What a colossal waste of taxpayer money. DOGE has been cutting funds for public safety while Tesla increasingly wastes public safety funds, like in this report by The Autopian:
Per reports from the San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office, emergency crews attended the fire in the Coventry Hill area just after 1 PM on Sunday afternoon. Along with deputies from the San Miguel and Montrose Sheriff’s offices, Norwood Fire, Naturita Fire, and Paradox Fire crews also reported to the scene where a Cybertruck was on fire…. Thick black smoke could be spotted in the air as 30 firefighters engaged to suppress the flames. US Fish and Wildlife soon joined the fight, supplying additional crews and apparatus to help contain the blaze. The efforts of emergency responders saw the fire 90% contained just two hours after crews arrived on scene. However, that wasn’t fast enough to save the Cybertruck caught in the blaze. The EV pickup was burned to the ground, leaving little more than a bare metal shell sitting in the dust.
30 firefighters and there wasn’t anything saved!?
The “extreme survival” design by the flamboyant Elon Musk is impossible to stop from turning into “little more than a bare metal shell sitting in the dust”. Let that sink in.
I grew up around the pleasant sunflower. Perhaps I took it for granted, but Native American art presented thousands of years of expressing the variations of sunflower respect.
Never, ever did I consider any European impressions of a sunflower anything more than a footnote by late movers who never really quite understood or captured the proper context of the natural power flowing over endless prairie hills, which a sunflower could survive. You want to see strength? Crawl out of a tornado bunker after torrential rains to find a sunflower being baked by a blazing sun.
Sunflowers after a deadly EF-4 tornado went through Barnsdall, Oklahoma. Source: News on 6
The BBC thus has just achieved something remarkable by throwing away all basic history and instead publishing a tone-deaf article about a sunflower having symbolism that only begins in… 1568.
Unlike many other symbols in art history, the sunflower is relatively new. They are native to the Americas and were only introduced to the “Old World” following Columbus’s explorations and European colonisation in the 16th Century. When they were successfully cultivated and propagated in Europe, the fact that immature sunflowers move their faces to follow the sun (a phenomenon known as heliotropism) became the plants’ most compelling feature, which fundamentally shaped its symbolic meanings. In 1568, the botanist Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, linked the flower to an ancient mythological character…
What? It’s like reading a treatise on the law of gravity that says it didn’t exist before Galileo started playing with his balls. The structure of the short-sighted BBC argument is that “the history of sunflower symbolism” only started when the violence of European foreign extraction decided to pay attention to one of their imports. Next the BBC will opine how water wasn’t wet until King Charles decided to tax people for inland ships and someone complained any boat that doesn’t float isn’t a boat.
Oh British writers, where would we all be if we didn’t get to ready your peculiar form of intellectual provincialism whereby your own ignorance is presented and undeniable universal absence. Van Gogh’s paintings are as revolutionary as the English laying claim to have found tea, conveniently blind to traditions developing forever before him. This represents a category error of impressive scope. The conflation of “European discovery” with anything actually having a “beginning” produces the same logical fallacy as claiming that fire was invented when the first Tesla rolled off the assembly line and crashed into a tree burning everyone inside to death. Before that? Not a real fire, not expressionist enough.
What the BBC presents us is the disgusting “colonial solipsism” that should have been made illegal around the same time slavery was banned—the systematic inability to conceive that knowledge might exist independently of a particular race claiming the first observation. It is philosophy of the most impoverished sort: the mistake of one’s own limitations for the limits of reality itself. The inability to wonder. The cultural bankruptcy of the BBC article is to deny a thousand years of indigenous sunflower iconography from being acknowledged. Who knows why this can still happen in 2025? Is it too much to ask for the modest effort of learning something not already pre-masticated by self-congratulatory institutions of white superiority?
The BBC’s history isn’t just wrong; it’s a continuation of racist colonial scaffolding that undermines knowledge and should have been dismantled generations ago.
“Sprich auch du” from “Von Schwelle zu Schwelle” (1955) by Paul Celan
Sprich auch du,
sprich als letzter,
sag deinen Spruch.
Sprich –
Doch scheide das Nein nicht vom Ja.
Gib deinem Spruch auch den Sinn:
gib ihm den Schatten.
Gib ihm Schatten genug,
gib ihm so viel,
als du um dich verteilt weißt zwischen
Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittnacht.
