Threat Modeling Quotes

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by.

I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model... So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don't know. Yes, it has made things difficult.

It is absolutely vital that appropriate levels of intrusive micromanagement, divisive paranoia, bullying, and the threat of arbitrary punishments are maintained, so that we can truly re-create the folkways of the past. Also a propensity for calling meetings at regular, and indeed irregular, intervals. Adam, and what is the end purpose of all this work we are seeing? Uncharles, there is none. This is also believed to be historically authentic.

Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively.

At a deep, unconscious level, Broud sensed the opposing destinies of the two. Ayla was more than a threat to his masculinity, she was a threat to his existence. His hatred of her was the hatred of the old for the new, of the traditional for the innovative, of the dying for the living. Broud’s race was too static, too unchanging. They had reached the peak of their development; there was no more room to grow. Ayla was part of nature’s new experiment, and though she tried to model herself after the women of the clan, it was only an overlay, a façade only culture-deep, assumed for the sake of survival. She was already finding ways around it, in answer to a deep need that sought an avenue of expression. And though she tried in every way she could to please the overbearing young man, inwardly she began to rebel.

In a healthy environment, increased threat sensitivity, poor emotion control and enhanced fear memory in MAOA-L [i.e., the “warrior” variant] men might only manifest as variation in temperament within a ‘normal’ or subclinical range. However, these same characteristics in an abusive childhood environment—one typified by persistent uncertainty, unpredictable threat, poor behavioral modeling and social referencing, and inconsistent reinforcement for prosocial decision making—might predispose toward frank aggression and impulsive violence in the adult.

The Internet of Things (IoT) devoid of comprehensive security management is tantamount to the Internet of Threats. Apply open collaborative innovation, systems thinking & zero-trust security models to design IoT ecosystems that generate and capture value in value chains of the Internet of Things.

when designers use clean aesthetics to cover over a complex reality—to take something human, nuanced, and rife with potential for bias, and flatten it behind a seamless interface—they’re not really making it easier for you. They’re just hiding the flaws in their model, and hoping you won’t ask too many difficult questions.

It wasn't enough to push open the doors. You had to change minds. How could girls truly make their mark if their role models were houseplants, if their fashions scarcely allowed them to breathe? If any expression of opinion on any subject was considered by young men to be a threat? And even more so, how could they escape the basic fact that no matter how horrid the boys were, the young women still wanted to please them - because what choice had they, really? Where could they go besides back to their own homes, where they would rest under the heavy thumbs of their own mothers, or into the home of a man - with the hopes that this man would be indulgent, like Papa, and not oppressive or cruel, like so many others?

there are only two basic ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity. All societies are patterned on either a dominator model—in which human hierarchies are ultimately backed up by force or the threat of force—or a partnership model, with variations in between. Moreover, if we reexamine human society from a perspective that takes into account both women and men, we can also see that there are patterns, or systems configurations, that characterize dominator, or alternatively, partnership, social organization.

Women are culturally conditioned to care for others, but not ourselves. We believe that having needs, feelings, ambitions, or thoughts of our own is not good. In this self-abnegation, we enact a culturally prescribed role that perpetuates sexist social structures. The needs and thoughts of men matter, but not ours. Christian theology presents Jesus as the model of self-sacrificing love and persuades us to believe that sexism is divinely sanctioned. We are tied to the virtue of self-sacrifice, often by hidden social threats of punishment. We keep silent about rape, we deny when we are being abused, and we allow our lives to be consumed by the trivial and by our preoccupation with others. We never claim our lives as our own. We live as though we were not present in our bodies.

Your Creative Autobiography 1. What is the first creative moment you remember? 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it? 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had? 4. What made it great in your mind? 5. What is the dumbest idea? 6. What made it stupid? 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea? 8. What is your creative ambition? 9. What are the obstacles to this ambition? 10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition? 11. How do you begin your day? 12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat? 13. Describe your first successful creative act. 14. Describe your second successful creative act. 15. Compare them. 16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play? 17. Which artists do you admire most? 18. Why are they your role models? 19. What do you and your role models have in common? 20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you? 21. Who is your muse? 22. Define muse. 23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond? 24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond? 25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? 26. When you work, do you love the process or the result? 27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? 28. What is your ideal creative activity? 29. What is your greatest fear? 30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? 31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? 32. What is your idea of mastery? 33. What is your greatest dream?

They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York - they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the others will get into some terrible trouble before he is seen again, and before anyone can help him. It is the spirit of the people, the eyes which endlessly watch them, eyes which never meet their eyes. Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner. They spend more of themselves, each day, than they can possibly afford, they are living beyond their means; they drop into bed each evening, exhausted, into an exhausting sleep. And no one can help them. The people who live here know how to do it - so it seems, anyway - but they cannot teach the secret. The secret can be learned only by watching, by emulating the models, by dangerous trial and possibly mortal error.

The first real threat it faced, today’s ridesharing model, only showed up in the last decade. But that ridesharing model won’t even get ten years to dominate. Already, it’s on the brink of autonomous car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-anywhere decimation. Plus, avatars. The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next ten years.

Evolutionary and neurobiological models of personality converge on the idea that neuroticism reflects heightened sensitivity of defensive psychological mechanisms designed to deal with multiple types of social and nonsocial threats.

From books, the Spaniards knew of many contemporary civilizations remote from Europe, and about several thousand years of European history. Pizarro explicitly modeled his ambush of Atahuallpa on the successful strategy of Cortés. In short, literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history. That gulf of experience encouraged Pizarro to set his trap and Atahuallpa to walk into it.

Parts often become extreme in their protective efforts and take over your system by blending. Some make you hypervigilant, others get you to overreact angrily to perceived slights, others make you somewhat dissociative all the time or cause you to fully dissociate in the face of perceived threats. Some become the inner critics as they try to motivate you to look or perform better or try to shame you into not taking risks. Others make you take care of everyone around you and neglect yourself.

It is worth noting here how extraordinary it was for anyone to be homeless in North Korea. This was, after all, the country that had developed the most painstaking systems to keep track of its citizens. Everybody had a fixed address and a work unit and both were tied to food rations—if you left home, you couldn’t get fed. People didn’t dare visit a relative in the next town without a travel permit. Even overnight visitors were supposed to be registered with the inminban, which in turn had to report to the police the name, gender, registration number, travel permit number, and the purpose of the visit. Police conducted regular spot checks around midnight to make sure nobody had unauthorized visitors. One had to carry at all times a “citizen’s certificate,” a twelve-page passport-size booklet that contained a wealth of information about the bearer. It was modeled on the old Soviet ID. All that changed with the famine. Without food distribution, there was no reason to stay at your fixed address. If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity.

In particular, the rise of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon has propelled a great deal of progress. Never before have such deep-pocketed corporations viewed artificial intelligence as absolutely central to their business models—and never before has AI research been positioned so close to the nexus of competition between such powerful entities. A similar competitive dynamic is unfolding among nations. AI is becoming indispensable to militaries, intelligence agencies, and the surveillance apparatus in authoritarian states.* Indeed, an all-out AI arms race might well be looming in the near future.

