France, And Europe, Vicious Downward Tech Spiral. Stopped By Anti-Hero Putin?

Consecutively to being the successor of Rome, and outlawing slavery in 657 CE, under queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, France, Francia, became the technological leader of the world. When one has no slaves, one needs ideas to build machines…

Most of the leading techs of the last 15 centuries were launched in France or by French inventors (contrarily to insulting myths of other jealous nations). Harvesters, labor horses, beans, hydraulic forges, Gothic architecture, field guns, in the Middle Ages; steam engine and steam boat (Denis Papin circa 1700 CE), cars, hot air balloons, master weaver in 18th-century Lyon, France, Jean-Charles Jacquard invented the programmable mechanical loom in 1804, photography (Niépce 1822, Daguerre 1837). motorized planes (Clement Ader, years before the US), internal combustion gasoline engine, nuclear power program for nukes, January 1938; transistors mass produced for high speed railroads just before their US “invention”, Kastler’s optical pumping, 1953, ramjet, computer chip, smart card (Roland Moreno, 1974), Giant Magneto Resistance (Nobel laureate Albert Fert, 1990s)…

However in recent times, European states, led by France, and in particular French woke political correctness infused with ecological hypocrisy and plutocratic manipulations, have doubled social spending (since 1980; especially for illegal immigrants of the Islamist persuasion)… and practiced a policy of deintellectualization and deindustrialization which has led to a catastrophic shrinkage of French technological leadership.. which is now just a shadow of its former self. These policies were akin to high treason, and how exactly they originated and the role of the Kremlin in them, has to be explored. For some reason, France, instead of getting her energy in France, got it from making Putin and Siberia wealthy. Now the energy tends to come from feudal friendly Qatar and distant Wyoming cowboys. That’s “ecology” and impoverishment, French style.

Yet France has nuclear forces indigenously developed and independent of the USA, the only such case in the West (UK nuclear forces are a hardware and software subsidiary of the US; a UK general said the UK could hold around a month without the US… no more…). French nuclear forces are also state of the art, and sometimes more advanced than their US equivalents. French anaerobic submarines are the best in the world (and French nuclear subs use some of their electric equipment to be the most silent… by shutting down their nuclear reactor and going all electric…).

The French are slowly getting conscious of their present state of increasing degeneracy and are starting to take measures to counteract it. This means an increasingly adversarial confrontation with the rest of the European machinery, which seems to have started, and is absolutely necessary. At this point, 2024, Europe can’t even launch a satellite, although New Zealand, North Korea and Iran can…

Things are improving, as the Vice President of the Russian Assembly, excited by French weapons and advisers in Ukraine, threatened to nuke Paris (March 2024). France replied in one sentence that she could defend herself. France helps Ukraine with some of the most sophisticated weapons in the world (CAESAR guns, SCALP AI cruise missile and Aster 30 anti-ballistic missiles… more coming, hopefully…) France was the world’s second exporter of weapons in 2023, behind her creation, the USA, and selling massive numbers of excellent French weapons is the imperial road to reindustrialization… and also survival...

Civilization is ever more technological, or is not. And civilization is stable only if it is technologically superior. France, and Europe forgot this in recent years.

Mechanical harvester pushed by donkey on the right, Gaul, Gallia, 2,000 years ago. Some were much larger and pushed by oxen teams. Those were not used in Italy, which had giant latifundia with armies of slaves…

Plutocrats Hate Trains, They Want Subsidized Private Jets! Hate Them Back! Cut Pluto Subsidies! Night Trains!

Hey, there is only so much money to go around! All the money should go to plutocrats! No taxpayer money for public trains! All the money for private jets! If plutocrats took the train, even private extra luxury “wagon lit”, they, the elite, the world government, would have to come in proximity to multitude of common people! Plutocrats can’t stand common people, because common, vulgar people are not philanthropists, those common low lives can’t help people, they can’t even help themselves, and must be taken care of all the time, just like pigeons, by the philanthropists who own the planets… So the least philanthropists should have is private jets, to travel in style….

Yes, plutocrats must travel private, among their equals to enjoy the planet privately, as per their exclusive nature. That means private, exclusive air travel. Private jets employ more than one million people in the USA, contribute to more than 1% of CO2 emissions, and receive gigantic subsidies. When a billionaire jets around, it‘s free for him, her and their hard owning family! Common, vulgar taxpayers pick up the tab for their superiors. In exchange the superiors shall finance some woke movements here and there: the cost of social peace…

Europe and the USA invested enormously in trains in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Trains were used to transport We The People and remain the main transporters of goods in the USA. 

But then the plutocrats took over all the subsidies you could possibly imagine, and they destroyed the train networks, including inner cities electric lines which existed even in the inner San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles… Trains subsidies disappeared, but private jets got enormous subsidies. A modern electric train (or maglev), major city center to major city center, is faster and more convenient than planes for trajectories less than 800 kilometers (500 miles).

