Long intriguing thread...

Quote:Last year, Ed Pierson was supposed to fly from Seattle to New Jersey on Alaska Airlines. He boarded his flight, but then he had an urgent discussion with the flight attendant, explaining that as a former senior Boeing engineer, he'd specifically requested that flight because the aircraft wasn't a 737 Max:

‘I want to get off the plane.’ The passengers refusing to fly on Boeing’s 737 Max

But for operational reasons, Boeing had switched out the equipment on the flight and there he was on a 737 Max, about to travel cross-continent, and he didn't feel safe doing so. He demanded to be let off the flight. His bags were offloaded and he walked back up the jetbridge after telling the spooked flight attendant, "I can’t go into detail right now, but I wasn’t planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane."

Boeing, of course, is a flying disaster that was years in the making. Its planes have been falling out of the sky since 2019. Floods of whistleblowers have come forward to say its aircraft are unsafe. Pierson's not the only Boeing employee to state – both on and off the record – that he wouldn't fly on a specific model of Boeing aircraft, or, in some cases any recent Boeing aircraft:

Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story

And yet, for years, Boeing's regulators have allowed the company to keep turning out planes that keep turning out lemons. This is a pretty frightening situation, to say the least. I'm not an aerospace engineer, I'm not an aircraft safety inspector, but every time I book a flight, I have to make a decision about whether to trust Boeing's assurances that I can safely board one of its planes without dying.

In an ideal world, I wouldn't even have to think about this. I'd be able to trust that publicly accountable regulators were on the job, making sure that airplanes were airworthy. "Caveat emptor" is no way to run a civilian aviation system.

But even though I don't have the specialized expertise needed to assess the airworthiness of Boeing planes, I do have the much more general expertise needed to assess the trustworthiness of Boeing's regulator. The FAA has spent years deferring to Boeing, allowing it to self-certify that its aircraft were safe. Even when these assurances led to the death of hundreds of people, the FAA continued to allow Boeing to mark its own homework:




What's more, the FAA boss who presided over those hundreds of deaths was an ex-Boeing lobbyist, whom Trump subsequently appointed to run Boeing's oversight. He's not the only ex-insider who ended up a regulator, and there's plenty of ex-regulators now on Boeing's payroll:

Boeing Debacle Shows Need to Investigate Trump-era Corruption

You don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that companies have conflicts of interest when it comes to certifying their own products. "Market forces" aren't going to keep Boeing from shipping defective products, because the company's top brass are more worried about cashing out with this quarter's massive stock buybacks than they are about their successors' ability to manage the PR storm or Congressional hearings after their greed kills hundreds and hundreds of people.

You also don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that these conflicts persist even when a Boeing insider leaves the company to work for its regulators, or vice-versa. A regulator who anticipates a giant signing bonus from Boeing after their term in office, or a an ex-Boeing exec who holds millions in Boeing stock has an irreconcilable conflict of interest that will make it very hard – perhaps impossible – for them to hold the company to account when it trades safety for profit.

It's not just Boeing customers who feel justifiably anxious about trusting a system with such obvious conflicts of interest: Boeing's own executives, lobbyists and lawyers also refuse to participate in similarly flawed systems of oversight and conflict resolution. If Boeing was sued by its shareholders and the judge was also a pissed off Boeing shareholder, they would demand a recusal. If Boeing was looking for outside counsel to represent it in a liability suit brought by the family of one of its murder victims, they wouldn't hire the firm that was suing them – not even if that firm promised to be fair. If a Boeing executive's spouse sued for divorce, that exec wouldn't use the same lawyer as their soon-to-be-ex.

Sure, it takes specialized knowledge and training to be a lawyer, a judge, or an aircraft safety inspector. But anyone can look at the system those experts work in and spot its glaring defects. In other words, while acquiring expertise is hard, it's much easier to spot weaknesses in the process by which that expertise affects the world around us.

