the fisherman of halicarnassus

linkin park is releasing a documentary.

from what we've heard, chester will only be mentioned briefly, mostly in passing and through a few photos. that's because the documentary's main focus is the band's new era: how they started over, how emily joined the group, and how they've moved forward since then.

for years, we've been told over and over that nobody is trying to replace chester. but with this documentary, the band's lack of sincerity is becoming harder to ignore, at least from my perspective. sure, nobody is trying to replace chester, but every time they talk about the future while mentioning him less and less, they seem determined to remind us that that chapter is over and that the band was never just about chester.

what's even more frustrating is that, according to reports, this documentary concept was originally planned while chester was still alive.

this shouldn't have been handled this way. chester's loss was a shared trauma for millions of fans, and watching him be gradually pushed into the background feels disrespectful to the people who supported this band through every era.

the truth is, most of us don't really care about emily. if they had started with the band's early journey, then covered chester's death and the difficult road to recovery afterward, they would have earned even more respect from longtime fans.

instead, they once again chose to minimize chester's presence.

because they no longer want to be defined by chester.

because, in their view, this was never chester's band.

shame on you.

star wars

this is a dark enlightenment that suddenly dawned on me one sunday afternoon while i was lying on the couch in a gothic languor. (dark enlightenment and all, i’ve gone full dervish here, but hold on, the amount of right i’ve got on my side is high enough to fray my nerves.) i came face to face with the fact that the bearded rascal named george lucas, who for years sold us this thing as a laser-pistol space western, had actually packed straight-up zoroastrianism and gnostic philosophy into spaceships and unleashed it on us. the thing is, my friends, it’s playing out somewhere miles away from that “oh, dudes are clashing swords, there are robots going beep boop” surface-level stuff.

let’s go straight to the tibetans, the hindus; these folks have a chant, a mantra, that goes “om mani padme hum.” the “padme” in there, the lotus flower. the myth of a pure light shooting up spotless and snow-white out of dark, muddy waters. the vibration of enlightenment, compassion, goodness. well, doesn’t our queen padme amidala vibrate at exactly this frequency? the woman is a monument to morality from head to toe, a sparkling lotus flower blooming amid the rotten, slimy bureaucracy of the republic. (even looking at the woman makes you want to light incense, sit cross-legged, and moan “o lord,” that’s the kind of spirituality we’re talking about.)

at this point our zoroastrian brothers’ ahura mazda and ahriman dilemma, or the gnostics’ bleak but exceedingly correct dualism, comes into the picture, the universe doesn’t run one-sided, my dear friend. the moment you put this pure light, this padme, on one pan of the scale, a pitch-black weight like tar is obligated to descend onto the other pan purely so balance is maintained. well, anakin skywalker is the tar itself. the dark side isn’t simple irritability or a teenage mood; it’s a necessary, esoteric, and tragic reflex that the cosmic scale gives in response to padme’s brightness. in accordance with the maxim that if the light shines too brightly, its shadow becomes equally dark and ferocious, anakin fills the system’s evil quota gladly, drawing his sword with a vwoosh. the guy is literally a walking ahriman, a breathing demiurge.

and now we come to the finale of the film, pardon me, of this magnificent hindu-gnostic rite… after anakin spends years on end bringing the universe to its knees while having asthma attacks in his sith lord costume, do you think what happens the second he hurls that stunted, sneaky emperor headlong into the reactor shaft is purely a fatherly instinct? not a chance. the move we’re talking about is the ancient light that padme represents, namely om mani padme hum, coming from way beyond and grabbing the darkness by the throat. the moment anakin acts, he isn’t just saving his son; he’s collapsing cosmic dualism and declaring light’s final, crushing victory over darkness. the fire zoroaster lit thousands of years ago starts burning away busily on a space station with return of the jedi.

star wars is, well and truly, an esoteric epic of existence. the moment i fully grasped this i threw off the fleece blanket on me and ran to the window, wanting to shout at the top of my lungs to the ordinary people passing by on the street, “heed me, o heedless ones, these folks are saying padme, they’re saying dualism!” but i didn’t do it. i sat down, heated some water in the kettle, and poured myself a tea. because enlightenment, you see, is a solitary affair that curls inward rather than outward.

