changingoftheguards @thresholdwatch

Amongst a long list of deluded central planning fiascos, Kim Jong-Il’s giant rabbit undertaking stands out as one of the more bizarre. In 2007, the former South Korean dictator sought a creative solution to the country's chronic food shortages and famine. He contacted a German farmer named Karl Szmolinsky, renowned for breeding giant, 10-kilogram continental rabbits. The communists bought 12 bunnies for $115 each. Arrangements were made for the breeder to travel to the secretive state to help establish a state-run rabbit breeding program that would solve the protein deficiency, though he cautioned that breeding giant bunnies is a low yielding undertaking - the meat output is relatively meagre compared to a rabbit’s huge appetite for carrots and potatoes and the project was likely to do more harm than good. Smolinsky never made it to Pyongyang. The trip was cancelled. Smolinsky speculated that Kim Jong-Il's appetite got the better of him and that the rabbits were likely cooked and served to the country’s elites at a lavish state banquet celebrating the dictator’s 65th birthday. Central planning rarely works out as intended. The ill-fated North Korean bunny experiment resembles other agricultural fiascos such as Fidel Castro’s super cow and Mao Zedong’s war on sparrows – desperate undertakings to compensate for the deficiencies of collectivist farming. The obvious lesson, that it was the socialist economic model - not nature - that was to blame for the low yield, was sadly ignored.

“That wasn’t real communism.” The excuse has been repeated for over a century, from the Soviet Union to Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Castro’s Cuba, and more recently Venezuela. The claim is that these regimes distorted Marx’s vision. But in reality, the authoritarianism and economic failure were not bugs - they were features built into the ideology itself. Marxism demands the complete abolition of private property and the market. Once property is seized by the state, someone must decide what is produced, how resources are allocated, and who receives what. This cannot be done through voluntary cooperation. It requires a central authority with coercive power to override individual choices on a massive scale. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was never a temporary phase; it was the necessary instrument to enforce the new order. Without market prices, rational economic calculation becomes impossible, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated. Central planners have no reliable way to know what people value or how scarce resources truly are. Shortages, waste, and collapse follow. To maintain control amid the resulting chaos and discontent, the regime must suppress dissent, control information, and eliminate independent centres of power. This is why every serious attempt to implement Marxism has produced one-party rule, secret police, and mass repression. The pattern is not accidental. It is the predictable result of trying to replace spontaneous order with total state direction. “Real communism” has never existed because the project itself is incompatible with human nature and economic reality.

The Soviet Union did not betray Marxism. It carried out its central imperatives with ruthless consistency. A common defence of Marxism claims that the authoritarianism, terror and total state control of the Soviet Union were distortions introduced by Lenin and Stalin. Leszek Kolakowski, in his monumental Main Currents of Marxism, demonstrated that this defence is false. The seeds of Soviet totalitarianism were clearly present in Marx’s original vision. Marx’s project required the complete abolition of private property and the market. Such a transformation cannot be achieved voluntarily or gradually. It demands a powerful, centralised state capable of overriding individual choices on a massive scale. Marx himself spoke openly of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and showed little regard for liberal institutions, individual rights, or constitutional limits. He viewed bourgeois democracy as a sham and believed that revolutionary violence was historically justified. Kolakowski showed that Lenin did not invent these features. He simply took Marx’s rejection of pluralism, his contempt for “bourgeois” legality, and his belief in the total reconstruction of society to their logical conclusion. The one-party state, the suppression of dissent, the abolition of independent civil society and the use of terror were not deviations – they were instruments required to impose a vision that left no room for genuine pluralism or individual autonomy. This is the decisive point. Marxism’s authoritarian tendencies were not accidents of bad implementation. They were the inevitable result of attempting to abolish private property and voluntary exchange in the name of a total social transformation.

