Media Analysis

I'm been binging on Marshall McLuhan YouTubes, as all the knowledge graphs show he's going to continue popping up within the networks we care about. There's the University of Toronto connection for starters. We're already focusing on Coxeter and Hinton. Canadians play a big role in our story.

Going over the disembodied interviews, I see his avatar clarifying many matters. A primary driver in his case is irritation. He finds what the next or downline generations are doing, with the new media, is frequently jarring and unpleasant, and not just because "too loud" although that's certainly part of it. So in some interviews he explains why he maybe comes off as somewhat cranky.

Also, let's talk about his Global Village meme, not far at all from Spaceship Earth. He and Bucky were co-conspirators, that's already established. Wasn't McLuhan all pollyanna Small World After All, the way Bucky was, or was rumored to be? "Global Village" sounds so quaint, so pat, as if we're all supposed to get along with obnoxious neighbors. By what Show White magic? 

On the contrary, explains McLuhan, a Global Village may be claustrophobic, like a Winesburg, Ohio which a read a long time ago. Tiny towns can get oppressive, as everybody knows everybody else's business. Secrets become hard to keep. Privacy is lacking. Gossip is rampant. That's a global village for you.

Reading McLuhan tends to revector (re-aim) what I consider to be the meaning of "tactile" in the sense of "visceral" in Synergetics, what Fuller hands over to "the Gibbisian" those vectorial degrees of freedom (visceral energy flows), those deltas around phase changes, around going between frozen, liquid, and gaseous states of being. One the other hand: "the Eulerian" which is the visio-conceptual.

McLuhan somewhat scrambles my senses such that TV becomes the aural-tribal-tactile side of the senses, the Gibbsian, whereas the reader of phonetic alphabets, with an imagination, is the visualizer, able to conjure mental imagery in a private theater driven by text. That imagery went to film, and then was taken in by all the channels and programming and network talk of the broadcast and cable stations, by way of radio in between.

McLuhan didn't live to see the internet take-off, but would have used that development to underline the same lesson: the next medium uses the previous as its raw material. Theater uses literature, which uses real life. Television uses the movies, which came from theater, and the internet uses television, as streams. The golden age of television is feeding into the power of point to point and a PWS that's fully personalizable. PWS = Personal Workspace in the GST namespace.

Television is "cool" but by that McLuhan didn't mean "non-hormonal". On the contrary, the 3rd parent reaches into our skulls and squeezes the endocrine system, gooses glands. The electronic media manage to scare up and harness veritable blobs of groupthink emotions. The "EST people" may have a better immune system (better antibodies) according the the Handbook.

Mass Exodus

My response to October 7 as my loyal readers might recall, was to hope for ways to let the noncombatants in Gaza get away from the violence, by land, sea or air. I pointed out that Ukrainians had a period of mass exodus in connection with the Russian intervention, or invasion, with civilians escaping in both directions from the front lines. Syrians fled a combination of drought and civil war, most over land.

The focus going forward, in Eastern Europe, will be civilians returning, to whatever extent practical, perhaps with assistance from outside agriculturalists, the FAO for example. 

I take for granted that the FAO and IAEA might be needed to assess whether any toxins (e.g. depleted uranium) have crept into the food chain, just as local authorities are doing in Northern California, around the lithium battery storage facility fire.

Didn't Governor DeSantis of Florida preclude Florida's accepting any Palestinian refugees shortly after October 7? The premise to such declarations is that there would be an exodus of refugees, needing to go somewhere, anywhere other than the bombing theater. As it turned out, Gazans were told to slosh around inside Gaza whereas their prisoner status, as entrapped and besieged, would not be ameliorated. 

For some reason, authorities felt compelled to move a million plus Palestinians as a group, to maybe Egypt or Jordan (both said no), to hastily thrown together refugee camps for the evacuees. I could see providing a default destination for those with nowhere else to go, and suggested one myself, but surely charitable groups, churches, NGOs, would rise to the occasion and accept Palestinians in places all over the world, besides Florida.

