patio888 retweeted
This is my story about this day.🇺🇸
On this 24 years ago, #Sept11 2001 #NeverForget911
I went into the office for the 2nd time, my office, 61st floor of #WTC2 Was a beautiful clear blue sky day, was on break looking North over Manhattan! Walked away from the windows and was about 5ft away or so when the fireball came out of #WTC1, I didn’t see the airplane hit so I didn’t know what was going on. Grabbed my stuff because I knew we were going to evacuate the building and wouldn’t be back the rest of the day. #USMC #MarineCorps
I was in the stairwell when we all came to a stop, they came over the intercom saying “the building is secure stay where you’re at, go back to your office”, no one moved. I was 2 stairs down from the 55th floor, not more than 30 secs later the plane hit the building(WTC2) I was in, did not know that at that time. I thought it was the top half of #WTC1 falling into us. The stairwell immediately filled with smoke, so much so I could not see my hand in front of my face.
Walked down the stairs and out of the building through the mall that was at the bottom. I remember watching the #firefighters walking in and up the stairs and thinking to myself not to go up because they might not come out.
I was outside the building and was watching all that was going on, was a bit in shock as that was not supposed to happen. The police were pushing us all back, I was about 2 blocks away. The corner of City Hall Park. That’s about the time we got word on the street it was 2 airplanes that had hit the towers. At that point I knew it was terrorism and started to walk away, again #MarineCorps training. As I did I saw peoples eyes getting big, I turned in time to see #WTC2 fall and could feel it. I was out of the building 10-15 minutes before it fell. 55 floors, a mall and out to the street in 56 minutes, from the time the plane hit until the building fell.
I had to make a decision, cross the #Brooklyn Bridge or walk north back to my hotel. I decided to walk back to my hotel 8.5 miles away, that took me about 2.5hrs. Once there I was eventually able to call out to talk to my wife and let her know I was ok.
There are a lot of other things that I did not cover but this is my basic story about the events of #September11th #NeverForget911
patio888 retweeted
MIT, autumn 2011. Four years before his death, an eighty-four-year-old man explained, on camera, why the self you feel yourself to be is an illusion built out of stupid parts. Then he showed you which ones.
Marvin Minsky co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959, with John McCarthy. He won the Turing Award in 1969. He built a robotic arm in the late sixties that used a camera and a computer to stack blocks, and it was that work, trying to make a machine pick things up, that pushed him toward the question of what a mind actually is.
He was also the technical adviser on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he is named inside the film itself.
The course is 6.868, The Society of Mind. There is no single thinker inside your head, he tells the room. What you experience as one continuous self is the output of a large number of small processes, none of which is intelligent, none of which understands what it is doing, and most of which are arguing.
Intelligence, on his account, is not a thing. It is what a crowd of stupid mechanisms looks like from the outside once they are organised well enough to argue their way to an answer.
Then he spends thirteen lectures naming the crowd.
Consciousness. Emotion. Pain. Why an infant cries. Why you can be in two minds about something, literally, because on his account you are made of minds, plural, and disagreement between them is not a malfunction.
One lecture is called From Panic to Suffering. Another asks what consciousness is, and argues the question itself is badly formed, which is a stranger claim than saying it is hard.
He teaches it the way an old man tells stories. No slides marching forward, no script. He wanders, digresses, follows a thought sideways for ten minutes, and lands somewhere you did not expect.
This is the last recording of the course. Minsky died in January 2016, at eighty-eight.
It is free. Thirteen lectures, the readings, the assignments, and the book the course is built on, which he put on his own website. No login, no cohort, no waitlist.
What it costs you is the sense that there is someone in there running the show. By the end, he has replaced that someone with a committee, and told you what sits on it.
I Claudius - Charles Laughton 1937 - Epic speech. youtu.be/lyacdakxywY?si=Mlh8… via @YouTube
patio888 retweeted
When this footage was released by WikiLeaks in 2010… (footage of American Forces killing Reuters journalists Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen), it was a huge scandal in American politics…
They wanted Assange’s blood for exposing these actions… the American public generally was outraged and uncomfortable.
When Israel kills journalist they upload the footage themselves and just label them a “terrorist.”
When you partner with Israelis, your morality and your dignity goes down with it.
You may argue well, “America did the same thing, so they are just as bad”, or you may argue “well it’s war and civilian casualties are a part of war…”
Regardless, the reason the government was covering this up and upset with Wikileaks was because they knew the American public would question the morality of what they were doing.
The fact that Fox News and the Israeli government can just openly release footage of journalist being murdered and celebrating it on TV while labeling everyone “Amalek” shows just how far the country has fallen…. Or rather how it has been led down this dark path via jewish supremacy…
patio888 retweeted
The USS Gerald R. Ford is not parked near Iran. It is parked off Israel. And nobody is asking the only question that matters: why.
The $13.3 billion crown jewel of the US Navy, the largest warship ever constructed, just positioned itself off Haifa. Not in the Arabian Sea where the Lincoln sits 850 kilometers from Iranian shores loaded for offensive operations. Not in the Gulf where strike range is optimal. Off Israel. Defending Israel.
This is not redundancy. This is architecture.
Two carriers. Two missions. Two entirely different strategic functions. The Lincoln is the sword, positioned to launch strike packages into Iranian airspace within hours of an order. The Ford is the shield, its Aegis missile defense systems creating an umbrella over Israeli population centers against the retaliation that follows the first Tomahawk.
America just split its carrier doctrine into offense and defense simultaneously. That has not happened since the Pacific theater in 1945.
But the positioning reveals something deeper than tactics. When Iran retaliates, and every wargame says Iran retaliates, its missiles and drones fly toward Israel. They will fly through the same airspace where a US carrier strike group is now stationed. Every Iranian missile aimed at Tel Aviv or Haifa must traverse the Ford’s defensive envelope. Shooting at Israel means shooting at, around, and through an American carrier group.
Iran cannot retaliate against Israel without engaging American naval assets. The Ford’s position makes that physically impossible. The carrier is not defending Israel as a favor. It is positioned so that any Iranian response to American strikes automatically becomes an attack on American forces, triggering the full unrestrained weight of US military response without a single additional political decision required.
This is escalation insurance written in steel and seawater. If the campaign goes longer than planned, if munitions run thin in 7 to 10 days, if allies hesitate, the Ford’s position ensures that Iranian retaliation does the political work Washington cannot do alone: it transforms a limited American strike into an act of self-defense that no ally can refuse to support.
You do not park a $13.3 billion carrier where the enemy’s return fire will hit it unless you want the enemy’s return fire to hit it.
The Ford is not there to prevent escalation. The Ford is there to guarantee that if escalation comes, it comes on terms that make American restraint politically impossible and allied participation politically unavoidable. open.substack.com/pub/shanak…