The most dangerous thing in politics is not malice. It's arrogance: the belief that a small group of experts can redesign society better than the countless individuals who actually live in it. Friedrich Hayek had a name for this mistake: The Fatal Conceit. In his final book, Friedrich Hayek delivered his most pointed critique of socialism and central planning. The book’s title refers to the fatal intellectual error at the heart of socialist thought: the arrogant belief that human reason is capable of deliberately designing and controlling the complex order of society. Hayek called this “constructivist rationalism” - the idea that we can scrap inherited institutions and traditions and rebuild society according to a rational blueprint. Hayek argued that this conceit is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how civilisation actually works. The extended order of the market - our system of prices, division of labour, property rights and moral traditions - was not invented or designed by anyone. It emerged through a long process of cultural evolution. No single mind, and certainly no central planning board, possesses the knowledge required to coordinate millions of individuals with constantly changing needs, preferences, and local circumstances. The price system, Hayek explained, is a remarkable mechanism that communicates dispersed knowledge far more effectively than any planner ever could. When socialists attempt to replace this spontaneous order with conscious direction, they do not merely cause inefficiency. They destroy the very foundations that make advanced civilisation possible. The Fatal Conceit goes beyond economics to defend the moral and cultural foundations of a free society. Hayek showed that the socialist project is not just impractical - it is based on a dangerous overestimation of human reason and ability, and an arrogant dismissal of evolved wisdom. The fatal conceit is still very much alive today in every attempt to centrally engineer society, the economy, or human behaviour. Hayek’s warning endures: civilisation is fragile, and those who believe they are wise enough to redesign it are usually the ones who end up destroying it.

Classical Marxism failed because the working class refused to revolt. So the left did something far more effective - they abandoned the working class entirely. One of the most significant developments in modern leftist thought was the shift from traditional Marxism to Critical Studies - an approach built explicitly around group identity and the demand for active political struggle. It is the dominant intellectual framework in much of today’s academia, media and corporate culture. At its core, it is an extension and radicalisation of the Critical Theory developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Critical Theory argued that Western society maintains its power not primarily through economics, but through culture, ideas, language and institutions that shape how people think. Since the spontaneous revolution Marx expected didn’t arrive, it would have to be actively forced through the systematic critique and dismantling of these “oppressive structures”. Revolution, in other words, became something that must be consciously engineered. This approach exploded in the 1970s and 80s with the rise of Critical Legal Studies. Scholars argued that law was not neutral but an instrument of power used by the dominant class to maintain control. That opened the floodgates. Soon came Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Studies, Critical Pedagogy. All of them share the same core project: identifying hidden systems of oppression based on race, gender, class and sexuality, and demanding active intervention to achieve “equity” (equality of outcome) rather than mere equality of rights. We now call this "woke". That the revolution must be forced to happen is why modern critical theory is so explicitly activist. As Ibram X. Kendi put it: “It is not enough to not be racist; we must be actively anti-racist.” Passivity is seen as complicity. Neutrality is impossible. Education, under Critical Pedagogy, is no longer about teaching knowledge but about turning students into political activists who view society through the lens of power and oppression. Critical Studies’ deeply anti-individual core replaces the idea of the sovereign individual with group identity and collective guilt. It rejects objective truth, merit and colour-blind liberalism in favour of power analysis and enforced equity. What began as a marginal academic project has become a powerful ideological machine that now dominates government policy, corporate hiring and education systems across the West.

@arifhussaintm അൽഫാം വെന്തില്ലാഹ് റബറിൽ ഐലമീൻ

The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. ― The Tree of Life

Alexander the Great has the most famous missing body in history. We know where it was for 700 years. Then it vanished. Here is the full trail. 323 BC: Alexander dies in Babylon. His body is so politically valuable that embalmers preserve it while the generals argue. Possessing the corpse means legitimacy. An ancient prophecy claims whoever holds the king's body holds an unconquerable kingdom. 321 BC: A massive golden funeral cart, two years in the making, finally rolls toward Macedonia. The general Ptolemy intercepts it in Syria with an army and steals the body to Egypt. The regent Perdiccas invades Egypt to get it back. His own officers stab him to death after a botched Nile crossing. The first war fought over a corpse ends with Ptolemy keeping the prize. The body rests first at Memphis, then moves to Alexandria, the city Alexander founded but never saw built. Eventually it lies in a grand mausoleum called the Soma, in a gold sarcophagus, at the crossroads of the city's two great avenues. It becomes the ancient world's biggest tourist attraction. 89 BC: A broke Ptolemy melts down the gold sarcophagus to pay his soldiers and replaces it with a glass one. Alexandrians are so disgusted they help run him out of Egypt. 48 BC: Julius Caesar visits and weeps before the body. 30 BC: Augustus has the mummy brought out, lays a golden crown on it, scatters flowers, and accidentally breaks off its nose. Offered a look at the dead Ptolemies too, he refuses: "I came to see a king, not corpses." Around 40 AD: Caligula allegedly raids the tomb and wears Alexander's breastplate around Rome. 199 AD: The emperor Septimius Severus orders the tomb sealed shut. 215 AD: His son Caracalla, obsessed with Alexander, visits and lays his own purple tunic and ring on the coffin. This is the last reliable eyewitness account in history. Then catastrophe stacks on catastrophe. In 272 AD the emperor Aurelian's war wrecks the royal quarter of Alexandria. In 365 AD a tsunami devastates the city. Around 400 AD the scholar John Chrysostom taunts: "Where is the tomb of Alexander? Show me." Nobody can. The body of the most famous man on earth is never seen again. The afterlife of the search is its own madness. In 1801 the British seized a sarcophagus from an Alexandria mosque that locals swore was Alexander's. It sits in the British Museum today. It actually belonged to the pharaoh Nectanebo II. One modern theory says Alexander's mummy was disguised as Saint Mark during the Christian riots and that Venetian merchants later smuggled it to Italy, meaning Alexander might be lying in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice right now, venerated by accident for a thousand years. Egypt has officially recognized over 140 search attempts in Alexandria alone. All have failed. Somewhere under that city, or in Venice, or nowhere, lies the man who conquered the world at 25 and lost his own grave.