Once the ecological and overall cost numbers are plugged in, the train becomes competitive even for passengers, from San Francisco to New York (with new lines). Right now, New York salads in winter come from California by train…

Trains in the Briançon station. Briançon is the highest city in Europe, and also the most isolated, from all the very high mountains in all directions, often for hundreds of kilometers. Its easiest access from Paris is by night train (complete with beds). Several of the world’s largest ski resorts are around Briançon, including Montgenèvre, the world’s oldest ski resort, opened in 1907 (still expanding, with 70 lifts and 400 kms of runs; the fifth largest ski resort in the world…).

For two decades or so, there was only one night train left in Europe, the Paris to Briançon line. The French central state tried to close it. The region Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur saved it.   More than one hundred miles of the line is single track through the high mountains. The line survived because the easiest way to Briançon is along a 200 kilometer valley along which Hannibal’s army suffered enormous losses. Hannibal’s international army got crushed by boulders from great heights… Other ways to get to Briançon  involve steep passes above timberline. With the night train one steps in at 8pm and the train arrives in Briançon, at 7am, after a good night’s sleep. No extravagant security checks. One can get inside the train two minutes before departure. No going to the airport, confronting traffic jams: the train station is in the center of Paris.  Any other way to go to Briançon is hazardous and haphazard (the high speed train across the Alps in valleys to the north, from France to Italy, is indefinitively cut by a rock avalanche…)

Train travel is ecologically correct, but it is NOT subsidized… whereas air travel is heavily subsidized. First of all, there is no tax on jet fuel. Secondly airports are enormously subsidized (by central government, regions and local cities). Third states provide for air traffic control, security, etc. 

For decades unsubsidized trains had to compete with heavily subsidized air travel. 

All over the world, electric trains could be used much more. An optimized electric train could go from the left coast to the east coast of the USA… In ten hours. But in California plutocrats  sabotage high speed rail….  

The French high speed train operator quit: during the time it started negotiations with California, it was able to start negotiation, build and complete a high speed line in  Morocco

The truth is, plutocrats want luxury air travel only in the USA, private and subsidized! Train, rubbing shoulders with common folks, is the enemy! 

Plutocrats have infected the planet. Macron gave the Legion of Honor to a number of extremely wealthy white males, whose single merit was wealth. One of them is David Rothschid, Macron’s ex-boss at Banque Rothschild. Macron did the Deep State trick of going from highest position in government financial inspection to private tricks organizing mergers and acquisition.

Plutocrats are destroying this planet with the wrong economic activities, at their service, whom they use taxpayer money for. The COP28 in Dubai convened that fossil fuels have to be given up, something that everybody knows, but that was an information operation to hide further investments in what they claim they want to quit. If COP28 wanted progress in the CO2 crisis, it would have announced massive research investments in new energy (say thermonuclear fusion where progress is now just a question of research activity to figure out details, that is, a question of money).

Bringing night trains all over Europe, subsidizing the ecological economy and stripping subsidies to plutocrats and their fancy toys should be the new directions, instead of forcing We The People out of cars…  And promoting wind farms at sea of dubious sustainability, let alone telling a growing country like France that she will have to spend 30% less electricity in ten years, as  the idiotic PM, a woman of prestigious diplomas and haughty socialism, but no common decency, or basic intelligence, planned to do.

Instead I suggest that the French PM be kicked out, just like the presidents of US woke universities (woke is an ideology invented in France which the French PM adheres to…)

Night trains back, private jets out… A night train between Paris and Berlin has just been reopened… From little gestures like that, genuine progress will be made… And not to be neglected, the arrogance of plutocrats will be brought down a notch.

Want to save the planet? Bring down the rule of plutocracy!

Patrice Ayme

Scientists Have Been Co-Culprit Of The CO2 Crisis. Case Of France.

An old and extremely odd position of climate specialists has been what I call the “Magical Stop”. It is because it is ridiculously anti-scientific. It was reiterated in the New York Times a few weeks ago (NYT banned my comment). According to this magical stop, stopping CO2 emissions would stop the disaster… Right away… Of course idiotic: CO2, ANTHROPOGENIC or not, last thousands of years in the atmosphere, and there is much more in the ocean, ready to come out, after re-circulation or ocean warming.
I had a monster clash about that at UC Berkeley seven years ago, lost friends, including at least two prestigious scientists and Berkeley professors… and never recovered them. Well, f… them all…
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/new-climate-lie-magical-co2-stop-possible/

Unrealistic solutions have been rolled out. Anti-nuclear positions, for example. Antihydrogen also. “GREEN” Hydrogen is immediately deployable, by using “green” energy to produce it, and then mixing it with natural gas (CH4). That was already done in France a century ago.

