Steve R

Army Veteran, plumber, husband, and lover of all things Montana

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The First Civilization Was Stranger Than You Think

In the early 1920s, British archaeologist Leonard Woolley stood at the edge of a deep rectangular pit in the ruins of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. What he uncovered would become one of the most haunting discoveries in the history of archaeology. Seventy-four skeletons lay arranged with deliberate care. Rows of young women wore elaborate headdresses of gold and lapis lazuli. Guards still gripped copper weapons. A musician remained curled around her harp, fingers frozen in the position of playing. At the center rested a richly adorned woman later identified as Puabi, almost certainly a queen.

There were no signs of struggle. No broken bones visible to the naked eye. No scattered weapons of resistance. Woolley concluded that these people had voluntarily taken poison so they could accompany their queen into the afterlife. The image of serene, loyal retainers drinking a final cup became the accepted story for nearly eighty years.

Then, in 2007, CT scans of two of the preserved skulls told a different tale. One belonged to a young woman from the Great Death Pit. The other belonged to a young man wearing a copper helmet from a related royal tomb. Both skulls showed clear perimortem fractures caused by a heavy pointed weapon driven into the head. The bodies had been carefully arranged afterward. Some evidence suggested heat treatment or the use of mercury compounds to slow decomposition and preserve the appearance of peaceful repose. What Woolley had interpreted as willing sacrifice was, in fact, ritual murder staged to look serene.

This single discovery captures the peculiar character of the world’s first true civilization. The Sumerians invented writing, the city, formal schooling, advanced mathematics, the wheel, and the systems of time we still use today. They also practiced mass human sacrifice on a scale that still unsettles. Both truths belong to the same people.

Around six thousand years ago, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates was a difficult place to build a society. The rivers flooded without warning and regularly changed course. There were almost no forests, little stone, and no native metals. The primary resources were clay, reeds, and mud. Earlier cultures, known as the Ubaid and then the Uruk, had already begun experimenting with irrigation and mud-brick temples. The Sumerians arrived or emerged in this landscape near the end of the fourth millennium BC and transformed it.

Their language remains one of history’s genuine mysteries. Sumerian is a language isolate. It is related to no other known tongue. Farming vocabulary appears to have been borrowed from earlier inhabitants, and many city names predate the Sumerians themselves. Their own myths claim they came by sea from Dilmun, identified with modern Bahrain, yet the archaeological timeline does not support a simple migration story. Scholars have proposed connections to the Indus Valley, Anatolia, the Caucasus, the Arabian Peninsula, or even farther afield. None of these theories has won consensus. The Sumerians appear almost fully formed, speaking a language that stands alone.

What they built was remarkable. By the early third millennium BC, southern Mesopotamia contained a constellation of independent city-states: Uruk, Kish, Lagash, Ur, Nippur, and others. Each controlled roughly three hundred square kilometers of irrigated farmland through networks of canals, dikes, and reservoirs. Control of water meant control of life. The rulers, called ensi, functioned as priest-administrators who managed irrigation, collected taxes, and conducted ceremonies on behalf of the gods who theoretically owned the land. In times of war a temporary military leader known as a lugal, or “big man,” was appointed. Over time the office of lugal became permanent and hereditary, and true kingship was born.

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[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The Great Inversion: AI Is Quietly Draining the Public Internet of Thought

Something profound is happening to the Internet, and almost no one is naming it clearly.

I have been cataloging it of the last 4 years.

For decades, the web’s most valuable resource wasn’t bandwidth or servers. It was the messy, public give-and-take of human questions and answers.

I was a Top Writer on Quora for nearly a decade as well as a massive pre-crazy Wikipedia contributor — I lived in the space of that give and take.

Someone would hit a wall, open a forum, type out the problem, and a conversation would form. Ideas were stress-tested in the open. Nuance appeared. Dead ends were marked. Better questions got refined in real time. That entire process — the friction, the disagreement, the collective thinking — was left behind as searchable, linkable, durable public knowledge.

That flow has reversed.

The same questions, the same moments of curiosity or confusion, are now more routed into private AI interfaces. A person opens a chat window, types the prompt, receives the output, and the entire exchange vanishes into a closed ecosystem.

The assumption we must make (because it is true) is that the AI company stores both the prompt and the response. The thinking that once would have become part of the shared human record is instead locked inside a corporate training silo.

This is not a minor shift in user behavior. It is an inversion of the Internet’s original knowledge architecture.

Public discourse is being systematically stripped of its higher-signal material. As the internet’s data gets more and more noisy in a very really way it is growing quiet.

The questions that used to generate the richest threads the ones that forced people to clarify assumptions, admit uncertainty, or synthesize across domains are the ones most efficiently answered by AI. What remains on the open web is increasingly the residual: lower-effort posts, performative arguments, recycled takes, and the questions that still feel too social or too ambiguous for a model.

AI then trains on that thinning residue, while the better thinking is captured privately and never returns to the commons.

The result is a strange feedback loop. The public Internet becomes less thoughtful precisely because the thoughtful interactions have been privatized. And the models, trained more and more on what is left behind, risk becoming increasingly fluent in the lesser exchanges that now dominate the surface.

This is not the usual complaint about “AI is making people dumber” or “forums are dying.” Those are symptoms. The deeper phenomenon is structural: the migration of human cognitive surplus from a public knowledge commons into private, non-reciprocal data reservoirs.

The Internet is no longer primarily a place where thinking is externalized and shared. It is becoming a place where thinking is extracted and contained.

The novelty of this observation is that it reframes the problem away from content moderation, engagement algorithms, or even AI capability. The core issue is architectural. We have inverted the direction of knowledge flow. What once leaked outward into a shared substrate now drains inward into silos that do not, by default, give back.

