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<p>Jochen -</p>
<p>Sorry for the misattribution of your origin story... it does
make a bit of difference I suspect. I think you once shared an
anecdote about watching (participating in) the wall coming down
physically? Mary had a piece of it from a brother-in-law
stationed in W Germany. She kicks herself for letting go of it...
worst case she should have broken it in half if she wanted to
share it. I could say the same for my bit of Trinitite I gave
up. And then there is the tale of the "homeopathic dose of
Shackleton Scotch" at Ginny's which I won't recount one more time
here!</p>
<p>Auspicious that Vonnegut was a POW who survived (?because he was
in the basement of the prison?) the Dresden Fire Bombings.</p>
<p>I do think we (Americans and in similar different ways the whole
Anglophone world at the time) were in fact heroes, even though we
did a lot of damage along the way and our "American
Exceptionalism" and the "Marshall Plan" were well disguised hubris
that is now biting us (and everyone else) in the ass? It is the
very thing that drives our MAGA faction that is also our huge
failing... and the folks with their "red hats on too tight"
can't see it through the military parades and the flags (with
Trump's face overlayed) waving in our faces. They are destroying
the very thing that made them proud (and arrogant) in the first
place, and they (therefore WE) are taking everyone else down with
us. Or maybe not, but definitely in a mini-collapse phase of the
punctuated equilibrium model of civilization!</p>
<p>When we were in Europe a few years ago, I met two people who gave
me an alternative picture that was somewhat new to me. One was
Polish and longed for "the good ole days" when things were so much
simpler... I don't know what her circumstances had been, but I'm
guessing they were "comfortable" by some measure and there should
be nothing to sneeze at for being comfortable and not wanting to
be presented with so many hopes and fears as our "neo-liberal
capitalist democracy" brings with it. The other's father (now
deceased) had survived the occupation of NL by the Nazis and then
the Liberation by the Allies... he apparently never forgave the
Allies for various atrocities they might have committed in the
name of "liberation"? Two tiny counterpoints, but useful to me
in getting over my "American Exceptionalism".</p>
<p>And yes to our (illusion of) panoptic or plenoptic "knowledge".
It raises the numerator (factoids/knowledge) without moving the
denominator equally (context/wisdom). I have some (possibly
misplaced) hope that ML/AI can be used to help us shift that
ratio... I don't think the LLMs have scanned any more
information than the search engines ever did, they just
contextualized it more-better/differently? <br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/29/25 1:09 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:202506290711.55T7B7iG048620@ame1.swcp.com">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<p style="margin-top:0.0pt;margin-bottom:0.0pt;" dir="ltr"><span
style="font-family: "Google Sans"; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variant-emoji: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I
was born in West Germany when the country was deeply divided
in East and West. British, French and American forces had
occupied the Western part, Russian/Soviet forces the Eastern
part. My home town was part of the British zone. I remember
British barracks, British forces on the streets, and British
radio stations (British Forces Broadcasting Service, BFBS). At
that time Putin was a small, insignificant KGB officer in
Dresden in the Eastern part - the city where Victor Klemperer
lived and suffered earlier.</span></p>
<br dir="auto">
<p style="margin-top:0.0pt;margin-bottom:0.0pt;" dir="ltr"><span
style="font-family: "Google Sans"; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variant-emoji: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Americans
were seen in the Western part as heroes. They were the ones
who had defended England and freed France from the Nazis,
rescued West-Berlin by the Berlin Airlift, and stopped the
communists. In the cinemas Americans were the heroes too:
first in American Western movies, like "The Tin Star" (Henry
Fonda), "High Noon" (Gary Cooper), etc., later in action
movies like Tom Cruise's Top Gun or Harrison Ford's Indiana
Jones.</span></p>
<br dir="auto">
<p style="margin-top:0.0pt;margin-bottom:0.0pt;" dir="ltr"><span
style="font-family: "Google Sans"; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variant-emoji: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">After
the Soviet Union collapsed everybody thought America and
liberal democracy had won. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of
History". As we see now maybe it is not that simple. Communism
has drawbacks - mainly that nobody has an incentive to work
because no one owns anything - but capitalism has a dark side
too: it unleashes evil corporations and tends to destroy
nature. </span></p>
<br dir="auto">
<p style="margin-top:0.0pt;margin-bottom:0.0pt;" dir="ltr"><span
style="font-family: "Google Sans"; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variant-emoji: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There
is evil on multiple scales and in multiple dimensions.