But speaking of decisions and choices, I want to turn to a question that baffles so many of us. Why is it that people who are victims of trauma are so often drawn to abusive relationships? Let me broaden the question, because it is so important in understanding not just abuse but all behavior. The key point is that all of us tend to gravitate to the familiar, even when the familiar is unhealthy or destructive. We are drawn to what we were raised with. As I’ve said before, when we are young and our brain is beginning to make sense of our experiences, it creates our ‘working model’ of the world. The brain organizes around the tone and tension of our first experiences. So if, early on, you have safe, nurturing care, you think that people are essentially good….But if a child experienced chaos, threat, or trauma, your brain organizes according to a view that the world is not safe and people cannot be trusted. Think about James. He didn’t feel ‘safe’ when he was close to people. Intimacy made him feel threatened. Here is the confusing part: James felt most comfortable when the world was in line with his worldview. Being rejected or treated poorly validated this view. The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged….Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.

In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this. James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this. If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of "the wealth of the nation," those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participation too much - voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that. “Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

Vision Robotics, a company based in San Diego, California, is developing an octopus-like orange harvesting machine. The robot will use three-dimensional machine vision to make a computer model of an entire orange tree and then store the location of each fruit. That information will then be passed on to the machine’s eight robotic arms, which will rapidly harvest the oranges.

Sift through threats for hidden possibilities. Every threat carries with it the potential for innovation. The problem of obesity contains the possibility of new kinds of nutrition. The problem of global pollution contains the possibility of new energy sources. The problem of high unemployment contains the possibility of new educational models. The list is endless, if you can learn to see what’s not there.

Serena’s body isn’t built to emulate the look of the model in an Ann Taylor shift dress. It’s built – through an exacting and grueling regimen – to decimate her opponents. And his suggestion that the body, too, is beautiful and sexy – in spite of, or even because of, its threat to the norms of white femininity – will continue to be threatening until the standards of beauty are decentered from those of the white upper class.

Business in New York has always been hard-edged, with the opening bid in negotiations typically starting with an exchange of “fuck you” and the threat of litigation. No tactic or ruse was too low, including preying on the weak or vulnerable—in fact, that became Trump’s business model, perhaps because he’d gone broke so many times himself, only to be bailed out by his Daddy, that he knew just how defenseless the insolvent really are.

Consciousness is not some abstract concept. It's our state of mind - our thoughts and feelings at any given moment. The 3LC model (Spacious, Heart, Safety) suggests the state of consciousness we are in will always influence how we perceive a situation, the choices we see for ourselves and our actions. In other words, it affects everything. Three Levels of Consciousness Spacious - AWE - Expansive, Nonverbal, Nontemporal Heart - Appreciation, Gratitude Safety - Reward - Purposeful Proactive Productive - Stuck - Anxiety Anguish Ambivalence - Threat - Fight Flight Freeze

When in child consciousness, an adult relates to themself and the world through helplessness, lack of agency, and feeling dependent on others for them to be OK. They experience their lives narrowly and without many options, leading to a limited sense of capacity and resiliency. They feel the regressive need to protect themselves from the threat of relational loss through a variety of strategies of disconnection (which traditionally have been referred to as defense mechanisms). Any sense of “growing up” or forward progress may feel like threat to the loyalty to these old survival style patterns.

4.​They can cause a lot of damage to your body and your life. Because they’re frozen in dreadful scenes in the past and carry burdens from those times, they will do whatever they need to do to get your attention when you won’t listen: punish you or others, convince others to take care of them, sabotage your plans, or eliminate people in your life they see as a threat. To do these things and more, they can exacerbate or give you physical symptoms or diseases, nightmares and strange dreams, emotional outbursts, and chronic emotional states. Indeed, most of the syndromes that make up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are simply descriptions of the different clusters of protectors that dominate people after they’ve been traumatized. When you think of those diagnoses that way, you feel a lot less defective and a lot more empowered to help those protectors out of those roles.

Cambridge. Russia does offer an alternative model to liberal democracy, but this model is not a coherent political ideology. Rather, it is a political practice in which a number of oligarchs monopolize most of a country’s wealth and power and then use their control of the media to hide their activities and cement their rule. Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realize this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realizing the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others and divert attention to external threats, either real or imaginary.

It is vital to acknowledge the new reality before taking any steps to change the existing policies. The world is not the same anymore. Tackling religion-based terrorism is perhaps one, if not the most serious threat the world face in the 21st century. Unfortunately, more terror attacks like the ones in San Bernardino, Brussels and Paris are expected to occur. While those attacks were a reminder of the challenges that lay ahead, they exposed the need to have an improved early warning system that may ultimately save civilian lives. Such a system should take into account the shortcomings of the current warning frameworks and evaluate the usefulness of warnings generated by improved models that would cover a broad range of attacks, larger geographic areas within the country in question and a wide range of potential attack scenarios. The system is likely to facilitate well informed decisions on the assessment of information gathered from different sources. In this vein, finding a balance between protecting human rights and ensuring national security is key.

MARK TWAIN Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model. Both wars were inspired from heaven. Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . . At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography.” And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars. General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father.

Polyvagal Theory proposes a neurophysiological model of safety and trust. The model emphasizes that safety is defined by feeling safe and not by the removal of threat. Feeling safe is dependent on three conditions: 1) the autonomic nervous system cannot be in a state that supports defense; 2) the social engagement system needs to be activated to down regulate sympathetic activation and functionally contain the sympathetic nervous system and the dorsal vagal circuit within an optimal range (homeostasis) that would support health, growth, and restoration; and 3) to detect cues of safety (e.g., prosodic vocalizations, positive facial expressions and gestures) via neuroception. In everyday situations, the cues of safety may initiate the sequence by triggering the social engagement system via the process of neuroception, which will contain autonomic state within a homeostatic range and restrict the autonomic nervous system from reacting in defense. This constrained range of autonomic state has been referred to as the window of tolerance (see Ogden et. al. 2006; Siegel, 1999) and can be expanded through neural exercises embedded in therapy. See: throughout

A good campaign usually deploys multiple tactics: paid media (TV ads, digital ads, radio ads, print ads), earned media (which is just jargon for public relations), opposition research (a euphemism for digging up dirt on someone), field (canvassing, door knocking, flyers, lit drops, posters, phone calls), lobbying (personal connections in one way or another), and today, perhaps more than anything else, social media. We went at it on every front. I convened a meeting of our senior team every morning at 8 a.m. to discuss what we could to do to drive Anthony from the race. Here’s the best of what we did: Earned media: I kicked things off by saying, on the front page of the New York Times, that if Anthony ran, I’d add an extra $20 million to our campaign budget to ensure that we destroyed his reputation so thoroughly, he’d never be able to run for anything ever again. In retrospect, the threat probably landed harder than I realized because Anthony was already starting to self-destruct. (It wasn’t like what he got caught doing on Twitter didn’t exist in other, pre-Twitter formats before then.) We started exactly where anyone would when it comes to Anthony Weiner: sex. In his time as a member of the House, Anthony had passed all of one bill. And that one illustrious piece of legislation was to give more visas to models. Yep, protecting the rights of hot women was Anthony’s sole achievement in office. That was a good point to make but not an exposé in and of itself. But then our research team noticed something: Anthony had also received campaign contributions from many of the models who received highly coveted H1B visas. Not only was this pay-to-play (give contributions, get government favors), it was illegal.

