The paradox of learning to build bombs.

Peter Thiel writes in his book From Zero to One,  chapter 14, page 173
OF THE SIX PEOPLE who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. Five were just 23 years old— or younger. Four of us had been born outside the United States. Three had escaped here from communist countries: Yu Pan from China, Luke Nosek from Poland, and Max Levchin from Soviet Ukraine. Building bombs was not what kids normally did in those countries at that time. 

The New York Times today writes:
Little is known about Khalid and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, whom the authorities named on Wednesday as having been involved in the Brussels attacks the morning before. Ibrahim blew himself up at the city’s main airport, they said, and Khalid at a subway station. 

Unlike the founders of Pay Pal,  they build bombs and then they blew themselves up, almost simultaneously, with the only goal of killing as many innocent people as possible.
What turns people toward violence? ... Despite millions of dollars of government-sponsored research, and a much-publicized White House pledge to find answers, there is still nothing close to a consensus on why someone becomes a terrorist.
“After all this funding and this flurry of publications, with each new terrorist incident we realize that we are no closer to answering our original question about what leads people to turn to political violence,” Marc Sageman, a psychologist and a longtime government consultant, wrote in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in 2014.
 Institutionalized rape, suicide bombers, decapitations, using dogs and autistic people as live bombs and other horror stories, can not be the source of the future

 All  un-natural demands, that go against the survivor instinct and family units, will fail.

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs biographer writes in his newer book The Innovators
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.
Few people know that Steve Jobs natural father,  Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, is born in Syria


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