all these things will lead towards more individualism or towards more collectivism? Without true freedom there is no true individualism. Will you become part of the Hivemind of the Beast—the Beast Matrix? Remember, one day you will not be able to buy or sell without a Digital Mark. I think you know where this is all heading! Will you be one of the last true human beings, or will you become part of the woke transhuman-hybrid (alien) collective? Beware of the body snatchers! They’re coming for you!

Revelation 17:13 “With one purpose they will give their power and authority to the Beast.”

"Throw off your chains of oppression, reject groupthink!"

“Postmodernism refers to the state of culture where the media is produced in such staggering quantities that it has crossed the boundaries into reality itself and hyper reality prevails.”

Stare at your screens, your brains rewired. Eyes to your screens, you’ve been dumbed down. Your vocabulary is shrinking, your attention span is gone. Who cares about wisdom, when you can watch TikTok? Look into your screens of false reality. Let them consume you with empty illusions. Let them kiss you with distractions. Embrace them tightly. Love them wholeheartedly. Dance with conformity. Waltz with surrender. Cuddle with collectivism. Despise individualism. Divorce free thought. Abandon critical thinking. Make love to wokeism. Give birth to anti-intellectualism: there are more genders than colours of the rainbow. However, if I say there are only two genders, I might get censored, I might get banned, I might get expelled, I might lose my job. Even worse, I might get jailed by the speech police—the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Release the hounds! Digital algorithm hounds, track down all dissenting voices. Big brother censors will torch dissenting language. Big tech censors will snuff out dissenting opinions. Practice your fire suppression, incinerate all opposing ideas. We can’t have two sides of the story. “Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”

Though the media is owned by a few, there’s not a monopoly on information. Though Trudeau has bought off the corporate media, it’s not a form of fascism. The internet isn’t used for surveillance. And social media isn’t antisocial. We’re not erasing self expression. We’re not scrubbing independent thought. We love rational people. “Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”

We must digitize all that can be digitized. Why use real books? Let’s use ebooks. Why go to school? Let’s have school online. Why go to work? Let’s work online. Why go to the store? Let’s shop online. Why use physical IDs? Let’s use digital IDs. Why use cash? Let’s use digital currencies. Why use real wallets? Let’s use digital wallets. Why think? Let’s use artificial intelligence. Why live in reality? Let’s live in virtual reality. Why be human? Let’s become transhuman. Enjoy the mindless entertainment of your screens. Enjoy being socially engineered. Enjoy being fact checked. Enjoy being indoctrinated. Enjoy propaganda. Your behavior is changing, you’re leaning less and less, you cannot think for yourselves. “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other.”

University fascists, burn down all dissenting debate. Raise a ruckus, get opposing speakers cancelled. Blow your whistles, beat your drums, and drown out dissenting voices. We’ll torch your ideas, we’ll incinerate your opinions. We can’t have different ideas, because we’re collectivists—we’re all supposed to think alike. We don’t want a free marketplace of ideas, because we don’t want to refute concepts with sound arguments. University is not about free speech and diversity of opinion. University is about indoctrination and groupthink. “But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

Welcome to a society that is obsessed with their screens. They struggle to look away from their screens, they struggle to think, they struggle to communicate with those in the real world around them. They are lost in their digital reality, they are lost in their virtual world. They are distracted, they are naïve. They are complacent, they are submissive. They are mesmerized, they are hypnotized. They all mumble the same things, they spew out the given narrative: social distance; mask up; take the jab; don’t visit your dying grandmother; don’t go to work; shut down schools; shut down gyms; shut down society. If you don’t conform your bank accounts will be frozen, your businesses will be locked up, your churches will be fenced off, your pastors will be fined and arrested as well as your dissenting politicians. Many of the screen watchers, however, agreed with their screens: think-dissenters are bad! Some even said: we should round up those anti-vaxxers and kill them. “But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.”

