Either way, I don't care about the 'nation' all that much (although constitutional free speech rights are very important - arguably a major factor of what's holding the world together at this point). But, I definitely care about where I grew up, the region, the homeland.

Personally, the place where I grew up: the geography, people, and culture are permanently etched into my identity. So, yes in a sense it is brainwashing - but driven by biology.

Unfortunately, the rulers always want to deconstruct individuals and groups into fungible mechanical parts that can be used by the machine that continues their reign and authority.

Yes, I can separate myself from my past, but it sure doesn’t feel good. Why do we continue to sacrifice the life satisfaction of the small and weak to only give greater satisfaction to the powerful? Have so many become a product of this corrupted system, that their homelands no longer matter to them?

One surprising thing is that immediately after the first two US-gulf wars began, professionals came in a dug down 10 meters at archeological sites, and reportedly over 100k artifacts were looted. However, I just checked Google's AI and it initially refuses to agree with this even though those numbers were reported by the scholars in their reports. If you challenge Google's AI (I haven't tried the others), it will eventually agree but will still be really vague about it.

The recovery of the dead sea scrolls is also interesting. They 'appeared' in caves in Qumran, but many early reports suspected they were placed there. Also interesting is the character "Kando" who ended up trading them.

Given recent current events (I won't mention names to avoid my comment being downvoted out of the search history), we know there are a lot of powerful people who are into the occult and ancient rituals. So, I suspect a lot of the artifacts end up with them. Who knows.

Yes, I'm exaggerating about the networking. Yes, you can lock it down by turning off all of the devices, but honestly, I'm still not 100% on that. It was a surprise to me after I disabled ethernet and wifi and turned off everything in system settings, and someone passed by with an ios device.

However, if you're an expert - please save me a year of trial and error and point me to the minimal list of services and daemons.

Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.

I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.

There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately. It’s a good time to be wary of any if you don’t trust the author 100%.

It’s like when HIV emerged in the 80s - the disco days of free love are over. Be wary of who you’re sleeping with, and always wear a condom.