And therein lies the problem: aviation isn't the only technically complex, potentially lethal, and utterly, obviously untrustworthy system we all have to navigate. How about the building safety codes that governed the structure you're in right now? Plenty of people have blithely assumed that structural engineers carefully designed those standards, and that these standards were diligently upheld, only to discover in tragic, ghastly ways that this was wrong:

Turkey earthquake: Why did so many buildings collapse?

There are dozens – hundreds! – of life-or-death, highly technical questions you have to resolve every day just to survive. Should you trust the antilock braking firmware in your car? How about the food hygiene rules in the factories that produced the food in your shopping cart? Or the kitchen that made the pizza that was just delivered? Is your kid's school teaching them well, or will they grow up to be ignoramuses and thus economic roadkill?

Hell, even if I never get into another Boeing aircraft, I live in the approach path for Burbank airport, where Southwest lands 50+ Boeing flights every day. How can I be sure that the next Boeing 737 Max that falls out of the sky won't land on my roof?

This is the epistemological crisis we're living through today. Epistemology is the process by which we know things. The whole point of a transparent, democratically accountable process for expert technical deliberation is to resolve the epistemological challenge of making good choices about all of these life-or-death questions. Even the smartest person among us can't learn to evaluate all those questions, but we can all look at the process by which these questions are answered and draw conclusions about its soundness.

Is the process public? Are the people in charge of it forthright? Do they have conflicts of interest, and, if so, do they sit out any decision that gives even the appearance of impropriety? If new evidence comes to light – like, say, a horrific disaster – is there a way to re-open the process and change the rules?

The actual technical details might be a black box for us, opaque and indecipherable. But the box itself can be easily observed: is it made of sturdy material? Does it have sharp corners and clean lines? Or is it flimsy, irregular and torn? We don't have to know anything about the box's contents to conclude that we don't trust the box.

For example: we may not be experts in chemical engineering or water safety, but we can tell when a regulator is on the ball on these issues. Back in 2019, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sought comment on its water safety regs. Dow Chemical – the largest corporation in the states's largest industry – filed comments arguing that WV should have lower standards for chemical contamination in its drinking water.

Now, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that there are safe levels of chemical runoff in the water supply. There's a lot of water in the water supply, after all, and "the dose makes the poison." What's more, I use the products whose manufacture results in that chemical waste. I want them to be made safely, but I do want them to be made – for one thing, the next time I have surgery, I want the anesthesiologist to start an IV with fresh, sterile plastic tubing.

And I'm not a chemist, let alone a water chemist. Neither am I a toxicologist. There are aspects of this debate I am totally unqualified to assess. Nevertheless, I think the WV process was a bad one, and here's why:

WVMA statement on human health criteria development

That's Dow's comment to the regulator (as proffered by its mouthpiece, the WV Manufacturers' Association, which it dominates). In that comment, Dow argues that West Virginians safely can absorb more poison than other Americans, because the people of West Virginia are fatter than other Americans, and so they have more tissue and thus a better ratio of poison to person than the typical American. But they don't stop there! They also say that West Virginians don't drink as much water as their out-of-state cousins, preferring to drink beer instead, so even if their water is more toxic, they'll be drinking less of it:

The Real Elitists Who Look Down on Trump Voters

Even without any expertise in toxicology or water chemistry, I can tell that these are bullshit answers. The fact that the WV regulator accepted these comments tells me that they're not a good regulator. I was in WV last year to give a talk, and I didn't drink the tap water.

It's totally reasonable for non-experts to reject the conclusions of experts when the process by which those experts resolve their disagreements is obviously corrupt and irredeemably flawed. But some refusals carry higher costs – both for the refuseniks and the people around them – than my switching to bottled water when I was in Charleston.

Take vaccine denial (or "hesitancy"). Many people greeted the advent of an extremely rapid, high-tech covid vaccine with dread and mistrust. They argued that the pharma industry was dominated by corrupt, greedy corporations that routinely put their profits ahead of the public's safety, and that regulators, in Big Pharma's pocket, let them get away with mass murder.