I realize that against the rhetoric of providing evacuation fleets and buses, more like in Yugoslavia, is the rhetoric about right of return and never leaving. However I have a hard time, from my distance, judging if the decision to stay is really voluntary, given no choice is given. Why call it an "open air prison" and then pretend that it's actually just a concentration of people eager to keep living in a slum?

OK, sure, better than a slum in many neighborhoods, but nevertheless a blockaded ghetto, a sieged land. 

I'd get into arguments that ethnic cleansing, so-called (gentrification is another word for it), is at least way better than genocide (murder). Letting the victim run away versus trapping the victim in a dead end alleyway, is less traumatic for the victim. 

I'm assuming Israeli authorities would be happy to let Palestinians leave en masse, and that this is what President Trump was also promising. I could see a lot of Palestinians choosing to stay, to work on building a new airport for example. But why not let family members take refuge elsewhere, given that Gaza is certainly a slum now, if it wasn't before October 7?

I see Chechnya built about 200 units for Palestinian refugees. That's far short of a million.  Not all the boat people from Vietnam came to Portland either, but a lot of them did, with a network of NGOs to support them. 

That's a scene I know something about given my agency (CUE) was a management hub for such refugee work in the aftermath of the American War in Indochina.  I understand any African country saying "no, we won't take them all en masse, what a silly idea". That's like how Poland was thinking about Ukrainians: sure some, but not all.

That we have no news stories about American countries accepting any Palestinian refugees, or even making plans to do so, tells me that the world has bought in to the concentration camp model, and even though we're witnessing a steady slaughter, they're thinking evacuation is not a realistic goal. Why? Because Palestinians are too in love with olive trees? They just can't help themselves, poor things. That's the propaganda I'm seeing.

If I were trapped in Gaza with my family, being bombed, I'd be asking the world why I'm made to stay here. Don't tell me how much I love olive gardens. Let me out of here, and do it now. I don't care if that's what the Israelis want as well. Let me out of this cage with the rabid dog. Instead, the onlookers express pity for my plight. It's like Hunger Games. The viewer-voyeurs are using my suffering for their entertainment.

Knowledge Graphs

:: my first use of mindmap.ai ::

The approach to Synergetics I'm recommending within Cascadia traces local history and so counts as "place based". 

We follow Ken Kesey (Cuckoo's Nest...) and his Merry Pranksters, aboard bus Further (in several versions) back from the hippie-psychedelic generation (Grateful Dead) to the Beat generation (Kerouac, On the Road), with Neal Cassady a bridging figure.

The criss-crossings of North America by car and bus by wandering youth helps knit together the recent history, along with the relocation of the film industry from New Jersey to Hollywood. Ralph Bakshi's American Pop would fit in here.

Yes, Ken and Jack had a meetup, if muted. Ken had returned to New York in time for the New York World's Fair (Robert Moses, urban renewal...). Wavy Gravy. Woodstock. Burning Man.

So where does Bucky fit in? Whole Earth Catalog, J. Baldwin... pillow domes in Cornwall (Eden Project). The industry industry missed. Resistant architects, their designs for the rich. Privatization. Reaganomics. Grunch of Giants.

Bucky the Bohemian (not Beat), was not party to the lavish excesses of the Roaring 20s, but was a maverick and rebellious in his own way. Disappointed by Harvard.

He eventually reinvents himself and invents futurism, buys Shelter. He joins the Board of Economic Warfare and his prototype later pops up in the Pentagon's garden, along with his newfangled DEW line radomes. Fortune Magazine. Kabul dome.

Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson... rural electrification. Spreading networks.

So we bring in the Cold War and Russophobia. John Birchers, McCarthyism, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Angleton. Kennedy assassination. LSD. Mary Meyer. Colonel Fletcher Prouty. Oliver Stone. Richard Nixon. Nikita Khrushchev. Moscow Dome. Kitchen Debates. Montreal dome, 67.

