Texas culture war robot just killed Plato

Dumber and dumber.

Texas A&M brought a robot to a culture war to scan syllabi for “gender ideology.” Their censorship AI flagged Plato’s Symposium, a 2,400-year-old dialogue where the phrase “platonic love” comes from.

The administrators wouldn’t overrule their dumb robot. They told the professor to censor the classics and delete Plato or be reassigned to teaching MAGA hat tricks.

This is the whole story.

Texas spent years building a political brand around defending the classics of “Western civilization” against woke academics who don’t teach the classics anymore.

Then they built an enforcement robot to kill liberalism. The robot instead killed Plato because the robot can’t tell the difference between woke training and the foundational text of Western philosophy.

Neither can they.

That’s the deepest cut here. The “classical education” thing was all hat and never any cattle. Cultural signaling for people who never read books. Hillsdale markets their Great Books programs. The Texas Public Policy Foundation runs “Western Civilization Summits.” The political network meant to save the classics built the robot that red-flagged the Symposium, just because Aristophanes’ speech from thousands of years ago mentioned a third gender.

They are not hypocrites, because that requires knowing what you claim to value. These are cargo cultists. Their cowboy affectations, the “defend Western civ” rhetoric, the Great Books branding… all of it just big empty hats.

Tribal markers, without commitments.

The rattlesnake just ate itself.

The Firings Will Continue Until Faith in AI Improves

An American equity slash-and-burn CEO has rushed his faith-based mindset about AI to the press, and keeps saying “belief” and “believe” like it’s a virtue rather than a huge red flag.

This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again

He explicitly says he’d “do it again” while also saying “I do not recommend that at all”, the sort of contradiction in a value extraction guy that deserves pushback. He’s claiming vindication while disavowing the method. That’s the tell of someone who knows his real story wouldn’t survive scrutiny, and who acts like nobody is allowed to challenge him on it.

The CEO acquires dying software products and extracts remaining value. He celebrates firing people for not “believing” rather than for failing to deliver measurable outputs. The technical staff who raised concerns about what AI couldn’t do, which is exactly what competent engineers should do, were labeled the “most resistant.”

Expertise became evidence of heresy. And then came the loyalty purge to get rid of technology experts. In other words he rapidly curated a value story and deleted everyone who could prove it wrong.

Engineering operates on evidence to reach a conclusion. You measure, you test, you revise based on outcomes.

Evangelical Christianity operates on belief as the only allowed evidence. You commit first, then interpret outcomes as confirmation. Doubt is sin, not method.

This CEO isn’t accidentally using religious language. He’s describing an actual faith-based decision process, toxic to engineering:

  • “saw the light”
  • “evangelize”
  • “belief was really the thing he needed to recruit for”
  • “changing minds was harder than adding skills”

All of this is evidence of incompetent leadership, because it destroys the foundation of intelligence necessary to build quality products. He invested 20% of payroll in a “mass learning initiative” that “failed”, but there’s no metric for what success would have meant. No measurement of productivity gains that justified the purge.

A 75% EBITDA figure is offered as vindication, but there’s no baseline comparison, no demonstration that the mass firing produced better results than alternatives. Because the firings were never about a measured outcome other than loyalty to the supreme ruler.

The business case is entirely post-hoc rationalization for a faith-based loyalty test to block human intelligence. An industry survey found workers who didn’t perform sufficient enthusiasm were labeled as committing “sabotage”. Vaughan’s framework shows why that false framing would follow.

Dissent essential to engineering becomes treason. In Schindler’s List, a Nazi officer abruptly shoots an engineer in the head, because she told him the foundation is flawed, and then he orders his men to follow her recommendation. The expertise was correct. The doubt was the crime.

The infamous Nazi Amon Goeth found causes for anger everywhere he looked, and especially hated technical expertise, as depicted in the movie Schindler’s List

The McKinsey framing of “lifelong reskilling” completes the circuit. In evangelical Christianity, you’re never saved enough because you must continually demonstrate faith, attend services, tithe, testify. Backsliding is always possible.