The thing is, all that is true. Look, I've had five covid vaccinations, but not because I trust the pharma industry. I've had direct experience of how pharma sacrifices safety on greed's altar, and narrowly avoided harm myself. I have had chronic pain problems my whole life, and they've gotten worse every year. When my daughter was on the way, I decided this was going to get in the way of my ability to parent – I wanted to be able to carry her for long stretches! – and so I started aggressively pursuing the pain treatments I'd given up on many years before.

My journey led me to many specialists – physios, dieticians, rehab specialists, neurologists, surgeons – and I tried many, many therapies. Luckily, my wife had private insurance – we were in the UK then – and I could go to just about any doctor that seemed promising. That's how I found myself in the offices of a Harley Street quack, a prominent pain specialist, who had great news for me: it turned out that opioids were way safer than had previously been thought, and I could just take opioids every day and night for the rest of my life without any serious risk of addiction. It would be fine.

This sounded wrong to me. I'd lost several friends to overdoses, and watched others spiral into miserable lives as they struggled with addiction. So I "did my own research." Despite not having a background in chemistry, biology, neurology or pharmacology, I struggled through papers and read commentary and came to the conclusion that opioids weren't safe at all. Rather, corrupt billionaire pharma owners like the Sackler family had colluded with their regulators to risk the lives of millions by pushing falsified research that was finding publication in some of the most respected, peer-reviewed journals in the world.

I became an opioid denier, in other words.

I decided, based on my own research, that the experts were wrong, and that they were wrong for corrupt reasons, and that I couldn't trust their advice.

When anti-vaxxers decried the covid vaccines, they said things that were – in form at least – indistinguishable from the things I'd been saying 15 years earlier, when I decided to ignore my doctor's advice and throw away my medication on the grounds that it would probably harm me.

For me, faith in vaccines didn't come from a broad, newfound trust in the pharmaceutical system: rather, I judged that there was so much scrutiny on these new medications that it would overwhelm even pharma's ability to corruptly continue to sell a medication that they secretly knew to be harmful, as they'd done so many times before:

Timeline: The Rise and Fall of Vioxx

But many of my peers had a different take on anti-vaxxers: for these friends and colleagues, anti-vaxxers were being foolish. Surprisingly, these people I'd long felt myself in broad agreement with began to defend the pharmaceutical system and its regulators. Once they saw that anti-vaxx was a wedge issue championed by right-wing culture war shitheads, they became not just pro-vaccine, but pro-pharma.

There's a name for this phenomenon: "schismogenesis." That's when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it. Think of self-described "progressives" who became cheerleaders for the America's cruel, ruthless and lawless "intelligence community" when it seemed that US spooks were bent on Trump's ouster:

Schismogenesis

The fact that the FBI didn't like Trump didn't make them allies of progressive causes. This was and is the same entity that (among other things) tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr into killing himself:

FBI–King suicide letter

But schismogenesis isn't merely a reactionary way of flip-flopping on issues based on reflexive enmity. It's actually a reasonable epistemological tactic: in a world where there are more issues you need to be clear on than you can possibly inform yourself about, you need some shortcuts. One shortcut – a shortcut that's failing – is to say, "Well, I'll provisionally believe whatever the expert system tells me is true." Another shortcut is, "I will provisionally disbelieve in whatever the people I know to act in bad faith are saying is true." That is, "schismogenesis."

Schismogenesis isn't a great tactic. It would be far better if we had a set of institutions we could all largely trust – if the black boxes where expert debate took place were sturdy, rectilinear and sharp-cornered.

But they're not. They're just not. Our regulatory process sucks. Corporate concentration makes it trivial for cartels to capture their regulators and steer them to conclusions that benefit corporate shareholders even if that means visiting enormous harm – even mass death – on the public:

Regulatory Capture - Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism.

No one hates Big Tech more than I do, but many of my co-belligerents in the war on Big Tech believe that the rise of conspiratorialism can be laid at tech platforms' feet. They say that Big Tech boasts of how good they are at algorithmically manipulating our beliefs, and attribute Qanons, flat earthers, and other outlandish conspiratorial cults to the misuse off those algorithms.

"We built a Big Data mind-control ray" is one of those extraordinary claims that requires extraordinary evidence. But the evidence for Big Tech's persuasion machines is very poor: mostly, it consists of tech platforms' own boasts to potential investors and customers for their advertising products. "We can change peoples' minds" has long been the boast of advertising companies, and it's clear that they can change the minds of customers for advertising.

Think of department store mogul John Wanamaker, who famously said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Today – thanks to commercial surveillance – we know that the true proportion of wasted advertising spending is more like 99.9%. Advertising agencies may be really good at convincing John Wanamaker and his successors, through prolonged, personal, intense selling – but that doesn't mean they're able to sell so efficiently to the rest of us with mass banner ads or spambots:

How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

In other words, the fact that Facebook claims it is really good at persuasion doesn't mean that it's true. Just like the AI companies who claim their chatbots can do your job: they are much better at convincing your boss (who is insatiably horny for firing workers) than they are at actually producing an algorithm that can replace you. What's more, their profitability relies far more on convincing a rich, credulous business executive that their product works than it does on actually delivering a working product.

Now, I do think that Facebook and other tech giants play an important role in the rise of conspiratorial beliefs. However, that role isn't using algorithms to persuade people to mistrust our institutions. Rather Big Tech – like other corporate cartels – has so corrupted our regulatory system that they make trusting our institutions irrational.

Think of federal privacy law. The last time the US got a new federal consumer privacy law was in 1988, when Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, a law that prohibits video store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history:

Why the VPPA Protects YouTube and Viacom Employees

It's been a minute. There are very obvious privacy concerns haunting Americans, related to those tech giants, and yet the closest Congress can come to doing something about it is to attempt the forced sale of the sole Chinese tech giant with a US footprint to a US company, to ensure that its rampant privacy violations are conducted by our fellow Americans, and to force Chinese spies to buy their surveillance data on millions of Americans in the lawless, reckless swamp of US data-brokerages:

The House passed a TikTok ban bill. But is the app really a national security threat?

For millions of Americans – especially younger Americans – the failure to pass (or even introduce!) a federal privacy law proves that our institutions can't be trusted. They're right:

TikTok video

Occam's Razor cautions us to seek the simplest explanation for the phenomena we see in the world around us. There's a much simpler explanation for why people believe conspiracy theories they encounter online than the idea that the one time Facebook is telling the truth is when they're boasting about how well their products work – especially given the undeniable fact that everyone else who ever claimed to have perfected mind-control was a fantasist or a liar, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA to pick-up artists.

Maybe people believe in conspiracy theories because they have hundreds of life-or-death decisions to make every day, and the institutions that are supposed to make that possible keep proving that they can't be trusted. Nevertheless, those decisions have to be made, and so something needs to fill the epistemological void left by the manifest unsoundness of the black box where the decisions get made.

For many people – millions – the thing that fills the black box is conspiracy fantasies. It's true that tech makes finding these conspiracy fantasies easier than ever, and it's true that tech makes forming communities of conspiratorial belief easier, too. But the vulnerability to conspiratorialism that algorithms identify and target people based on isn't a function of Big Data. It's a function of corruption – of life in a world in which real conspiracies (to steal your wages, or let rich people escape the consequences of their crimes, or sacrifice your safety to protect large firms' profits) are everywhere.

Progressives – which is to say, the coalition of liberals and leftists, in which liberals are the senior partners and spokespeople who control the Overton Window – used to identify and decry these conspiracies. But as right wing "populists" declared their opposition to these conspiracies – when Trump damned free trade and the mainstream media as tools of the ruling class – progressives leaned into schismogenesis and declared their vocal support for these old enemies of progress.