We already have The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner to help anchor Bucky as a literary figure, but how do we anchor Synergetics?  We come across it, like the ruins of a temple, deep in a jungle book forest. What are these alien hieroglyphs? What's all this cryptic stuff about a tetrahedron? Martian Math. Ties to virology and crystallography.

Operation Duckrabbit (Wittgenstein). New language games for motherboard Earth. World Game. est. The Hunger Project. Positive futurism vs the doomer boomers. Economics vs GST.

Consistency Check

People ask me how it's consistent to tell a story in which America's leading futurist and Medal of Freedom winner (under Reagan) pronounces the USA we have known morally bankrupt and financially non-viable, and yet global imperialism, under the guise of the USA, continues on for decades thereafter, with nation-states continuing to occupy a central place in the belief systems of the collectively unconscious. 

How can I say the Business Plot of FDR's day was ultimately successful, and yet still wave the flag and speak of a continuity in ethos? And is that the Cascadian flag I'm waving, or the modified East India one favored by the District? Or both? Or neither?

I'm seeing the USA as a conquered people, effectively subjugated by "the complex" president Eisenhower warned us against. It's a psychological self-subjugation that we're experiencing, wherein the word "complex" has its psychological meaning. We're straitjacketed by reflex-conditioning, media programming, keeping us slavish. 

A soul-extinguishing ideology has maintained its grip on the popular imagination, leading us towards oblivion. 

So in that sense, there's still a counter-culture, a resistance, a sense of an underground, a sense that a buried version of the USA is continuing to fight back, to regain lost freedoms. USA OS I call it, where OS stands for "operating system". 

That particular language echos the "cosmic computer" tropes of the futurist in question, as he believed human evolution was more a result of a cosmic computation than the leadership of political ideologues.

Doesn't a belief in some cosmic pressure towards greater liberty and higher living standards (these go together) echo the Technocracy ideology? 

I'd say it echos those who believe in a transcendental Zeitgeist that guides at least an intuitive minority along more promising paths. 

In Quaker parlance, that's like saying I believe in God's will. Not that controversial. Humans are like neurons on a planet that's still growing a brain. We're still in a touch and go juvenile period, developing an immune system that's less inadvertently self destructive than the one we've had.

Comparing Timelines

I'd trace my awareness of the Trump family, mostly in hindsight, through the Mayor Koch chapter in New York City. Donald was making it happen, whereas I was the penniless speculator in Jersey City, just outside of Manhattan, hoping I could do something with the Stanley Theater, 2nd largest of its kind after Radio City Music Hall they told me. 

And that wasn't the full extent of my urban dreamscape. A single ticket, no off and on (no transfer needed) train line: EWR to/from JFK. That'd be so great. Plus that Dymaxion billboard, just outside my front door (the Loew's blank wall was so inviting).

That movie The Apprentice, that I take as historical fiction, is set in around that same time. I could sense at the time that my acting as a booster for Jersey City, like some self-bootstrapping speculator, was somewhat redundant with what else was going on at the time. 

I got tracked into other lines of work: protecting the right to vote in DC; upholding academic standards in NYC. I was very much the east coaster back then, having acclimated through Princeton, post Philippines. I wouldn't resume my west coast lifestyle, interrupted in the mid 1960s, until around 1985, upon arriving in Portland from Bangladesh, where mom & dad had pulled up stakes (Bhutan still ahead).

On the right to vote front, I learned that many don't believe their ballots stay secret and they fear retribution from the powers that be if they go against the local rulers, whomever these may be, most likely the party in power, but possibly a company, gang or family network, whatever astroturf. That's only the beginning of the intimidation gauntlet. Making you believe that they'll know is more effective than knowing, and way more efficient. Heightening paranoia levels is a tool in every bully's tool chest.

On the academic standards front, I was learning about the economics of serving every public school child with the requisite hard copy textbooks, and milk (food logistics was not my focus back then, although the connection between nutrition and work-study productivity I'd clearly made). 