Oh, it’s perfectly safe to handle if somebody else has triggered the curse and you took it from their still-smoking body.” Eve paused. “Or if they sold it to you.” “You bought it, didn’t you?” Imp walked towards her. “Didn’t you?” “I think so. I may have screwed up that side of things,” Eve admitted. “It’s unclear.” “What’s unclear?” “It was up for auction: obvs, right? But it’s not clear that the person auctioning the location of the manuscript actually owned what they were selling, that’s the thing. Also, ancient death spells and intellectual property law don’t always play nice together. I, uh, my boss has a standard procedure he has me follow in cases of handling blackmail and extortion. We pay the ransom, then once we’ve destroyed the threat I repossess the payment from the blackmailer’s bank account. Via a Transnistrian mafiya underwriter—” This time it was Wendy who interrupted: “The Russian mafiya has underwriters?” “Transnistrian, please, and yes, criminal business models are inherently expensive because they have to pay for their own guard labor—there are no tax overheads, but no police protection for carrying out business, either—so of course they evolved parallel structures for risk management, mostly by embedding the risk in a concrete slab and dumping it in the harbor—anyway. At what stage does the book consider itself to have been legitimately acquired? And by whom? Is it safe for you to handle it, as my employee? What about as an independent freelance contractor not subject to the HMRC IR35 regulations? Am I an acceptable proxy for Bigge Enterprises, a Scottish Limited Liability Partnership domiciled in the Channel Islands, in the view of a particularly dim-witted nineteenth-century death spell attached to a codex bound in human skin by a mad inquisitor? It’s like digital rights management magic, only worse.

The USSR model was never a serious threat to anyone's bottom line. People blow up over Germany because, for all its left-wing bent, it may be a more plausible form of capitalism than ours.

Steps in the IPB Process  First, define the battlefield environment. Identify characteristics of the battlefield that influence both friendly and competitor operations. Establish the limits of the battlefield and identify elements that are unknown but should be known.  Second, describe the battlefield’s effects on operations. This step always includes an examination of terrain and weather but may also include the characteristics of geography and infrastructure and their effects on friendly and threat operations, as well as such factors as politics, civilian press, local population, and demographics.  The third step is to evaluate the competitor. If the competitor is known, determine how it normally organizes for combat and conducts operations under similar circumstances. This information can be drawn from historical databases and well-developed threat models. With new or less well-known competitors, intelligence databases and threat courses of action may have to be developed simultaneously.  Finally, determine the competitor’s possible courses of action. The main question to be answered here is: Given what the competitor normally prefers to do and the effects of the specific environment in which it is operating, what are its likely objectives and courses of action?

There was little the mainstream auto industry could do to slow Tesla down. But that didn’t stop executives from trying to be difficult whenever possible. Tesla, for example, wanted to call its third-generation car the Model E, so that its lineup of vehicles would be the Model S, E, and X—another playful Musk gag. But Ford’s then CEO, Alan Mulally, blocked Tesla from using Model E, with the threat of a lawsuit. “So I call up Mulally and I was like, ‘Alan, are you just fucking with us or are you really going to do a Model E?’” Musk said. “And I’m not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would actually make more sense if they’re just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E at this point, and we’ve got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with the Model E, it’s going to look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of ‘Model’ as being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber. And he was like, ‘No, no, we’re definitely going to use it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea because people are going to be confused because it’s not going to make sense. People aren’t used to Ford having Model something these days. It’s usually called like the Ford Fusion.’ And he was like, no, his guys really want to use that. That’s terrible.” After that, Tesla registered the trademark for Model Y as another joke. “In fact, Ford called us up deadpan and said, ‘We see you’ve registered Model Y. Is that what you’re going to use instead of the Model E?’” Musk said. “I’m like, ‘No, it’s a joke. S-E-X-Y. What does that spell?’ But trademark law is a dry profession it turns out.

By 1912, global sales of electric vehicles peaked at 30,000 cars which would have spelled good news to electric car manufacturers had they not been faced with the threat of petrol-powered cars.

The risk models developed by private firms, whether hedge funds, rating agencies, or banks, are not reliable guides to the future. Even when these models are applied by government regulators, their application is flawed, because they look to past market history as received truth. But markets, we must emphasize, are imperfect; they are the agglomeration of myriad investors, most of whom usually act rationally - usually, as history has shown, but not always. Even perfectly logical investors will panic, as will theatergoers at the mere possibility of fire, so as not to be last to the exit; this threat of contagion renders financial markets inherently unstable.

In 2014, there were about 6,000 searches for the exact phrase “how to kill your girlfriend” and 400 murders of girlfriends. If all of these murderers had made this exact search beforehand, that would mean 1 in 15 people who searched “how to kill your girlfriend” went through with it. Of course, many, probably most, people who murdered their girlfriends did not make this exact search. This would mean the true probability that this particular search led to murder is lower, probably a lot lower. But if data scientists could build a model that showed that the threat against a particular individual was, say, 1 in 100, we might want to do something with that information. At the least, the person under threat might have the right to be informed that there is a 1-in-100 chance she will be murdered by a particular person.

The conservative movement has largely become associated with—and financed by—old industry and traditional religion, both of which perceive an existential threat from new science. Rather than supporting exploration of wherever the evidence leads, they have invested big money in an authoritarian model of defending their values and business models, and that means denying science that contradicts those things.

the overzealous institutionalization of social relationships, which comes along with the increasing formalization and physical and numerical growth of modern settlements and societies, makes people unhappy and undermines the moral legitimacy of political authorities. The more powerful the institutions, the more ‘rights’ and vested interests they will have in the affairs and interactions of the ordinary citizen, and the more marginal individuals will be compared to the interests of the institutions. The ultimate form of this trend is a situation where institutions become not only a burden, but a threat to public well-being, even to public security. I argue in the book that there are ways to revive organic communities in modern political systems by conducting decentralization, and by adopting models from the existing

However, the position of my books, and of post-modernism in general, which regards all representations, or maps, or models, as probabilistic and relative to their social context, Gross and Levitt dismissively call “perspectivism” (a good word in my estimation, so I cheerfully accept it). Gross and Levitt see perspectivism as an insidious threat to their One True Faith and a pathway downward to the bottomless abyss of nihilism.

There was little the mainstream auto industry could do to slow Tesla down. But that didn't stop executives from trying to be difficult whenever possible. Tesla, for example, wanted to call its third-generation car the Model E, so that its lineup of vehicles would be the Model S, E and X - another playful Musk gag. But Ford's then CEO, Alan Mulally, blocked Tesla from using Model E, with the threat of a lawsuit. "So I call up Mulally and I was like, 'Alan, are you just fucking with us or are you really going to do a Model E?'" Musk said. "And I'm not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would actually make more sense if they're just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E at this point, and we've got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with a Model E, it's going to look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of 'Model' as being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you going stealing Tesla's E? Like you're some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber. And he was like, 'No, no, we're definitely going to use it.' And I was like, 'Oh, I don't think that's such a good idea because people are going to be confused because it's not gong to make sense. People aren't used to Ford having Model something these days. It's usually called like the Ford Fusion.' And he was like, no, his guys really want to use that. That's terrible." After that, Tesla registered the trademark for Model Y as another joke. "In fact, Ford called us up deadpan and said, 'We see you've registered Model Y. Is that what you're gong to use instead of the Model E?'" Musk said. "I'm like, 'No, it's a joke. S-E-X-Y. What does that spell?' But trademark law is a dry profession it turns out.

