On Safety #It'sOn

Math is safety. It is an absolute, there is always a right answer, even if you don't know it yet. It gives you relief, satisfaction. You can sleep at night. There is no tumult replete with tossing and turning waiting for the morning light to try again. With math, the pain is over and the problem is solved. The solution is at hand. All that is left to do is to execute on the answer, the finding, the insight, or the epiphany. Not so with the written word. Words are cheap. You can't trust them. They dazzle you, seduce you. People use words to beguile and render you helpless under their spell. Or if you are unfortunate, words can be abusive, disordering your very essence with their power, their ugliness and hate. Words have power but their truthiness is always suspect. You can't hang your hat on words. Best to know where you stand with the written and spoken word. I learned this lesson early in life. Born a consummate skeptic, as a child I intuitively knew when something was off and things were not quite so. I felt it in every fiber of my being, down to my kidneys. Most children hate math in school. It is so hard, we are told. Only the smarties are good in math, mostly boys. Wasn't there a famous scandal with Larry Summers when he ran Harvard, our top institution of higher learning, because he said women are genetically predisposed to not being good at math? I loved math. I can arrive at an answer. I feel its finality at the very core of my being and it feels good. I was safe. It is the one time, so-called teachers and educators can't mess with me. They have to bow down to the power of the math and accept its correctness even if they don't like me or are politically motivated to hate me. Like my math teacher in now South Sudan, then just Sudan, who gave me a failing grade on my arithmetic test in the third grade because I was the only northern kid in the entire school. She wanted to make an example out of me. She might have also been annoyed with my Dad who said something to her about the state of the classroom chairs being subpar. Well-intentioned as he was, encouraging the school to seek funds for better equipment as is their right under a government-funded program, he said the wrong thing, unbeknownst to him. My poor Dad. He was such an idealist. Instead, my teacher thought he meant to disparage the southerners and once again point out how inferior the south is to the north. She couldn't see past the north-south frame. The country was at war, the longest running civil war in the world actually, for the trivia pursuit lovers. She was going to teach us a lesson, being a proud Dinka woman. At least I think she was Dinka. They are the predominant tribe in the south of Sudan. Anyway, I brought my test home to my Dad who helped me study for my exam, tears streaming down my cheeks because I had failed. He checked the answers, as one does with math. Thank god. Because, if it had been an essay or a dictation, how can you verify it is 100% correct? It is a matter of opinion. It is a he-said, she-said situation. You would have to make a judgement, render a verdict. For that, you need wisdom, experience, a benevolent heart, a smart brain. It turned out my answers were all correct. My Dad was baffled. We marched into the school the next day and demanded an explanation. Thinking quickly on her feet, my third grade teacher told Dad I was supposed to write the answers on the left side of the page, but instead I wrote the answers on the right. Maybe it was the other way around, I can't be sure. She had no choice but to mark them all wrong, she said. The lesson was not math then, but following the rules. If it had been a math test, as it was advertised to be, I would have gotten a 100%, a perfect score. At this juncture, it has to be said that public education is just that; not about the education but about breeding a class of workers who obey orders blindly. In case you didn't know, our educational system is inherited from the Hungarian-Prussian empire, pre the modern nation state of Germany that we have today. The schools' purpose is to separate children from their parents and create factory workers who run the production of widgets ushering in the industrial age. It was not about schooling at all, but enslavement. The school system sought to break the ties of history and heritage that gave people their fundamental identity. Once schools got a hold of children, like an abusive uncle, they destroyed any sense of wonder and the divine magic of discovery, only to fill children heads with drivel and self-doubt. I would say once again Germany was on the wrong side of history but it was not Germany. It was just a story as old of time. The fight between good and evil. Abel and Cain. Apparently, there is a nuance with that biblical tale; Cain tried again and again to gain God's favor but it was to no avail. He had let in an impurity in his soul. He was a purveyor of sexual deviance. And so it is with our educational system. Any gift to God was permanently tainted. Schools do not educate your children; they brain-wash