The observation I'll make now in that connection is voluntarily fasting in a condition of mindfulness, as many religions recommend, is different from feeling deprived in a Dickensian condition of servitude. A true fast begins with the promise of a feast on the other end, if that's what's wanted. This is why you'll get your rich and famous touting a lean and mean yoga that works for them: they have a choice in the matter.

Exactly what that school textbook market looks likes today I couldn't say as I'm no longer closely following that literature, except when it comes to Silicon Forest stuff. The electronification of learning resources was just starting back then, and they set me up as a new kind of gatekeeper. Nowadays I'm on the other side of things, feeding the local schools with what big publishing keeps unavailable.

Some of the stuff I'd review for McGraw-Hill was too good to become standard and would be a threat. The wholly local, community sourced curriculum, faculty generated, would spell the end of big publishing, so our business model was to take a pass, but best of luck. 

I remember how years later, Microsoft would swallow FoxPro, which competed internally with the Visual Basic (VB) line of products, Microsoft Access in particular. From my point of view as an outsider, the freelance developer, MSFT seemed involved in something of a DIY exorcism after that, trying to extricate the better, but alien project, from it's VB beating core. Like a science fiction movie.

I'm sketching where my headspace went, aftering thinking for-credit viewing for college audiences would be a thing. It would be, but they don't need to all go to the same theater on a scary train. VHS would be sufficient, or community television. My vision was too Disney in the sense that I was treating The Stanley as a theme park pavilion. All before JCNJ would star as Gotham in the Joker movies (along with Newark).

Did I watch The Apprentice (the TV show, not the movie)? I barely watched any game shows back then. I got into networking downtown (in Manhattan), by taking up duties voluntarily. I had my choice of cults, one could say, in a city of that size. 

I forget the exact set of stepping stones that took me from the Bonnie and Ray (and Julie) Simon chapter (friends and neighbors) to the Americans for Civic Participation chapter (Reagan-vs-Mondale) and thence onward to the 28th floor of that Rockefeller Center building, now back in Ray's orbit, but based in Brooklyn (and maybe Queens?).

Anyway, I couldn't have watched The Apprentice back then as it was still years into the future. I'd be back in Portland, Oregon by the time it aired, and again I had little time for game show TV, let alone wrestling shows. If I was staring at a screen at it, I was likely eyeballing Visual Foxpro, or VFP as we called it, through version 9. 

By 2015, the exorcism was finally complete: Microsoft was no longer supporting its super popular FoxPro line. Which doesn't mean FoxPro went away. That was one of the issues: FoxPro was subject to rampant piracy, and open sourcing it was never an option, or maybe it was. I'd still get a last chance to dabble in it, in connection with long haul truck scheduling and routing. I was back in apprentice mode myself in that case, working with a skilled transportation engineer and another independent application developer, a lot like me.

Protected Values

(ɔ) DAF | cogsec

Meanderings

Watching The Cycle, an Iranian movie tracing the hospital blood supply back to those desperate enough to sell blood, the geeks of that society, geek in the old sense of chicken head carnival act, got me thinking about blood flows more generally. 

Terry has lent me a copy of Shape and Structure: From Engineering to Nature, by Adrian Bejan. The book in reminiscent of a D’Arcy Thompson work, in focusing on how form follows function. 

You might find where I was querying Perplexity about the relevance of Bejan to the GST approach to eco-thermodynamics, i.e. surfing the solar gradient per Into the Cool, another book on the ISEPP shelf.

The Cycle is a 1977 film set and made in Iran, that won much acclaim on the film festival circuit.

Bejan cites Geoffrey West, author of Scale, a book here in my own collection. Scale is all about power relationships by which I don’t mean in geopolitics but in geometry. When you grow or shrink a shape by a scale factor, the change in linear dimensions is a 3rd root of the change in volume. If I double all the edges of a cube, its volume multiplies by a factor of eight i.e. two to the 3rd power.