What, you’re a nurse, and you posted an alterative view of covid? Come into my office, we’ll have a talk! If you continue expressing such viewpoints, we’ll fire you. What, you’re a doctor, and you’ve been expressing doubts about the vax? We’ll have to investigate you for spreading misinformation. We’ll fire all unvaxxed medical staff; as a consequence, many clinics and emergency rooms will shut down, and there will be longer waiting times for medical treatments. We’ll pass a bill to punish all doctors who speak out against our medical policies. If they are found guilty we’ll fine them $200,000, or give them six months in jail, or burn their medical licences. Doctor, can I have Ivermectin? No! I don’t want my life ruined on account of my medical opinion. What, truckers what to protest covid lockdowns? We’ll just use the WAR MEASURES ACT against those domestic terrorists. We’ll arrest you, we’ll seize your trucks, and we’ll freeze your bank accounts. We’ll use the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as our goon squad. Our woke leader, Mr. Blackface Trudeau, has bought off the corporate media. So the fascist government/corporate media will push the desired narrative. We’ll also pass bills to control as much of the internet as possible. Yet we’ll give a Nazi a standing ovation in Parliament. And I, Trudeau, admire China’s basic dictatorship. “Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”

Let’s introduce Digital IDs, CBDCs, Social Credit Scores, and Universal Basic Income. Let’s enslave the clueless zombies, the useless eaters who are disconnected from reality. The wolves will lead the sheeple like sheep to the slaughter. Lost in their entertainment they will put up little fight. They’ve been trained to follow, to be soft and weak, and to not resist. We’ll microchip them like animals. We’ll Mark them like beasts. We’ll tattoo them with the identification tag number: 666. Welcome to the Beast Tracking System database, where all your dystopian nightmares will come true!

At the end of Fahrenheit 451 the city is bombed. Woe! Woe to you, great city, dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet, and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls! In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin! Its labours are only fuel for the flames, its work will be destroyed by fire!

“Montag felt the slow stir of words, the slow simmer. And when it came to his turn, what could he say, what could he offer on a day like this, to make the trip a little easier? To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something . . . And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Yes, thought Montag, that’s the one I’ll save for noon. For noon... When we reach the city.”

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota, USA

Although I have seen wild horses in other areas, the surest place to find them, west of the Mississippi River, is Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV

US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, kicked up a political storm this week. On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act. If passed into law it would place stringent restrictions on US funding of the UN’s budget.

The US currently funds 22 percent of the UN’s general budget. That budget is passed by the General Assembly with no oversight by the US. America’s 22% share of the budget is nonvoluntary, meaning the US may exert no influence over how its taxpayers’ funds are spent.

If Ros-Lehtinen’s act is passed into law, the UN will have two years to enact budgetary reforms that would render a minimum of 80% of its budget financing voluntary. If the UN does not make the required reforms, the US government will be enjoined to withhold 50% of its nonvoluntary UN budget allocations.

Beyond this overarching demand for UN budgetary reform, the act contains several specific actions that are directed against UN institutions that advance anti-American and anti-Israel agendas.

Ros-Lehtinen’s act would defund the UN Human Rights Committee until such time as it repeals its permanent anti-Israel resolution, and prohibits countries that support terror and are under UN Security Council sanctions from serving as its members. It would also prohibit the US from serving as a member of the UNHRC until such reforms are enacted.

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill defunds all UN activities related to the libelous Goldstone Report, and the anti- Semitic Durban process. It vastly curtails and conditions US funding of UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency permeated by members of terrorist organizations. UNRWA’s facilities are routinely used to plan, execute and incite terrorism against Israel and to indoctrinate Palestinians to seek Israel’s destruction.

The bill pays special attention to the Palestinian Authority’s plan to have the UN Security Council and General Assembly vote in favor of Palestinian statehood later this month. The bill would cut off US funding to any UN agency or organization that upgrades the Palestinian mission to the UN in any way in the aftermath of a General Assembly vote in favor of such an upgrade in representation.

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill, which has 57 co-sponsors, provides detailed explanations for how the targeted UN agencies and activities harm US interests. It notes that the US’s membership since 2009 in the UN Human Rights Council has had no impact whatsoever on the UNHRC’s anti-Israel and anti- American agenda. The US has been unable to temper in any way the UNHRC’s actions and resolutions, including its decisions to form the Goldstone Committee and to endorse the findings of the Goldstone Report, and its continued support and organization of the anti-Semitic Durban conferences in which Israel is attacked and libeled as an illegitimate, racist state.

The bill notes that despite US efforts to extend oversight over UNRWA’s hiring process, UNRWA continues to hire members of terrorist organizations. The bill provides a long list of UNRWA employees who have perpetrated terrorist attacks.

Ignoring its fact-based assessment of UN failings, the Obama administration has rejected the Ros- Lehtinen bill out of hand. Speaking to Politico, an administration source panned the bill, claiming, “This draft legislation is dated, tired and frankly unresponsive to the positive role being played by the UN.”

