PhD Student in Philosophy of Religion (Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion) at California Institute of Integral Studies 🌎🌱 | Thinking Religion Podcast
Spartanburg, SC
Joined January 2010
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Can another being's independently unfolding good alter the very end of an intention, rather than only its informational basis, its means, or the norm by which we later judge it?
ecologicalintentionality.org…
Dad to 19, 16, 7, and 3 yr old girls here in SC. Exactly this. Thank you, Mandy.
This is my friend’s little girl in @postandcourier today with Senator-elect @AnnieAndrewsMD . I love thinking about how little girls in SC today will spend their childhoods with a female US Senator role model - and that will shape their dreams and beliefs in what’s possible in their own lives. What we see and read and live in those early years shapes everything. When I ran for office, moms would bring their daughters to take pictures with me to show them what was possible. When I lost statewide, in the saddest moments, I returned to the memories of taking pictures with those little girls and hoping they would get someone soon who was able to take it across the finish line. Annie Andrews did that this week. And little girls will grow into big girls in the coming six years and the whole time they’re going to have a strong female leader to look up to, one who values our future and creating the kind of world they deserve to inherit.
Between having been a middle and high school teacher for almost 20 years and now having a 10-year-old son who's interested in politics, this is one of the most egregious things I've ever seen. I'm so thankful that the voters in North Carolina voted out Virginia Foxx. Just wow.
Whose Good?
"But the practical question is worth asking of congregations too. A church might consider how to accomplish an existing project with less ecological harm..."
open.substack.com/pub/caroli…
Sam Harrelson retweeted
Take a deep breath, give yourself a big hug, and remember, we're all in this together! 💛💚
Sam Harrelson retweeted
Dude's name is Tom Hoyle, and he also took the time to educate a security guard on the history of Florida death metal 🖤
thehandbasket.co/p/tom-hoyle…
Sam Harrelson retweeted
Endorsement alert: former South Carolina governors Jim Hodges (a Democrat) and David Beasley (a Republican) endorse @AnnieAndrewsMD for Senate over Darline Graham.
Hodges, the last Democrat to serve as governor, defeated Beasley back in 1998.
Ad here: m.youtube.com/watch?v=ARZ5yG…
"But Thursday added language we should consider as the county making decisions not only for our individual lives and families, but also for the larger human community, our watershed, and the wider ecology."
@ChrisHBoschult
What the Drafts Let Us See open.substack.com/pub/caroli…
"What becomes possible for our communities when we allow the lives and relationships that sustain us to change not only how we accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes might become?" open.substack.com/pub/caroli…
Sam Harrelson retweeted
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Sam Harrelson retweeted
💻🗑️
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
So good and so true!
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Sam Harrelson retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Research involves choices about what we see, what we claim, what evidence warrants those claims, and when something is ready to become public...
samharrelson.com/2026/10/05/…
"The updated CV also makes something else more visible to me. The academic work isn’t happening apart from the rest of my life."
samharrelson.com/2026/10/04/…
