David Flickinger

Christian | Avid reader

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

Instead, hierarchical and horizontal forms worked in ‘creative tension’, producing new ideas and practices.”

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

I appreciate that Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe tells history as it was rather see it only through the lense of class struggle, “Above all, the ideology of the common good, like government techniques, was not simply pioneered by citizens only to be stolen later by princess….

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

You have to work in a garden yourself or you miss its meaning.” - L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside

[Andrew Zywiec, M.D. @AndrewZywiecMD]

As a straight A, intense biology and chemistry undergraduate, I believed in evolution. There was so much data, so much information, so much theory.

I am now a 17 year, extremely well educated, highly accomplished and intellectually experienced medical doctor and scientist.

Evolution is like many things. On the surface, it has a luster. But deeper examination exposes pyrite.

Fool's gold.

The first sip from the glass of secular science is atheistic, but God is at the bottom of the glass. (Paraphrased)

[Hayek-Club Weimar @WeimarClub]

Sozialismus ist das perfekte Geschäftsmodell für Politiker: Er erzeugt Abhängigkeit, und Abhängigkeit erzeugt Wähler. Wer vom Staat lebt – durch Transferleistungen, Subventionen, „soziale“ Absicherung, planwirtschaftliche Privilegien – wählt denjenigen, der die Hähne aufdreht. Der Politiker wird zum Versorger, der Bürger zum Klienten. Je größer die Abhängigkeit, desto größer die Macht. Deshalb lieben sie ihn. Nicht aus Ideologie, sondern aus nacktem Eigeninteresse.

Kapitalismus hingegen ist für die politische Klasse eine existenzielle Bedrohung. Er belohnt Eigenverantwortung, Risiko, Innovation und private Initiative. Er macht Menschen unabhängig vom Staat – und damit unkontrollierbar. Wer seinen Lebensunterhalt selbst verdient, seine Entscheidungen selbst trifft und seinen Wohlstand selbst schafft, braucht keine Gönner in Berlin, Brüssel oder sonstwo.

Jede Regulierung, die „den Markt zähmen“ soll, ist in Wahrheit ein Instrument, um Wettbewerb zu ersticken und etablierte Interessen zu schützen. Der freie Markt braucht keinen Politiker als Mittler. Der Politiker braucht den freien Markt als Feindbild.

Deshalb die ewige Rhetorik: Kapitalismus wird als „gierig“, „ungerecht“, „unsozial“ gebrandmarkt – während der Staat, der mit Gewalt monopolisiert, umverteilt und kontrolliert, als moralische Instanz auftritt. Es ist die älteste Strategie der Macht: die Abhängigkeit als Tugend verkaufen und die Unabhängigkeit als Gefahr.

Der Staat hat kein Interesse an freien Menschen. Er hat Interesse an Untertanen, die ihm dankbar sind. Sozialismus liefert die Untertanen. Kapitalismus liefert die Freien.

#FreiheitstattKnechtschaft #SteuernsindRaub #Eigentum #Freiheit #ParasitenwegmitEuremZwang

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

CS Lewis on why “dumb blue collar people” usually do not fall for the same terrible ideas that the “educated elite class” so often does:

“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

– CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

… Or Romans 1: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

“It was not until the eighteenth century that Europeans embraced the modern idea of progress, which envisaged the future as an improved version of the present.” - Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

Reading Kafka is somewhat like experiencing a fever dream …but a productive and insightful fever dream.

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

“Invisible in war and invincible in peace.”

[The Conservative Alternative @OldeWorldOrder]

"We in America have no interest in being polite & orderly caretakers of the West's managed decline."

—Marco Rubio

[Congressman Brandon Gill @RepBrandonGill]

Today I asked an abortion advocate what her favorite method of abortion is.

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

“I hope you will burn all cotton and save us the trouble. All you don’t burn I will.” - William Tecumseh Sherman

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

@mattvanswol Find a good Bible believing local church, get to know the pastors and elders, attend regularly, and tithe.