that phone really did have a "character." it feels strange looking back now, but the nokia 6600 wasn't just a device, when you held it in your hand it was as if it had a little technological personality. now phones are fast, powerful, everything's ready to go. but back then even loading something onto it was an event. you'd transfer an mp3, open a video (if it opened), change the theme... everything felt like a little accomplishment. even while writing an sms there was room to think; when you hit the wrong key, even "deleting" carried a weight to it. the strangest thing about the nokia 6600 was this: the thing you carried in your pocket wasn't just a communication tool, it was a bit of a "toy + tool + status object" mix too. it was enough for someone who picked it up to say "ooh, this is a good phone," no explanation needed. now phones are flawless but a little soulless. those old phones were flawed but they were memorable. maybe what we call "character" was exactly this.

a supplier whose world cup jerseys have terrible cuts. the shoulder sections of the jerseys don't sit quite right, and they have named this problem shoulder gate. it can be seen in the brazil-morocco match i'm watching right now too, in fact i even spotted it on the spectators in the stands.

the welfare society that was humanity's shared dream never arrived, but one person's net worth bar overflowed off the map. becoming a dollar trillionaire is, as much as it is a feat of entrepreneurship, also a billboard for who the current order grants unlimited growth to. calling him rich falls short now, the guy has officially become the final boss of capitalism. on one side people waiting for a raise, on the other a man whose fortune overtakes the gdp of some countries; the picture is pretty instructive.

let's quickly recap what went down. while the scottish general macbeth is returning victorious from battle, he runs into three witches. the witches tell this bloody hero with the sword that any day now he'll rise to great heights, that his fortune shows door after door opening for him, that he should wash his little cup and set it aside good and proper. macbeth, with butterflies fluttering in his stomach, goes skipping across the meadow. and what do you know, before long word comes and one of the doors the witches pointed to by reading the coffee grounds swings open, the door of government, and our man mako becomes a lord. once the first prophecy comes true, lord macbeth gets in the mood and is certain the next prophecy will come true as well, that history is crying out his name, keeping the beat with mac beth lord, mac beth lord.

lady macbeth, one of the greatest manipulators the world has ever seen, learns of the situation and works lord macbeth over but good. in the end macbeth lays king duncan down and slaughters him like a sacrificial offering. they pin the crime on others and slip away clean, and macbeth becomes king. but, oh boy, from this moment on fate starts weaving its webs with fine thessaloniki craftsmanship, and the road to macbeth's tragic end is paved with these webs.

macbeth proved himself on the battlefield and became a great commander with the sharpness of his sword. but here's the thing, there's also a peacetime side to this. (a duality also found in king richard.) in peacetime he's always hesitant, always pensive, and open to influence (especially his wife's influence). macbeth is a man of action, and while he's at ease when face to face with death, in civilian life, meaning in the period where thoughts take the place of action, when he has the time to listen to his inner voice, he falters. in this respect he reminds me a bit of hamlet, if you ask me. because of this duality he's generally struck me as a character somewhere between richard and hamlet.

hamlet's weakness of not being able to move from thinking to action is seen in peacetime macbeth too. the guilt he feels after killing the king brings macbeth down from his invincible-hero position and weakens him, blinds him. he gets scared. because of his troubled conscience he starts seeing ghosts. he wants to be sure he's invincible. he goes to the witches and confirms he's invincible, but he's actually fallen into an ironic situation. meanwhile, since he's reached the point of being able to fill a pool with the blood of the people he's had killed, a great coalition has formed against him. in the end he's killed in an ironic way, in keeping with the very prophecy that declared his invincibility. macduff, who kills macbeth, is unlike macbeth someone who never strays from virtue, someone who figures he'd have nightmares not because he killed but because he failed to kill. since he carries the sword of justice, the slaughter he's about to commit will be justified (the verdict is the viewer's now).

macbeth, and even lady macbeth, who goes mad and dies, are straightforwardly bad people. openly evil, that is. but they underline a nice point. while being a death machine in wartime is normal, in peacetime it isn't. with intrigues, assassinations, massacres and so on coming one after another, the heroic warrior of old becomes a vile murderer in an instant. the transition from good to evil is an interesting subject. everything about good and evil is expressed through morality and conscience. this is one of the interesting sides of the play. evil knows it's evil, and while this troubles it, it becomes even more evil.

macbeth is one of the products of shakespeare's pessimistic period. even though order is restored and justice is served at the end of the play by paragons of virtue, when you think about everything that happened, seeing the level evil can reach out of the good-evil pair inside a person must have really changed the man's view of humanity.

everybody's out here chewing on the same gum about apple falling behind in the ai race. the people who actually know what's going on explain the reason for this like they're spelling it out for a five-year-old, and yet we still see some folks who insist on not getting it.

people! those chats you have with gemini, chatgpt, claude, grok are becoming folk songs on everyone's lips, becoming data passed hand to hand in targeted ads. when you go into gemini on your samsung phone and type "i can't get it up, what can i do," first the keyboard you typed it on is tracking you, then the samsung ai watching your screen is tracking you, and finally google is tracking you. then these three sit down at the big data coffeehouse and gossip behind your back about how you're impotent. meta hears this and comes running right over to you: "bro, i heard something, is it true?

they're saying your little soldier won't stand at attention? don't worry man, look, there's this pill, you pop one and you're walking around rock hard for 24 hours," and it shoves the ad in your face everywhere. you swipe two stories and bam, "boner pill," you open the explore page and it's full-strength paste recipes, then you come over here and cry about "our phones are listening to us."

apple, see, is trying to do all this ai stuff on the phone's own chip precisely so your honor, your pride, your reputation, your manly dignity and self-respect don't fall onto the tongue of every dog and jackal out there. where its power falls short, it works in the cloud through icloud, and it does that encrypted too. it can't use your data to improve the ai, it can only do what the phone's power allows. and since your 7-year-old iphone 11's chip obviously won't be enough to run that operation, it can't offer you that service. if you don't complain when your 7-year-old laptop can't run this year's game, then do me a favor, sweet brother, and don't go criticizing apple for stuff like this either.

stop comparing siri to chatgpt and gemini like a bunch of cattle. these companies are firms that can pour all their human resources and unlimited billions of dollars into ai. apple, on the other hand, has a ton of products it needs to use its human resources on effectively. should this engineer develop the new os, or do ui, or focus on the watch, the phone, the computer, the vr headset, the earbuds, the smart tv, all kinds of products, or should they develop ai?

what apple is actually telling you, crystal clear, is this: i'm not an ai company, my job is to develop the tech devices you use day to day and to create smart assistants for you while protecting your privacy. and in doing that, to build an ai voice-command assistant whose whole world is you, that exists inside your device, that doesn't open up your private business to anyone, maybe a little more limited than its rivals but able to handle a big chunk of your daily tasks.

my worry is that apple gets so fed up with the criticism from thick-headed folks like you that it finally says "screw you and your privacy too, forget it" and crosses over to the dark side and plasters everything you've got for the whole world to see. then i'll get to see the diameter of you people's asses that use chatgpt like a therapist. on that note, if any of you haven't watched it, i recommend watching every one of its films. a cloud-based ai will always be better than an on-device ai, because at that very moment that little tramp is talking to millions of people besides you at the same time. just like someone who's flirted with, slept with, and gotten up next to a whole lot of people gets experienced at giving you a good time in conversation and in bed, this slippery ai gets experienced the same way, talking to billions of people all at once. your siri, meanwhile, is a virgin who opened her eyes to the world with you and has only ever seen everything in you. she's not great at this kind of thing, but she doesn't sully your honor either.

you all probably aren't aware of how serious the data these devices like phones, computers, and vr headsets collect about your life really is. processing this data on open servers means even information that could ruin your life ends up doing manual labor out in the streets.
"object removal in photos works really well on samsung"

yeah, because samsung uploads that photo to google's servers, edits it there with gemini, and sends it back to you. and meanwhile gemini is even keeping a record of what kinds of objects you delete from your photos. say you removed your ex from a photo? it dumps dating apps in front of you as ads, on instagram it pours out reels with messages like "time to break up with your partner," "you should be heartbroken," "show the ones who don't appreciate your worth their place." and don't even ask how it knew the person you removed from the photo was your partner.

