1/ We've discussed Persia-in-China, but what about China-in-Persia? Before the Mongols, known sources record few Chinese ppl in Iran. However, Chinese products left a distinct mark. The most famous (and imitated) was Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. #iranchina - @IranChinaGuy

2/ Chinese ceramics were an important part of a global trade network that linked China and the Middle East to the world economic system. Many of these objects were transported overland in a series of trade networks, today called the "Silk Road". In addition to land routes...

3/ ...maritime trade flourished. Middle Eastern, African, and Chinese merchants flowed back and forth between important ports along the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the coast of India, and the islands in the South China Sea. This has been called the "Maritime Silk Road".

3/ As early as the 9th and 10th centuries, ceramics were being exported in large quantities. Ibn Battuta comments that Chinese ceramics are “carried to India and to other climes so that it even reaches our country in the Maghreb. And it is the most marvelous of kinds of pottery.”

4/ The famous Muslim Chinese explorer Zheng He also documented the widespread appreciation of Chinese ceramics. Ma Huan, his traveling companion, mentions the extremely enthusiastic reception their ceramic goods received in Champa (modern Vietnam), India, Ceylon, and Mecca.

Scoop: FULL TEXT of @StateDept Dissent Cable I obtained, signed by over 100 officials: 1/many

1. On January 6, 2021, the United States witnessed an unprecedented effort by American citizens to violently subvert the democratic will of the American people...

After months of promoting baseless claims of voter fraud, which were rejected by the judiciary in dozens of cases, President Trump encouraged supporters, some armed, to storm the U.S. Capitol while Congress was certifying the results of a free and fair presidential election...

His incitement led to a violent riot in the U.S. Capitol, five deaths, untold injuries, destruction and vandalism of government property, and incalculable damage to our democratic system and our image abroad...

He played an integral role in breaking the 220-year streak of peaceful transfer of power between political parties during U.S. elections. (End of point 1).

Continuing....

STATE DEPARTMENT DISSENT CABLE POINT 2:

The Department of State should explicitly denounce President Trump's role in this violent attack on the U.S. government. Just as we routinely denounce foreign leaders who use violence and intimidation to interfere in peaceful democratic...

ALERT: Here's how @USArmy @USNationalGuard responded to the #CapitolRiot. Follow this thread for more.

Statement on the National Guard Response in the District of Columbia from the Secretary of the Army.

"During a rapidly evolving situation Wednesday Jan. 6, the Department of Defense fielded multiple calls from elected officials requesting and

offering assistance to the unprecedented breach of the U.S. Capitol Building. The Army and the D.C. National Guard were coordinating with the federal Capitol Police and the local D.C. Metropolitan Police Department to assist with an immediate response.

Secretary of the Army, Hon. Ryan McCarthy, first spoke with Governor Larry Hogan at 4:40 p.m. on Jan. 6. He thanked him and accepted his offer. Secretary McCarthy assured him his service members will be taken care of and provided a point-to-point contact.

Throughout the day and the morning of Jan. 7, Secretary McCarthy spoke directly with the governors of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Additional National Guard support from New York and Delaware was also approved and communications with all of these states and

Thread:

Here is a wake up call for those Republicans who believe we're going to take back the House in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024:

You will never win another election in the next 50 years.
The election fraud system perfected by the Democrats and their Deep State agents planted by the Obama cabal was put in place before the 2016 mid term and it is working perfectly.

It worked in 2016 when the GOP lost the House despite Trump being at the height of his popularity and the economy roaring back to life after 8 long years of depression;

It worked in November 2020 when Biden, an elderly man suffering from dementia was declared the winner with 1.5 million more votes than the young, charismatic and energetic Democratic Party political rock star Obama ever had cast for him in both elections he won;

And it worked in 2021 in GA run-offs, after the GOP candidates who were in the lead all day, they got defeated after vote dumps that happened after the counting closed for the day in a repeat of the scenario that happened during the Presidential election.

So...let's have a lil chat about what's been going on and what's to come: a thread.
We now know, beyond a doubt as it's videoed:
1) Capitol cops were in on it
2) trump and his brood were right about orgasmic watching it
3) It was cosigned by many officials

1/

including the DOD appointees trump ushered in at the last second - this was why
4) the people who are resigning now stayed on to see if the coup would work.
Now, none of us who could tell this was coming are surprised one little bit.

2/

But what I think needs to be said is that *this was a test run*.
They are brazen enough to talk about it on Parler. This is how we all know that they're going to try it again on Jan 19th.
The @FBI I'm sure is aware by now that they had explosives ready to go too.

3/

If this doesn't terrify you, it should. This is exactly what Hitler had done with the Reichstag Fire. History repeats itself. These treasonous imbeciles are neo-Nazis; all of us who had seen this coming know the exact playbook. I'm sure that law enforcement knows it too.

4/

I could go on forever about everyone being warned about this. @HillaryClinton was all but psychic. I've already written about the media's complicit participation at my blog. Link:

After I shit the bed with my dad in it in Hong Kong*, my bowels were never quite right and got progressively worse. My calamitous movements became legend. At one friend’s house, there was a sign in the bathroom. PEOPLE WHO CAN’T TAKE DUMPS HERE: CHRIS.