This is the crux of Naomi Klein's brilliant 2023 book Doppelganger: that as the progressive coalition started supporting these unworthy and broken institutions, the right spun up "mirror world" versions of their critique, distorted versions that focus on scapegoating vulnerable groups rather than fighting unworthy institutions:

Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

This is a long tradition in politics: hundreds of years ago, some leftists branded antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Rather than condemning the system's embrace of the finance sector and its wealthy beneficiaries, anti-semites blame a disfavored group of people – people who are just as likely as anyone to suffer under the system:

Antisemitism is the socialism of fools

It's an ugly, shallow, cartoon version of socialism's measured and comprehensive analysis of how the class system actually works and why it's so harmful to everyone except a tiny elite. Literally cartoonish: the shadow-world version of socialism co-opts and simplifies the iconography of class struggle. And schismogenesis – "if the right likes this, I don't" – sends "progressive" scolds after anyone who dares to criticize finance as the crux of our world's problems as popularizing "antisemetic dog-whistles."

This is the problem with "horseshoe theory" – the idea that the far right and the far left bend all the way around to meet each other:

Incomplete vs. overshoot

When the right criticizes pharma companies, they tell us to "do our own research" (e.g. ignore the systemic problems of people being forced to work under dangerous conditions during a pandemic while individually assessing conflicting claims about vaccine safety, ideally landing on buying "supplements" from a grifter). When the left criticizes pharma, it's to argue for universal access to medicine and vigorous public oversight of pharma companies. These aren't the same thing:

We promised this vaccine waiver 20 years ago

Long before opportunistic right wing politicians realized they could get mileage out of pointing at the terrifying epistemological crisis of trying to make good choices in an age of institutions that can't be trusted, the left was sounding the alarm. Conspiratorialism – the fracturing of our shared reality – is a serious problem, weakening our ability to respond effectively to endless disasters of the polycrisis.

But by blaming the problem of conspiratorialism on the credulity of believers (rather than the deserved disrepute of the institutions they have lost faith in) we adopt the logic of the right: "conspiratorialism is a problem of individuals believing wrong things," rather than "a system that makes wrong explanations credible – and a schismogenic insistence that these institutions are sound and trustworthy."

Forget Iceland or Bali, real travel influencers go to Poyais. It's so exclusive it doesn’t even exist! The story of this fake country starts in 1822 with a man named Gregor MacGregor (real name).

Quote:Gregor MacGregor Creates His Own Country

In 1822 and 1823 hundreds of people departed England and Scotland on voyages to the promising new country of Poyais. Clutching Poyaisian currency and filled with hope for a prosperous future, the would-be settlers were shocked to find that the bustling harbor, elegant capital city, and readily cultivatable land promoted by the country’s dashing governor, Gregor MacGregor, were in fact nothing but a desolate wilderness. Leading to financial ruin and more than 150 deaths, the colonization attempt revealed Poyais to be more con than country, and MacGregor, the Scotsman behind the scheme, to be an equally cunning fraud. How had he pulled it off?



Although he had risen to the rank of general in the war for Venezuela’s independence from Spain, MacGregor had done little to distinguish himself in that struggle. Yet, when he returned to Britain from the Americas, he succeeded in convincing aristocrats in London that he was a war hero. What’s more, he convinced them—and investors there—that an Indigenous ruler in Central America had granted him an eight-million-acre tract of land along the region’s Mosquito Coast and had appointed him cacique, or prince, to govern and develop the country. To corroborate his story, MacGregor presented an array of official-looking documents, land grants, maps, and a flag.

Thus, MacGregor’s success story was not confined to the new country’s parameters. After hearing of his achievements and status abroad, members of the English aristocracy did not hesitate to induct MacGregor into society. Not only did he receive the use of a country estate while visiting England, but Poyais gained credibility as a country.

What was the point of MacGregor’s fake country? Although it may have been an ego booster for him to introduce himself as its prince, he had more at stake than the title and its attendant rewards.