And also the criminal idiocy that economic degrowth was a solution…. Degrowth is the idiocy that if we use much less energy, including less electricity, we will reduce our CO2 footprint. It is pretty much the policy of the EU and especially France. It has brought a relative collapse of French GDP (say relative to GDP growth in Switzerland or Germany). And this is just a warming up (of the collapse). French government plans is to reduce electric consumption, while forcing everybody in electric cars…

WOKE FRANCE’S ELECTRIC PRODUCTION Decaying, Just Like The Country Itself In The Name Of Degrowth:. In 1999, the inflection point below, the Kremlin financed ecologists made a secret pact with the ruling French Socialists to deconstruct French nuclear energy… in the name of what would be later called wokeness (it helped that KGB Putin had just come to power):

France is full of scientists who believe in “degrowth”. It is already applied. As the graph above of Electric Production clearly shows. The only effect is that France gets weak, and the impact of whatever good French ideas there are, is decreasing into nothingness on the world stage… Or even the French stage because, thanks to deindustrialization, French fate is decided in China and the USA, and tomorrow, India..

***

The chief scientist above in the link is one of the climate fossil fuel propagandists in the guise of being the opposite. Just one of the contracts of his mother institution, UC Berkeley, with just one single oil company, was worth more than 60 million 2023 dollars… Making us believe that such enormous contracts do not influence those who get them depends upon our complete deprivation of common sense.

***

Patrice Ayme: Is UC Berkeley or the associated huge Lawrence-Berkeley lab getting financing from fossil fuel companies?

ChatGPT: As of my last update in January 2022, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have faced criticisms and protests regarding ties to fossil fuel companies. In the past, there have been instances of partnerships, funding, or research collaborations with companies involved in the fossil fuel industry.

***

Follow the science, says those who know too little… But often following science means just following scientists, and scientists, like everybody else, tend to follow the money...

Scientists have pretended that the CO2 crisis and the fossil fuel energy crisis are not as severe as they are. So-called renewables are having a neglectable impact so far and for a very long time to come. Only nuclear and hydrogen could have a significant proximal impact. Nuclear waste, from nuclear being one million times more energetic by mass than fossil fuels, is one million times less bulky than fossil fuel waste…

Another lie from well compensated scientists has been the expected rise of temperatures. Last I checked we were 1.8 C above the pre-industrial level, worldwide, but scientists pretend that’s not the case, by looking at carefully selected long term averages… If they averaged over 20,000 years, they would establish that we are still in an ice age….

Scientists want to feed their families, live in nice houses and be respected… They can get all this if they please the powers that be. So they do. With reassuring fables…

Patrice Ayme

Biden Submarine Fiasco Grab Invites Xi Attack

Biden torpedoed the contract with France which would have provided Australia with state-of-the-art Short Fin Barracuda Air Independent Propulsion submarines, the AIP version of the nuclear Suffren class. The Suffren class is the world’s most advanced sub, with electric only silent mode.

Why did Biden do that? Many in the US Deep State want the Pacific to be a new Mare Nostrum, American style. And guess what? France occupies a gigantic maritime domain right in the middle of this would be Anglosphere lake… Last thing the US needs is an Australian republic tightly allied to France: US plutocracy could lose control. The treacherous Australian PM which broke the contract with France’s Naval Group, Morrison, is now enjoying payments from US plutocratic universities and other think tanks…

At the time Biden and company lied by presenting the US nuclear attack subs as more advanced than AIP subs. Actually, in the shallow waters off China, it’s certainly the other way around as AIP subs can be less noisy than nuclear subs (the most advanced run on fuel cell and electricity… no noisy turbines and pumps).

But it turns out that, while Biden torpedoed France, its own fleet was sinking from sheer neglect. To wit a recent article in the Wall Street Journal repeating a lot of the same notions in the New York Times a few months ago (The Times censored my comment, of course, but the WSJ published it):

The Sorry State of America’s Submarine Fleet
To preserve its undersea advantage over China, the Navy should procure subs from Japan and South Korea.
By Seth Cropsey, Sept. 29, 2023. Hey, anything but French subs… Precisely because the French subs are the best, thus most threatening to the US military dominance. Nevermind that France was a founding member of NATO, and Japan and South Korea are not in it.

WSJ: The U.S. submarine fleet is in a dire state. The U.S. doesn’t have the domestic infrastructure to repair and sustain its existing subs, much less expand the fleet. America needs to get creative to sustain its undersea advantage. The Navy should procure conventionally powered submarines from U.S. allies, namely Japan and South Korea…. In the Sino-American military balance, America’s greatest advantage is its submarine fleet. Our 50 nuclear-powered attack submarines are heavily armed with torpedoes and missiles …

The U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet, however, is in lamentable shape. Of the total U.S. fleet, about 40% of vessels are in maintenance and repair facilities at any given time. This puts the fleet at roughly 30 deployable boats at best, rather than the 40 to 45 expected at operating level. In addition, the Navy is retiring two submarines a year on average, but building only three every two years, leading to a net annual decline. U.S. production looks unable to reverse this. The issue isn’t yards—although another short-term maintenance yard would ease the stress on larger facilities—but parts. Submarines are extraordinarily complex, requiring components in a lengthy supply chain. It takes years to procure the specific undersea sensors, fire-control systems and other crucial internal parts for each boat. 

