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Food, History, Poetry, Security

Elon Musk Calls for Armed Rebellion in UK, Yet Fails the Simple God and Chocolate Test

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When British soldiers liberated Berlin in 1945, they encountered something both heartbreaking and illuminating: German children hiding in Nazi bunkers with weapons, terrified of the world, were unable to articulate what they were actually afraid of. These children had been indoctrinated through Hitler’s propaganda platforms to believe that Allied soldiers would kill them if they surrendered.

The battlefront solution, as one British veteran recalled, was surprisingly simple:

You put a bar of chocolate in their hands and it alters the whole war – as far as the children are concerned.

A Catholic priest who spoke German would calm these remaining Nazi adherents down, and suddenly the existential threat they’d been taught to fear dissolved completely in the face of basic human kindness coupled with overwhelming force.

This historical moment offers a crucial lens for understanding contemporary political rhetoric, in terms of parenting fundamentals, particularly Elon Musk’s recent inflammatory militant-like statements at a far-right rally in London.

Engineered Fears Lack Specificity

An AFD (Nazi Party) rally in Germany was headlined by Elon Musk

Speaking via video link to a “unite the [white] kingdom” rally organized by political extremist Tommy Robinson, Musk deployed weaponized disunity language that follows a familiar pattern.

Musk… told the crowd that “violence is coming” and that “you either fight back or you die”.

He said: “I really think that there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. You can’t – we don’t have another four years, or whenever the next election is, it’s too long.

“Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”

On the face of it he is calling for an end of government. It is the most anti-unifying tactic possible.

And also note the overt ignorance displayed with “four years, or whenever” and “something” as his demand for immediate action.

Such statements of weaponized disunity represent the systematic deployment of rhetoric designed not to reform government policies or win electoral victories, but to collapse the shared foundations that make democratic governance possible.

Normal political opposition seeks to change who governs or how they govern within existing institutional frameworks. Musk’s call for “dissolution of parliament” bypasses democratic processes entirely – he’s not advocating for policy changes, candidate support, or even constitutional amendments, but for militant extremists to immediately destroy Britain’s elected government.

This call to arms mirrors the text of Golding’s famous novel Lord of the Flies, when institutional authority collapses, the result isn’t liberation but an intentional state of chaos that inevitably exploits anyone vulnerable to abuse by a small authoritarian cabal. Just as Ralph’s democratic leadership in the novel protected Piggy until the system broke down and constant violence took over, democratic institutions – however flawed – provide a framework within which peaceful conflict resolution remains possible.

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Russell Square, London: Faber and Faber, 1954.

Musk’s rhetoric encourages people to abandon safe protective structures without offering any viable alternative governance model, creating the very power vacuum that historically leads to authoritarian capture or societal breakdown.

The “weaponized” aspect thus lies in using democratic freedoms (free speech, assembly) to advocate for democracy’s elimination – exploiting the system’s tolerance to promote intolerance, precisely what Popper so clearly warned against in his paradox of tolerance.

This intentional abuse of language has in fact been studied extensively by historians of disinformation warfare (e.g. social engineering attacks):

  • Existential Threat: “Violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth.”
  • Urgent Timeline: “We don’t have another four years… it’s too long. Something’s got to be done.”
  • Vague Enemy: References to “the left,” “the woke mind virus,” and unspecified forces threatening British society.
  • Call to Extraordinary Action: Demanding “dissolution of parliament and a new vote.”

This rhetoric creates what security experts might call a “crisis of meaning” to bypass unity and falsely generate feelings of existential threat despite the lack of concrete, specific dangers that would justify the extreme responses being advocated. “They” are coming to get “you” is how bogus “caravan” rhetoric was used in 2016 to drive national security fraud (illegal redirection of funds) for Americans involved in the disasterous Maginot-like “wall” campaign.

Historical Basis in Today’s Nazi Endgame

The parallels between Musk’s rhetoric and Nazi Germany’s final propaganda push reveal identical patterns. After 1942, when military defeat became inevitable, Nazi messaging abandoned rational policy arguments for purely apocalyptic themes designed to prevent surrender.

The regime’s massive construction projects exemplify this delusional mentality. Structures like the absurd Boros bunker in Berlin were built by Nazi slaves in 1943 as “shelters,” yet it functioned more like an above-ground prison, where thousands of Germans were crammed to cower in fear rather than meaningfully protect them. The Nazi propaganda sold death camps as freedom, entrapment as safety, total desperation as preparation for victory.