The answer is simple: money. Armed with two loans of £200,000 each—obtained through two bond issues on the London market, the first granted in October 1822 and the second in October 1823—MacGregor could advertise to prospective settlers lots as large as 540 acres, which could be divided into smaller lots for extremely low prices, potentially gaining him hundreds of thousands in profits.

Having reached what was supposed to be the main port of Poyais in 1822 and 1823, the would-be settlers attempted to construct makeshift shelters on the shore as they awaited help. But before a rescue ship from an British colony in what is now Belize arrived, almost three-quarters of the group had succumbed to malnutrition or tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.

Despite the many lives and hundreds of thousands of pounds lost through his scheme, MacGregor was never quite brought to justice. Still under his spell, a number of people, including even some of the surviving colonists, pointed their fingers at the organizers and leaders of the voyages rather than blaming MacGregor. The possibility that he had lied about his title and country seemed inconceivable. Taking advantage of Britain’s hesitation to prosecute him, MacGregor fled to France in 1823.

Once a con man, always a con man: even after the failure of the Poyais venture, MacGregor never really learned his lesson. In France he traced the same footsteps he had made in England: forging documents, obtaining bank loans, and raising a new crop of settlers to people Poyais. Despite enduring a brief period of suspicion, during which the French government jailed but eventually acquitted him, MacGregor continued to make money by promoting Poyais until the late 1830s, when he retired the scheme. By then he had been welcomed back to Venezuela with a pension for his military service there, allowing him to live out the rest of his days as the prince of Poyais.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/188...in-torture

Quote:Moscow terror suspect tortured by Russian soldiers with genitals hooked up to 80v battery

GRAPHIC TORTURE WARNING Disturbing new photographs shows Russian security forces brutally torturing one of the Moscow terror suspects by tying his genitals to an 80v battery.

Moscow terror suspect tortured by Russian soldiers with genitals hooked up to 80v battery

GRAPHIC TORTURE WARNING Disturbing new photographs shows Russian security forces brutally torturing one of the Moscow terror suspects by tying his genitals to an 80v battery.

Video shows concert hall in Moscow under attack by gunmen

The new interrogation footage follows similarly gruesome videos released yesterday of the Russian security forces cutting off a terror suspect's ear and forcing him to eat it.
The new photograph, shared widely on Wagner Group-linked Telegram channels, reveals a graphic torture scene.
One of the suspected gunmen, named as Shamsuddin Fariddun, can be seen lying on the floor with his trousers pulled down and wires hooked to his genitals.

Quote:In the early 1990s, Chinese-American physicist Ning Li published a series of controversial papers theorizing about anti-gravity. In 2001, she received a Defense Department contract to fund experimental efforts based on her theories... And in 2004, Ning Li disappeared — prompting a flood of conspiracy theories. Let's dive into the work of Ning Li and the mystery surrounding her disappearance to see which parts of this story we can finally put to rest for good.

Quote:“Embark on an interstellar journey with ‘The Three-Body Problem’ audiobook summary. Dive into the award-winning science fiction saga by Liu Cixin, where humanity grapples with the consequences of contacting an advanced alien civilization. Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, this novel weaves a tale of cosmic intrigue and human resilience. Discover the secrets of the Red Coast Base, the mysterious Frontiers of Science, and the fate of two civilizations in this gripping narrative. Tune in for a condensed exploration of this modern sci-fi masterpiece.”

A thread that probably nobody cares about, but I was curious and provides a little bit of insight into the thinking of Deus ex.

"I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents" says Elon Musk.



25 books recommended by Elon:

1) Issac Asimov’s Foundation Series

“In terms of sci-fi books, I think Isaac Asimov is really great. I like the Foundation series, probably one of the all-time best.

His Foundation books were an inspiration for the need to make life multiplanetary while civilization is still strong.” — Elon Musk




2) Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson.