So now, ironically enough, it turns out that the US can’t even maintain its attack sub force, let alone building one for Australia. A solution should be to buy French AIP subs (as many countries, including India did).

But many in the US Deep State seem to consider France to be more of a threat than China, and would rather have China dominate the sea with a considerable number of subs more silent than US nuclear attack subs…

Weakness, in military matters, invite war and aggression. The attack against Ukraine shows that the West is not ready to fight a major war. If one wants to defend the West optimally, one should augment the Defense Industrial Base, not just of the USA but also of Europe. The US can’t do it alone. So indeed civilization needs as many subs as possible, and the US should purchase a technology that it does not have (like French hydrogen fuel cell AIP from diesel!)

By withdrawing all forces from Afghanistan, even aircraft maintenance (even though Europe proposed to leave 10,000 soldiers!) Biden not only left twenty million females to the mercy of ravenous male abusers, but Biden also enticed Putin to finish his invasion of Ukraine (started under boiled noodle Obama in 2014).

By making it so that the West is weak in its submarine force, Biden is inviting Xi to attack. For historical comparison, the US submarine force was extremely strong when the imperial fascist Japanese Navy attacked Pearl harbor and the Philippines. However, a severe problem for the first two years or so, was that US torpedoes would not explode, or explode prematurely, or circle back to strike the ship which had launched them (by comparison the Japanese torpedoes worked very well). This was caused completely by policy decisions (insufficient financing, insufficient testing, etc.) [1].

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the war is turning into a drone war… 200 Ukrainian companies are producing drones. A $300 drone can destroy a million dollar tank. It takes less than ten minutes for any force to be detected and attacked, be they soldiers or armor. Western weapons have proven not superior at all. And the invading Kremlin fascists are adapting… With their own army of drones… Thanks to leaky electronics embargo against Russia…

Si vis pacem, para bellum! And if you want war, keep on lying about your weapons….

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] The Mark 14 was central to the torpedo scandal of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Submarine Force during World War II. Inadequate production planning led to severe shortages of the weapon. The frugal, Depression-era, peacetime testing of both the torpedo and its exploder was woefully inadequate and had not uncovered many serious design problems. Torpedoes were so expensive that the Navy was unwilling to perform tests that would destroy a torpedo. Furthermore, the design defects tended to mask each other.^[36] Much of the blame of the Mark 14 came from the Mark 6 exploder. In twenty months of war, torpedo after torpedo either missed by running directly under the target, prematurely exploded, or struck targets with textbook right angle hits (sometimes with an audible clang!) yet failed to explode.^[37]

The Mark 14 torpedo:

• Tended to run about 10 feet (3 m) deeper than set.
• The magnetic exploder often caused premature detonation.
• The contact exploder often failed to detonate the warhead.
• It tended to run “circular”, failing to straighten its run once set on its prescribed gyro-angle setting, and instead, to run in a large circle, thus returning to strike the firing ship.^[39]

Some of these flaws had the unfortunate property of masking or explaining other flaws. Skippers would fire torpedoes and expect the magnetic influence exploder to sink the target ship. When the torpedoes did not explode, they started to believe the magnetic influence exploder did not work. Against orders, some submariners disabled the magnetic influence feature of the Mark 6 exploder suspecting it was faulty, and went for contact exploder hits; such efforts confused the issues.

Once the torpedoes were made to work (from live testing), the Japanese merchant and war fleets were devastated, and the immense Japanese maritime empire fell apart in thousands of pieces which could hardly communicate with each other. Left stranded on desert islands, most Japanese soldiers starved to death: that’s how most Japanese who died in World War Two actually died… Around two million soldiers, while aerial bombings, including the two nukes killed *only* around 750,000…

Xi will not attack if confronted to a mighty submarine force. That’s all what pacifists need to know.

Calling France Cowardly Coverups US Empire Building From World Wars

A viewpoint common in US academia and attendant US media and Think Tanks, is that the French are “Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys“, France being an arrogant nation of ungrateful cowards waving white flags, chronically saved from enslavement by US astounding valor and abnegation.

The truth is exactly the opposite: the French are extremely valiant in war, and the fundamental security problems that France had in the Twentieth Century comes from the US, this rogue child of France, selfishly leveraging a number of aggressive anti-French fascists… worldwide, from Vietnam and Japan, all the way to Europe.