General Erwin Rommel exemplified this tragic mindset of self-destruction – when given the choice between suicide or having his entire family killed in front of him, he chose the poison pill instead of a fight, telling his family he could not bear to live under Allied occupation while condemning them to it. This selfish binary thinking – death or dishonor, with no middle ground and totally devoid of care for others – became the genocidal regime’s final message.

German children were indoctrinated with binary thinking in order to force an unnatural and inhuman choice. Hitler estimated that any ray of sunshine at all would disinfect even the youngest minds and so the binary was absolutist: fight to the death against liberation or face annihilation. And this, when Allied soldiers actually arrived offering chocolate, fresh air and daylight instead of violence and isolation, the entire ideological framework collapsed instantly.

Again, the Nazi propaganda used known effective social engineering:

  • Emotional appeal (life or death stakes)
  • Timing appeal (no time to think)
  • Vaguery appeal (allowing people to project their own fears)
  • Absolute appeal (only two options, false choice in total extremes and driven by above emotional-timing-vaguery)

Musk Grew Up on a Diet of Hitler Propaganda

Musk’s rhetoric follows this template with remarkable precision. We know his Grandfather was arrested in WWII Canada for sympathies with Hitler, and fled to South Africa to lead apartheid. We also know from Musk’s father that Elon was raised in an environment promoting Nazism. It should come as little surprise that Musk statements still create a sense of imminent civilizational collapse while remaining frustratingly non-specific about actual threats or solutions. What exactly is the “violence” that’s coming? Who specifically represents “the left” that he claims celebrates murder? What concrete policies justify dissolving an elected parliament? Isn’t this all just like South African apartheid or Nazi German rhetoric all over again?

Indeed, as with Nazi messaging that terrified German children into taking up arms, this rhetoric again asks people to believe the Hitler doctrines to act on fear rather than evidence, urgency rather than deliberation.

A God and Chocolate Test of Our Time

The British soldiers’ success in Berlin suggests we know a powerful antidote to extremist messaging: persistent human decency protected by rule of law (or overwhelming force) that contradicts the propaganda narrative of fascism. When people discover that the supposed monsters are actually offering genuine acts of kindness, the entire fear-based worldview can collapse. Is the human mind open to receive help if being trained on imposed scarcity to react always in trauma mode?

The question isn’t about ignoring real political disagreements or legitimate concerns about social change, it’s about enabling safe disagreement. That’s why Popper describes the healthiest boundary development as an intolerance paradox, where ideas can be encouraged by flagging ideas of intolerance for restriction. It means recognizing when rhetoric crossed from political argument into known propaganda techniques that have been designed to bypass rational thought in order to cause intentional discriminatory harms.

Think of it as a test not whether someone is racist, but whether someone exhibits genuine anti-racism. Claims of population decline and “white genocide” from intermarriage, also claims of color blindness, are proto-typical proofs of someone failing to demonstrate genuine anti-racism.

The “chocolate test” for contemporary political messaging might ask: Does this rhetoric encourage people to see fellow citizens as fully human and deserving of human rights? Does it promote specific, achievable solutions? Does it allow for complexity and nuance? Or does it demand immediate, extreme action against vaguely defined existential threats, dehumanizing specific targets?

Breaking the Pattern

The children in Berlin weren’t inherently extremist, given that they were responding to a traumatic narrative that told them the world was ending and only violence could save them. When that narrative was gently contradicted by reality, they could return to being children.

The tactics of using children as weapons weren’t limited to Nazi Germany’s final days. After Rhodesia lost its colonial war in 1979, white supremacist forces shifted to covert destabilization operations in neighboring Mozambique, where British-trained SAS units supported Renamo rebels in a campaign that killed over one million people – 60% of them children.

These operations deliberately targeted schools and kidnapped children, forcing them to murder their own families before being used as child soldiers in raids against civilians. The psychological warfare under the regime adopted by Musk’s Grandfather was identical to Nazi methods: create absolute terror, destroy normal social bonds, and force impossible choices between violence and death. Over 250,000 children were separated from families, 200,000 orphaned, and half the country’s schools destroyed – all under the false flag of “protecting” civilians from the legitimate government.

The parallel is unmistakable: white supremacist forces consistently use children as both weapons and victims while claiming to be their saviors.

The same pattern appears across many conflicts, from Canadian General Roméo Dallaire defusing a child soldier with an AK-47 at his nose in Rwanda by offering chocolate, to Dutch children receiving their first taste of chocolate from liberating Canadian soldiers in 1945.