In the United States, the dominant analytic framework for explaining international relations today is realism. ... Those deploying this model to explain Russia’s behavior today...offer several prescriptions for how to defuse the current Russia-Ukraine crisis: Freeze NATO expansion and Russia will be content. Offer face-saving concessions that give Russia tangible gains and the threat of war will subside. Don’t arm Ukraine because that will fuel escalation and trigger a Russian invasion. If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. But Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology — only some of which comport with Western rational realism.

Applying the Finnish model is based on the assumption that in return for neutrality—meaning not joining NATO—Russia will let Kyiv maintain its sovereignty and Ukraine will be able to develop into a stable, democratic, and prosperous state. However, the likelihood of such a scenario seems to be unlikely, given that the existence of a free and democratic Ukraine is a threat to Putin’s corrupt and authoritarian Russia. In consequence, “the Kremlin will seek nothing less than the collapse of democracy in Ukraine.

But perhaps the greatest threat to subjectivity comes from contemporary cognitive science. In light of decades of groundbreaking research in neurobiology, there is a growing tendency to turn towards scientific models of explanation to explain away the uniqueness of human subjectivity. Researchers are not just constantly downplaying the role of systematic self-observation and autonomous discourses that deny the supremacy of experimental science; rather, what is increasingly coming into question is the infinite array of material offered by self-consciousness and the meaning of philosophical investigations into its culture and politics as structurally free from biological concerns. Instead of having recourse to first-person experience as it shows itself to us in the irreducibility of its complex dynamics as the site of personality (phenomenology), or the labyrinthine network of the symbolic universe of discourses informing our sense of self and other (postmodernism), they are able to explain the entire range of emotional and social characteristics through the nonconscious, asubjective pulsation of brute matter, the mere non-personal movement of neurochemico-electrical activity wherein the I becomes an epiphenomenal illusion created by a closed biological system of response mechanisms pre- determined by genetic code.

She said, "I could kill him for what he did to you!" It was a curious phrase. I could kill... One I never used since I actually had killed before. I was a murderer, so for me it lost its hyperbolic quality. But like when you buy a car and then see that specific model everywhere, I noticed whenever anyone idly threw out murderous threats. And it was often. For me they stuck out like neon signsin otherwise dull common colloquialisms. People were always exclaiming, "I could kill you right now! or "I want to fucking kill her!" or the classic joke, "If I tell you, I'll have to kill you," and on and on and on. I heard something like that said at least once a week, and I nodded and smiled and understood, like a well-adjusted nonhomicidal person.

Once we account for Christian nationalism in our statistical models, white Americans who attend church more often, pray more often and consider religion more important are less likely to prioritize the economy or liberty over the vulnerable.

Like any of man’s inventions, artificial intelligence can be used for good or evil. In the right hands and with proper intent, it can do beneficial things for humanity. Conversely, it can be used by evil dictators, sinister politicians, and malevolent leaders to create something as dangerous as a deadly weapon in a terrorist’s hands. Yuval Noah Harari is a leading spokesperson for the globalists and their transhumanist, AI, and Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda. Harari is also an advisor to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. Barack Obama refers to Harari as a prophet and recommends his books. Harari wrote a book titled Sapiens and another titled Homo Deus (“homo” being a Latin word for human or man, and “deus” being the Latin word for god or deity). He believes that homo sapiens as we know them have run their course and will no longer be relevant in the future. Technology will create homo deus, which will be a much superior model with upgraded physical and mental abilities. Harari tells us that humankind possesses enormous new powers, and once the threat of famine, plagues, and war is finally lifted, we will be looking for something to do with ourselves. He believes the next targets of our power and technology are likely to be immortality, happiness, and divinity. He says: “We will aim to overcome old age and even death itself. Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn homo sapiens into homo deus. When I say that humans will upgrade themselves into gods in the 21st century, this is not meant as a metaphor; I mean it literally. If you think about the gods of ancient mythology, like the Hebrew God, they have certain qualities. Not just immortality, but maybe above all, the ability to create life, to design life. We are in the process of acquiring these divine abilities. We want to learn how to engineer and produce life. It’s very likely that in the 21st century, the main products of the economy will no longer be textiles and vehicles and weapons. They will be bodies and brains and minds.48

In the futures markets, they bought and sold paper contracts. Futures contracts had been around for more than a century and were an integral part of the food system. Corn, pork, and soybean futures were traded on the Chicago Board of Trade. The NYMEX specialized in eggs and butter. The futures market wasn’t big—traders in the market tended to be farmers and big grain millers. They used futures contracts to limit their risk. The owners of the NYMEX weren’t content with their sleepy corner of the financial world, and they decided to expand their business and sell contracts for new kinds of products. The NYMEX introduced the first futures contract for crude oil in 1983. At first, the birth of oil futures contracts looked like a threat to Koch’s business model. Howell and his team spent years figuring out how to be the smartest blind men in the dark cave of the physical oil business and making the best guess as to the real price of oil. Koch Industries had gained an expertise in exploiting the opacity of oil markets and wringing the best price out of its counterparties. The new oil futures contract created something that was anathema to this business model: transparency. When the NYMEX debuted its oil futures contract, it created a very visible price for crude oil that changed by the minute on a public exchange. Again, this wasn’t the price of real crude; it was the price for a futures contract on crude, reflecting the best guess of all market participants as to what a barrel of oil would be worth in the future. Even though the futures price wasn’t the real price, it provided everybody with a common reference point. Now, when Koch called up someone to buy oil from Koch’s tank farm in St. James, that customer could look at a screen and start haggling based on what the markets in New York were saying the price of oil was worth. “It was the first time that there was a common, visible market signal,” Howell said. “It just kind of sucked the oxygen out of the room for that physical trading.

Indiana had pioneered the world’s first compulsory sterilization law. And a new measure that Governor Jackson signed in 1927 was enforced until 1974, allowing the state to deny thousands of Hoosiers the ability to bring children into the world. The same year that the new law went into effect, the United States Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, upheld the right to sterilize a “feeble-minded” woman in a mental institution. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the majority opinion. In the years that followed, about 70,000 Americans who were deemed a threat to the national gene pool—the deaf, the blind, ethnic minorities, people with epilepsy, homosexuals, poor people, and “promiscuous” women—were sterilized against their will. Nazi Germany defended its own 1936 eugenics law by pointing to the United States as a role model. In 1981, Oregon performed the nation’s last legal forced sterilization.

When a young child faces a conflict between Self and attachment, the need for attachment always wins. When experiencing a threat to the attachment relationship, children are faced with an impossible situation: they need to stay connected to their caregivers, but they also need to stay connected to their authentic Self. This bind pits their relationship to caregivers against their relationship to Self, which reflects a conflict between attachment and separation-individuation.

PTSD focuses on experiences of safety, related to life-and-death threat, and the symptoms associated with physiological dysregulation. C-PTSD focuses on experiences of inner security, related to the threat of the Self, and the symptoms associated with psychobiological disorganization.

Indeed, rapid OODA looping is merely one aspect of the process of adaptation. In the comprehensive OODA loop model Boyd’s attention to this broader theme comes most clearly to the fore. While the early presentations are clearly aimed at a military audience and pertain to operational art, by shifting his focus to a number of processes that in abstract are similar for a variety of organisms and social systems, Boyd steers A Discourse beyond military history and warfare. In particular during his later period Boyd approached and explained patterns for winning and losing from this more abstract point of view, suggesting patterns in the behavior of organisms and organizations when confronted with threats and challenges of an even more general nature.