The worker under permanent reskilling obligation is the congregant who can never miss a Sunday, always being evaluated for sufficient devotion, while the pastor accumulates wealth as proof of blessing.
Capital gets to be the priesthood.

Labor gets to be the congregation that must perpetually prove faith while receiving no guaranteed salvation.

And let’s be honest. All this “AI transformation” narrative really is just PR cover for what this guy at ESW Capital has always done to squeeze blood from a rock: acquire companies, convert employees to contractors, surveil them, and eliminate headcount.

The faith-based language signals more than incompetent tech leadership—it’s cover for a private equity extraction operation rebranding mass layoffs as visionary disruption mumbo jumbo.

Cyber-Dumb: Interior Minister Partners With Israel on German Cyber Gaza Project

German Cyber Gaza is not hyperbole. It’s accurate.

The radical right-wing minister Andreas Dobrindt is in the news again. And, as usual, it’s not good for Germany.

He became infamous for his wrong “vectoring” monopolist broadband policy that entrenched copper infrastructure across Germany to slow down or even prevent fiber being rolled out like the rest of the world. Dobrindt’s record as Transport and Digital Infrastructure Minister until 2017 was genuinely catastrophic by any professional standard. The Federal Audit Office (Bundesrechnungshof) issued a devastating report concluding that his ministry failed to observe “essential principles of orderly administrative conduct.”

He had all the hallmarks of bad leadership, when you read the report that billions in budget allocations were demanded “without first determining the actual funding requirements”, and staff positions bloated rapidly without any assessment of need. He expanded from 29 to 45 positions in three weeks with “no justification”. Power. He was hungry for rapid power, opposite to lawful and orderly conduct, let alone good governance.

Besides his tech being slow, and never going to improve, the old copper networks that Dobrindt championed are inherently less secure than fiber. More expensive, less secure. Right Dobrindt? The metal is easier to tap, far more vulnerable to physical disruption, and far lower capacity for the kind of real-time threat detection required today. He pushed Germany onto the exact wrong technology back then, and he’s doing it again now.

Let me put it like this. I deployed an entirely switched fiber network to the desktop in 1997 because of security concerns, meeting requirements that copper could not. The idea that Germany in 2017 was being pulled away from fiber should be seen as an absolute failure of leadership. How did his huge “vectoring” campaign, which undermined German infrastructure, not end his political career?

That’s why it should be highlighted now and forever. The guy who brazenly spent 2013-2017 making Germany fall behind the world, was also making it more vulnerable to exactly the kinds of attacks he’s now invoking… Israel to address. How many bad decisions will he be allowed to make?

In other words, the 2026 Berlin power grid attacks he references happened on his infrastructure designs, since resilience was compromised by underinvestment that his ministry’s policy cynically extended. Now he acts like Germans looking at the attacks he enabled will forget his role, and blitz their way into “personelle Aufstockung der Nachrichtendienste und eine Ausweitung digitaler Befugnisse.”

The Israeli expertise he is trying to import was NOT developed as prevention, in the regular sense of infrastructure defense. It was developed primarily to target and maintain control over a population.

Let me put it like this. I was told in 2017 I could not deprecate a specific deployed EOL Java library because weak and broken code was essential for “defense” technology deployed in… Gaza.

The “Zusammenführen von Informationen” Dobrindt describes is the same consolidation playbook that Israel uses for crimes against humanity. The “Prävention, Detektion und Reaktion” chain described is more accurately a hunt and kill chain.

When Dobrindt talks about “Ausweitung digitaler Befugnisse” and “personelle Aufstockung der Nachrichtendienste,” that’s the infrastructure of aggression and control, opposite to defense, a security model developed for certain subject population control.