WWII poster by Nestle promoting their Type D chocolate ration. Source: Western Connecticut State University

I’ll say it again, that people drawn to apocalyptic political messaging aren’t necessarily lost causes. They’re often responding to injected anxieties about normal social change, regular economic uncertainty, or predictable cultural shifts. The challenge is addressing the many underlying concerns with concrete solutions and social science rather than exploiting them with fear-based mobilization. The Fabians understood this intimately when they responded to industrialization by laying the groundwork for modern data science.

As William Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the Man.” How we allow outsized characters claiming paternal authority to speak to people’s fears – whether nurtured with artificial scarcity into extremism or offered surplus and conversation – shapes the society we’ll inhabit today into tomorrow.

History has already run this experiment many times. We know how Musk propaganda ends, just like he does and refuses to believe. The question is whether he can learn before he generates another global disaster of hate.

Many people struggle to articulate why certain rhetoric feels dangerous beyond normal political disagreement, so I hope to have provided some expert vocabulary and historical context to make the threat identification clear.

Famous picture of 16-year old Nazi “Volkssturm” Hans-Georg Henke upon his 1945 surrender to aid, humanitarian care and feeding.
Food, Poetry, Security

Let Them Eat Cake Recipes: Why Consciousness Will Never Be Code

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Security professionals are intimately familiar with the tension between formalization and practice.

We can document every protocol, codify every procedure, and automate every response, yet still observe the art of security requires something more. Things made Easy, Routine and Minimal judgement (ERM) depend on a reliable source of Identification, Storage, Evaluation and Adaptation (ISEA).

A recent essay by astrophysicist Adam Frank in Noema Magazine explores a similar tension in consciousness studies, one that has profound implications for how we think about all intelligence, both human and artificial.

The tension here is far from new. Jeremy Bentham’s ambitious attempt to create a mathematical model of ethics—his utilitarian calculus—ultimately failed because it tried to reduce the irreducible complexity of moral experience to quantitative formulas. No amount of hedonic arithmetic could capture the lived reality of ethical decision-making. His codified concept of “propinquity” was never made practical, foreshadowing the massive deadly failures of driverless AI hundreds of years later.

In sharp contrast, Ludwig Wittgenstein succeeded in understanding language precisely because he abandoned the quest for mathematical foundations while being one of the best mathematicians in history (yet not a very good WWI soldier). His practical and revolutionary language games emerged from what he called “forms of life”—embodied, contextual practices that resist formal reduction. We depend on them heavily today as foundational to daily understanding.

Frank’s central argument is that modern science has developed what he calls a “blind spot” regarding consciousness and experience. The idiocy of efficiency means a rush to reduce everything to computational models and mathematical abstractions has totally forgotten something fundamental to success:

Experience is intimate — a continuous, ongoing background for all that happens. It is the fundamental starting point below all thoughts, concepts, ideas and feelings.

The blindness of the efficiency addict (e.g. DOGE) isn’t accidental. It’s built into the very foundation of dangerously lowering the safety bar for how we practice science. As Frank explains, early architects of the scientific method deliberately set aside subjective elements to focus on what Michel Bitbol calls the “structural invariants of experience“—the patterns that remain consistent across different observers. That may be a baseline, a reductive approach, that drops far too low to protect against harms.

The problem emerges when abstractions are allowed to substitute for reality itself, without acknowledging fraud risks. Frank describes this as a “surreptitious substitution” where mathematical models are labeled as more real than the lived experience they’re meant to describe.

Think of how temperature readings replaced the embodied experience of feeling hot or cold, to the point that thermodynamic equations became regarded as more fundamental than the sensations they originally measured.

Meta is Fraud, For Real

This leads to what Frank identifies as the dominant paradigm in consciousness studies: the machine metaphor (meta). From this perspective, organisms are “nothing more than complicated machines composed of biomolecules” and consciousness is simply computation running on biological hardware.

And of course there’s a fundamental difference between machines and living systems. Machines are engineered for specific purposes, while organisms exhibit something far more substantive in what philosophers call “autopoiesis“—they are self-creating and self-maintaining. Meta is extractive, reductive, a road to death without a host it can feed on. As Frank notes:

A cell’s essence is not its specific atoms. Instead, how a cell is organized defines its true nature.

This organizational closure—the way living systems form sustainable unified wholes that cannot be reduced to their parts—suggests a different approach to understanding consciousness. Rather than asking how matter creates experience, we might ask how experience and matter co-evolve through embodied symbiotic healthy interaction with the world.

You Can’t Eat a Recipe

To understand this distinction, consider consciousness within the act of cooking to eat rather than just computation. The recipe captures the structural patterns and relationships—the “how” and “what” that can be systematized and shared.