My guts were so rank, I remember my GOOD poops more than my bad ones. In 1996, I took a poop in a French youth hostel that I still think about like a lost love. That poop was transcendent. People who poop like that all the time… They have no idea how lucky they are.

Things came to a head, so to speak, when I went to university. (Hi, @UBishops!) I lived in a dorm, Mackinnon, that had two big bathrooms for, like, 40 kids. They were co-ed. Absolute nightmare. But my first day, I somehow got in and out without anyone else seeing me.

Unfortunately, the stench got out, too, and I’m not joking: It was like a fire drill. Dozens of kids ended up retching on the grass outside the building. I was like, OH GOD WHO SHIT along with everyone else. Meanwhile, all I could think was: Where am I going to poo for a year?

At 24, I was finally diagnosed with Crohn’s. Anyone with a bowel disorder will tell you: They have a secret network of secluded, relatively unused toilets they’ve scouted out all over town. Sort of like the Floo Network in Harry Potter, except it’s places where they shit.

Here's a happy story to end the week. For years @RonJichardson and I had fantasised about going to New York. For almost as long as we'd known each other we'd dreamt of going and having a holiday there. In 2011 we sorted it and set off on our adventure.

We went for 10 nights which is a long time in New York. It was emotional. For both of us NY was the land of dreams. Seeing the Ghostbusters Fire Station is still one of the highlights of my life. My main memory is of the bars. I think we went to every bar in New York.

The best thing about going for 10 nights is you can do the tourist stuff pretty quick and then you're just mooching about as if you live there for a week. The days are long, especially when you're doing a pub crawl every day.

One of the games we'd play at home was The Lookalike Game. On a train, in a pub or on the Tube you'd spot someone and say "over your right shoulder, looks like a short Les Dennis" or "by the bar, a male Barbara Streisand". It was purely for our own amusement.

Towards the end of our trip in New York we're walking down a busy street in downtown Manhattan. We're playing the lookalike game. Jon says "he looks like Billy Connolly". I look up and there's a radiant man in a North Face gilet. He didn't look like Billy Connolly.

"Dependency" and "personality disorder" in mental health services: a thread.

I'm thinking today about Courtney Porter who died earlier this year, just three days after being discharged from inpatient care against her wishes. 1/

She was 20 years old. At her inquest, @CNWLNHS defended their decision to discharge Courtney by stating that people with a diagnosis of EUPD could not stay indefinitely due to the "risk of developing a dependence on the service." 2/

"Risk of dependency" is a phrase used very commonly to deny or withdraw support and care from certain mental health patients - most often those bearing a personality disorder label. But why? Why are this huge heterogeneous group of people, labelled with PD, 3/

supposedly all at risk of developing dependency, more so than anyone else, and what is so terrible about dependency that it's actually preferable for people to die than to be dependent..? 4/

Mental health services in the UK reflect the western culture of viewing autonomy and independence as key to personal development and success. Since the rise of individualism and self-care in the NHS moved us away
5/

I do times inbetween tweets, translate the difference, plug the numbers back to the drops. Lookin at DJT this will be a more inclusive one. We'll look at three tweets instead of two, don't worry I'll seperate and post a refresh snip in the interest of organization.

Post all three up (tweets). Do the base first, both tweets are subtracted though the first snip stays the same (just the way I did it). So 19:10 on the 7th is the base. 2nd snip, 10:44am Jan 8th. 3rd, today at 9:46.

Our differences looking like such.
First snip in red so,
1534, 1556, 934 , 4065
Blue is, 1436, 3806, 146[0], 876, 2556

Red branch first, info and timestamps in the drop are up to the user. 1534, 1556, 934 , 4065.

934, 4065

The Anabaptist Option:

Neo-Calvinist Cornelius Van Til was a lifelong Republican voter, but couldn't crack the application of Reformed theology to politics. How does the Christian worldview manifest in the political realm with regard to particular parties and politicians?

Van Til's student, Francis Schaeffer, motivated by his postmillennialism in the Cold War context, promoted Christianity as antithetical to communism. Fundamentalist friends like Jerry Falwell found political motivation in the moralist message of Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto.

The aforementioned mindset put the Moral Majority (1979) into motion right around the time of the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention (1979) and the presidential run of Ronald Reagan (1981). Similar rhetoric and results followed in the years to come.

Politicians, knowing they had to secure the votes of the Moral Majority, or 'Values Voters,' or 'evangelicals' as a voting bloc, pandered to them by citing their 'Christian faith' and 'pro-life' positions which ran counter to Roe v. Wade (1973), another Schaefferian target.

Those left unpersuaded by the aforementioned project were no longer merely political opponents, but morally inferior people, most likely owing to a lack of true Christian faith and practice. Clearly, the moral failings of Bill Clinton weren't consistent with his Christian faith.