This is Kahanism-level extremism in the exact place where you do NOT want radical right-wing Israel calling shots. I should know, I personally met Kahane and heard his theories first hand. Germans probably say Kahane who, which is exactly why they should worry more. The connections of the deal to an extremist like Netanyahu forces the awkward question on Germany: where will this Cyber Gaza system be defined and by who? Who will this architecture be pointed at?

We already know part of the answer.

Dobrindt’s first act as Interior Minister was ordering pushbacks at the border. His threat assessments fraudulently inflate left-wing numbers while hiding right-wing growth, using intentional deception and manipulation tactics.

His “Maßnahmenpaket” expands surveillance authorities. The infrastructure being built isn’t neutral. This is an information targeting system to be operated by a minister who clearly demonstrated bias in which threats he sees and which he manufactures.

Anyone who questions the absurdity of the partnership can be positioned as questioning Israel, questioning Holocaust memory, questioning Germany’s special responsibility. Dobrindt explicitly dismissed Gaza concerns as irrelevant, which is a huge tell. The “Premiumpartner” language is a special shield.

The man who claimed left-wing threats literally ‘rising’ from 11,200 to 11,200 (not a typo), while completely ignoring a huge rise in right-wing violent crimes, is now building Germany’s “threat” detection architecture.

This all deflects from his own record. Apparently much easier for him to talk about alignment with Netanyahu than to explain WHY Germany is in this vulnerable position in the first place.

Him. What if he is the threat?

This is classic fascism. In Germany, no less. Create the problems, stoke crisis, point fingers at left-wing phantoms, expand and centralize state power as the only solution.

Russian Missiles and Ministers: Cynical Winter Attacks Hit Ukraine and Berlin

Same Putin Playbook, Same War, Different Deniability

This week over 1,000 buildings in Kyiv lost heating. Russia had launched nearly 1,100 strike drones, 890 guided aerial bombs, and over 50 missiles against infrastructure in Ukraine.

Temperature: minus 10 Celsius.
Impact: Over 500,000 civilians in danger from Russian attacks.

Zelenskyy called it “conscious, cynical Russian terror against the people.”

In Berlin, timed for the same winter cold spell, Russia targeted heating and energy systems. Their Vulkangruppe attacked civilian dependence on critical infrastructure in freezing weather.

The operational logic is identical. The difference is how Putin architects deniability.

The Strategy Has a Name

What Russia is executing across both theaters is “coercive degradation”. It is a systematic destruction of civilian trust in infrastructure to break political will without triggering direct military response. The target appears to be infrastructure itself. The target is actually trust in democracy, undermining confidence that a representative government can protect its citizens.

In Russian military doctrine, this falls under “reflexive control”: shaping an adversary’s decision-making by controlling the information and conditions they use to make decisions. When German citizens lose heat in winter and their government lacks a coherent explanation, they begin to question their safety. That questioning is the objective. It of course also matters that Russia has radical right-wing politicians working for them in Germany, pre-maturely declaring the enemy can’t be Russia.

The Gerasimov doctrine explicitly prioritizes non-military means of achieving military objectives. The ratio he proposed: 4:1, non-military to military.

Infrastructure sabotage in any NATO territory is the non-military component. Missile strikes in Ukraine are the military component. We see this play out a single campaign, where different tools are calibrated to what each theater will tolerate.

Russia can’t invade Germany, yet. But they can have the German CDU party and interior minister sow political fear and doubt after Russian assets destroy critical infrastructure.

The Deniability Gradient

Russia operates on a sliding scale of attribution:

  • Ukraine: Overt military strikes. Denial is performative – everyone knows, Russia doesn’t care. The message is raw power.
  • Germany: Covert sabotage. Plausible deniability maintained. Attribution is slow, contested, buried in bureaucratic process. The message is vulnerability.
  • Undersea cables, pipelines: Technical deniability. “Accidents happen.” Years of investigation, sporadic arrests of Russians, no consequences. The message is impunity.