Why did the US behave so badly? What was the motive? France, Britain and other secondary European powers had world “empires”… and the USA wanted one… Actually, all of them! Here is America preening herself as a “WORLD POWER” in full “EXPANSION”, thanks to “ARMY” and “NAVY”, as represented by a US magazine in 1901, after the first conquest of the Philippines by the USA (that 40 months war, killing more than 275,000, was followed by a rebellion which lasted another 12 years).

The US propaganda likes to call France cowardly to hide the fact that the USA supported Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito, while they were marching to war… And that these “Axis” powers marched to war in part because they thought, and observed, that they had US support (helped by lip service to the contrary!)

French opposition to the Axis was not enough to deter the Axis, in light of de facto US support. In 1939-1940, France declared war to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan… Among others. Britain sided with France, but the USA fed the enemy.

In their dearth of historical wisdom, naivety and lack of anticipation, Axis powers didn’t realize they were falling into a US trap. This is why the US betrayed France, and democracy, and civilization! A trap which was very profitable short and long term to US plutocracy… much of the soul of the US Deep State.

Had the USA aligned itself with long held French positions against fascism at the time, World War Two would not have happened, or the Axis would have been promptly defeated with relatively few deaths. No holocausts. And an immense drawback, as far as the US Deep State was concerned: the US empire would only be one of many, and not the largest.

Calling France cowardly, calling the nation with the most wars and battles in the history of civilization cowardly is completely outrageous to common sense. It’s impossible to find a single year in more than 15 centuries since France defeated the Goths, when France was not at war… one way or another.

Examples: French soldiers died in combat in Africa and the Middle East in 2023. Just a few, but some. And more wars are brewing: both the US and France refused in September 2023 to evacuate their armies from Niger after a coup there.

Calling France cowardly in World War Two is an example of the Biggest Lie Technique: the most cowardly country in WW2, at the geostrategic level, was the USA. The USA led by plutocrat Roosevelt, exchanged the death of more than 90 millions and most Jews against the built-up of its own empire… by NOT helping France fight the Nazis.

HITLER declared war TO the USA on December 11 1941… Yes, four days after Pearl Harbor, I think it was a Thursday. Hitler went to his pupeet parliament, the Reichstag, and made a discourse declaring war to the USA. The seemingly bovine Americans couldn’t even rescue their honor, after the vile Japanese imperial attack!

On September 3, 1939, after an ULTIMATUM (to get out of Poland), FRANCE declared war TO HITLER. The USA betrayed civilization and humanity by not helping her parent and creator, France. The USA never declared war to Axis Japan, Germany and Italy. The USA found itself at war after the Axis declared war TO the USA. Eternal shame. And, more deeply, a question: how come the US Deep State is not put to the question by US Academia on that matter?

Inspecting the details makes the situation even worse: US plutocrats were making massive business and tech transfers with the Nazis… Including US banks, most major US industrial companies, plutocrats such as the Bush family patriarch, or lawyers such as the Dulles brothers, who represented more than 1,000 Nazi companies. The Dulles brothers ruled over the CIA and the US Department of State after the war. The war against the Spanish population by a rogue army of fascists empowere by Hitler and Mussolini, was made possible on US credit and equipment, not just US oil (graciously sold to the Nazis).

Japan conquered and massacred China, thanks to US oil… For a full decade… Before the USA cut the flow, triggering the Japanese dash to Indonesian oil (and thus Pearl Harbor). Mussolini was such a pawn of US big oil, that Italian resistants hanged him and his retinue from a US gas station in 1945. And so on…

Even the USSR got massively financed, invested and supported by the USA …while France was not. Why? Divide and conquer. By giving half of Europe to Stalin, Roosevelt knew that he was neutralizing the US plutocracy’s greatest competitor… the most powerful European nation states. For example, even the Netherlands controlled gigantic Indonesia, while Portugal, which held Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique had an immense influence zone in Africa… the rest of which was under French and British control, except for Ethiopia.

All of this is relevant to the war in Ukraine… and who supports whom and for which reasons. and the potentialities of future developments. The Kremlin has been trying to control, exploit, invade and ravage Ukraine and Eastern Europe for three centuries. However the USA was clearly not always the friend of Eastern Europe it tries to masquerade into recently. Both in 1919 at Versailles and before and during WW2, the USA stabbed Eastern Europe in the back… Example: Although Poland courageously refused to accommodate Hitler in 1939, and was as a result nearly annihilated by the Nazis and the Kremlin (who were allies), the US carefully betrayed Poland, this old French ally and sister country, in 1945…

One can see what some in the US Deep State are thinking in Ukraine: wait… Are we making European democracy too strong? How come French missiles (Storm Shadow/SCALP) are making deep strikes, including on the Russian Navy in Sevastopol? Is the European Union a French empire by another name, and Britain is its ally? Is that why the dollar is so weak and the Euro so strong? No doubt alarm bells are ringing in Washington… while Macron stands with Ukraine “jusqu’a la victoire!”