So I was traveling with Mattis in 2017 when Trump made his infamous “fire and fury” comments amid escalation with North Korea over its nuclear program, and obviously talk of a preemptive strike. (Thread)

Mattis looked exhausted and was desperately avoiding engaging in discussion about what Trump had said. He kept insisting that he would “leave the rhetoric up to the President” but you could see that he was trying to hold back a hell of a lot of thoughts.

Staff told me at the time that he wasn’t getting a lot of sleep (he never really did anyway) but that despite his constant insistence that he kept other people up at night, he was having a difficult time sorting a way out of the situation.

Later that year, on another trip with Mattis this time to Asia, I asked him about what he thought of nuclear madman theory. It was my way of trying to get him to engage on what we were seeing from Trump, since he is a student of history, without making him utter Trump’s name.

For those unfamiliar, nuclear madman theory predates Nixon, but he’s closely associated with it as he was working with aids to suggest to the North Vietnamese that he might just be crazy enough to nuke them, and that they should therefore negotiate a settlement.

Here are a few thoughts on everything from this humble reply guy:

1: The establishment/uniparty/whatever are about to go scorched earth on whatever is left of the MAGA movement. The pampered rich kid just got a bloody nose and is about to send his lawyer parents after the bully.

If anyone wanted to defuse this, they'd offer amnesty to the protestors and give Trump a backdoor deal where he's uncharged but stays out of the political world and gets to go back to being a reality TV personality, with a bit of Dubya-style character rehabilitation thrown in.

From there, they'd steer the MAGA movement back into the ideological walled garden of Dan Crenshaw and Charlie Kirk. There'd still be rallies, but now it'd be Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley. The vast majority of Trump's voter base would lap it up like puppies.

But everyone either doesn't want to defuse this (so they can scorch even more earth) or they're so blinded by partisan furor (and their base is so fired up) that the calls for blood become a vicious cycle that pushes this towards the territory of 19th century American politics.

2: The clearpill is that even when galaxies collide, individual star systems are barely affected. Focus on yourself, focus on your job, focus on building and sustaining a good home life, and no matter which way the political winds end up blowing, you'll probably be alright.

Dear all, I've taken cognizance of all the evidence surrounding alleged Hindutva participation in the Wednesday insurrection. My conclusion? There's not much and it's not worth getting distracted from the bigger picture.

1) An Indian Christian raised an Indian flag. Yes, I think it's safe to conclude that's a sign of Indian nationalists backing Trump. There's some circumstantial evidence suggesting he's associated with Sanghis. But it's not significant.

2) A man, apparently a "Hemant Bhatt" from New Jersey, joined the rally. But there's no obvious connection between him and Hindutva. And the presence of a single individual is not significant.

3) @Voice_For_India was present. She is a Hindutva stooge. Her presence is the most significant of that of any. But there's no evidence suggesting she was there as part of a larger crowd or mobilization.

4) There was a small group of Indians present who were all pictured together. But that's it. No identification of them. No evidence they have any Hindutva links. Totally insignificant in context of the Hindutva influence in America issue.

Here’s how to double conversion on your startup’s homepage.

(From rewriting over 1,000 websites.)

A thread 👇

1/ Your "above the fold" (ATF) section is the part of your site that's immediately visible before scrolling.

When visitors see this, they decide to either keep scrolling or bounce.

In seconds, they attempt to assess:

• What you do.
• Whether you're a fit for them.

2/ If your ATF is confusing or uninteresting, visitors bounce.

This happens because of:

1. Weak messaging: Your product's purpose is unclear, uninteresting, or irrelevant.

2. Weak design: Your design is unprofessional or outdated.

3/ There are 3 things you can change on your ATF.

1. Header
2. Subheader
3. Design

Let's dive into each.

4/ Headers need to:

1. Identify how users get value from your product.

2. Include a hook—to get them to keep reading.

3. Speak directly to your customer personas.

Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://t.co/Z2aLwF1Ez3

1/

Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

2/

When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

3/

I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

4/

But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I realized that facts were now cheap - anything could be discovered with a single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms - knowing what to search FOR.

5/

Dear MAGA, why do you follow this con? First he told you Mexico would pay for the wall. They didn’t. Then he warned you that caravans of illegal immigrants were invading. They weren’t. He said the ACA was a disaster and that he had an amazing plan to replace it. He didn’t.
(1)

He said he was the strongest against Russia. But he wouldn’t even condemn Putin for putting bounties on our troops. He said it was a perfect call. It wasn’t. He said he would save the coal industry. He didn’t. He said other countries would respect us. They don’t.
(2)

He said he only hires the best people. But fires those same people. He said if Clinton were elected it would be nothing but investigations. We’ve had nothing but investigations his entire 4 years. He said he would be tough on North Korea. They have more missiles than ever.
(3)

He said they’re coming for the suburbs. No ones coming. He said Covid was a hoax. It’s not. He said it’s just like the flu. Over 350K are dead in 10 months. He said he shut down travel from China. Not true. He said everyone who wants a test could get one. They couldn’t.
(4)

He told you masks don’t work. Let me say that again. He told you masks don’t work. Cmon. He said the day after the election Covid would just go away. Since the election every fucking day has been worse. Over 4K died just yesterday.
(5)