With the natural caution of a scientist venturing outside his field, Dr. Cannon concluded his study of 'The Wisdom of the Body' with the suggestion that the model of the living organism might be applied with advantage to the larger human community. Since technologies and economic systems are themselves products of life, it is not strange that, to the degree that they work effectively at all, they have incorporated many organic devices not in line with their own abstract ideological or institutional premises. But because brain physiology, dream exploration, and linguistic analysis were all outside his are of high competence Dr. Cannon never faced the central problem that arose, at a very early point, I suspect, once the enlargement of man's neural functions enabled him to escape the automatism of his reflexes and hormones. how under those conditions to prevent the brain from succumbing to its own disorderly hyperactivity, once liberated from the bodily functions and environmental contacts and social pressures necessary for its existence? The need to recognize this special source of instability coming from the extraordinary powers of the mind, and to take measures for overcoming it, is not the least lesson to be drawn from man's historic development. In so far as automatic systems become more lifelike as well as more powerful, they carry with them the threat of increasing human irrationality at higher levels. To follow an organic model, then, not only the system as a whole must be kept in view, but each individual part must be in a state of alertness, ready to intervene at any point in the process and take over.

If our mental models are mere approximations of reality, then, the conclusions we draw cannot help but be prone to error. A few words uttered by someone close to us can carry enormous weight, for example, whereas the same words uttered by a stranger won’t resonate at all. At our jobs, we may interpret not being invited to a meeting as a threat to us or to our projects, even when no threat is intended. But because we often don’t see the flaws in our reasoning—or our biases—it’s easy to be deluded while being quite convinced that we are the only sane ones around.

Ketika dunia melihat bangsa kita bangkit, jangan kita sia-siakan kesempatan bersejarah ini. Kita menjadi contoh, kita menjadi model, sambil kita juga belajar dari negara lain. Mereka banyak belajar dari kita, jangan malu-malu. Kita menimba pengalaman yang baik. Globalisasi ada yang baik, ada yang buruk. Globalisasi, ada opportunity dan ada threat. Threat- nya kita tolak, kita hadapi. Yang buruk-buruk kita tahan, tapi yang baik-baik, jangan kita menutup diri karena akan membawa kemajuan dan manfaat bagi bangsa kita.

WHAT IS IT, exactly, that people are really afraid of when they say they don’t like change? There is the discomfort of being confused or the extra work or stress the change may require. For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre—personally, I think the person who can’t change his or her mind is dangerous. Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I don’t know anyone who thought he was weak. Managers often see change as a threat to their existing business model—and, of course, it is. In the course of my life, the computer industry has moved from mainframes to minicomputers to workstations to desktop computers and now to iPads. Each machine had a sales, marketing, and engineering organization built around it, and thus the shift from one to the next required radical changes to the organization. In Silicon Valley, I have seen the sales forces of many computer manufacturers fight to maintain the status quo, even as their resistance to change caused their market share to be gobbled up by rivals—a short-term view that sank many companies. One good example is Silicon Graphics, whose sales force was so accustomed to selling large, expensive machines that they fiercely resisted the transition to more economical models. Silicon Graphics still exists, but I rarely hear about them anymore.

The Keeling Curve Courtesy the NASA Earth Observatory. NASA graph by Robert Simmon, based on data provided by the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory.   If the scientific story of global warming has one great hero, he is James Hansen, and not only because he is the most important climatologist of his era, whose massive computer models were demonstrating by the early 1980s that increased CO2 posed a dire threat.

Avis Budget, recognising the emerging threat, spent $500m last year buying Zipcar, the world’s largest example of a “car club”, a form of sharing in which vehicles are parked on the streets and users can rent them, using a swipe-card, by the hour. In theory, the giant hire firms are well-placed to operate the car-club model: conventional rentals peak during the week, whereas club-car use peaks at weekends, so they can achieve high utilisation rates by shifting cars between the two services. Car clubs and other forms of sharing are proving especially attractive to young drivers. That is encouraging the carmakers to return to a business they have dabbled in before (Hertz has been owned by both Ford and GM; and GM once part-owned Avis).

Remember and Share - The Hook Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential. - Once a product is built, Habit Testing helps uncover product devotees, discover which product elements are habit forming (if any), and why those aspects of your product change user behavior. Habit Testing includes three steps: identify, codify, and modify. - First, dig into the data to identify how people are behaving and using the product. - Next, codify these findings in search of habitual users. To generate new hypotheses, study the actions and paths taken by devoted users. - Lastly, modify the product to influence more users to follow the same path as your habitual users, and then evaluate results and continue to modify as needed. - Keen observation of one's own behavior can lead to new insights and habit-forming product opportunities. - Identifying areas where a new technology makes cycling through the Hook Model faster, more frequent or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products. - Nascent behaviors — new behaviors that few people see or do, and yet ultimately fulfill a mass-market need — can inform future breakthrough habit-forming opportunities. - New interfaces lead to transformative behavior change and business opportunities.   *** Do This Now Refer to the answers you came up with in the “Do This Now” section in chapter five to complete the following exercises: - Perform Habit Testing, as described in this chapter, to identify the steps users take toward long-term engagement. - Be aware of your behaviors and emotions for the next week as you use everyday products. Ask yourself: - What triggered me to use these products? Was I prompted externally or through internal means? - Am I using these products as intended? - How might these products improve their on-boarding funnels, re-engage users through additional external triggers, or encourage users to invest in their services? - Speak with three people outside your social circle to discover which apps occupy the first screen on their mobile devices. Ask them to use these apps as they normally would and see if you uncover any unnecessary or nascent behaviors. - Brainstorm five new interfaces that could introduce opportunities or threats to your business.

What the Western world does not understand about Islam is that its adherents’ first and foremost identity is being a Muslim, without the limitations of national boundaries or allegiances. There is no such thing called Sunni dar al-Islam and Shiite dar al-Islam. There is only one dar al-Islam and then there is the rest of the world, dar al-harb, or the house of war. Sunnis and Shiites understand this basic distinction and easily set aside internal conflict to deal with an external power. That is to say, the Sunni-Shiite conflict is secondary only to the Muslim–non-Muslim conflict. According to one author, “One of the myths of modern Islamist terrorism is that Sunni and Shi’a do not get along; but when it comes to common enemies or objectives or using force to replicate the Iranian revolution in other localities, they work together quite frequently.”18 There is no better example of such a display of unity against the Western influence, the external power, than the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The doctrine of jihad against nonbelievers coupled with the model of the Iranian Revolution has been a strong impetus for both Sunni as well as Shiite jihadist organizations.19 Iran sees the United States and Israel as such grave, existential, external threats to Islam that thwarting and ultimately destroying both the United States and Israel are important enough to temporarily put aside theological differences with heretical Sunni organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, making these some of the scariest partnerships in the unholy alliance.

The huntsman of the Libyan desert, the discerning art collector, the tolerant intellectual, disappeared, and in their place Hadrian emerged as a model of Roman power responding to perceived threat with absolute ruthlessness. Generosity became irresolution, tolerance turned into suppression, pragmatism into punitively enforced proscription.

