5:31 pm

Today I saw a man wearing a blue T-shirt and white shorts. He had a good muscular physique. Not too big; just a nice lean athletic build. Alas, he had chicken legs.

Reincarnation is real. One day you’ll die, and your atoms will be go back into the universe that birthed you. And then one day those same atoms will come together again to form molecules for another life. It could be a a year later, ten years later, or twenty billion years later. But it will happen. You won’t remember your previous life, but that’s a good thing, because you’ll be able to start anew without the insecurities and trauma that held you back in this one. You’ll get a second chance.

So I got some more plants. Actually I didn’t get them, my dad did. Yesterday, he came home and presented me with four new plants that he got for very cheap from a street vendor. Today he made me plant them in 12-inch pots.

My dad likes gardening (he used to do when he was a teenager) and he would love to have some plants around this house. But he’s lazy. Coincidentally he found a slave who’s naturally inclined towards this hobby, so from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. today, I did unpaid labor under the July sun.

So now I have a Rose plant which is looking quite sad to be honest. Most likely because of the transplant shock. Hopefully it’ll look much happier in a few weeks.

And then there’s this Chambeli plant, which is mostly growing to one side.

A Lady of the night.

And a Jasmine plant.

These last two are in a much better shape.

From my limited gardening experience, it takes about a month for plants to get acclimated to the new pot and environment. But once they do, you start noticing new growth almost every other day.

I decided to add my gardening adventures here as well. I started this at the end of May with a couple of snakes plants, a lemon tree, and some aloe vera (RIP to them). Since then I’ve added a few more: a calico plant, sweet basil, and orange jasmine (murraya paniculata). The actually started really growing this month and I’m seeing new shoots in all of them.

I also some pothos growing in my window but it’s not picture worthy yet. And the mint I planted, well, people say you can’t kill mint, but I did. So a reverse achievement of sorts?

Anyhow, this is the progress of these smaller plants so far. I’ll maybe do this garden posting as a regular weekly thing.

Let me start by saying that I did NOT enjoy this movie. I was suggested to watch this movie by a brand new friend that I caught like a pokemon about two months ago. So in lieu of keeping the pokemon placated I decided to give this movie a go. It had Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Julia Roberts. I like Jude Law. He was great in Sherlock Holmes and Enemy at the Gates (those are his only movies I watched). So I thought with such a high profile cast, this would be the most peak movie ever.

I was disappointed.

Closer is just a bunch of people doing a bunch of people things. But none of it is intriguing or captivating. If I have to summarize the plot, it’s basically just four people talking. Actually, there is no plot to begin with.

And the characters are equally empty. I get the idea that they were supposed to be flawed and not someone to root for, but I couldn’t even feel anger towards them. There was also no growth or even anti-growth (regression?) for that matter. Nothing changed at the end of the movie.

Instead of an actual good movie, it seemed like one of those arthouse movies that are designed to be Oscar bait. And it didn’t even win any. Only pretentious critics can enjoy something like this while talking about “themes” and sniffing their wine glasses.

I read people’s comments saying it’s a dialogue driven movie. The only good line in the entire film was when Larry describes the human heart to Dan.

“Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood!”

And the only visually enjoyable thing was Natalie’s pink hair stripper aesthetic.

Speaking of Natalie, I think a lot of earlier Natalie Portman movies have her in very mediocre roles. Not to say she’s a bad actor, but in her earlier movies she was literally just cast as eye candy whether it was Léon: The Professional or something like Star Wars.

Anwyay, I rate this movie 2/5. Complete waste of time. Not even philosophically deep or anything. If you want to watch trashy people doing trashy things, just go to X (Formerly Twitter).

Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War recounted the history and the causes behind the war between Athens and Sparta.

Sparts was the regional hegemon of Greece while Athens was a rising nation, growing econimically and mitarily and eventually surpassed Sparta in terms of wealth, influence and power. This led to Sparta feeling concerned of the growth and influence of Athen’s and how it could challenge Spartan dominance. According to Thucydides, Spartan fear of Athens’ growing power was the fundamental cause of the war. A conflict born purely out of assumptions that could have been avoided had both parties just talked it out.

The term Thucydides Trap is used to describe the tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens of rivals to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon.

This is the trap that America and China are currently finding themselves in.

But the trap is a total self projection on the hegemon’s part. It is rooted in their own insecurity and bad faith. Because the hegemon itself came to power using warfare and illigtimate means, thus it believe that the rising power will do the same even if the rising power in question has no plans of doing that. This leads the hegemon to attack first, and eventually, losing to the rising power.

China will win. But at what cost?

So the other day I was watching a video about bees. The video focused on the Queen Bee. How it was just a fat breeding cow and how it has attendants that feed her and take care of her needs while her only jobs is to lay eggs. This is because bees are eusocial insects. The entire colony functions like a single organism. Or in sci-fi terms, a hive mind.

And I think we are going to become like bees.

Think about it. The Queen bee is the elite of the bee society. She does nothing and yet has everything. Who does that remind you of? The most recent trillionaire maybe? How do you think he became a trillionaire?

And it isn’t that far fetched to believe humans could be turned into a bee like society. We went from hunter gatherers to farmers to whatever the fuck we are right now. Why can’t we be bees? It is in the interest of the elites of our society that only they get to reproduce (only to make new elites) while the rest of us are forced into sterilization and made to only serve them. New slaves would be born out of test tube babies. So why won’t they turn us into bees? The truly disturbing part is that such a society might not even need force to begin with. People could be genetically modified to enjoy their assigned role.