Blicke umher:
sieh, wie’s lebendig wird rings –
Beim Tode! Lebendig!
Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht.
Nun aber schrumpft der Ort, wo du stehst:
Wohin jetzt, Schattenentblößter, wohin?
Steige. Taste empor.
Dünner wirst du, unkenntlicher, feiner!
Feiner: ein Faden,
an dem er herab will, der Stern:
um unten zu schwimmen, unten,
wo er sich schimmern sieht: in der Dünung
wandernder Worte.
The falling star as wiser, the shadows stripped away, is powerful stuff.
Truth doesn’t ascend toward false fluffy consolation but descends into the pressure of crisp difficult depths. The speaker becomes “Schattenentblößter” (shadow-stripped) with shadows given to speech, growing “thinner, more unrecognizable, finer,” an emaciation to the core thread by which truth descends.
This is notably different from simply taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who sees a binary win or lose decision, framed as daunting truth over contented ignorance.
Celan is saying the opposite, like how a swimmer learns best how to survive by thriving in the struggle to hold breath under the unsurvivable water, contented to struggle beyond always floating and getting pulled out. Celan’s death by drowning in the Seine in April 1970 is generally considered suicide by scholars and biographers, but it wasn’t definitively proven. Instead we should say his star descended, his shadows were stripped away, as the shadowy criminals of the Holocaust were being given plum jobs and Swiss bank accounts to profit from the Cold war.
Klaus Barbie was on the CIA payroll, Wernher von Braun was becoming a folk hero, and Operation Paperclip was quietly integrating war criminals into American institutions. The star descends while the evil of Nazi offspring in the shadows, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, rises.Source: New Mexico “Space Hall of Fame” plaque celebrating a 1976 induction ceremony for Walter Thiel, a Nazi killed along with his slaves in 1943 by an innovative Allied night-time bombing. Peter Thiel’s parents, involved in southern African apartheid mines, moved to California the next year.
Celan’s verses aren’t just pointing out the struggle to survive a descent underwater, but also highlighting capacity to exist under tension between breath and breathlessness, between survival and surrender. There is a liminal space where the body under water learns something essential about extreme endurance that can’t be taught on the surface.
The revolutionary instruction “Doch scheide das Nein nicht vom Ja” (But do not separate the No from the Yes) creates dialectic tension preventing clear resolution – maintaining contradiction without a false synthesis. The balance is the answer.
After certain experiences, simple affirmation or denial becomes impossible. Truth exists only in recognition of the tension itself. A bicycle can only be ridden by acknowledging a fall to either side is failure. Truth requires constant balance and rebalancing, but the contemporary world of extractive corrupt consumption seems designed to make such balancing impossible.
I don’t know what’s worse today looking back at the 1950s, the Nazis running American anti-Communist ferver or the Nazis running Communism. Seems the problem for everyone involved was treating Nazis as useful idiots, yet losing control to the extremists. President Truman fired General McArthur for being “almost criminally out of touch with reality“, while today this seems almost like a prerequisite for a Trump appointment. The poem’s insistence on speaking “als letzter” (as the last) takes on this additional weight for us to contemplate. Perhaps Celan sensed even then that he was among the last who would insist on uncompromising testimony before the convenient and cruel “rise” of intentional forgetting began.
Celan’s refusal to separate No from Yes requires a kind of patient dwelling that “almost criminally out of touch” extractive systems can’t tolerate. The efficiency addicts demand quick resolution, clear sides, simple answers that can be monetized and undermine society without accountability.
The Department of Government Efficiency was created as an obvious nod directly to forgetting Nazis, as their descendants bathed in shadows that enabled rapid and unjust seizure of power.
The red pill mythology is actually selling addiction to false efficiency. It promises one swallow of hard truth let’s you operate from a position of superiority. Celan’s warning “don’t separate the No from the Yes” refuses this comfort entirely as fraud. The Department of Government Efficiency represents a bogus reduction of complex moral and social questions to technical problems “solved” rather than lived with. It’s all a lie because there’s no actual moment of awakening that frees you from the necessary ongoing tension between affirmation and denial.
The efficiency mindset attempts to reframe sophisticated moral questions into simple optimization problems. It’s the same logic that could absorb war criminals by focusing on their technical skills, totally ignoring their huge shadows. The promise is always the same: complex human problems can be solved through snake oil rather than lived with through ongoing moral attention.
There are some clumsy translations of the poem to English floating around, such as this:
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
