the fisherman of halicarnassus

i can't explain this by giving myself as an example. because i never claimed to be a good person. but i've seen plenty of living examples of it around me.

in my opinion the reason for this isn't that they're evil by birth. it's that after a while they start connecting cause and effect. getting ingratitude in return the more good you do, being used the more you sacrifice, losing out the more honest you are... at some point i think a feeling like "screw it, if being good doesn't pay off, then forget it" forms in a person's head.

maybe they don't really become merciless. maybe they just go numb. because a person who gets wounded in the same spot over and over eventually learns to protect themselves. from the outside it looks like they've lost their conscience, but really they've just lost their expectations and their feelings.

and that's the most dangerous transformation of all. you get used to the wickedness of wicked people, but when people who were once good give up, it tells you so much more.

in the 1840s, at vienna's largest hospital, women about to give birth ended up in one of two wards: the first ward, run by doctors, and the second, run by midwives. women cried and begged not to be put in the first, and some, purely to avoid ending up there, gave birth in the street and came to the hospital only afterward. they weren't wrong to, either; in the doctors' ward the death rate from puerperal fever climbed as high as ten percent, while in the midwives' ward it was two or three. the young doctor ignaz semmelweis became fixated on this difference. the turning point came when his friend kolletschka cut his hand with a scalpel during an autopsy and died with the exact same clinical picture as puerperal fever. the pieces fell into place: in the morning the doctors were dissecting cadavers, and in the afternoon they were delivering babies without washing their hands. the midwives never touched cadavers at all. semmelweis made handwashing with chlorinated lime mandatory, and the deaths dropped to one percent.

what came after is one of the most shameful pages in the history of medicine. his colleagues took offense, saying "a gentleman's hands can't be dirty"; since germ theory didn't exist yet, the talk of "cadaver particles" was treated like superstition. nobody wanted to admit they'd spent years killing patients with their own hands, that's all there was to it. semmelweis lost his job, and the more he wrote letters calling europe's famous doctors "murderers," the more isolated he became, until he was finally locked away in an insane asylum. there, a wound opened by a beating from the guards got infected, and within two weeks he was dead. from the very thing he'd devoted his life to describing, that is. the semmelweis reflex comes from this story: the reflexive rejection of new knowledge that contradicts established belief, no matter how solid the evidence. pasteur and lister proved the man right twenty years later, but by then it was too late.

in this period it was not only humanity that was subjected to genocide, it was works of art at the same time. adolf hitler, after becoming chancellor of germany in 1933, set up a unit to loot works of art, and he put einsatzstab reichsleiter rosenberg in charge of it, a man who was an enemy of art, a skull-measuring racist and a fundamentalist, and who was desperate to get into hitler's good graces.

in fact, on march 15 of that same year, through him and his unit, a blacklist was published. the first order of business was stripping george grosz of his citizenship. the bauhaus school was shut down. names like max liebermann, kathe kollwitz, paul klee, max beckmann and otto dix were removed from their posts at the art schools. and roughly a week before these dismissals, the propaganda ministry that joseph goebbels would be put in charge of had already been officially announced. so everything had actually been planned in advance.

as far as hitler was concerned, one of the biggest cultural obstacles standing in the way of national socialism was art. he defined the modernists as people who distorted art. the futurists, the cubists and the dadaists were included in that too. their work was worthless to him. because the way he saw it, art was supposed to serve politics, and it needed to be turned into a part of nazi propaganda as quickly as possible.

and sure enough, a short time later, on july 18, the first artistic exhibition of nazi propaganda, kunst, opened in berlin. the exhibition featured the paintings and sculptures of so-called artists who were hitler bootlickers, people like arno breker, josef thorak and adolf ziegler. and of course, with plenty of hitler portraits made by various people, the rise of his party to this point was being visualized in artistic terms.

and at more or less the same time, the commission led by max von schillings and wilhelm furtwangler was busy censoring the musicians, radio stations and composers who were active in that era. television programs and films got caught in the censorship machine too, of course. and in 1935, the first state-backed propaganda film in history, triumph des willens, was released.

but hitler did not stop even there. in may of 1938, he put into effect the degenerate art law designed by einsatzstab reichsleiter rosenberg and joseph goebbels. with this law, the government would be able to seize works of art on made-up grounds and without paying any compensation. and it did not take long at all. the great majority of the confiscated works of art were sold off at very cheap prices in order to belittle the art and the artist. the ones that could not be sold were burned in an orderly fashion in berlin, under the name of a festival.

the breaks fall at the natural shifts: the setup, the 1933 blacklist and dismissals, hitler's view of modern art, the propaganda exhibition, the censorship of music and film, and finally the 1938 degenerate art law and the destruction of the works. same text as before, just paragraphed.

trump played it small, if you ask me. instead of belgium, he could've thrown israel into the tournament at this stage and turned the quarterfinal into something like an israel-usa friendly.