Actual cooking involves embodied skill, responsiveness to the moment, intuitive adjustments based on how things look, smell, and feel. There’s a tacit knowledge that emerges through the doing itself.

A skilled chef can follow the same recipe as the unskilled one and produce something entirely different. Ratatouille, the animated film, wasn’t about a rat as much as the lived experience; the kind of analysis of an environment that I like to call in my AI security work “compost in, cuisine out” (proving that “garbage in garbage out” is a false and dangerously misleading narrative).

A lightning strike enlightens this animated film protagonist like Frankenstein turned chef

The consciousness-as-cooking isn’t just about following instructions—it’s about lived engagement with materials, real-time adjustments, the way experience shapes perception which shapes action in an ongoing loop. OODA, PDCA… we know the loop models of audit and assessment as fundamental to winning wars.

Frank’s emphasis on “autopoiesis” fits here perfectly. Like cooking, consciousness might be fundamentally about self-creating and self-maintaining processes that can’t be fully captured from the outside. You can describe the biochemical reactions in bread rising, but the seasoned baker’s sense of when a proper bagel is ready involves a different kind of knowing altogether.

AI Security is Misunderstood

The necessary perspective has serious implications for how we think about artificial intelligence and its role in information security. When we treat intelligence as “mere computation,” we risk building systems that can process information but lack the embodied understanding that comes from being embedded in the world.

Everyone using a chatbot these days knows this intimately when you ask about the best apple and the machine spits back the fruit when you want the computer, or vice versa.

Frank warns that the deceptive reductionist approach “poses real dangers as these technologies are deployed across society.” When we mistake computational capability for intelligence, we risk creating a world where:

…our deepest connections and feelings of aliveness are flattened and devalued; pain and love are reduced to mere computational mechanisms viewable from an illusory and dead third-person perspective.

In security contexts, this might mean deploying AI systems that can detect patterns but lack critical contextual understanding that comes from embodied experience. They might follow the recipe perfectly while missing the subtle cues that experienced practitioners would notice.

Palantir is maybe the most egregious example of death and destruction from fraud. They literally tried to kill an innocent man, with zero accountability, while generating the terrorists that they had begged millions of dollars to help find. I call them the “self licking ISIS-cream cone” because Palantir is perhaps the worst intelligence scam in history.

Correct Approach: Embedded Experience

Rather than trying to embed consciousness in physics, Frank suggests we need to “embed physics into our experience.” This doesn’t mean abandoning mathematical models, but recognizing them as powerful tools that emerge from and serve embodied understanding.

From this perspective, the goal isn’t to explain consciousness away through formal systems, but to understand how mathematical abstractions manifest within lived experience. We don’t seek explanations that eliminate experience in favor of abstractions, but account for the power of abstractions within the structures of experience.

Cooking School Beats Every Recipe Database

This might be why the “hard problem” of consciousness feels so intractable when approached mathematically—it’s like trying to capture the essence of cooking by studying only the recipe. The formalization is useful, even essential, but it necessarily abstracts away from the very thing we’re most interested in: the lived experience of the cooking itself.

Perhaps consciousness studies—and by extension, our approach to AI and security—needs more public “cooking schools” and fewer Palantir “recipe databases.” More emphasis on cultivating the capacity for analysis and curiosity for lived inquiry rather than just dumping money into white supremacist billionaires building racist theoretical machine models.

This is the opposite of abandoning rigor or precision. It means recognizing that some forms of knowledge are irreducibly embodied and contextual. The recipe and the cooking are both essential—but they operate in different domains and serve different purposes.

For those of us working in security, our most sophisticated tools and protocols will always depend on practitioners who can read the subtle signs, make contextual judgments, and respond creatively to novel situations. The poetry of information security written here since 1995 lies not just in the practice of developing algorithms, but in the lived practice of protecting systems and people from harm in an ever-changing world.

The question isn’t whether we can build machines that think like humans, but whether we can create technologies that enhance rather than replace the irreducible art of human judgment and response. Like Bentham’s failed calculus, purely computational approaches to intelligence miss the embodied nature of understanding. But like Wittgenstein’s language games, consciousness might be best understood not as a problem to be solved, but as a form of life to be lived.

Perhaps the poet Wallace Stevens captured this tension best in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where he writes of the sea and the singer who shapes our perception of it:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

Consciousness, like the singer by the sea, is neither reducible to its material substrate nor separate from it. It emerges in the dynamic interaction between embodied beings and their world—not as computation, but as the lived poetry of existence itself.