Europe reassuming its natural superiority after plutocratic and US machinations and conspiracies in the Twentieth Century caused it to fail, is the deepest threat to US plutocracy… Short of course from robotic allies of US plutocracy such as Xi or Putin suffering from a major technical malfunction and going nihilistic the nuclear way…

Patrice Ayme

California, Switzerland, France, Or Why Direct Democracy Is Superior

French Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne succeeded the competitive exam to the Polytechnique school, and then came out among the best. Does that mean she has a good level in math, does that mean she is good politician? Merkel was a physicist (applied) with a PhD… But she shut down nuclear for lunatic reasons (tsunamis in the middle of Germany?), and choose instead coal and of course her colleague Putin (Merkel was a Russian speaking “Communist” government official of the DDR, and Putin was a German speaking Kremlin spy and special agent of the KGB inside the DDR, feeding the Red Army Faction, and its ilk… )

PM Borne has a master’s degree in mathematics by equivalence… Well, so what?
Borne saw solving partial differential equations…
A polytechnician is not a mathematician, at best a socially ambitious baby engineer. A competitive beast who tends to think that having a big competitive brain at 20 gives you mastery of real life.
And a vulgar mathematician is not necessarily a deep thinker. Borne’s statement on the need to reduce CO2 emissions in France, and the need to do in a few years what has not been done for decades reflects a singularly narrow-minded mentality…. typical of common mathematicians, namely a delirious non-observation of the real world… a trait too often characteristic of French pseudo-intellectuals, an escape from reality.
California has a higher GDP than Germany (from high tech). Switzerland has a GDP per capita equal to that of California (from high tech, big pharma). What these two states have in common is direct democracy and not just being run by a pseudo-mathematician with all the answers to the five or six equations she knows.

***

I rule, therefore you don’t need to think? Too much fascism does not make a country smartest. Look at all those flags and sabers…

Both Athens and Rome, when they flourished, were places of the highest intellect and thus the most superior technology… and the latter made them superior economically and militarily. France used to be democratically, and human rights superior to all during the period 500 CE-1610 CE (forgetting for a moment crusades, Cathars, Vaudois, inquisition and religious wars)… England’s democratic structures, implemented by the rogue Frenchmen thriving there during the Middle Ages, became clearly superior after 1688 CE, while France sank below her own horizon with the demented Sun king; however a closer examination shows that French peasants, however poor, owned their lands, and the British peasant didn’t. In 1789 CE, both France and the US adopted the equality of rights (the UK still doesn’t have it: look at the chamber of “Lords”, not just the clownish monarchy).

Nowadays, France is definitively less democratic than California and Switzerland, and it shows in the ability of France to pay her own bills...

***

Partial French version:

Une maitrise (master) en mathématiques par équivalence… Bon, et alors?

Borne a vu résoudre des équations différentielles partielles…

Un polytechnicien n’est pas un mathématicien, au mieux un bébé ingénieur socialement ambitieux. Une bête à concours qui tend à penser qu’avoir un gros cerveau compétitif à 20 ans donne la maitrise du reel.

Et un vulgaire mathématicien n’est pas nécessairement un penseur profond. La déclaration de Borne sur la nécessité de réduire les émissions de CO2 en France, et la nécessité de faire en quelques années ce qui n’a pas été fait depuis des décennies reflètent une mentalité singulierement bornée…. typique des mathématiciens communs, à savoir une non-observation délirante du monde réel… un trait trop souvent caractéristique des pseudo-intellectuels français, une fuite hors du réel.

La Californie a un PIB supérieur à l’Allemagne. La Suisse a un PIB par habitant égal à celui de la Californie. Ce que ces deux États ont en commun, c’est la démocratie directe et ne pas être simplement dirigé par une pseudo-mathématicienne avec toutes les réponses aux cinq ou six équations qu’elle connait.

Patrice Ayme

US Health Greed Is A Category Error

While the Democrats criminally prosecute their main opponent with the allegation of spying, a first in a representative democracy, it is appropriate to consider what the Democrats claimed has been their greatest achievement in decades… Healthcare.

Democrats were extremely at fault when they set up the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). ACA was a complete lie. The entire idea, inspired by free enterprise, was a category error. Obama said health care would profit from… competition in the marketplace. Patients were supposed to go to “exchanges” and purchase the best product with an eye on affordability… as if health was a stock exchange.

Obama called this ACA his “signature achievement”. Later, confronted with the abysmal failure, millions of US citizens dead, Obama fanatics claimed that Obama did not have a supermajority, so Obama could not fix healthcare. That was a lie. (Besides Republicans in the past set up the HMO system under Nixon, and Medicare Part D under G W Bush… So there is no proof Republicans are what prevents Democrats from acting…)

Obama claimed that the act of smart purchase would solve the healthcare affordability and availability crisis. Obama claimed healthcare was just a question of the free market: augment the competition, and the price of healthcare will go down… As it does for… cars (price of cars has been going up, in spite of many more models out there than ever before).

