Martyrmade - "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem"

Amazing podcast.

How partially fear of a global dark power was intentionally instigated to pressure countries in creating a new state.

Weissman (?) who brokered the deal for Israel in the UK government.

The Arabs fighting in WW 2, sometimes against each other, as proxy wars.

How "laws" in the bible, such as a man can just pay the family of a woman he has assaulted as she'll become his wife, were necessary at the time to prevent escalating bloodfeuts between tribes or families: there was no policy, there was no system to judge.

All you had was your honour and your word. When someone was chosen as arbiter, they were chosen because of how people perceived their honour. Still reflected in current day's courts where the judge is called "your honour".

Kathleen Lubey - "What Andrea Dworkin missed about Pornography"

https://aeon.co/essays/what-andrea-dworkin-missed-about-pornography

But the women soon qualify the potency of the penis. Miss Forward finds it to be, in crucial ways, unlike the dildo: whereas the dildo remains constantly erect, the penis ‘contracts himself like a Snail’, becomes ‘mean and pitiful, sneaking and supple’ in the absence of feminine beauty. Men, the young women realise, do not in their essence possess strength and power. Rather, they require an object of desire to beckon them to action. Men’s claim to uncontested social dominance, therefore, is premised on a faulty anatomical analogy.

Richard Jensen - "A damned stupid thing to do - the origins of C"

https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/12/a-damn-stupid-thing-to-do-the-origins-of-c/

With each failure, Ritchie added features back into NB in a manner that made sense to him and Ken, and once he added structures—variables that store multiple distinct values in a related or ‘structured’ fashion—Thompson was able to write Unix in this new language. Ritchie and Thompson saw the addition of structures, which could be found nowhere in B, SMALGOL, BCPL or CPL, as a change significant enough to warrant renaming the programming language, and B became C.

Michael J Warren - "British place names resonate with the song of missing birds"

https://aeon.co/essays/british-place-names-resonate-with-the-song-of-missing-birds 

Cuckoos, like so many British birds that are threatened or extinct, would have been much more abundant in the Middle Ages. Yaxley, on the edge of surviving cuckoo strongholds in the former Fens, would have thronged to their calls. Now these places, and many like them where the birds of their names are absent, are solemnly displaced, the names creaking in the wind like dilapidated pub signs whose buildings have long since closed or fallen into ruin. We can sense that displacement in the sprawl of modern suburban environments too, which, with considerable irony, fashionably assign bird nomenclatures to roads and residential spaces (Sandpiper Drive, Nightingale Way, Lark Rise, Goldcrest Mews…) where the species named are nowhere to be seen, and perhaps never have been.

Mara van der Lugt on hopeful pessimism

https://aeon.co/essays/in-these-dark-times-the-virtue-we-need-is-hopeful-pessimism

In the early Enlightenment, of course, there were no such concerns for the future of the planet. But there were evils in existence – plenty of them. Crimes, misfortunes, death, disease, earthquakes and the sheer vicissitudes of life. Considering such evils, these philosophers asked, can existence still be justified?

This longstanding philosophical debate is where we get the terms ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’, which are so much used, and perhaps overused, in our modern culture. ‘Optimism’ was the phrase coined by the Jesuits for philosophers such as Leibniz, with his notion that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (for surely, if God could have created a better one, he would have done so). ‘Pessimism’ followed not long afterwards to denote philosophers such as Voltaire, whose novel Candide (1759) ridiculed Leibnizian optimism by contrasting it with the many evils in the world. ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds,’ Voltaire’s hero asks, ‘what on earth are the others like?’

But really, Voltaire wasn’t much of a pessimist: other philosophers such as Bayle and Hume went much further in their demonstrations of the badness of existence. For Bayle, and for Hume after him, the point is not just that the evils of life outnumber the goods (though they believe this is also the case), but that they outweigh them

Jeremiah Lowin on Negative Engineering

https://future.com/negative-engineering-and-the-art-of-failing-successfully/

Negative engineering is “insurance as code”

So, what would be a better solution? I think it’s something akin to risk management for code or, more succinctly, negative engineering. Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives. If positive engineering is taken to mean the day-to-day work that engineers do to deliver productive, expected outcomes, then negative engineering is the insurance that protects those outcomes by defending them from an infinity of possible failures.

After all, we must account for failure, even in a well-designed system. Most modern software incorporates some degree of major error anticipation or, at the very least, error resilience. Negative engineering frameworks, meanwhile, go a step further: They allow users to work with failure, rather than against it. Failure actually becomes a first-class part of the application.

You might think about negative engineering like auto insurance. Purchasing auto insurance won’t prevent you from getting into an accident, but it can dramatically reduce the burden of doing so. Similarly, having proper instrumentation, observability, and even orchestration of code can provide analogous benefits when something goes wrong.

“Insurance as code” may seem like a strange concept, but it’s a perfectly appropriate description of how negative engineering tools deliver value: They insure the outcomes that positive engineering tools are used to achieve. That’s why features like scheduling or retries that seem toy-like — that is, overly simple or rudimentary — can be critically important: They’re the means by which users input their expectations into an insurance framework. The simpler they are (in other words, the easier it is to take advantage of them), the lower the cost of the insurance.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress

Enjoyable enough anime with some Claymore elements where some humans become part zombies/monster ("kabaneri", while the monsters are "kabani") while traveling and fighting on huge trains traveling through the landscape.

And of course infighting between the humans, folks not happy with the Shogunate etc.