them. They bore and distract your kids so they won't think for themselves; they just swallow what's given to them hook, line and sinker. They tell them things like "math is hard", "it is only for boys", "it is only for smart people", and then "it is only for Asians if you live in America". The rest is up to the imagination. How you string together your psychological "put-down" to limit your mind is up to you. Well, thank you very much. It is to ensure people don't develop a taste for the hard truth and get grounded in immoveable absolutes. Schools short circuit the frontal cortex of precious young minds, levying daily lobotomies to remove any hint of critical thought let alone original ideas. I once took two friends who were not "good at math" having flunked their tests in elementary school to an "A” grade just by re-teaching the lesson in my own words, as I understood it. And our teachers were actually good; we attended a privileged, private, international American school in west Africa. La Cote D'Ivorie, to be exact. Our children survive the school system like children of a hidden war, pervasive and subversive. Some of them are the better for it but that's because of who they are, their personality. Not what they are, smart. A physical manifestation of Nietzsche’s well-known saying “that which does not kill you only makes you stronger.” Indeed, the whole "smart versus stupid" paradigm is itself one of the torture tools employed by the school system against civilized society. It is a "divide and conquer" strategy used by the British to sow the seeds of conflict like in Africa and the Gaza strip which was peaceful and prosperous until the UN decided to intervene. Under the auspices of the British crown, they tricked the world that they were doing good by creating a Jewish state for God’s lost flock and chosen people. It was just another underhand move to eliminate the undesirable state of peace in the middle east, turning the key on perpetual profits extracted from the war machine well into the future. We will never solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not because it is too hard. But because it is a glorified family-feud with both sides being egged on to keep up the fight for money and entertainment. How else will the media channels fill the news and find content to look and sound serious, grave, learned? Those pundits on the news are not impressive and erudite. They are the face of evil. Before I lose you to too much darkness, there is hope. It is Bitcoin. Bitcoin marries math with words to perfection. For those who don't know about Bitcoin, or know a little but not a lot, fear not. Bitcoin is a network of people using their humble computer, nothing fancy or special purpose, to do the math every ten minutes. If the math checks out, the Bitcoin node operator, accepts the running sum total. If the math is wrong, the Bitcoin network rejects it. It is that simple. No hurt feelings, no misunderstandings, no political tit-for-tats. Just math. For security in cyberspace, you don't need guards like meatspace, or anti-virus software like your IBM machines. All you need is math. This time the formula is not a lowly summation worthy of a third grader. It is cryptography which to be fair is advanced math. Heady stuff. Don't panic. That's where the words come in. These are 12 words you can easily memorize and actually trust. That is, there is a correct answer you can verify. It is called a seed phrase. Unlike the seed of dissent, like the US dollar that takes you into the pit of hell, the abyss of despair with math that never adds up, Bitcoin seed phrases rely on a Bitcoin Improvement Protocol, BIP for short, number 39. It takes the cryptographic key which you use to sign a Bitcoin transaction and translates it into words. This transformation is an exact science, it is an absolute. Your English teacher can't argue the result, or edit your words arbitrarily to her liking. Your school overloads can't intervene and force grades on you like a life sentence. The key will either work because you have the right words, or not if the words are wrong. It is binary; it is black and white; it is clear-cut. No shades of grey; just pure heaven. Dear reader, do please be reminded these words are speech, guarded by the first amendment of the United States constitution. BIP39 words are special, they preserve your life, they protect you from a fate worse than death. That's right folks, we are talking about rape. Yours actually. The daily in and out. You have been anesthetized to not feel it, with your loins made numb, courtesy of the government. Bitcoin does not debase you while you are sleeping. Bitcoin respects your body and values your humanity. To do that, it doesn't even know need to who you are (like banks), where you come from, what religion you believe in, which passport you carry, what color your skin is, and what cultural background you identify with. It just works. Each and every time. It is all math. Be safe. Buy Bitcoin. Take custody of it with a hardware signing device. Memorize your words. Goodnight. Sleep well.