Obamacare is what is called in philosophy a category error. Obama claimed that health was all about buying and selling. Care was supposed to be improved by… competition, that is, greed. 

In truth all countries with universal health coverage have eliminated competition for basic healthcare…. and for profit health care insurance. Obamacare ended up financing private insurance with public funds, ensuring that the US healthcare system, per capita, is 50% more expensive than any other system, with the disastrous outcome of a collapse of US life spans. Such a collapse was only seen before in the ex-Soviet Union

The complexity of the US healthcare system was only increased by Obamacare, and complexity means cost: where France has just one computerized individual health card for all and any patient, the “carte vitale” used for all health transactions, with all medical records and drugs on it, the US has… 10,000 different health plans! 

Another problem in the US is outright greed: many top administrators are paid fortunes in the US system, sometimes hundreds of millions. The equivalent jobs in other countries simply don’t exist.  

Obama’s lunacy was a combination of insufficient ability for study, and greedy gullibility: he just did what the health insurers told him to do. Now Obama has three mansions, all in locales for the wealthy, two on expensive islands… so, as far as he is concerned, he is ahead and you are losers. This may sound harsh, but Obama literally had the Vice President of a health insurer write down “Obamacare”. To be more corrupt than that, one has to visit Putin’s Kremlin.

But then, as the Biden Ukraine related tapes say:”We are OK, because we never paid the big guy directly“…

Obama explained on Netflix in 2023, that’s the way it is… There are winners and leaders (like himself), and then there is the great abject mass below… Those without mansions, and who can’t afford healthcare… more than ever, thanks to the system Obama installed, Obamacare… Should we call it more authentically: Obamagreed? 

With Democrats like that, the US public got completely trumped.

Patrice Ayme

France 100% Allied With Ukraine, Must Go To “War Economy”. Francophobic, Treacherous New York Times Allies With Putin

Which side of the Ukraine war is which side of the Democratic establishment on? Well, Obama was on Putin’s side, and clearly Biden is on Zelinskyi’s side. However, the propagandist New York Times does not forget that its number one enemy is France. Let me quote: An Endgame for Ukraine, June 6, 2023:…”How should this end?

We can start by listing the ways in which it shouldn’t. The first is the one suggested last year by President Emmanuel Macron of France. “We must not humiliate Russia,” he argued, “so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” At the time, to “not humiliate Russia” was code for allowing Russia to preserve its ill-gotten gains while it was on the offensive.”

That’s a pack of lying shit. And the NYT did even worse, after lying about Macron, the NYT advocates that 20% of Ukraine, including Crimea, should be given to Putin:”Winning comes in two flavors. The first, and riskier, is … to push Russia out of the territories it seized in this war, to retake Crimea and the breakaway “republics” in the east. This is what Ukrainians want, and what they are morally and legally entitled to.

But retaking Crimea will be hard, and even success will come with costs, primarily in the form of populations that aren’t necessarily eager to be liberated by Kyiv. Hence the second flavor: To help Ukraine restore its pre-February 2022 borders, but no further —”

Is the NYT completely senile? It advocates doing exactly what it claims to be outraged by, and, in contradiction of evidence, what it attributes to Macron. 

Amazingly, after sitting on my comment correcting them for hours, the NYT allowed the following to be published. No NYT reader “recommended “ it:.. Showing that not only the NYT is a problem for civilization, but so is its readership, apparently made of decerebrated, angry, gullible robots.

By “not humiliating Russia“, Macron meant just that, and only that. France officially will not negotiate returning Ukraine to anything less than her pre-2014 borders. No reward for aggression. The dozens of long range, high precision, ultra mobile French CAESAR 155mm guns have proven the most useful part of Ukrainian artillery: just one of them mounted on a barge forced the Russian to surrender Snake Island. Other howitzers tend to get destroyed by counter-battery fire… while a CAESAR is gone in seconds after a volley.  

Zelinskyi was provided, during his last tour, a jumbo jet from the French Republic, and he went all the way to Japan and back with it, under french colors for the whole world to see. So definitively, Macron is in Zelinskyi’s camp. 

Putin can’t be rewarded with one centimeter of Ukrainian territory, because, if he were, all could see that aggression pays… In any case, Putin will not negotiate… because his regime would collapse if he did. 

Even if Putin’s forces were ejected from Ukraine, Putin would keep on fighting. Fighting justifies Putin’s tyranny. So the West has to get ready for a very long war, barring the miracle of Putin’s personal disappearance…. Which could well happen as units of the Russian army and Wagner PMC have started to ambush and shoot at each other…

The run-up to full world war two in 1939  started in 1931, in China, and lasted 8 years. Too few countries took it seriously (or then, like the USA, and the USSR, decided to take advantage of the increasing conflict: US plutocrats made money all over, especially from trading with fascist regimes, for example selling oil to Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito; or developing Stalin’s oil). French president Macron has said that “France needs to go into a war economy”. Well, all the West does need to go to a war economy if it does not want the war with fascism to get way worse. Deterrence works, even during a world war! After all, the Nazis didn’t even try to use the gigantic reserves of nerve gas that they had, knowing that if they did, their population would be exterminated in return!