You should be able to reconcile past events in a matter of seconds. However, if you do not know what is or has happened, you must take an offensive posture and actively seek out those agents and transactions based on multiple dimensions over time. This is the environment in which you will work and you must build a security model that can actively detect, monitor and pursue that activity.

But if you wanted to replicate the working of the human brain, you had to intimately understand your model. AI, in other words, required psychology. The engineers read Freud, just like the literary critics—and reinterpreted him for their own purposes. They debated Chomsky about the nature of the mind.

Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.” Oppenheimer tried valiantly to divert us from that bomb culture by containing the nuclear threat he had helped to set loose. His most impressive effort was a plan for the international control of atomic energy, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report (but was in fact conceived and largely written by Oppenheimer). It remains a singular model for rationality in the nuclear age.

Isolationism is not the solution. Righting the balance will require an innovative re-globalization model in which state players and major corporates recognize the existential threats of their established playbooks and reset their goals to encompass a fairer distribution of wealth globally, unwavering support for basic democratic and human rights practices, and otherwise use their power to create and maintain sustainable social and political stability on a global scale.

Hanlon’s Razor, when practiced diligently as a counter to confirmation bias, empowers us, and gives us far more realistic and effective options for remedying bad situations. When we assume someone is out to get us, our very natural instinct is to take actions to defend ourselves. It’s harder to take advantage of, or even see, opportunities while in this defensive mode because our priority is saving ourselves—which tends to reduce our vision to dealing with the perceived threat instead of examining the bigger picture.

Mikulincer and Shaver created a model of attachment-system functioning and dynamics,4 which I’ve adapted into a flowchart showing how the different attachment experiences arise. First, if a child experiences a threat—whether perceived or actual, physical or emotional—they will try to find protection by seeking closeness to an attachment figure. If their attachment figure is available and responsive, and meets their needs, the child feels safe and can go back to playing or exploring. But if their attachment figure is unresponsive or inaccessible, and the child is left without a safe haven to turn to, they may adapt by either deactivating (turning down) or hyperactivating (turning up) their attachment needs. As children, when we feel afraid, threatened or in need, and seeking closeness with our parents is not a viable option because they’re not available or because turning towards them doesn’t make things better, we learn to rely more on ourselves. We become more self-reliant and we minimize our attachment needs. When we deactivate our attachment system, we suppress our attachment-based longings—not because we don’t still want closeness and connection, but in order to adapt and survive. If we experience discomfort or danger and closeness to a parent is still somewhat of a viable option, we might learn that we can get their attention by intensifying our attachment cries. If our caretakers did not respond to our initial bids, but ramping up our demands and hyperactivating our attachment system did get their attention in some form, we then learn that this is an effective strategy. Later in this chapter, we’ll talk about how these strategies—deactivating, hyperactivating, or vacillating between the two—relate to the three different insecure attachment styles. FIGURE 1.1 An adaptation of Mikulincer and Shaver’s model of attachment-system activation and functioning in adulthood.5

He heard a quiet thock, like an electrical relay opening, coming from the rear of the second Suburban that had been here last night, near the gear cabinets. The faintest smell hit his nose—like an old penny or the electric scent of a model train engine.

The fusion of economics and politics is a critical part of this model and is something early liberal theorists missed. States consistently seek to protect 'their' capitalists all over the world. Whether in the form of taxation, trade policy, or foreign policy, capitalists always rely on politicians to provide them with opportunities for profit-making abroad. Lenin, who in 1917 wrote that imperialism was the 'highest stage' of capitalism, realized that this fusion of state and corporate power would make it even harder for poor states to catch up with rich ones. While this fusion of corporate and political power is largely hidden within modern capitalist economies, historically it was understood to be a central component of imperial power. We have already seen how early capitalist states sought to govern the world economy through corporate sovereigns like the East India Company. The Nazi Party also encouraged the creation of 'trusts, combines and cartels' on the basis that doing so would support the German state's imperial power at home and abroad. Unions, and any other threats to corporate power, were destroyed, and a law was passed to 'force industries to form cartels where none existed.' Unchecked corporate power -fused with that of the state- was a key component of Nazism.

The System would tolerate these harmless activities as a means to allow people to go through the Power Process to meet contrived needs which pose no threat to its dominance. For example, rather than directly work towards obtaining food and shelter, one would occupy one’s time with innocuous pastimes like building model ships or cheering for a particular football team, despite the fact that one’s quality of life would not be improved at all even by seeing one’s favourite team win the top championship game. Kaczynski of course calls these surrogate activities.

If such a destination has indeed been chosen for us, it is obvious that ecology's rational deities will be powerless against the throwing of technology and energy into the struggle for an unpredictable goal, in a sort of Great Game whose rules are unknown to us. Even now we have no protection against the perverse effects of security, control and crime-prevention measures. We already know to what dangerous extremities we are led by prophylaxis in every sphere: social, medical, economic or political. In the name of the highest possible degree of security, an endemic terror may well be instituted that is in every way as dangerous as the epidemic threat of catastrophe. One thing is certain: in view of the complexity of the initial conditions and the potential reversibility of all the effects, we should entertain no illusions about the effectiveness of any kind of rational intervention. In the face of a process which so far surpasses the individual or collective will of the players, we have no choice but to accept that any distinction between good and evil (and by extension here any possibility of assessing the 'right level' of technological development) can have the slightest validity only within the tiny marginal sphere contributed by our rational model. Inside these bounds, ethical reflection and practical determinations are feasible; beyond them, at the level of the overall process which we have ourselves set in motion, but which from now on marches on independently of us with the ineluctability of a natural catastrophe, there reigns - for better or worse - the inseparability of good and evil, and hence the impossibility of mobilizing the one without the other. This is, properly speaking, the theorem of the accursed share. There is no point whatsoever in wondering whether things ought to be thus: they simply are thus, and to fail to acknowledge it is to fall utterly prey to illusion. None of this invalidates whatever may be possible in the ethical, ecological or economic sphere of our life - but it does totally relativize the impact of such efforts upon the symbolic level, which is the level of destiny.

Technology innovation is a key factor in retaining the gains produced by business model innovation. After all, if one technology innovation can create a new market, another technology innovation can render it obsolete, seemingly overnight. While Uber has achieved massive scale, the greatest threat to its future doesn’t come in the form of direct competitors like Didi Chuxing, though these are formidable threats. The greatest threat to Uber’s business is the technology innovation of autonomous vehicles, which could make obsolete one of Uber’s biggest competitive advantages—its carefully cultivated network of drivers—essentially overnight.

What Bitcoin does is run a computerised lottery, in a process called “mining.” Bitcoin miners guess a number. They take their guess, they combine it with a block of transactions that are waiting to be processed, and they do a simple calculation on them. If the calculation gives a small enough number, the miner wins six-and-a-quarter fresh new bitcoins! And their block of transactions is added to the public blockchain. The more guesses you make, the better your chances. In June 2020, Bitcoin miners were making 100 quintillion guesses every second. This used as much electricity as all of Austria.45 This is called “proof-of-work” — though it might better be termed “proof-of-waste.” Blocks come out approximately every ten minutes. If miners win coins too often, the difficulty goes up, to slow the system down — so the miners have to add more computers to compete. This results in spiraling electricity use — Bitcoin is, literally, anti-efficient. The point of all this waste is to secure the blockchain — the threat model is that nobody can change the blockchain without wasting at least as much electricity. The Bitcoin mining system is incredibly slow, and very hard to scale up. Bitcoin now consumes between 0.1% and 0.5% of all the electricity in the world — for the same seven transactions per second, worldwide, that it could do in 2009, when it was just running on Nakamoto’s desktop PC. Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment network in human history.