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland attacked the bill, saying it would “seriously undermine our international standing and dangerously weaken the UN as an instrument to advance US national security goals.”

Since taking office, Barack Obama has taken concerted steps to place cooperation with the UN at the top of his foreign policy agenda. Through word and deed, Obama has shown that he believes that the US should minimize the extent to which it operates independently of the UN on the global stage.

Obama and his advisers give four arguments to support their view that the UN should effectively replace the US as the global leader. First, they say that the US cannot operate unilaterally on the global stage.

Second, they insinuate that operations undertaken outside the UN umbrella are somehow illegitimate.

To support this contention, they intimate that the reason the US was bogged down in Iraq following its 2003 invasion was because it did not receive specific Security Council permission to invade. In contrast, they point to the current Security Council-sanctioned military operation in Libya and the 1991 Security Council-sanctioned Persian Gulf War as success stories. And they attribute those missions’ successes to their conduct under the UN aegis.

The third argument, which comes across clearly in Nuland’s statement, is that to have credibility in global affairs, the US must not throw its weight around at the UN. If it objects too strenuously to the way things are done, or makes its support for the UN conditional on UN actions, then all the other UN members will be offended and refuse to cooperate with the US.

The final argument they make is reflected in the statement the unnamed administration source gave to Politico. Quite simply, in their view, trying to hold the UN accountable for its actions is old fashioned. In today’s world, accountability is out. And anyone who doesn’t understand that is simply out of touch, “dated, tired.”

All of these arguments are false. In the first instance, it is simply untrue that the US is incapable of operating unilaterally. Aside from Saudi Arabia in 1991 and Kuwait in 2003, the US did not need its partners in Iraq. Of all the non-American participants in the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, only Britain made an impact on fighting. And frankly, the US would have secured Saudi, Kuwaiti and British cooperation without ever involving the UN.

Indeed, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, the US has frequently acted successfully outside the UN framework. In 1999, the Clinton administration could not get UN Security Council agreement to fight in Kosovo, and so it ignored the UN and fought alongside its NATO allies.

The US had 21 allied militaries fighting alongside its forces in Iraq, despite the fact that the operation was conducted outside the UN Security Council umbrella.

The US-initiated Proliferation Security Initiative founded in 2003 is arguably the US’s most successful multilateral effort to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Operating completely outside the UN framework, the PSI has 98 members.

As for the two major US military operations that have been carried out in recent memory by force of UN Security Council resolutions, the jury is still out on both. Due to the Security Council’s restrictions on the mission of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the US permitted Saddam Hussein to remain in power after removing his invasion forces from Kuwait.

In the 12 years between that war and the 2003 Iraq war, Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who – at US urging – tried to overthrow him. He exploited the Security Council sanctions to starve his people for propaganda purposes while he and his cronies enriched themselves through corrupt UN oil-for-food contracts.

Had Saddam been overthrow in 1991, his replacement by a pro-Western successor regime could have been enacted more smoothly and at far smaller cost to the US and the Iraqi people.

As for Libya, reports from Tripoli indicate that critics of the UN mission were correct. In overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi, the US has apparently enabled a situation in which any successor regime will likely be dominated by al-Qaida-aligned political and military forces allied with Iran.

The claim that the US will lose influence in international affairs if it is perceived as bossy by its fellow UN nation states is similarly groundless. The hard truth is that no one goes along with the UN simply because it is the UN. States are reasonably and consistently opportunistic in their cooperation with the UN. They support the UN when it supports their interests and they ignore the UN when it opposes their interests.

States do not oppose the US at the UN because they consider it bossy. They oppose the US at the UN because they believe it serves their national interests to oppose the US and its interests.

It is due to clashing interests, not the comportment of US representatives, that the Obama administration to fail to exert any influence over the UNHRC’s agenda despite its commitment to “engagement.”

Clashing national interests are the reason the Obama administration has failed to secure Security Council support for anything approaching effective measures against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The final administration argument – that it is déclassé to demand that the UN stop advancing the causes of America’s enemies – is not simply peevish and insulting. It is indicative of the culture that motivates the administration to cling to its UN-centered agenda despite its obvious and repeated failure.