“I didn't read actually very many general business books, but I like biographies and autobiographies, I think those are pretty helpful. Actually, a lot of them aren't really business. [...]

Isaacson's biography on Franklin is really good. Cause he was an entrepreneur and he sort of started from nothing, actually he was just like a run away kid, basically, and created his printing business and sort of his way of doing that, and then over time all of the science and politics.

I'd say certain he's one of the few people I most admire. Franklin's pretty awesome." — Elon Musk




3) Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

"Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes." — Elon Musk




4) Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark

"This is a compelling guide to the challenges and choices in our quest for a great future of life, intelligence and consciousness—on Earth and beyond."
— Elon Musk




5) Human Compatible by Stuart Russell

"Worth reading “Human Compatible” by Stuart Russell (he’s great!) about future AI risks & solutions."  — Elon Musk




6) Our Final Invention by James Barrat

"While on the subject of AI risk, Our Final Invention by James Barrat is worth reading." — Elon Musk




7) Zero to One by Peter Thiel

"Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how." — Elon Musk




8) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams

"I guess when I was around 12 or 15... I had an existential crisis, and I was reading various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean?

It all seemed quite meaningless and then we happened to have some books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at age 14 (laughter). It is bad, it’s really negative.

So then I read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which is quite positive I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question..."  — Elon Musk




9) The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

"I know it's cliche, but this is my favorite book ever.

The heroes of the books I read, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and the ‘Foundation’ series, always felt a duty to save the world."  — Elon Musk

According to many modern translations, the chief priests and scribes were anxious to arrest Jesus, but not “during the feast, lest there be a tumult of the people” (Mark ch14 v2, Matthew ch26 v5). The AV modifies it by adding a supplementary word; “on the feast day.  These translations give the impression that they wanted to avoid action during a period of time. This in turn gives rise to the idea that they changed their minds when Judas showed them how the arrest could be made in the middle of this period.
 
However, I think this idea is a misunderstanding, based on a mistranslation.
 
The Greek expression translated as “during the feast” is EN TE HEORTE. But EN is the equivalent of the English “In” and has a wider range of meanings than “during”. That is why the AV translates “on” and is obliged to add “day” to make it more idiomatic in English speech. I’m going to suggest, though, that HEORTE is not a period of time but a location.
 
Let’s take a similar expression in modern English; “At the carnival”. The best-known carnival in the world is surely the Brazilian “Carnavale” (their spelling wanders further away from the Latin CARNI VALE, “farewell to flesh). The most recent  Carnavale was held on February 9th-14th 2024. But can we say that something is happening “at the carnival” just because it is happening during that time period? Surely a man can’t truly say that he is “in the carnival” or “at the carnival” unless he’s out there on the streets. If he’s hiding out in a back street hotel room, then he’s evading the carnival, not being part of it. “At the carnival” is as much about location as it is about time.
 
So “not at the feast” could be understood as “not in the streets, in the middle of the crowds which have gathered for the feast”. And that’s exactly how Luke seems to take it. His paraphrase is that Judas offered them a chance to capture Jesus “in the absence of the multitude” (Luke ch22 v6). While in John, the chief priests and Pharisees are giving orders that “if anyone knew where [Jesus} was, he should let them know, so that they might arrest him” (John ch11v57). This too is about “away from the crowds”.
 
So Judas was, in fact, offering the authorities what they had wanted from the beginning, namely a way to arrest Jesus without interference, because it would be “not in the middle of the feast-crowds”.

“And Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah” (Matthew ch17 v4).
 
I was reminded of this episode recently by a wrong-headed interpretation of it found in Toynbee’s “Study of History”. I like Toynbee. I am carefully reading through this work for the fourth time. But his enthusiasm for his case sometimes moves him to build it upon inaccurate details, and this is one of them.
 