@TheDataHubX 16

British Humor, Fear of Phobia.

LINK: github.com/organicmaps/or…

THAT’S WHY AMAZON HATES CLAUDE. The cart was around $300. I checked out at $147. No coupons. No browser extensions. No “deal” newsletters. Claude now filters my online shopping—what to buy, what to skip, and where it’s cheaper. Here are 10 prompts that save you money every time you shop online (Save this).

Your smart TV is taking screenshots of your screen every 15 seconds. Not a guess. Not a theory. A peer-reviewed study by researchers at UC Davis, UCL, and UC3M tested it. Samsung TVs: every minute. LG TVs: every 15 seconds. Even when you're just using it as a monitor. Here's how to turn it off for every brand:

50 free websites every person on the internet should bookmark in 2026. 1. Wikipedia — humanity's free encyclopedia 2. Khan Academy — free education from K-college 3. Coursera — free Ivy League courses 4. edX — Harvard and MIT classes 5. MIT OpenCourseWare — every MIT class free 6. CS50 — Harvard's intro to computer science 7. Duolingo — learn any language free 8. Anki — memorize anything with flashcards 9. Internet Archive — 35 million books, free 10. Project Gutenberg — 70,000 classic books 11. OpenLibrary — borrow any book digitally 12. Google Scholar — academic papers, free 13. arXiv — preprints from every science field 14. PubMed Central — medical research, full text 15. WolframAlpha — solves math and shows steps 16. Hemingway Editor — fix wordy writing instantly 17. Grammarly Free — basic grammar checking 18. DeepL — best translator on the internet 19. Photopea — full Photoshop in your browser 20. Canva Free — design anything, no skills needed 21. Excalidraw — clean diagrams in 30 seconds 22. Penpot — free Figma alternative, open source 23. Coolors — generate color palettes instantly 24. Fontshare — free fonts for commercial use 25. Pexels — free stock photos, no attribution 26. Unsplash — high-quality stock photography 27. Remove .bg — strip backgrounds in 5 seconds 28. TinyWow — 100+ free PDF and file tools 29. Cobalt. tools — download any video, anywhere 30. NotebookLM — turn PDFs into a podcast 31. Perplexity — AI research with citations 32. Claude — the best free AI conversation 33. ChatGPT — the AI everyone's heard of 34. Gamma — make a presentation in 30 seconds 35. Suno — generate songs from text prompts 36. ElevenLabs — clone any voice instantly 37. Runway — generate Hollywood-grade video 38. HeyGen — turn scripts into AI videos 39. Cal. com — free scheduling with bookings 40. Bitwarden — free password manager forever 41. SimpleLogin — unlimited email aliases 42. Marginalian — 20 years of wisdom, ad-free 43. Stratechery — Ben Thompson's tech analysis 44. Farnam Street — mental models from Munger 45. Paul Graham essays — startup wisdom archive 46. Y Combinator Startup School — free founder training 47. Stripe Press — beautifully published essays 48. SEC EDGAR — every public company filing 49. World Bank Data — every country's stats 50. Wayback Machine — see any website's history For most people, it became Instagram. For 1% of people, it became this list. Save it before you forget. 100% free. Forever.

Turtles Have Called an Emergency Meeting 🐢

Source: esecurityplanet.com/threats/adobe-… Steps to reduce risk: