Who needs peace when you can spend 1.2 trillion dollars on a shiny golden dome? About 40% higher than the annual defense spending of 2025

The power of historical knowledge—the profitability of indoctrination. - The characterizations of the foundations of Western civilization are always fascinating; Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire have been presented as the intellectual and political ancestors of the modern West, and thus inevitably become part of its spiritual foundations and guiding principles. From Ancient Greece, we have the intellectual germ; philosophy, democracy, rational thought, mathematics, theatre, and science. Rome gives us our institutional germ; law, government, military, engineering, administration, and of course, empire-building. The historical, academic, and cultural reverence in Western classrooms overlooks the fact that these societies had, as one of their cores, the familial dynamics of primogeniture, patriarchy, and most importantly slavery. After the death of the father, the firstborn son would become king of the house, the dead forefather, would be an idolized figures zealously watching over the family affairs and demanding veneration from its members. All other children, girls and boys alike, were subservient and subjected to the will of the eldest, who after having come into sole possession of the paternal state, was then, without formality, a monarch. This new king, this ‘pater familias’, had the power of his father before him and no law to restrict him in exercising his authority. He, in possession of paternal property with its corresponding stock and fixtures, owned and all members of the family as well, who were unrecognized by law and expected to give reverence, obedience, and labor. - So next time you hear a politician talk about the “human family”idea or a shared universal bond (a rhetoric long used by the UN, as well as Reagan, Obama, Merkel, Macron, Tony Blair, and Ursula von der Leyen among many others), remember that they might not be talking about the same kind of family that you may be thinking of. —— Interesting works to read: "La Cité Antique" by Fustel de Coulanges.

Imagine using AI to enable diagnostic systems deployed through phones, solar kiosks, and offline devices to continuously monitor health, assist teachers in delivering individualized education, empower nurses to diagnose and treat patients, transform public budgets into transparent ledgers continuously audited and optimized by open AI systems, allow poor communities to maximize food production, or solve complex international conflicts and wars guided by game theory cooperation principles—but oh no, we use it for making trump, putin, and kim jong un music videos and lego animations of war, flooding music apps with ai singers, managing our fucking calendars, making ppts, vibe coding, hacking others, guiding missiles and drones, deciding who to kill in conflicts, making slop and whatnot

Do you know Domenico Ghirlandaio or Bertoldo di Giovanni? Two of the people who taught and inspired Michelangelo. In the past, creative work fueled other people’s creativity, today it trains AI and feeds the slop