Corporations and their CEOs can be evil, politicians and
presidents too, churches can be evil (think of "Roman
Inquisition") and political parties in totalitarian systems
can be supremely evil. Even if we look at nature where animals
eat each other alive we must wonder if Vasily Grossman was
right in his book "Life and Fate", where he asks whether life
itself is evil.</span></p>
<br dir="auto">
<p style="margin-top:0.0pt;margin-bottom:0.0pt;" dir="ltr"><span
style="font-family: "Google Sans"; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variant-emoji: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Yes,
we live in interesting times. We have more knowledge at our
fingertips than all generations before us, and yet it does not
seem to make us wiser or act better.</span></p>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">-J.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto" style="font-size:100%;color:#000000" align="left">
<div>-------- Original message --------</div>
<div>From: steve smith <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"><sasmyth@swcp.com></a> </div>
<div>Date: 6/28/25 11:51 PM (GMT+01:00) </div>
<div>To: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com">friam@redfish.com</a> </div>
<div>Subject: [FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily
News </div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<p>TD;DR (Too Downer Don't Read)</p>
<p>I am reading Shirer's <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Diary"
moz-do-not-send="true">Berlin Diary</a> as Mary reads <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(book)"
moz-do-not-send="true">Navalny's autobiography</a> (aloud to
me) while our daily news rolls by this season (year? decade?) is
pretty disturbing, but also comforting in a disturbing way. We
read (Mary out loud to me) <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer"
moz-do-not-send="true">Victor Klemperer's Journals</a> (nod to
Jochen's recent reference) a few years ago.</p>
<p><PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The *dis*comfiting part is really obvious I would say...
watching, through first person accounts of how an otherwise
functioning, and in some cases vibrant culture can slip into a
self-destructive spiral, usually with a strong opening game of
abusing some *other* group of scapegoats (non-White,
non-Christian, non-MAGA) on the way down. Maybe invading your
neighbors (Canada, Greenland, Panama?)<br>
</p>
<p>Navalny's reports are most salient to some of the
conversations here, notably glen's references to holding
stocks as a strategy to keep tabs on our <i>evil corporate
overlords</i> and even (potentally) attend stockholder
meetings or demand extra documentation, etc. It appears
Navalny made this into a fine art in his early days of rising
to attention and influence. *I* reduced all of my "blood
stocks" to 1 share about the time of the election, some
significantly before. My dirtiest financial secret was riding
Elno's coat-tails some ways up, but did begin to distance
myself well before he went full-MAGA before the election. </p>
<p>And best I can tell, as Chomsky indicated about "socially
responsible investing", they are *all* blood stocks. Some
more than others. Palantir, Anduril, United Health, Purdue
anyone?<br>
</p>
<p>In Berlin Diary, I am just at the point where Paris has been
occupied and the extreme contrasts THAT yielded. The French
government (as many may know) withdrew and declared Paris an
"Open City" meaning they would not attempt to defend it as
they had other cities and villages in the path of the Nazi
Wermacht. I was raised (anecdotes and history books) to
believe that this represented some kind of moral failure of
the entire French People (live to fight another day!). </p>
<p>Shirer, an American, having lived/worked in Paris was very
attached, and was "sent" into Paris (from Berlin) because all
other foreign media had *fled* in the face of possible
invasion (in spite of the Open City) status. His reports of
the police and fire remaining (mostly) intact (albeit
disarmed) directing traffic (mostly Wermacht vehicles) while
hundreds of thousands of evacuees were suffering (unto dying)
on the roads leading away was stunning. But the destruction
of Paris itself (and the millions who did not flee) would not
have served anything either?<br>
</p>
<p>I also just spent 90 mins on a video chat with my Ukrainian
colleagues (from Kiev) who have been unavailable since the
invasion began. We avoided direct discussion of their
"troubles" in lieu of strictly technical discussions of their
developments. They did "let slip" that the bulk of their
progress halted 4 years ago and they were just now trying to
marshall those results into something marketable (e.g.
triangular LED panels designed for constructing dome-sections
at a scale from 9m to 90m (diameter)... knowing that they
are doing this under the constant threat of kinetic attacks
from Russia and some of their (previous) descriptions of how
hard they fought as young professionals (in their 30s) against
the systemic corruption of (post) Soviet Ukraine gives me a
little more perspective.</p>
<p>As for the daily news: I recommend the apocryphal Twain
quote: “I never read the newspapers until at least two weeks
after they're published — that way I can be sure the lies have
been corrected.” and <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_%28film%29"
moz-do-not-send="true">Tom Hanks' movie News of the World</a>
for some perspective?<br>
</p>
<p>Bottom line is "how good we have it" juxtaposed starkly with
"this is how it all slides into oblivion", juxtaposed with
"this too shall pass". Jochen (born in Cold-War E. Germany?)
and Pieter (came of age through Apartheid), et al can
probably speak more personally to these contrasts?</p>
</blockquote>
<p></PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining></p>
<p>Interesting times?</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
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