How is a heart supposed to pump oxygen to every nook and cranny in a camel or elephant, dinosaur or giraffe, when there’s so much volume? The answer of course is tubing, and what Bejan shows is that two trees intertwined, one sending warm blood distally, the other harvesting cooler blood to bring back, actually reinforce each other in measurable ways, bumping that 3rd to 2nd root transition, from size to body surface area, to a 4/3rd root instead (still a 2/3rd root if cold-blooded). Klieber’s Law.

In grade school we might look at it this way: we know the D-edged tetrahedron has about 6% less volume than its R-edged cubic counterpart, where D = 2R, diameter and radius respectively, of our reference sphere. S3 is the signifier we sometimes use, for the R-cube/D-tet ratio of 1.06066, the 3rd root of which we call S1. Take that D-edged tet, say made of clay, and add to any face, by a linear amount of S1 times initial length, which isn’t much. Surface area will increase by a factor of S2. S1 = ~1.01982445133,

One of my Google slide deck slides cites Huffington Post as my source for a D’Arcy Thompson letter, written to Alfred North Whitehead. He wants to know where all this “three dimensional” jazz is stemming from, in the process of questioning his own allegiance to orthogonality. His concerns prefigure a later architect’s. Can’t a tetrahedron bear the brunt, when we talk quaintly about the square-cube law?

A cool thing about a tetrahedron is: if you slice parallel to any face, like from a tetrahedral loaf of bread, or chunk of cheese, all six edges will decrease in proportion. The face has been foreshortened, and so have been the edges to the opposite corner, keeping all the angles the same overall, including central angles, meaning no change in shape, only size. 

In contrast, a clay brick, cut parallel to any face, will keep its 90 degree surface angles yet suffer changes in relative proportions, meaning in radial central angles. A brick has to shrink inwards in all directions, giving that more tesseract-looking outline, of cube within cube. The tetrahedron keeps shrinking towards a corner.

This distinction between angles (central and surface), meaning shape, and scale (meaning size), is commonly considered core curriculum. The size spectrum is likewise our frequency spectrum, from the tiniest intervals to the largest we need. This might as well be the electromagnetic spectrum of polarized oscillations, otherwise known as vibrations, or frequencies. Pure shape = Platonic.

Our beginning might be methane, or CH4, with the idea of an idealized gas per Avogadro, a uniform distribution of molecules, but with random variations from CCP origins. Then zoom in on one molecule and focus in on the angles of 109.47 degrees between any two CH vectors. Arccos(-1/3). We learned trig for a reason apparently. 

We know have a fun API for the XYZ apparatus, with four basis vectors instead of three primary and three secondary. No differences in class, between positives and negatives. All twelve permutations of (2, 1, 1, 0) will give the 12 radials of a home base shape, the one we associate with dynamic equilibrium. Chaotic perturbations test our sanity sometimes.

To Be Continued

:: narrating my Google slides (February 2025) ::

Many of my readers know about the Google slide decks, which I tend to make public and encourage others to use, because they share what I consider to be vital content, coming from a background as a high school math teacher at St. Dominic Academy, and later contributing editor and educational software evaluator, for McGraw-Hill.

One of those decks (the focus of the embedded YouTube) is more of a personal nature in that I feature my own visage among others in a narrative aimed at fitting puzzle pieces together, pieces of a large size, such as American Transcendentalism versus German Idealism. 

I say "versus" to distinguish them, not to posit some polarizing dialectic. In large degree, these were on the same page. My slides trace a vector from Kant through Coleridge to Emerson and Fuller (both Margaret and her great nephew, Richard Buckminster).

Where I fit in is as a Princeton student learning about all of the above, although being a scholar is a lifelong endeavor and, truth to tell, I'm still putting the puzzle together and some of the above is post Princeton for me. I've simply continued to take an interest in following the action. 

I was Class of 1980, and much of the action I wanted to track would come after that. In my slides, I use the est Training as a bridge, as I started with that at Princeton but was still volunteering after moving closer to New York.