poor apple, meanwhile, is doing the best it can with the a19 chip inside the phone without disgracing you in front of everyone. yes, maybe it doesn't give results as amazing as gemini yet, but at least it respects your privacy. it doesn't even know what you deleted.

the visual awareness feature introduced in this version, the ability to see what's on the screen, only just now arrived on iphones. yet androids have been spying on your screen for years.

bottom line, if apple wanted to it could make the absolute king of that ai too, and yet in this day and age they're still chasing after things like protecting your privacy, stuff you don't even care about yourself.

shrink your digital footprint, dear friends, support the services that don't record your digital footprint, that don't see it as data to be sold left and right. and then you wander around going "the things passing through my mind show up as ads in front of me."

thinking will never be popular, because it demands too much. we're used to accepting any kind of internal conversation as thinking: hashing out problems, seeking advice, going over the same situations endlessly and again and again. but real thinking begins when a person is willing to question the way they make sense of what's happening.

this means giving up one of the most powerful human needs, namely the need to be right. for most people, protecting familiar worldviews matters more than verifying whether those views actually correspond to reality.

if a person is convinced that others are responsible for all their failures, this idea shields them from acknowledging their own part in what's happening. if they see themselves as someone who's "just naturally this way," that frees them from the responsibility of changing anything. if they've convinced themselves that "now isn't the time," that gives them the option of putting off important decisions forever. in all of these cases thinking doesn't move forward; on the contrary, it serves an explanatory system that's already been set up.

but real thinking works differently, because it tears down the structures that psychological comfort rests on. it forces you to accept that your habitual interpretations might be wrong, and it strips away the convenient excuses. it exposes your own role in creating problems that previously seemed imposed from the outside. this doesn't always make life easier, but it's at exactly this moment that a person is freed from being a prisoner of their automatic explanations. only then do they begin to see how they build their relationships, how they make their decisions, how they limit themselves, how they create recurring conflicts, and how they can change the course of their own life.

this is why thinking, since it takes the courage to abandon the illusions that have long served as support, remains an activity for a select few. the price of thinking is the loss of your former certainty. the result of thinking is the chance to live consciously, for the first time, rather than out of inertia.

it was august of 1856. the pickaxes of miners clearing out a limestone cave deep inside the rocky neander valley near düsseldorf snagged on some strange humanlike bones. the earth wasn't actually showing us the face of our forgotten brother for the first time, similar skulls with thick bones and heavy brow ridges had surfaced before in belgium and gibraltar, but the elites of the era had brushed them aside, calling them "misshapen deformities of modern man." this time, though, the bones reached the hands of johann carl fuhlrott, a local schoolteacher and naturalist, and fuhlrott became the first person to sense the ancient truth behind that flattened skull. what stood before us wasn't a modern human who'd suffered rickets, but another species of human left behind in the depths of history. the scientific world officially named this new species "homo neanderthalensis," but naming something, of course, isn't the same as understanding it.

to this species we had probably been neighbors with for thousands of years, we committed one of history's greatest injustices over the century following the day we rediscovered its existence.

the racist, colonial arrogance of victorian europe had framed evolution as a linear ladder, starting at the very bottom and climbing inevitably up to the white man. since the neanderthals had gone extinct, they could only have been "failures," crude, lumbering, incapable of speech, half-savage creatures barely a step above apes.

sloppy work like the famous flawed reconstruction the paleontologist marcellin boule commissioned in 1911, based on the skeleton of an elderly neanderthal, ruthlessly carved the cliche of a caveman into modern minds, knees bent, neck hunched forward, standing more like a gorilla than a human. yet boule had completely ignored the fact that the skeleton he was working on belonged to an elderly individual whose spine had been bent by arthritis. this caricature was really a mirror reflecting the warped mentality of our own species, the one we scramble to portray as flawless and noble, a mentality that inevitably comes to light today. we made them savage to hide our own savagery; we declared them mute to sanctify our own tongue.

but of course, the truth has a way of eventually coming out, even from beneath the soil. by the time the 1950s arrived, new studies being carried out in many parts of the world began to shake the rigid template surrounding the neanderthals.