This gradient is the core feature of hybrid warfare, as I discussed earlier with the CIA Snow Globe methodology. Russia calibrates pressure precisely to stay below the threshold that would trigger unified NATO response while still inflicting costs. Each level of deniability corresponds to a different political tolerance in the target population.

Germany should know better than to delay infiltration and disruption of Vulkangruppe’s ties to Russia.

Winter as Weapon

Russia has weaponized winter for centuries, and celebrates it as one of their tactical advantages. Hitler and Napoleon both were wrecked. What’s new is the precision application across multiple countries simultaneously, calibrated to each target’s political tolerance and attribution capacity.

The seasonal window is extremely strategic. Infrastructure attacks in July reveal the many Russian weaknesses. Infrastructure attacks in January are signature Russian, psychologically damaging and potentially lethal. Russia synchronizes its offensive operations with weather that multiplies impact of their least efforts. The same sabotage in summer that would be laughed away, becomes a crisis instead when timed for hospital and school pipes to freeze and heating fail.

This isn’t opportunism. It’s diabolical operational planning. The winter offensive against Ukrainian infrastructure intensifies every year in the same months. The sabotage operations in Germany follow the same calendar. The pattern indicates Russian centralized planning exploiting weather vulnerabilities.

The Strategic Objective

The goal, as always with the Russians, is to fracture political cohesion, inject weakness into an enemy through disruption of representative government. In terms of NATO states, Russia aims for three things:

  • Vulnerability: NATO members cannot protect their own critical infrastructure
  • Impunity: Russia can impose costs without suffering consequences
  • Linkage: Supporting Ukraine means accepting domestic attacks

Every German citizen who loses heat this winter is meant to ask: should I support the AfD (Nazi) party because I’m scared and they talk tough about the enemy? Every unanswered sabotage operation reinforces the message that your government needs a “strong man” to keep you safe.

This is the same logic as the terror bombing campaigns of the 20th century, updated for hybrid warfare. The innovation is plausible deniability for achieving the political effects of strategic bombing without the political costs of attribution.

Why Germany Won’t Say It

German authorities continue treating infrastructure attacks as a string of isolated criminal incidents rather than a coordinated Russian campaign. This unfortunately means that while German intelligence services understand exactly what’s happening, their hands are tied by political paralysis.

Naming Russia as the attacker would require a very different response. A response would require political will. Political will would require explaining to the German public that the AfD (Nazi) party has been involved in Russian sabotage operations, covered up by the CDU party in an attempt to win AfD voters back. Easier to investigate an incident separately, or not at all, and let attribution fade into bureaucratic process, and hope the pattern remains invisible to the public.

This is what Russia pays for and counts on.

The deniability gradient works because Western politicians cooperate and even collaborate with it. They try to spin a fiction of isolated incidents to use for political gain, because acknowledging the sustained attack would require action they’re not prepared to accept and take.

The Test

Ukraine can name its attacker. We see Zelenskyy call it “conscious, cynical Russian terror” because the missiles leave no room for ambiguity, and he is a leader.

Germany plays dumb, or incompetent, and creates a leadership vacuum by refusing to admit its attacker. 15 years of Vulkangruppe attacks and yet supposedly not a single clue linking it to the Moscow Vulkan contractors to FSB (known for Sandworm). Germans are making a choice to let the CDU/AfD dynamic play out and swing politics hard right, rather than force attribution that would expose it. That’s a choice. The sabotage leaves just enough room for official doubt, and German political culture fills that space with paralysis enabling a radical right-wing minister to point the wrong direction. I think we all know how this turned out in Germany before.

Weaponizing winter works the same whether you use missiles or ministers. The only question is whether German intelligence will leak and citizens will start to recognize the pattern before the next heating season, and whether recognition would change anything.

Russia is still betting the AfD (Nazi) party will continue to normalize sabotage. So far, that investment is paying off.