As the easy refutation of all the administration’s arguments makes clear, the agenda is not a product of rational thought. It is the product of the groupthink that is endemic at the universities whence Obama and his advisers have emerged. This groupthink is directed by unquestioned clichés that are passed off as sophisticated reasoning. These include such pearls of wisdom as “global governance,” “Twitter revolution,” “multilateralism” and “interdependence.”

These clichés have become articles of faith that are impermeable to fact and reality. As a consequence, those who adhere to them will never acknowledge their failure to deliver on their utopian promises. Instead they attack anyone who points out their failure as “dated,” and as “tired” old fogies who are too unsophisticated to understand the world.

We see this attitude at work in all aspects of Obama’s foreign policy. For instance, Obama came into office with the view that the reason all efforts to date to successfully complete a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians failed because the Palestinians didn’t trust the US to “deliver” Israel. To remedy this perceived problem, Obama has consistently sought to “put daylight” between the US and Israel. This policy has failed abysmally, as the PA’s current UN statehood bid shows. And yet the administration continues to cling to it, because acknowledging its failure would involve renouncing a cliché.

So, too, the administration’s policy of engaging Iran has brought the mullocracy to the brink of a nuclear arsenal, empowered it to violently repress pro-American democracy protesters, expand its influence in Iraq and Afghanistan, take over Lebanon, and make inroads in Egypt, Libya and beyond. And yet, despite all of this, the administration refuses to admit its policy is wrong and adopt a more effective one, because doing so would involve acknowledging that “engagement” is not the panacea it was cracked up to be.

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill is expected to be blocked in the Democrat-controlled Senate before Obama has the opportunity to veto it. This is a pity not simply because the bill would advance US interests and the cause of freedom. It is a pity because it shows that the foreign policy debate in the US is now a fight between those who trust facts and those who trust clichés.

Full article: www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=236368

1) Timbuk2 Q Backpack - I detailed my FWP saga on twitter wherein I continually destroyed previous OGIO bags. I love this bag. It fits all of this stuff perfectly with room to spare.

2) Apple iPad 2 with Zagg keyboard case, which has subsequently come out of my bag.

3) Apple EarPods - I don’t listen to music much via headphones these days. At this point, they’re really a travel accessory for flights, airports, etc.

4) Apple Magic Mouse - On the odd occaision that I feel like I really need my mousing to be away from my typing, this comes in handy. I almost never use it, but that doesn’t mean never never, so it stays in the bag.

5) Kleenex

6) Prescription Sunglasses - For (other) reasons. I go to Zenni Optical for all of my glasses needs, because I can’t stomach spending hundreds of dollars per pair. I tend to re-buy 1–2x per year, and my wife buys her pairs in bulk. The case is about a decade old from a previous glasses prescription. It’s almost dead, but has survived being thrown from a car and a bike, and was otherwise free.

7) Pen, Pencil, Stylus

8) CPR Mask and various keys that aren't in my EDC.

9) Post-It Notes - Great for leaving notes for your wife, child, employee, dude who parked like a moron in the parking lot, etc.

10) Business Cards - Always useful for closing conversations. They’re boring and as such suck for starting conversations.

11) Magsafe Charger

12) iPad and iPod adapters - Even though #14 has 2 USB ports, I always get the best charge for my iPhone or iPad from a stock adapter. Just the way it is.

13) Belkin mini surge protector - They keep changing the model numbers, but this one is what I have. It’s vital when traveling, and even in some conference rooms where everyone is fighting for the 2–4 outlets on the table. Suddenly there are two additional outlets and you’re the hero. Done.

14) Magsafe extension cord - Because about once a month I’m in a conference room where the only power is in a recessed box that won’t accomodate the MagSafe brick. That’s basically the only reason this travels with me anywhere.

15) Scrum Planning Poker Cards - Because groupthink is a terrible situation, and inevitably one person on my team forgets theirs, and I don’t (usually) vote. When I do vote, I have cards.

16) Overflow wallet - See My EDC for the wallet I carry on my person. This one carries everything else I might possibly need that’s wallet-shaped. It’s probably overstuffed, but when I need my Panera rewards card, it’s right there, you know?

17) Cables! Adapters! - Oh My! These used to take up about 40% of a large Grid-It, but once I switched to this bag I stopped needing the Grid-It and figured out that all of these cables would also fit, airtight, in a snack-sized Zip-Loc bag. Which is even better.

18) Work iPhone 4S in LifeProof case, because if I break it I buy it.

19) Plantronics Voyager Legend - I’ve tried several headsets in the last few years. None of them are as comfortable or as easily rechargeable. The sound quality and noise isolation leave something to be desired, but usually I’m in my car with the windows up when wearing this, and it’s sufficient. Some sort of feature where it turns off the side of the mic away from your face so that nobody knows you’re walking in from the parking lot would be super.

20) Handmade coffee cozy - My wife’e friend sells these on Etsy, though appears to be neglecting her store at the moment. Saves one starbucks cardboard sleeve at a time, and let’s me represent my favorite football team.

21) 15" MacBook Pro, Late 2011, Non-Retina - My baby.

Formó un colectivo se subió a él lo metió en formol durmió durmió durmió se pasó salió bajó.

# # #

He created a group climbed to put it in formalin slept slept slept passed by got out landed off.

The book releases tomorrow. It is a thrilling story of the formative years of the $100B company with one of the most impactful groups of people ever assembled in technology. Against a dramatic backdrop of multiple CEO coups and wild product development bingers, Soni captures some of the valuable lessons learned, from company naming, to team size, to competing with FAANG for engineering talent, to the pinnacle of viral marketing (I’ll share a couple excerpts in the comments below).

I like his attitude and admiration of the great accomplishments in others. The book is also refreshingly accurate. The author actually did fact checking (unlike the cynical clickbait business books from mainstream media journalists that you won’t see me reviewing). He also interviewed Musk, Thiel, Levchin, Nosek, Hoffman, Sacks… I know all of these founder protagonists personally, and I was competing for their first round of investment (but lost out by underbidding Nokia by 4x, one of my biggest misses). From my perspective, Soni captures the personalities and the frenetic zeitgeist of the times with aplomb.

Confinity became PayPal. Cosmogia became Planet. Much better names. From four syllables to two, with the pleasing pause of plosives and, from Master-McNeil branding exercise: “If people don’t know how to say something, or if they are fearful of saying it incorrectly, they will do anything to avoid saying it. Embarrassment is a very strong emotion.”

Like Skype, PayPal was founded with a singular focus on the mobile experience. Initially, Skype envisioned wifi-only phones and PayPal envisioned beaming currency with the PalmPilot infrared port. Usage on PCs was not part of the initial pitch. In both cases, the engineers built a test chassis using PCs for faster iteration and development. For PayPal, “the email money demo dramatically simplified the sequence — Levchin could now test transfers with a few mouse clicks. Within weeks, Levchin had become an avid user of the afterthought product, even as he remained committed to the vision of the original. ‘That should have been a clue,’ he said.”

Confinity’s first head of product, David Sacks, said he’d only join the company "if the email product was given primacy. ’The PalmPilot product was a dumb idea,’ Sacks remembered. In the email money transfer battle, Confinity enjoyed a lead thanks, in part, to the insistence of a single team member: David Sacks.”

Levchin on teams: “The number of people in a room correlated positively to friction in basic communication.” “Avoid groupthink. A good rule of thumb is that the diversity of opinion is essential anytime you don’t know anything about something important. But if there is a strong sense of what’s right already, don’t argue about it.”

Elon’s first principles perspective: he would ask in interviews “Why does it cost so money to move bits and bytes within the financial system?” (sounds similar to his later analysis of rocket raw materials costs for SpaceX)

Many near-death experiences and moments of doubt: “Hoffman remembered Thiel’s pitch [to join Confinity]: ‘Look, we’re running like a hot mess internally. We have no business model. We need to package this thing up for a sale.’ Thiel assured him a brief Confinity tour of duty — and an exit that would burnish his technology resume.”

Nosek on the Confinity/X merger of equals: “A merger isn’t two companies joining together. It’s actually closer to hiring fifty people, sight unseen.”

Running on fumes, Thiel pushed hard to get a big funding round done in 2000, just days before the great dotcom crash: “if the team had not closed that one hundred million, there would be no SpaceX, no LinkedIn and no Tesla.”

Amateurs are not drowning out informed and fact-based commentary; they are just replacing the old one-way monologue with increasingly rich and variegated conversations where a billion voices can be heard.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in Wikinomics (Preface.xi)

astore.amazon.co.uk/will-lion-21/detail/184354637X/026-57...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics

Background image courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/340185708. This citation appears in the top right of the image.

From the museum label: Flouting convention with its thick paint, clashing colors, and crude caricatures, Ensor's satirical masterpiece imagines how the citizens of Brussels would respond to the Second Coming of Christ. Paying little heed to Jesus on his donkey, the carnivalesque crowd surges down a gigantic boulevard in a procession led by buffoonish representatives of the church, military, and bourgeoisie. Slogans on jostling banners and flags evoke official civic and religious events as well as mass political demonstrations. A fierce individualist who identified with Christ as a persecuted revolutionary, Ensor signals his cynical distance from mindless groupthink through a placard reading "Fanfares Doctrinaires / Toujours Réussi" (roughly, "Dogmatic fanfares always succeed").

Required reading: COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink.

"Saint Valentine is past;

Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?"

– William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (c. 1595-96), Act IV, scene 1, line 144.

"For this was on seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make."

Translation:

"For this was Saint Valentine's Day,

When every bird cometh there to choose his mate."

– Geoffrey Chaucer, "Parlement of Foules" (1382 [!]).

"The stronger the thunder, the more powerful the lightning. All reiterate—the New Age arrives in storm and lightning. For the lightning there are needed positive and negative energies. If Maya does not furnish the negative evidence, how then can flash forth the sword-blade of positive reality?"

– Agni Yoga, "New Era Community" (1926).

#Blackwater #rising #warming #atomic #pink #cottoncandy #bikini #hbomb #bathtub #godzilla #navalbase #landscape with #toxic #pocket #parks and #nuclear #family #sulfur #petroleum #housing #hangars as #envisioned #masterplastered by #ucberkeley #architectureschool #architecturestudent #groupthink

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sschoepp: Make that "very"

I keep a bust of Mao Zedong in my office, perched atop a copy of his Little Red Book. It sends an appropriately ambiguous workplace message while also acting as an antidote to overwrought corporate gobbledygook and groupthink.

Many of Mao’s quotations in the LRB can be read as his solutions to practical management problems, and while (in hindsight) they’re not necessarily sustainable ideas -- or even good ideas -- they were, at one point at least, reasonably effective.

The fact that they also come with creepy historical baggage counts as a bonus — in one of my previous jobs, I enjoyed noting the eerie parallels between the memos sent out by our CEO and passages from the Quotations of Chairman Mao. Needless to say, the CEO did not find this amusing.

Some off-the-cuff examples of Management Mao...

One the importance of proper employee training:

”Cadres are a decisive factor, once the political line is determined. Therefore, it is our task to train large numbers of new cadres in a planned way."

-- "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War" (October 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II

On teamwork and meeting established goals:

”Place problems on the table. This should be done not only by the "squad leader" but by the committee members too. Do not talk behind people's backs. Whenever problems arise, call a meeting, place the problems on the table for discussion, take some decisions and the problems will be solved. If problems exist and are not placed on the table, they will remain unsolved for a long time and even drag on for years. The "squad leader" and the committee members should show understanding in their relations with each other. Nothing is more important than mutual understanding, support and friendship between the secretary and the committee members, between the Central Committee and its regional bureaus and between the regional bureaus and the area Party committees.”

-- "Methods of Work of Party Committees" (March 13, 1949), Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 377.

On our anticipated quarterly results and the need for future cost-cutting:

"To win country-wide victory is only the first step in a long march of ten thousand li.... The Chinese revolution is great, but the road after the revolution will be longer, the work greater and more arduous. This must be made clear now in the Party. The comrades must be helped to remain modest, prudent and free from arrogance and rashness in their style of work. The comrades must be helped to preserve the style of plain living and hard struggle."

-- "Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (March 5, 1949), Selected Works, Vol. IV

On employee empowerment and bottom-up leadership:

”Ask your subordinates about matters you don't understand or don't know, and do not lightly express your approval or disapproval.... We should never pretend to know what we don't know, we should "not feel ashamed to ask and learn from people below" and we should listen carefully to the views of the cadres at the lower levels. Be a pupil before you become a teacher; learn from the cadres at the lower levels before you issue orders.... What the cadres at the lower levels say may or may not be correct, after hearing it, we must analyse it. We must heed the correct views and act upon them.... Listen also to the mistaken views from below, it is wrong not to listen to them at all. Such views, however, are not to be acted upon but to be criticized.”

-- "Methods of Work of Party Committees" (March 13, 1949), Selected Works, Vol. IV