26 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis #Overturn

Underneath The News, Beneath The Blackout Blanket

I thought to call today's mediation, "The Death Of The News Cycle," but couldn't. It may be ill. One day it may die. But it's power remains vast, and we're going to discuss that first.

'Treasure Gods' - Sangha Nidhi' and 'Padma Nidhi', Tirumala, Tirupati.

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These are the two guards guarding the Wealth and Treasure of Lord Sri Venkateswara.

They are representatives of two treasures of Kubera, the God of Wealth.

One guard who is holding shangam (conch) on both the hands is known as Shanka Nidhi ('nidhi' means wealth).

On the other side, the guard who is holding Lotus flowers on both the hands is known as Padma nidhi.

Shangu is from the ocean which includes all types of wealth like pearls and corals.

Why shagam in his hand? Because shangam only gives the sound of 'omkaram'.

'Padmam' is the symbol of water sources in land like river, lakes, tanks etc. which is very important for all living beings.

As per the tradition, these guards are installed at the third entrance of the temple.

One enters the holy shrine after saluting the first protection threshold - Sankha Nidhi and Padma Nidhi.

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.

Many readers have asked me "why do so many pulp covers feature women in ripped red blouses standing in swamps while a man fights off an unusual animal attack?"

The answer is artist Will Hulsey...

Will Hulsey was the undisputed king of the animal attack pulp cover. You name it, he'd paint it attacking you in a pool of stagnant water.

Very little is known about Will Hulsey, but he worked on a number of men's pulp magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s including Man's Life, True Men, Guilty, Trapped and Peril.

Their audience was ex-GIs: during WWII the US Council of Books in Wartime had given away over 122 million books to American servicemen to read; this led to a post-war surge in paperback and magazine sales amongst these newly enthusiastic readers.

As a result the 1950s saw a raft of men's pulp magazines being published to tap into this market - almost 200 different titles!

1. Now that Stan Lee is being eulogized far and wide, it's important to remember how marginal Stan Lee and his collaborators (Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) were in the 1950s and 1960s.

2. Marvel Comics (before that Atlas) was just a cog in the machine of a bottom pulp publisher run by Martin Goodman, the husband of one of Lee's cousins. It was the lowest of the low in the publishing world.

3. Now Mario Puzo (not yet the author of the Godfather) shared offices with Stan Lee in the 1950s and 1960s. Puzo wrote for garrish men's adventure magazines and, like Lee, dreamed of writing a novel & breaking out. But Puzo looked down on Lee.

4. Flo Steinberg, 1960s secretary at Marvel: "They were always making jokes about us. They'd come in and giggle. mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and say, 'Work faster, little elves. Christmas is coming.'"

5. When JFK was killed, the whole office of Magazine Management was stunned and quiet. Except Lee. He continued working. "He was still working on the comic books," Puzo said. "Like that was the most important thing in the world."