The long-term consequences are massive under-discussed as not noticed.

How does a civilization maintain a high-quality public epistemic environment when its best questions are no longer asked in public? What happens to the training data of future models when the richest human reasoning is locked behind commercial walls? And what cultural muscles atrophy when the habit of thinking out loud, in front of others, becomes rarer?

This is the silent inversion of the Internet. The data once destined for the commons is now shunted into AI. The thoughtful exchanges are disappearing from the surface, and the models are learning from what remains.

That is the novel dynamic. Everything else is downstream of it.

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

"The Wall of Fire"
Amazing folks! If you aren't here, you're missing out.

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

And a video of the Redbull chopper doing a loop. Still so wild!
#yellowstoneairshow

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

I will never get over seeing this Redbull chopper upside down.
#yellowstoneairshow

[M2 @Amer1can_Barbie]

Good morning 😃

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@ItIsHoeMath You are correct. Montana isn't safe from the craziness either. We have pride parades in Bozeman. It's disgusting that nowhere is free of the debauchery.

[Ted Nugent @TedNugent]

there is no real “moderate Muslim” when imams in America are openly calling for “Death to America” and a Muslim caliphate on U.S. soil.

Islam, in its doctrinal and political form, rejects the core Western principles of free speech, equal rights, and secular law & contrasts with America’s foundation of liberty and limited government, stating that a system built on submission and supremacy cannot coexist with one built on individual freedom.
Clearly a long-standing position that cultural and ideological differences should not be ignored. These are not fringeviews but issues rooted in the religion’s teachings and visible in public calls from certain religious leaders.

A direct and unapologetic assessment of the dangerous conflict between Islamic doctrine and Western values.

[Montane Messenger Missoula Montana Western Divide @theSOURCE406]

Go on then, go to town… but I can’t even stand a locked gate at a trailhead parking lot. All I know is public land ain’t much public if the only way to get to it is spendin’ days and weeks walkin’ dozens of miles, just to get to it.

And while you’re at it, explain how allowin’ the cuttin’ of tens of millions of board feet of lumber somehow ain’t gonna knock that $75 price tag down a nice bit on them 4x8 sheets of plywood I looked at last weekend at the lumber yard

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

Truth! Great post.

[Jason Wilde @JasonWilde108]

My friend Ben Davidson isn't warning about some way off space age scenario in the future.

He is warning about changes that are already happening.

Earth’s magnetic field has weakened. The magnetic poles are moving. The South Atlantic Anomaly is expanding. Solar storms have already damaged satellites, disrupted communications and pushed electrical systems toward failure.

Davidson believes these are not rare and isolated events...they are pieces of a much bigger cycle building toward a dangerous window between 2040 and 2060.

He is talking about Earth’s magnetic protection becoming weaker while the Sun remains capable of throwing enormous amounts of charged material directly at us.

We have built an entire civilization on satellites, GPS, banking networks, electrical grids, communications and computers...and all of it depends on a stable technological environment.

Take away the power for long enough and everything halts .. like completely!

People seem to pass by Davidson because scenario scares the bejesus out of them.

Its way way easier to call him a nutter than to admit that our civilization is fragile as hell and almost completely unprepared for a severe geomagnetic event.

He has spent years connecting the Sun, Earth’s magnetic field and the planet’s history of catastrophe while everyone else studies each piece separately. His exact mechanism is a little controversial, but the crazy danger he is pointing toward is very very real.

Laugh at him all you want...I'm not...but when the shield is weakening and the Sun is capable of shutting down the world we built, ignoring the warning is stupidity.

Follow him @SunWeatherMan

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@2eyesofgreen @Matt_Bracken48 I love that book, well the whole series. That first read turned me into a prepper.

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@Matt_Bracken48 Two weeks? Bro, you've got about two days. Stay prepped, stay strapped.

[Soaring Eagle @zwinchester5]

Bozeman School District started to allow students from outside Bozeman. Who paid the price? Bozeman taxpayers. How is that even possible?

Because of the increased enrollment, they levied the taxpayers, but the taxpayers didn't know this was for out of city enrollment? I wonder how many of these students were illegals.

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@thomas_garrard Your assumption is correct. -20 requires extra special daily operations. We'd be happy to have you in Jul/Aug, it only snows rarely in those months.

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@AdrianAnnMiller If that is true then laws are being broken and you should contact your local Sheriffs office.

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

Yet another reason why I'm never leaving Montana. Private businesses can allow Flock(and others) on their property (ahem, Lowe's! ) but I have the right not to shop there. My state protects me from government observation. God Bless Montana!

[Montanans for Limited Government @mt4ltdgov]

@FrontierMontana weighs in on laws protecting Montana residents from government surveillance.

https://t.co/BlAywvEUHT

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@stew_hosk I lived in Cut Bank too! From 95-97. Cold as fuck there! But an incredibly unique beauty.

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@AdrianAnnMiller We do, a very limited number, in the cities, at businesses that support flock. Of course they're collecting your data. So don't shop at those locations and you'll avoid the tracking in Montana. https://t.co/XR0l73LfJK has been doing an excellent job locating Flock. Knowledge!

[Austin Knudsen @MTAGKnudsen]

Kudos to Gallatin Co Judge Andrew Breuner for rejecting CA Audrey Cromwell’s horrendous plea deal.
Judge Breuner is to be commended for his courage. County Attorney Cromwell should be sent packing for her cowardice and laziness.
https://t.co/lmj0aSzoMv

[Steve R @PandemoniumMT]

@Oilfield_Rando Isnt it funny that it's the rich fuckers that can afford the best health care out of pocket that tend to support free Healthcare for all? So out of touch...