Food, History, Poetry, Security

Sunflower Supremacy: When an Art Historian Should Van Gogh F*ck Himself

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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.

Food, Poetry, Security

Real Life Wonder Woman: American Survived 13 Blizzards in 3 Weeks of Wilderness

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Tiffany Slaton, a hiker who survived blinding whiteness of the High Sierra winter for three weeks after a dangerous avalanche fall, speaks during a press conference, Friday, May 16, 2025 in Fresno, Calif. (AP Photo/Gary Kazanjian)

Special forces around the world will be studying lessons learned in this story of one woman’s ingenuity and perseverance in extreme conditions.

Soon into her trek, Slaton recounted falling off a cliff and getting knocked unconscious. When she came to, she had to pop her knee back in and make a splint for her leg. Slaton said she couldn’t make it back to the road, blocked by the avalanche she determined she had been in, and attempts to call 911 failed. Her phone, however, could route her to Starbucks, the nearest one being 18 miles away.

“You can’t get me 911, you can’t get me GPS, but you can get me a Starbucks?” Slaton said. “… In doing so, I ended up on this very long, arduous journey that I journaled to try and keep sane.”

That’s an algorithm for you. Some clever programmer wrote her results to skew towards consumption patterns, regardless of inputs, probably because of ad revenue bias.

Sounds like 911 needs to start offering Starbucks in the ambulance, maybe put some Chipotle in there too, just so the American capitalist “what’s in it for me” system will bother to make its emergency services available.

When you dial, maybe it could offer “press 1 for a hot cup of fresh coffee, press 2 for a lovely burrito, press 3 for pancakes… and, if you are still there after 9 wonderful opportunities to buy something special for you or those around you, press 0 to state your emergency.”

Just think of those revenue possibilities from people desperate for help. See how being a Big Tech engineer works? No ethics required, unlike any other engineering field in the world.

The avalanche area she mentions is very familiar to me from my own time in those Sierras, above Huntington lake (where at least one crashed WWII B-24H Liberator has been preserved under icy waters). Mono Hot Springs (abandoned settlement) indeed is a very remote area, although tiny roads snake upwards towards… the odd empty cabin.

Slaton somehow made it past the hot springs on her own. She went farther northeast, up to Kaiser Peak at an elevation of more than 9,000 feet, and left her bike buried in the snow at a trailhead, according to the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office. Then, a blizzard hit the area.

“I only saw white upon white in that storm,” Slaton said. As she approached the cabin where she would be found, she saw a “pristine Christmas tree and a tiny house and it had markers like Santa’s sleigh, and I could not understand. I actually thought I was losing my mind at that point, that I had somehow managed to make it to the North Pole.”

Slaton was ultimately found the next morning about 40 miles, or a two-hour drive, farther east than where she was last seen at Shaver Lake.

The cabin owner said it took him a day just to hack his way in through the whiteness. When he opened the door did she say “how ice to see you”?

She had only been in the cabin about eight hours of her three week ordeal, so it’s notable that she glowingly credits the hut with her entire outdoor survival. I’m sure it felt that way, while she knows it isn’t true. Such clever modesty is duly noted, and most people will miss the point entirely: she used hope of a cabin as a step, a small mental tactic to maintain focus, not actually relegating responsibility.

But seriously this woman should be training people on survival. This is such a better story than almost all the others we are trained on. Her 3 Weeks over 40 miles wearing a splint, through 13 Blizzards, is an amazing inspiration to anyone whose job is to survive extremes.

She’s a trained forager and permaculturist, and leeks are both bountiful in the Sierra and nutritious. So nutritious that her bloodwork was in remarkable shape at the hospital, she said during a press conference on Friday. Her eyes, however, took some damage from an extended time in the blinding white snow, requiring sunglasses in the aftermath.

The important power of leeks. The danger of blinding whiteness. The latter is definitely is not to be underestimated. Both have a familiar ring to anyone working in national security.

I always find it interesting when Americans tell me they don’t know the history of the real Wonder Woman (Nieves Fernandez) who inspired the comic book superhero. I see some parallels here.

Also find it interesting how blizzards and deserts never made the English security phrases “white list” or “white box” a negative connotation. I’ve survived the most extreme conditions in both and I always reflect on blinding whiteness being highly undesirable if not deadly. Whiteness seems like death, in many cultural representations. Yet in tech we frequently hear about black list and black box as unfavored, rather than the more naturally preferred, state of being. Perhaps her story, far more grounded as a hiker than the usual remote summit story, also will help readjust security language and perceptions of danger from whiteness.