it's entirely a matter of supply and demand. it's about the industry knowing what to get people to like. in every era people have wanted to consume things collectively, to feel a sense of belonging, and popular culture has filled that need. back in the day everyone in the neighborhood read the same newspaper, now they follow the same influencer, at its core not much has changed, in my opinion. turning up your nose and calling it low-quality would be taking the easy way out too, because not everything popular is bad, and by the same token we don't have to call something good just because it's popular. what's bad is losing your own taste inside this spiral. i mean, the part that matters is how much we, as people, have surrendered to it. being able to put a little distance between yourself and it, consuming it with a questioning eye, feels like the healthiest approach to me.

it's not a scandal. the officials carried out the instructions they were given. it wouldn't matter if this were messi or just some regular guy. besides, since messi too is a being in the category of human, whatever the procedure is there, that's what gets applied. if you want to call it an illogical, unnecessary practice, maybe that's up for debate. but it's not a scandal. also, there were referees and iraqi footballers who were denied visas, and nobody batted an eye. there's no scandal bigger than that.

they say death is the greatest pain in the world, but the most unbearable kind of it is the loss of a child. what you want for a living being who's a part of you, whom you gave birth to, whom you love and have devoted your life to, is always a long and healthy life, but sadly not every mother gets to live out that wish. the best-known example of this is michelangelo's pieta, which means "mercy" in italian; that scene where mary carries her child in her arms with an endless grief. image

michelangelo made this sculpture at the age of 24 on commission, and jean bilheres de lagraulas, who served as a cardinal at st. peter's basilica for many years, wanted the sculpture as a tomb monument so he'd continue to be remembered after his death. the sculpture's reference source isn't the bible but the scenes of lamentation following the death of christ that were depicted in 14th-century german art. the sculpture was made by carving a single block of marble, and the terms of the commission were extremely demanding for such a young sculptor. the first of the terms was that the figure of christ be life-sized, and the other was that the sculpture be "more beautiful than any marble work to be seen in rome at the time, and that no master of the era could produce a better one." these ambitious conditions were asked for despite michelangelo's youth, and the sculpture was given as a commission to this little-known sculptor.

to realize the idea of a life-sized christ, which was one of the terms of the commission, michelangelo created the sculpture by carving a single block of carrara marble. we see the difference between mother and son through contrasts. horizontal and vertical, living and dead, nude and clothed. in order to create a life-sized christ and achieve balance in the composition, mary's shoulders were widened and an effort was made to create a proportional composition with an abundance of fabric. in the work, mary carries her son with a pained, resigned expression. even though it's an extremely striking and beautiful composition visually, there are criticized points too. one of them is that mary, who should be in her 50s at her son's death, looks far too young, but michelangelo explained this criticism as "the effect of mary being pure and a virgin having left her unspoiled." the other detail that makes the sculpture special is that michelangelo carved the latin sentence "michaelangelvs bonarotvs florentinvs faciebat" (michelangelo buonarroti, the florentine, made this) onto the sash mary wears. the pieta is the only work the artist signed in his entire career. image

in my opinion some shows have a feature more important than whether they're good or not: being watched at the right age. person of interest is one of those. when i watched it in my early twenties it was a nice show, exciting. when i rewatched it a few years later, though, i realized it was actually a story built on technology, surveillance, artificial intelligence, ethics, and human nature. the same show doesn't change, but the person watching it does. i suppose the value of some productions emerges right here too. if it widens the window you look at life through a little, rather than just entertaining you, it sticks with you even years later. that's why the netflix show the blacklist is actually like a follow-up show that people who liked person of interest should watch. when it comes to opening a new window every episode, nothing beats it. i recommend it.

that emptiness that comes when you reach the summit: hedonic adaptation. you succeeded. you got that job you wanted, you finished that big project, you pulled that car of your dreams up to your front door. for months you focused on that moment, you went sleepless, you took risks. and the moment came. so why did it only last 15 minutes? why, the day after that big success, did your mind immediately start searching for the next "deprivation" target, as if nothing had happened?

the answer is simple but unsettling: your brain is fooling you. in psychology this is called hedonic adaptation. the human mind has evolved to accept every new level it reaches as the "new normal" in record time. you finish a construction, and that building is now just a pile of concrete to you. you earn a fortune, and a week later it's now your "ordinary" balance.

the eye-opening truth here is this: as long as you index happiness to "acquiring," you're doomed to run on a hamster wheel. no matter how fast you run, the wheel will keep turning at the same speed. most people try to solve this trap with "more ambition"; they work more, earn more, want more. but this is just turning the wheel faster.

real mastery (and real peace) begins here:

– change the finish line: index your goal not to a "result" (money, property, title) but to a "level of mastery." results undergo adaptation, but deepening in something, that is, the "learning process," is resistant to adaptation.
– architect the process: that emptiness you feel when you reach the goal isn't actually a failure; it's the system's signal to "look for a new challenge." if you use this signal not to buy a new "toy" but to gain a new "skill," you become the architect of the system rather than its slave.