In this bee-like society:

• Natural reproduction is outlawed.
• A small reproductive elite produces the next generation.
• Most humans are sterilized at birth.
• Artificial wombs create workers in large numbers.
• Genetic engineering determines social rank before birth.
• Loyalty is directed toward the “hive” rather than the family.

The Zucks and Bezoes of our world are already building their colonies (underground bunkers). What do they know that we don’t? What do they think will happen? What are they trying to make happen?

Anyway, this entire thing is just cool sci-fi plot that I thought up on the toilet (I’m not actually this much deranged).

The picture above, named The Blue Marble, was taken by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the last of the Apollo missions. The picture below, called Hello, World, was taken on April 4, 2026, by the Artemis II mission currently on its way to the moon.

But for some reason, nobody is excited.

I wasn’t yet born when the original Apollo program took place. All I have are videos and articles from back then to see how people felt about it. There is television footage of people gathered around the launchpad to view the launch in awe. There are records of people listening to the launch and mission communication on their radios. Yet today, nobody seems to care. Even I learned about the mission two days after it started.

I think many people don’t understand the implication. Sure, we’ve already as a species gone and come back from the moon, but it’s still a big deal. There’s reason it took 57 years to visit the giant ball of cheese in the sky once more.

During the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, they had to wait for astronauts to return to retrieve the film and pictures. This time, the entire mission is being live streamed on YouTube. There are cameras inside the shuttle. There are cameras outside the shuttle looking into the void of space. Back then they used expensive modified Hasselblad cameras with custom-made film. This time, they used a consumer-grade Nikon camera. The amount of technological progress in the last few decades is hard to fathom without contexts like these.

Yet people don’t care.

Many people might look at the images and ask, “What’s the big deal? It’s just an image of Earth. I can do a Google search and find 200 of those.” But images of Earth aren’t easy to come by, especially true ones. Most images we see online and otherwise are composites of sectional images taken by satellites. You can’t take a full image of the Earth unless you’re far enough away, which is why this image and the mission are such a big deal.

But I guess the current war in Iran and the global economy take precedence over this accomplishment of human will and ingenuity.

In the past few days, the Pakistani space on X (formerly Twitter) has been talking consistently about the upcoming 27th Amendment, cheekily being called the unconstitutional amendment. The general consensus is that this amendment will hand over sweeping control to the federal authority over many aspects such as funds, judges, courts, elections, and the military. But the most vocal criticism about this amendment is that it will roll back the 18th Amendment and take away power and authority from the provinces.

Naturally, in a country as diverse as Pakistan, this was bound to get severe backlash. Pakistan is a federal country in which different provinces come together to form a union state. But the problem with Pakistan’s provinces, unlike, say, the United States or Japan, is that the provinces are divided along ethno-linguistic lines.

I believe Jinnah was prescient in this regard. He aspired for Pakistan to be a cohesive whole, not a confederation of ethnic provinces. Therefore, the implementation of a unified language (Urdu) and the rights of minorities were important aspects of state building. This is not a problem specific to Pakistan. Soon after the unification of Italy in 1861, Massimo d’Azeglio wrote:

“We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”

His remark summarized a central post-unification problem: while the Italian peninsula had been politically unified, its people were still divided by regional, linguistic, and cultural differences. Pakistan, like Italy, made a state before making a nation. We made a Pakistan, but we forgot to make Pakistanis.

Even in 2025, the country is as divided as it was during the British colonial era. If you pick a random citizen from the country and ask him to identify himself, he would count ten different labels, but not one of them would be Pakistani. This is because the word Pakistani has almost become a slur, a symbol of oppression for the regional peripheries due to the 70 plus years of being sidelined by the center. The word Pakistan is synonymous with the Federation, a Federation that is a tool for control.

The 18th Amendment sought to fix the issue by decentralizing power and devolving many of the subjects to the provinces. They were given the much-demanded autonomy, and it was assumed that maybe this would pacify the hatred against the federation. But this only led to further division because the provincial governments themselves weren’t able or weren’t interested in running their constituencies adequately.

Health, education, and agriculture policies, while already inconsistent between the provinces to start with, have worsened over time. National projects stalled because provinces disagreed or lacked the capacity to undertake them or contribute.

• Federal ministries lost oversight, leading to duplication and inefficiency.
• The NFC Award’s rigid formula made it difficult to adapt to economic realities.

What was meant to empower provinces instead created administrative silos. Each province began acting as an isolated unit, duplicating functions, hoarding resources, and politicizing service delivery. The spirit of cooperation that federalism demands was replaced by competition for funds and influence.

Moreover, the ethnic divide deepened further as the common man was taught the cause behind all his life’s problems was Punjab.

Political parties increasingly became provincial rather than national. PPP, once a national force, retreated into Sindh; PTI found roots in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; and Baloch nationalist movements re-emerged with renewed grievances. Instead of bridging divides, autonomy hardened them.

And then there’s all the external threats that the country faces. Pakistan is located in a geographically tense region where it constantly needs to be on the lookout for potential threats. Just in this one year, the country has faced escalation from both India and Afghanistan.

In the 21st century, fragmented governance doesn’t work. The provinces can wallow about their differences and cultural and linguistic heritage, or they can come together under a unified federation to face the world together. Otherwise, the world would not be so kind to them.