I’d spent our marriage on high alert for the sex kittens, the glamour queens, the pinup models masquerading as pencil pushers. I’d known his type—leggy brunettes with great bodies—and had blocked every potential threat with precise accuracy. He was a sexual man, one who appealed to practically every woman out there, and I’d spent the first few years of our marriage playing badminton with beauties until I’d

The following fundamental question therefore arises: what is the importance of occupational upward mobility today? The last section discussed the difficulties of analysing occupational groups in relation to social stability. If the son of a skilled worker finishes secondary education and becomes a journalist, or the daughter of a commercial employee becomes a lawyer, then both have risen in relation to their parents, according to the traditional model. Their jobs bring greater social prestige—however, they may no longer automatically earn more money than their parents. Likewise, whether they are precariously employed and under constant threat of unemployment is generally not taken into account.

Even PayPal’s millions of dollars in bad transactions could be justified for the extensive data set they generated. “Losing a lot of money to fraud was a necessary byproduct in gathering the data needed to understand the problem and build good predictive models,” Greenfield later wrote on a personal blog. “With millions of transactions and tens of thousands of fraudulent transactions, our fraud analytics team could find subtler patterns and detect fraud more accurately.” Taken together, PayPal turned fraud from an existential threat to one of the company’s defining triumphs. It also had the unexpected benefit of thinning out the competition. “As the Russian mobsters got better and better,” Thiel said, “they got better and better at destroying all our competitors.” Thieves forced to work ever harder to fleece PayPal customers moved on to easier prey. “We’d also find that fraudsters were kind of lazy, right? They want to do just the least amount of work… So we just kind of hoped to push them off onto [our competitors],” Miller observed.

Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks through to Circuit VII — a minor neurological miracle loosely called “intuition” — and comes back down to the third circuit with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is generally considered a threat to territory (ideological head space). The long list of martyrs to free enquiry, from Socrates onward, shows how mechanical this neophobia (fear of new semantic signals) is.

The other truth is that limbic system trauma has a profound affect on the central nervous system and on brain function, and as a result, it can alter our sensory perception. While complete avoidance of triggers may prevent symptoms temporarily, in the long run, avoidance can actually reinforce the pathological neural pathways that are in play with these conditions. In the “neurons that fire together – wire together” model, every time a specific encounter is avoided out of fear, the threat response to that stimulus is heightened.

massive transitions to something entirely “new” were always defined in terms of a response to a violent external shock or the threat of one to come. World War II, for example, led to the introduction of cradle-to-grave state welfare systems in most of Europe. So did the Cold War: governments in capitalist countries were so worried by an internal communist rebellion that they put into place a state-led model to forestall it. This system, in which state bureaucrats managed large chunks of the economy, ranging from transportation to energy, stayed in place well into the 1970s. Today the situation is fundamentally different; in the intervening decades (in the Western world) the role of the state has shrunk considerably. This is a situation that is set to change because it is hard to imagine how an exogenous shock of such magnitude as the one inflicted by COVID-19 could be addressed with purely market-based solutions. Already and almost overnight, the coronavirus succeeded in altering perceptions about the complex and delicate balance between the private and public realms in favour of the latter. It has revealed that social insurance is efficient and that offloading an ever-greater deal of responsibilities (like health and education) to individuals and the markets may not be in the best interest of society.

Police conducted regular spot checks around midnight to make sure nobody had unauthorized visitors. One had to carry at all times a “citizen’s certificate,” a twelve-page passport-size booklet that contained a wealth of information about the bearer. It was modeled on the old Soviet ID. All that changed with the famine. Without food distribution, there was no reason to stay at your fixed address. If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity.

Police conducted regular spot checks around midnight to make sure nobody had unauthorized visitors. One had to carry at all times a “citizen’s certificate,” a twelve-page passport-size booklet that contained a wealth of information about the bearer. It was modeled on the old Soviet ID. All that changed with the famine. Without food distribution, there was no reason to stay at your fixed address. If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity. Among the homeless population, a disproportionate number were children or teenagers. In some cases, their parents had gone off in search of jobs or food. But there was another, even stranger, explanation. Facing a food shortage, many North Korean families conducted a brutal triage of their own households—they denied themselves and often elderly grandparents food in order to keep the younger generation alive. That strategy produced an unusual number of orphans, as the children were often the last ones left of entire families that had perished. The kochebi, the wandering swallows

When your system is under threat, your response is not voluntary—your rational mind is not doing the choosing. You don’t decide to fight, flee, freeze, or collapse. Your nervous system responds with the capacity it has in that moment, based on how it’s been conditioned by past experiences, what was modeled to you as a child, what you’ve tried before that worked or didn’t work, and where you have gotten stuck in a rut.

Many families have been emotionally blackmailed and told that they will lose their kids to suicide if they don’t agree to participate in the affirmation model. This threat is an unsubstantiated claim. When parents tap into the experiences of detransitioners, they learn that mental health often crumbles after transition. If it doesn’t work out so well on the other side, then what? It is a no-win situation for parents.

Beware of the Tribes Effect A threat to identity can elicit the Tribes Effect, an adversarial mindset that pits your identity against that of the other side: It is me versus you, us versus them. This mindset most likely evolved to help groups protect their bloodlines from outside threat. Today it can just as easily be activated in a two-person conflict, whether between siblings, spouses, or diplomats. The Tribes Effect spurs you to make a blanket devaluation of the other’s perspective simply because it is theirs. It is thus more than a fleeting fight-or-flight response. As a mindset, it can hold you hostage to polarized feelings for hours, days, or years; through learning, modeling, and storytelling, it can even be passed down through generations, relentlessly resistant to change.

This also points to a theme we’ve not touched on, namely that in Luke’s Gospel Jesus prays, and prays a lot. In 3:21-22, it is while he is praying as he is baptized that the Holy Spirit comes upon him and he hears the voice of his Father saying, “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” In 5:16, Luke writes, “Jesus would withdraw to deserted places for prayer.” In 6:12, Jesus prays to God “all night long” before choosing his twelve disciples. In Luke 9:18, he prays by himself. In Luke 9:28, he takes Peter, John, and James up on a mountain to pray, and while he prays he is radiantly transformed. In 11:1, as Jesus was praying, his disciples noticed and asked him to teach them to pray, and he taught them to pray the Lord’s Prayer. There are other times Jesus prays, but in Gethsemane, we see Jesus modeling for us the practice of praying when in anguish and filled with anxiety. The prayer doesn’t remove the threat, but it does provide strength for Jesus in the midst of despair.

It's got to be disappointing, being called all those things." Nancy thinks: How long has she been doing this? Nearly twenty years--she can pin it to the month. The answer to that question can never untie itself from her husband's death: when Howard was killed, Nancy ran. Since then she has been called, among other things, a bitch, a cunt, a slut. Hysterical, emotional, irrational. Too fat, too thin, too tall, too short. Murderer of a husband, mother of a faggot, destroyer of liberty. A harpy, a ballbuster, a snowflake, a traitor. But also: a fighter. A role model. Sunglasses on, coat collar popped, walking down the Capitol steps. A hope, and probably just as often, a threat. The reason that the Republic might ultimately prevail, but also the source of its ultimate demise. She says: "America is disappointing, Cate. That's why we do what we do.