[Fandom Pulse @fandompulse]

Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card on the problems with how religion is portrayed in current fantasy and science fiction:

"In our culture, intellectuals have become so uniformly a-religious or anti-religious that our fiction, with few exceptions, depicts religious people in only two ways: the followers are ignorant and stupid and easily fooled, and the leaders are exploitative and cynical, manipulating others' faith for their private benefit.

I know some people who fit those descriptions. But they are in a tiny minority. Most religious people I know are smart, well-educated, independent-minded, stubborn, honest, and generous -- at least as much so as the average intellectual, and usually more.

The hostility toward religion among American intellectuals arises, I think, from a clear awareness that it was against a publicly religious culture that their own culture rebelled. Now that rebellion is completely successful in terms of capturing control of all the public instruments of transmission of culture -- the universities, the media, and the literature and art -- but it has become such a shibboleth of intellectual life to snipe at religion that, like the aging "revolutionaries" of the old Soviet Union, they mindlessly continue to "rebel" in order to defend their tight grip on the establishment. Indeed, those intellectuals are the establishment. And what was once a daring and rebellious stance is now just another example of lockstep conformists mindlessly echoing ideas that they haven't examined.

That's when contemporary fiction mentions religion at all. Most of the time, in and out of speculative fiction, religion simply doesn't exist. Characters don't believe in God or even think about believing in God. Nobody talks about religion. Nobody belongs to any kind of church. Religion simply doesn't exist. ...

This is, I think, a serious lapse, a dishonesty in our contemporary literature. It is most seriously dishonest because in fact, even the supposedly a-religious intellectuals behave exactly as religious people always have. That is, the behavioral and cultural patterns that we have always associated with religions are indistinguishable, except by vocabulary, from the behavioral and cultural patterns of the a-religious intellectuals. They band together with fellow believers, feel sorry for or hostile toward unbelievers, immediately punish heretics -- intellectuals who, having once been accepted in the 'faith,' dare to question its premises -- anoint their priests and theologians (psychologists and therapists being their ministers, scientists and, more usually, science popularizers being their doctors of atheology), and insist on their absolute right to put forth their religious ideas with public funding and the authority of the state behind them, while doing their utmost to silence or marginalize the beliefs of others.

Most fiction has become, in short, an instrument of propaganda for the established religion of our time, which differs from other religions only in the particular content of the faith and the vocabulary used to describe it. Naturally, the true believers are sure that the real difference is that their beliefs are objectively true. But then, true believers have always believed that. This is not what distinguishes them from other established religions, but rather what makes them fundamentally identical to them.

The honest depicter of human life will include the religious aspect of that life. This is not to say that stories need to be about religion, any more than stories about our contemporary culture need to be about cars. But the cars need to be present, at least by implication, and if a character doesn't know how to drive, we'd need to know why."

Is this why Hollywood stopped adapting his books into films?

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

Without having done anything to earn it, that baby is the beneficiary of thousands of years’ worth of other people’s effort, experimentation, and pain.” - Charles Cooke

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

“A baby who is born in America today would have been envied by pretty much every other human being who came before.

[David Flickinger @thewinterquiet_]

Union Officer on realizing they had destroyed a unit comprised mainly of boys and old men: “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack.

Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords.

LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm.

Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks.

Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages.

Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.

[Dandalf @DanTalks1]

I know you think you are smart, but everyone knew you were a foreign asset and you were used as a counter-intelligence asset (as I described in my article on the war, Tucker was the Iranian spy). You got used as a counter-intel asset to convince them nothing was happening.

You got used to kill the Iranian leadership. You personally were one of the key reasons they believed nothing was happening. Which gave them the confidence to convene a meeting with their entire high command. You did your job well, being a traitor.

Imagine thinking that you'd get a prime time slot with the president on the eve of a war, after repeatedly humiliating him and him calling you a retard multiple times publicly. You are as arrogant as you are stupid.

But now your usefulness has ended, and its time to go. Good luck my guy, you are going to need it. Thanks for helping us kill all your friends tho, you did great work.