in 1957, the anatomists william l. straus and a. j. e. cave reexamined the "la chapelle-aux-saints" skeleton that marcellin boule had used as the basis for his 1911 "apelike freak of nature" model, and they laid out evidence that the skeleton's owner was simply an elderly patient suffering from severe arthritis (osteoarthritis), and that neanderthals had in fact stood and walked completely upright, just like modern humans. the evidence was so striking that these two scientists were bold enough to claim that a neanderthal, shaved and dressed in modern clothes, wouldn't raise an eyebrow from anyone if he boarded the new york subway.

but the real turning point came with the excavations the american anthropologist ralph solecki carried out at shanidar cave in northern iraq between 1957 and 1960. solecki presented his examinations of the skeletons he found there to the world in 1971 with his book "shanidar: the first flower people." the work, with the new findings it laid out, argued that the neanderthals weren't crude brutes but instead possessed deep social bonds and compassion.

in his excavations at shanidar cave, located in the zagros mountains of northern iraq, ralph solecki had found skeletal remains belonging to neanderthals who lived roughly 45,000 to 60,000 years ago. according to him, two specific findings among these skeletons offered evidence that would fundamentally change the way we see neanderthals:

solecki determined that an elderly neanderthal male, whose skeleton was found in the cave, had his right arm amputated as a result of severe blows taken at a young age, had gone blind in one eye, and had trouble walking, and he demonstrated that this individual's ability to live for years with these grave disabilities was only possible thanks to being cared for, protected, and fed by the other members of the group. this was the first major piece of evidence for human behavior that shattered the "primitive savage" image.

the same excavations also showed that neanderthals buried their dead. but what was far more intriguing was that the pollen samples taken from the soil of another neanderthal buried in a funerary position suggested that this individual had been buried with healing, colorful wildflowers like yarrow, st. john's wort, and hollyhock deliberately laid over him. (even though this finding has been reopened to debate in recent years, the impact it created at the time was enormous.)

with the book "shanidar: the first flower people," published in 1971, ralph solecki announced to the world that neanderthals weren't the "gorilla-like savages" that figures like marcellin boule had claimed, but on the contrary possessed deep emotions, an aesthetic sensibility, compassion, and an advanced soul. even the book's title, by alluding to the era's "flower children" (hippie) movement, positioned neanderthals as peaceful and sensitive beings.

solecki's book had been published in a climate where the era's flower children movement and the humanist, anti-vietnam-war wave were at their peak. in presenting his findings, solecki was no doubt influenced by the social headlines and this peaceful atmosphere, and by naming his book "the first flower people" outright, he practically positioned neanderthals as the peaceful hippies of ages past. under the conditions of the time, bending the scales the other way, toward extreme romanticism, in order to tear down the "savage monster" portrayal marcellin boule had created worked strategically, but scientific objectivity eventually filed down some of these claims.

solecki's most popular thesis in particular, the "shanidar iv, flower burial" hypothesis, took serious hits in later years from the work of developing micro-archaeology and palynologists (pollen scientists). when solecki saw the pollen of healing plants like yarrow, st. john's wort, and hollyhock concentrated in the grave soil, he took it as evidence of an aesthetic and medicinal respect for the dead. but later analyses showed that this pollen might have been carried there by the activities of rodents like the "persian jird" (meriones persicus), which are very common in that region and dig deep tunnels into cave floors. these rodents pulled whole plants of this kind underground to insulate their burrows and to feed. in other words, that romantic funeral ritual was most likely nothing more than a prehistoric rodent stocking up for winter.
then again, it wouldn't be fair to say solecki was completely wrong either, because the anatomical facts on the "shanidar 1" skeleton (the elderly, disabled individual) in that same cave were too concrete to romanticize away.

the severe bone damage in the left eye socket clearly proved that the elderly neanderthal had been blind for many long years, that the trauma to his head had probably paralyzed his right side, and that his right arm had been amputated below the elbow and healed while he was still alive.

under the harsh ice age conditions the neanderthals lived in, it would have been impossible for a paralyzed individual who couldn't hunt, who couldn't even protect himself with his one arm, to survive more than ten years with these injuries. the thesis that the other members of the group brought him food and protected him from predators isn't a romantic embellishment but a scientific finding that still holds up today.
in the end, solecki, in the process of restoring the neanderthals' good name, had no doubt gotten swept up in the spirit of the times and dressed the story up in language that was too poetic. today's archaeology sees neanderthals neither as the peaceful "flower children" solecki claimed nor as the crude "gorillas" the old century claimed. they too, probably just like us, were a species of human that came up with pragmatic solutions to survive, that cared for its wounded when the moment called for it, that resorted to violence when the moment called for it, that could think abstractly but above all was pragmatic and extremely realistic.

even so, the paleogenetics and modern archaeology methods of the 21st century keep on demolishing the arrogant narrative solecki struck the first blow against. today we know for certain that neanderthals were complex beings who survived for hundreds of thousands of years with resilience and grace in the brutal world of the ice age. they could think abstractly, they drew geometric symbols on cave walls with red pigments, they made beads out of seashells and hung them around their necks. they didn't just bury their dead in the ground, they perhaps sent them off into the unknown by leaving flowers and gifts beside them. they didn't abandon their sick and wounded; through social cooperation, they kept them alive for years.

today, one of the most stunning and current pieces of evidence for neanderthal sophistication lies in a 59,000-year-old molar from the chagyrskaya cave in siberia. according to the results of microscopic analyses led by dr. alisa zubova, a senior researcher at the peter the great museum of anthropology and ethnography (kunstkamera) under the russian academy of sciences (ras), a deep cavity in this tooth may show signs of having been drilled out and cleaned with stone tools at millimeter precision, with a rotating motion.
if this thesis is correct, it would be the oldest known invasive dental procedure in human history. what's more, the smoothed-over walls of the cavity carry evidence suggesting this neanderthal survived despite that terrible pain and kept chewing with that tooth for years. all of this, like it or not, points to the manual skill needed to perform an operation that painful, the knowledge of healing plants to ease that pain, and a sense of community to care for that individual after the surgery.

then, when the gene maps were spread out before us, we saw to our great astonishment that they hadn't completely disappeared after all. even today, a 1 to 2 percent neanderthal legacy circulates in the dna of every modern human outside of africa. the neanderthal wasn't just our cousin, he was also our ancestor.

so how did a species this adaptable, strong, resilient, and intelligent end up withdrawing from the stage of history? and at the same time, how did it manage to preserve its existence in our genetic legacy?

the first thing that came to mind had been "genocide" theories. but this bloody thesis, grounded in the cruelty of our species, is gradually giving way in the scientific world to a far more tragic and sorrowful truth. we didn't wipe them out with a systematic massacre. we assimilated them.

new findings show that around 40,000 years ago, while europe's climate was fluctuating at an unpredictable pace, the homo sapiens population arriving in waves from africa vastly outnumbered the neanderthals. the neanderthals were already living in small, scattered groups. the large crowds of sapiens narrowed their hunting grounds, depleted their resources, and pushed them to the edges of the map, toward gibraltar. but this wasn't a war, it was a melting away.

sapiens mixed with the neanderthals they encountered and had children. the neanderthals slowly dissolved into the enormous gene pool of our numerically superior species, melting away inside us.

this species, which had managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years under the harsh conditions of the ice age, had adapted physically to the cold to perfection. but around 40,000 years ago, sudden and extreme fluctuations occurred in europe's climate (very rapid warming periods followed by extreme cooling). this turned the wooded hunting grounds they were used to into open steppe. while homo sapiens, with their higher technological and social flexibility, adapted much more quickly to the changing ecosystem, the new environmental conditions may have contributed to the process that brought about the end of the neanderthals.

homo sapiens, setting out from africa, may also have carried into europe tropical diseases and pathogens that neanderthals had never encountered and developed no immunity to. these epidemics may have rapidly drained the already fragile neanderthal population.
as sapiens mixed with the increasingly shrinking neanderthal population that remained, they must have absorbed the neanderthal gene pool into themselves. so, as we said, maybe we didn't slaughter them en masse, but we assimilated them within our own population. the 1 to 2 percent neanderthal legacy living on today in the genes of people outside of africa is the most concrete proof of this.
what we see today when we turn around and look back isn't a primitive, shapeless freak of nature, but merely a version of humanity that could have been a good alternative but vanished, unable to keep pace with the new conditions.