in short: if the thing you desired suddenly loses its meaning once you reach it, it means you're targeting the wrong thing. it's not what you have but who you become that nourishes you. next time you reach a goal, don't ask "what did i gain?" ask "who did i become on this path?" this is the only way to get off the wheel.

since it's the easiest star to observe in the sky (a star, for the people of antiquity), it's the first subject of humans interacting with planets outside their own world. of course, since it's observed from our world in a pretty random manner, some ancient civilizations also treated venus from time to time as a different star.

probably because they lost the trip to the moon to the americans, the soviets got seriously hung up on this planet. while america was investing in the moon, these guys invested in venus. but of course, once again the usa surpassed the ussr on the venus matter too. even though the soviets came to have quite a bit of knowledge about venus thanks to the robots they sent, it was again the americans who mapped venus in detail. since landing on it and roaming its surface is pretty difficult (the average temperature on its surface is 465c), most states said "ah, forget venus for now" and focused on mars. for instance, the soviets' venera 13 is the craft most resistant to the venus environment, and it was able to operate for 127 minutes.

by the way, here's something interesting. it's thought that the planet actually ended up in this state because of the greenhouse effect. meaning our world too will maybe end up like this one day...

the cup whose two biggest surprises so far are uruguay being knocked out by cape verde and ecuador, while down 1-0 against germany, coming back to win 2-1 and advancing. there's also south korea, who beat czechia in the first match, losing to south africa in the final match and getting knocked out. turkey getting knocked out is the 4th biggest surprise.

normally he was expected to play in this match and pad his stats against jordan, but he chose to rest. after all, the man has nothing left to prove. if it were mbappe or cristiano ronaldo, there'd be a particular wish to play them in this match.

a very fast-paced first half played out. we don't know norway's plans for the next round exactly, but they have an air of having accepted second place in the group. so much so that they put 10 players into rotation all at once. and this inevitably reflects on the play. despite issues like the errors in defense, the inability to multiply in attack, and the failure to hold onto the ball, finding a goal still counts as an achievement... there's nothing to say about france anyway. i mean, if a team has dembele, mbappe, and olise playing together, that team losing is almost a miracle. it would take a heavy complacency for that. olise's deep, technical passes, mbappe holding up and distributing the ball like a pivot, and dembele's finishing technique reflected directly on the scoreboard. honestly, even if through naturalized players, the french national team has always kept its squads rich. it's been this way for years. and it's never short of stars, of characters who create domination. it doesn't make you say "like belgium" of one bygone era, they're always there, they can always put forth a consistency. i expect norway to start the second half with 4 substitutions. they'll be advised to be more careful in defense.

spacex buyers are about to be wiped out

here's what nobody's telling you!

right now, only 4% of spacex shares are actually being traded. the other 96% is locked.

this changes on august 6th!

the q2 earnings report will be released, and instantly 20% of insider shares will unlock. then every 2 weeks another chunk will be released onto the market.

by september, insiders will be able to offload 44% of all shares. the circulation rate will jump from 4% to almost 10 times that overnight.

think about what this means: for every 1 share being traded today = 10 more will appear.

facebook did this in 2012. the ipo was $38. the lockups ended. six months later: $18. half the value flew away.
not because facebook was a bad company. but because the supply showed up and the buyers ran dry.

$spcx is the same movie. just on a much bigger screen.

my target: $80-90 by year's end.

the world's largest cybersecurity company, founded in july 2009 by matthew prince, michelle zatlyn, and lee holloway. matthew prince still serves as ceo at the company, while michelle zatlyn serves as president and coo. lee holloway, who initially built and coded cloudflare's entire architecture by himself, had to leave the company in 2016 because of illness.

people think cloudflare is just a simple thing that provides ddos protection, but it's actually not like that. apart from ddos protection and dns routing, they offer hundreds of services. as was written in the entry earlier, cloudflare has no competition. 25-30% of all the sites on the internet use cloudflare. there's an incredible monopolization going on. but honestly, i haven't seen cloudflare abuse this enormous monopoly power so far. for instance, they provide their ddos protection and bot blocking services completely free. there are very few sites on the internet that do this completely free. i'm someone who's been using cloudflare for years, i use it on all my sites, but i haven't paid a single penny so far. they also do the caching of your static files (css, js, images) on a global cdn network and the ssl certificate completely free. on top of that they offer a completely free email forwarding service too.

this situation seems surprising to me. like i said above, a firm this monopolized offering free services like this and being user-friendly seems interesting to me. these days every website forces you to take out a monthly subscription even for the tiniest task.

if you say "doesn't cloudflare charge anything at all, brother?", of course they have paid plans, but these are more for large-scale websites rather than individual users.

in my opinion the worst part of their monopolization is that if something happens to them one day, half the internet will straight-up disappear. it already crashes from time to time and we see what happens.