He is offering examples of Violent and Gentle reactions to the disintegrations of civilisations. He counts Peter initially as an example of the violent tendency, partly because of the ear-cutting incident at Gethsemane, and partly because of the declaration just quoted. He claims that Peter took the appearance of Elijah and Moses as the signal for a war of liberation, “proposing to build on the spot the nucleus of a camp of the kind that the Theudases and Judases of Galilee were wont to establish in the wilderness during the brief interval of grace before the Roman authorities received intelligence of their activities and sent out a flying column of troops to disperse them” (Volume V, p393, if you want to look it up).
 
Commentaries don’t always do better. One found on my bookshelves, ignoring the wording of the remark, suggests that Peter wanted to build shelters for the three disciples, being the ones who would need shelter, so that they could stay on the mountain longer. Most commentators discover an allusion to the annual Feast of Tabernacles, often called “Feast of Booths” in modern times. The RSV translation implies the same assumption.
 
But I suggest that Peter was not thinking of the annual feast at all, but of the original Tabernacle, the one established by Moses in order to meet with God. The word used by Peter (SKENE) is the same word used in Hebrews ch9 for the original Tabernacle.
 
I think he was remembering that the Tabernacle had been erected originally so that Moses could speak with God. Seeing Jesus, Moses and Elijah together, it occurred to him, in his understandably muddled state of mind, that they might need one each. Hence the proposal.

Hello, I hail from AboveTopSecret forum.

The ATS hacking incident barred me from retrieving my original account (I didn't bother visiting the discord group), and subsequently, I was locked out of my 2nd account for no reason.

I heard rumors that the end of the site may come soon so I made an account on here in advance (and I'm considering, against my better judgment, making one on another refuge site). During my time on ATS, I never made any topics, I preferred to only react to other people's remarks.

But the urgency of our situation compels me to step out with an announcement. 
I come bearing a message on behalf of a friend, who was also locked out of his 2nd account. Setting aside his religious agenda, I would like to focus more on the political side of things, it seems he foresaw a possible variation of the recent terror attack in Moscow as early as February 13, 2023: https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thr...id26887123

I will reproduce some of it here:

WanderingMrM Wrote:And I heard many voices, laughter and songs, I saw dances and foods... I heard many voices, screams and panic, there were kids and women crying. Smoke filled the once happy area and when I barely stood up, past all the ringing and chaos I managed to see and realize it was some sort of bomb that went off... 
So, ladies and gentlemen, we got multiple terrorist attacks it seems planned either on Russian territory or European. The time placement I would say was between April-July based on the sort of weather I was experiencing, but the masses of people gathered definitely reminds me of some sort of European festival or market, a Russian festival or as they call Yarmarka, or an American-like festival. 
In regards to those who were involved all I can say is that the multiple channels the TV was cycling through said they had ties to ISIS and Al-Qaeda. I then sat there and thought why specifically "ISIS and Al-Qaeda" didn't those guys fall off the radar? and No longer really did anything? 
And that is when it happened, everything around me went silent as I sat there looking through the corridor with people being treated, some screaming, some covered in blood and have their leg/legs or arm/arms missing... I said to myself "Wait... Did Americans do this?" and my body instantly became cold from the shock of the realization.

WanderingMrM Wrote:Either in coming few days, or it will be kept silent due to a mass reveal by Putin to rise up Russians and do an entire national mobilisation. If you have anyone in Europe especially in France around time of Olympic games tell them to stay away. If this is a timeline scenario, something might be planned for France.

A very strong and well spoken opening statement

Quote:In a recent hearing, Tony Bobulinski took aim at Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman, accusing them of perpetuating lies across various media platforms. The hearing, convened by the House Oversight Committee amidst a Republican-led investigation, delved into allegations surrounding the business dealings of Joe and Hunter Biden. Testimony was provided by former associates of Hunter Biden, including Lev Parnas, once linked to Rudy Giuliani. Tony Bobulinski's testimony focused on purported connections between the Bidens and business ventures in China and Russia, suggesting their involvement in influence peddling. He claimed firsthand encounters with the Bidens in 2017, portraying them as actively engaged participants in the alleged dealings.