Although said Google deck about me 'n people shows a picture of my dad, whom I credit for feeding my interest in GST a lot, Kenneth Boulding also (both Quakers), the last slide says To Be Continued and I haven't gotten around to my mom yet, but that's where I'm focusing in my latest studies. 

DAF suggested, through prompts to Obsidian, that Jane Addams be reckoned among the pragmatists, along with Rorty, Dewey and William James. She's a co-founder of WILPF, in which both my mom, and Ava Helen Pauling were active members.

Since I've already invoked memories of Margaret Fuller, Loïe Fuller (no relation), Ada Byron (Countess Lovelace), Queen Marie of Romania, and Zelda Fitzgerald, the women of WILPF will fit right in, as an influential intelligencia helping to guide world affairs. 

Strong players of "world game" in other words (my jargon for engaging in Earthian participation, as human or otherwise). 

Mom's bio (Carol Urner's), will then open doorways to other narratives: Jacoba Settisoli, Abdul Ghaffar Khan (عبدالغفار خان), MLK and why not Cub Scouts of America, for which she served as a den mother, in Rome?

Ava Helen is memorialized at Lake Oswego Cemetery, whereas PSU's Walk of the Heroines, provides reminders of Carol Urner and Mary Bolton. 

Ava's partner Linus Pauling was the famous 2x Nobel Prize winning chemist, with one of those prizes for Peace, and credited to her in large degree, the WILPF activist. Terry Bristol, ISEPP president, in collaboration with former Pauling student Doug Strain, a Silicon Forest industrialist, salvaged the boyhood Pauling residence and made it a Center for Science, Peace and Health.

Domestic Matters

We really lucked out with this house in a lotta ways. I've been here since the mid 1990s, and the house was built in 1905. Yet so far I haven't had to replace the roof. There's like a double layer.

I do have critters in the rafters and have used a ladder and like chicken wire to block the one ingress and/or egress I could find, northwest corner, near where we used to have that TV aerial. The dish is unused. The house gets 99% of its TV from optical fiber, with digital broadcast receiving another option, used less often.

Mostly those critters are squirrels. Do the neighbor's chickens attract rats? They'd be around anyway. More exotic: racoons.

The property has a detached garage, which I don't use for my car, a 1997 Nissan, highly weathered, with a still healthy powertrain and new tires. I've got some boxes of C6XTY components in said garage and no, that's nothing dangerous, inert shaped plastic, designed in Oregon, manufactured in China. The components assemble into the sculptures at the front and to the rear of the main building.

The previous house we just rented (own this one) was only a block or so away, around the corner, and it would flood really badly if the sump pump had problems. It was also much more permeable to the elements. We had it checked, as a student thesis project. The wind throughput was considerable. In contrast, this "new" place (since mid 90s) has a leaky basement, true, but that's Portland. The furnace is not endangered. With palettes, stuff stays dry. The space is pretty high humidity though, and low ceilinged except in the washer-dryer area.

After we moved in here, we replaced all the doors and windows with highly insulated hardware, and sprayed insulation into the wall spaces. Yes, the furnace burns fossil fuel, which comes in a tank truck. The fuel tank is under the driveway and when I want to know how much fuel is left, I lower a wooden stick and read the height. Very National Geographic.

My upstairs office was space for successive daughters, who painted it aquamarine and bright red respectively. It's still bright red, with yellowish trim. That sounds kinda loud for an office but the lighting is muted, sometimes is no more than computer screens. There's no bed. This is not a guest room. 

Some years I let my agent fill out the IRS schedule whatever to declare my home office, and its portion of household expenses. The guest room, was Carol's room, sleeps one, although I do have a spare bedroom upstairs that's only habitable outside peak summer, as we don't do upstairs air-conditioning. The office gets hot too but is fine with the deck door open, and a fan.