Society can be thought of as a collection of overlapping nodal networks (things like companies and cultivars), with each node representing a person and their connections to other people. Historically, pop cultures, simple memetic viruses, evolved to target single nodes. These cultures would flip target nodes (convert them) by offering individuals an easy life and positive emotional subsets. While these viruses lowered the birth rates among the individual nodes they flipped and could sometimes lead to wild outbreaks, those outbreaks were always contained within single or closely-related nodal networks, meaning they were never really an existential threat to our species. . . .The supervirus evolved a new strategy. Instead of flipping individual nodes, it works to flip entire nodal networks. Instead of selling the promise of minimizing emotional suffering within a single node, it entices nodal systems with the prospect of minimizing negative emotion across the entire network. 

Evolutionary models of phobias share the assumption that evolution has equipped us with a predisposition to fear certain targets more than others. In modern conditions, this evolved repertoire creates a high potential for mismatch, focusing defensive systems on negligible threats while downplaying some real and potentially lethal dangers.

Why,” he said at last, “why did you come alone - why were you sent alone? Everything, still, will depend upon that ship coming. Why was it made so difficult for you, and for us?” “It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it. Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere-messenger boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Eminem is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the revers of the doctrine that the ends justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model…So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don’t know. Yes, it has made things difficult. But I might ask you as profitably why you’ve never seen fit to invent airborne vehicles? One small stolen airplane would have spared you and me a great deal of difficulty!” “How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?” Estraven said sternly.

When people experience relational trauma, they are generally not responding to a mortal threat. Instead, they are responding to a threat to the security of one’s sense of Self. This has profound impact on the neurodevelopment of children and self-organization. For young children, their sense of Self is dependent on their early environment. They are 100 percent dependent on their caregivers for their survival and well-being. A young child who experiences environmental failure has the lived experience that they themself won’t exist without connection and love.

To overpower savagery one must lash out savagely. In their stories Euro-American colonists invented and broadcast a vision of wolves as threats to human safety. They then modeled their behavior on the ferocity they perceived in wolves. Thus folklore explains not only why humans destroyed wolves but why they did so with such cruel enthusiasm.

Wilderness leaders need to understand that there are varying normal responses to a crisis. Until there is time to regroup, behaviors may seem unusual when, in truth, they should be expected. Some behaviors that may emerge in the face of a crisis include: 1. Regression. Many grown people revert to an earlier stage of development. The theory is that, since their parents used to care for them as children, someone else may care for them now if they behave in a childlike manner. In particular, tantrums used to be very effective. Tantrum-like or very dependent behavior is not unusual. 2. Depression. Closing into one’s inner world is another common response to crisis. This is where some people find the sources of strength to cope with an emergency. This is characterized as a shutdown effect: fetal positioning, slumped shoulders, downcast eyes, arms crossed over the chest, and unwillingness or difficulty in communicating. 3. Aggression. Some people lash out, physically or emotionally, at threats, including the vague threat of an emergency. High adrenaline levels may intensify the response, and so may the feelings of frustration, anger, and fear that commonly surround unexpected circumstances. This response is characterized by explosive body language, including swinging fists and jumping up and down. What one should do about the various behaviors that surface during a crisis depends somewhat on the individual circumstances. As a general rule, open communication, acknowledgement of the emotional impact of the event, and a healthy dose of patience and tolerance can go far during resolution of the situation. Some basic procedures to consider in crisis management might include the following: 1. Engage the patient in a calm, rational discussion. You can start the patient down the trail that leads through the crisis. 2. Identify the specific concerns about which the patient is stressed. You both need to be talking about the same problems. 3. Provide realistic and optimistic feedback. You can help the patient return to objective thinking. 4. Involve the patient in solving the problem. You can help the patient and/or the patient can help you choose and implement a plan of action. Someone who completely loses control needs time to settle down to become an asset to the situation. Breaking through to someone who has lost control can be a challenge. Try repetitive persistence, a technique developed for telephone interrogation by emergency services dispatchers. Remain calm, but firm. Choose a positive statement that includes the person’s name, such as, “Todd, we can help once you calm down.” (An example of a negative statement would be, “Todd, we can’t help unless you settle down.”) Persistently repeat the statement with the same words in the same tone of voice. The irresistible force (you) will eventually overwhelm the immovable object (the out-of-control person). Surprisingly few repetitions are usually needed to get through to the patient, as long as the tone of voice remains calm. Letting frustration or other emotions creep into the tone of voice, or changing the message, can ruin the entire effort. Over time, the overwhelming responses that generated the reaction may occasionally resurface. This is normal. Without being judgmental or impatient, regain control through repetitive persistence. A crisis may bring out a humorous side (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not) among the group. When you wish to release the intensity surrounding a situation or crisis, appropriate laughter is one of the best methods. It should also be noted that many people cope just fine with emergency situations and unexpected circumstances. They are a source of strength and an example of model behavior for the others.

In the domain of mental health, huge pools of data are being used to train algorithms to identify signs of mental illness—a threat I call “surveillance psychiatry.” Electronic health records, data mining social networks, and even algorithmically classifying video surveillance will significantly amplify this approach. Corporations and governments are salivating at the prospect of identifying psychological vulnerability and dissent.

This theory has been part of many people’s thinking about insurgency and civil war for a long time. But the cases we’ve examined in this chapter suggest that it applies to any nonstate armed group that preys on a population. It applies to insurgents, terrorists, drug cartels, street gangs, organized crime syndicates, pirates, and warlords, and it provides useful explanations and insights for law enforcement, civil war, and diffuse social conflict—not just for insurgency. I will suggest that we treat this theory (until another theory emerges that better fits the available facts) as a working model for dealing with future threats.

threat assessment models is AOI (ability opportunity, and intent).

If you do enough threat modeling, you start noticing all kinds of instances where people get the threat profoundly wrong: * The cell phone industry spent a lot of money designing their systems to detect fraud, but they misunderstood the threat. They thought the criminals would steal cell phone service to avoid paying the charge. Actually, what the criminals wanted was anonymity; they didn't want cell phone calls traced back to them. Cell phone identities are stolen off the air, used a few times, and then thrown away. The antifraud system wasn't designed to catch this kind of fraud. * The same cell phone industry, back in the analog days, didn't bother securing the connection because (as they said): 'scanners are expensive, and rare.' Over the years, scanners became cheap and plentiful. Then, in a remarkable display of not getting it, the same industry didn't bother securing digital cell phone connections because 'digital scanners are expensive, and rare.' Guess what? They're getting cheaper, and more plentiful. * Hackers often trade hacking tools on Web sites and bulletin boards. Some of those hacking tools are themselves infected with Back Orifice, giving the tool writer access to the hacker's computer. Aristotle called this kind of thing 'poetic justice.' [...] These attacks are interesting not because of flaws in the countermeasures, but because of flaws in the threat model. In all of these cases, there were countermeasures in place; they just didn't solve the correct problem. Instead, they solved some problem near the correct problem. And in some cases, the solutions created worse problems than they solved.