as for the neanderthals' sorrowful story, it's trying to tell us this: there wasn't just one way to be human in this world. and the option that existed alongside us may have been offering something more human than today's humanity, an alternative that adapted without throwing off nature's balance, and most importantly, one that was far more peaceful. we sapiens, meanwhile, while spreading across the world with our organizational ability to mobilize masses, probably ended up responsible for the disappearance of this brother species of ours that had ruled the european continent for thousands of years, and in doing so we laid the groundwork for the conditions that will, before too long, bring about the total disappearance of humankind in general too.

in 1900, john d. rockefeller controlled roughly 90% of all oil refineries in the united states. by some estimates, he was the richest private individual who ever lived.

he had a problem. scientists were discovering that compounds derived from coal tar, a byproduct of petroleum processing, could be used as synthetic medicines. aspirin derived from coal tar was commercialized by bayer in 1899. what rockefeller had previously treated as industrial waste could now be sold back to the public as medicine at profit margins approaching 10,000%.

he had another problem too. american medicine in 1900 was a competitive ecosystem of homeopaths, herbalists, naturopaths, osteopaths, midwives, and traditional doctors who used food, plants, water, and lifestyle as the primary tools of healing. nearly half of all american medical schools taught some form of natural or alternative medicine.

rockefeller invested heavily in the german pharmaceutical industry and eventually gained major interests connected to the ig farben consortium, which included bayer, basf, and hoechst. then a report was commissioned.

the report was written by abraham flexner, an educator with no medical degree. funded by the rockefeller and carnegie foundations, it was published in 1910. the report declared natural and alternative medicine schools to be unscientific quackery. it recommended shutting down more than half of all american medical schools and standardizing the remaining institutions around medicine based on synthetic patented drugs.

congress acted. within a decade, more than half of american medical schools were closed. the remaining schools accepted rockefeller and carnegie funding on the condition that they restructure their curricula around pharmaceutical treatment. nutrition was removed. herbal medicine was removed. lifestyle intervention was removed. the role of the doctor was redefined: diagnose the symptom, prescribe the drug.

the drugs were petroleum derived. the petroleum came from rockefeller controlled refineries. the medical schools were funded by rockefeller. the journals were funded by rockefeller. the american medical association was backed by rockefeller. hospitals were funded by rockefeller.

by 1925, the american medical system had effectively become a vertically integrated extension of the oil industry operating under the marketing slogan of “scientific medicine.”

this is the system that still exists today.

the pharmaceutical industry now generates around $1.5 trillion annually. although the united states makes up about 4% of the world’s population, it consumes roughly 50% of all pharmaceuticals produced globally.

the system was not designed to make people healthy. it was designed to manage symptoms in ways that create lifelong customers. a healthy patient is a lost customer. a managed patient taking pills every day for the rest of their life is recurring revenue.

the goal has always been to keep you profitable in that corridor between healthy and dead.

healthy enough to keep buying for as long as possible. not healthy enough to stop.

the doctor telling you to fix your metabolism by changing your diet is, from the system’s perspective, a defective product. the doctor prescribing statins, metformin, antidepressants, and lifelong blood pressure medication is functioning exactly as designed.

the system was designed by an oil baron who needed a market for the waste products of his refineries.

and more than a century after the flexner report, it still operates almost exactly the way it was intended to.

you are the customer.

the corridor is where you live.

fenerbahce got eliminated by benfica in the champions league qualifiers;

the manager went to benfica.

benfica got eliminated by real madrid in the champions league round of 16;

the manager is now on his way to real madrid.

and all of this happens within a single year.

the world's population declining is already something many people want. with limited resources, it could be a positive development for the future if there are fewer people to support.

on the other hand, the fact that birth rates are lower in developed countries while much higher in underdeveloped countries could end up pushing humanity backward in terms of overall progress and quality of life.

it's a painting so small in size that seeing it in person for the first time gives you that "meeting up with a girl you matched with online and finding out she's way shorter than expected" feeling. image

the live version, lasting at least six minutes, featured on elvis presley's 1970 las vegas-recorded album "that's the way it is," has somehow surpassed all other interpretations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1g5tVGZhfk

you explain in plain language what you want to do in your excel sheet, and it writes the formula for you. it currently supports excel, google sheets, and apple numbers. https://reviso.net/formula-generator