Yesterday I was out front on my hands and knees repairing the bottom northwest corner of the C6XTY tetrahedron. The stuff gets brittle in sunlight and parts will pretty easily snap off. Solutions were within reach when the prototype run ended, and the product got shelved and time capsuled. My sculpture garden showcases how far Sam got with this spatiotemporal rendering of a scale-independent lattice concept.

This blog is full of information on Flextegrity, as are some of my Github repos.

USAID Family

Given what's in the news, about DOGE going after USAID, among other agencies, I've taken to bringing up here in my blogs, and conversationally, that we were a USAID family in the Philippines for some years. Of course that identity has entirely to do with my dad's work, which paid the bills. My mom played her counterpoint to dad-the-technocrat (lowercase): she was a pretty serious human rights advocate, standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples vs the colonizing Christian lowlanders. I was proud of them both.

However we got to the Philippines care of UNDP, an agency of the United Nations. We even had UN passports at that point, which as I recall gave us special privileges going through airline security checks. In any case, I was proud of that identity as well.

However, I believe dad was somewhat uncomfortable being a part of a high end serve the wealthy kind of project involving filling in Manila Bay even more, to add room for fancy hotels and / or that Cultural Center of the Philippines they built while we were there. 

He was more into teaching the techniques of grassroots planning, like he'd developed in Libya, wherein local administrations and ministries are empowered to develop their own land use plans, armed with their own locally undertaken demographic and other statistical studies. He knew about how you put a cable-like sensor across a road, to count vehicles, get a sense of the traffic. It's not like I followed him around work all that often, just that I'd pick up dribs and drabs.

So I think his arranging to switch to a USAID job was in line with his wanting to practice planning in a more decentralized, advisory-only capacity. He got to fly around the islands a lot and meet with counterparts. He loved doing stuff like that. I think the USAID job really suited him, probably because he helped design it. Certainly it outlasted my own stay, as I was off to Princeton a year or two before they left Makati.

As an expat 3rd culture kid, I do have empathy for families suddenly finding their future plans canceled because of tumultuous changes back in the imperial capital. I checked a few websites in the Philippines to see what might be going on with some of the families there.

Dad was a freelancer, meaning he was not career USG by a long shot. He'd work for whatever governments, for whatever private firms, and he'd work for the UN. I'm pretty sure his work with Libya followed a similar trajectory to the one he followed vs-a-vs the Philippines: he got started with that EUR-based job (EUR is outside of Rome, Italy) but then shifted over to Whiting and Associates, a Nebraska-based planning firm, and it's with them that he had an office in the Paroli area, right near the South Korean ambassador's residence (I was good friends with the ambassador's youngest son).

Dad spent many years helping Libyans plan for a bright future, looking at least 50 years ahead. He didn't live long enough to see NATO ganging up on Gaddafi and bombing the place, with operatives moving Libyan weapons stashes to Syria as Seymour Hersh would later write about.

I never had much respect for US foreign policy towards Libya. It seemed mostly based on revenge for his having shut down Wheelus AFB and nationalized the oil. Who is sucking up Libya's oil reserves today I wonder?  I'll ask a chatbot.  BP and Shell, among others. Figures. When does NATO plan on bombing Venezuela on behalf of BP?

My Facebook comment on Natasha's Youtube says this, somewhat summarizing the above:

Natasha is one of my favorite YouTubers. Don't be misled by the thumbnail, she's being sarcastic, sassing her critics.

People who dislike her anti-Z messages (Z being code for special military operation) think she must be secretly getting money under the table from the USG. She reassures us she's just another everyday YouTuber of the type that depends on the channel itself for revenue, and on Patreon.

I've been following Natasha since she started her channel, already back from the USA student exchange program, which she has always been open about and proud of. Not a secret.

By the way, my own family was USAID for awhile. I could claim USAID put me through high school (although it was the UNDP that got us there -- to the Philippines -- in the first place). Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya put me through 4th - 8th grade in Italy, if you wanna drum up even more scandal.