Tootfinder

Just got these messages from @seengoals@mastodon.social, one of the members of Gaza Verified, basically accusing me of running a fundraiser for Gaza and keeping the proceeds (I have no fundraiser on any fundraising site anywhere) and extorting me to share his fundraiser or he’ll apparently go public with it.
So here’s what’s going to happening instead: Nabil has been removed Gaza Verified (

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

On a hazy afternoon in the Persian Gulf nearly 40 years ago,
the captain of a U.S. Navy frigate summoned Lt. Gordan Van Hook to the bridge and handed him a pair of binoculars.
Through them, Lieutenant Van Hook, the ship’s chief engineer, saw the danger that lay ahead
— three Iranian mines.
The frigate, part of an American force sent to escort oil tankers, came to a stop well ahead of the mines.
But some 10 minutes later, an undetected mine exploded under the shi…

What Happened After a U.S. Warship Hit an Iranian Mine in 1988
President Trump has suggested providing escorts for stranded tankers. A mine strike on a U.S. frigate in the Persian Gulf shows the perils of doing so.

Some City Some Nature V 🏙️🪾
一些城一些自然 V 🏙️🪾
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ ERA 100, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Conservatives want schools to teach this strict life path they say avoids poverty
The steps are simple: Graduate from high school. Find a full-time job. Get married before having kids.

The three-pronged framework is currently taught in just a handful of classrooms.
But soon, students across the country may be told that following those steps could keep them out of poverty as adults.
The approach is getting a boost from conservatives seeking to bring it to America’s middl…

Conservatives want schools to teach this strict life path they say avoids poverty
Bills in at least seven GOP-led states would require lessons on the “success sequence.” Critics say it ignores systemic challenges and stigmatizes non-traditional families.

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.
The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.
The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.
It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.
This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.
But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.
Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

When guards appeared earlier this month outside the room Christian Hinojosa shared with her son and other women and children at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas,
she guessed what they might be after.
She quickly donned her puffy winter jacket, then slipped a manila envelope inside it.
“Thank God the weather was cool,” she said — the jacket didn’t raise suspicions.
Then, she said, she was instructed to leave the room while eight to 10 guards lifted up …

Seized Art, Eavesdropping Guards: Parents Describe a Clampdown at Dilley Detention Center as Kids Shared Their Stories
Detainees told ProPublica that art supplies have been removed in room searches, immigrants have lost access to Gmail and staff hover within earshot during video calls.