Patrice Ayme. 

Fascism Weaponized French Early Retirement

French retirement used to be at 65 during the “30 glorious years”, the time of reconstruction which followed World War Two [1]. Then Mitterand became president and lowered retirement to 60. This was a trick to weaken the French People. It worked. Mitterand was a fake socialist and true demagogue: as an authentic fascist, having launched his career wih fascism, Mitterand received the francisque medal from his boss the racist dictator Philippe Pétain, a collaborator of Adolf Hitler, who was condemned to death as a traitor upon liberation from Nazism [2]. Mitterand instead of having been tried as a traitor became a politician. The fascist Mitterand is vastly admired in France, a proof of national derangement.

The socioeconomic theory behind lowering to 60 was that the fewer older people worked, the more young people would go to work. The opposite happened: GDP grew less, and so there were fewer jobs overall. Indeed, older workers have expertise, younger workers do not. Left to the young and arrogant, France became incompetent. Mitterand and his right wing PM, Balladur privatized companies that Mitterand and his Communists had just nationalized, by giving their leadership to young people who knew-nothing, yet viewed with awe, as they came from grandes écoles (where their families’ background had made sure to put them).

The practical result was that the French economy crashed and is still crashing. Art 14.5% of GDP France spends twice more on retirement relative to GDP than the USA. Germany spends 10.4%. While tyrannies are doing their best to launch and win a world war, and hundreds of thousands were killed or gravely wounded as a result in Europe alone, Paris spends only 1.9% of GDP on its military… while leaving Africa to be reorganized by China and Putin’s Wagner “Private Military Corporation”…. Paid in part by a French deficit is 5% of GDP… and more borrowing, at ever higher rates, keeps the state going.

As work got decimated in France, the ultra rich rose to prominence and pulled the levers: France is embellished with the world’s wealthiest man, and the wealthiest woman… The former from selling overpriced trinkets (luxury), the latter from rents (and not paying taxes). 

France has also the second highest taxes in term of GDP, just behind Denmark… taxes for the common person, that is. The ultra rich families mostly avoid taxation, having engineered the tax code that way (as in the USA, but even relatively more so). 

17 million French retirees live from sucking the energy of 23 million workers. As recently as 2014, they earned 106%, that is, more, than the average French wage earner. As the country slowly collapses, from the lack of attractivity of compensated work, this strange dependency has bought civil peace. Ah, but there is a war…. And the war is actually related to the weakness of the West and of France in particular: leaving an entire continent such as Africa, to the mercy of dictators Putin and Xi has consequences: all Africans want to move to France (they get generous social benefits)… while, of course, as most of them can’t do so, hating France.

In 1940, Stalin was allied to Hitler, and brand new French planes were not armed because authorities were afraid that the Moscow addicted workers would seize the guns. Consequence? The defeat of May 1940… Which put Mitterand and his ilk in power…

A spectacular spiral of evil.

UlTRA WEALTH IS FASCIST And UNEMPLOYMENT ITS FRIEND:

The power of hyper wealthy families has been growing in France enormously (that can be measured in their size in the financial markets). Following North America and Asia, Europe is controlled by the ultra-wealthy . In 2021, the top countries for the ultra-wealthy were France (30,000), Germany (28,000), U.K. (25,000) and Italy (17,000). Each of them has more than 30 million dollars of net worth, the level at which the 100% Roman Republic wealth tax applied. France, relative to population has nearly 1/3 more ultra wealthy than Germany… No wonder all the strikes…

The power of the ultra-wealthy is inversely related to the power of We The People. So to grow and prosper, the ultra wealthy need to weaken We The People. And how do they do that? As under the Roman Empire, successor to the Roman Republic: they deprive We The People of employment. So send the jobs to China, de-industrialize: in 1946, any little French town had a factory. Now, of the 20 or so so-called French car models sold in France, only one is really made in France. (Similarly US electric cars would not exist without Chinese manufacturing as the fundamental elements of batteries are made there.)

Early in the Roman Republic, 25 centuries ago, to get more rights, the Roman Plebs went on strike, retiring to a hill. Rome completely stopped functioning. The Plebs got its rights. Why? Because without the Plebs, Rome could’t not work. This is why the tyrannical empire made sure that the Plebs had no work, or at least no important work. In the modern Western world, the employed Plebs is in China, making important devices, and China is where the power is, and the French Plebs has little residual power: it goes on strike, but cars are made somewhere else.

***

David Mcmahon: “The socioeconomic theory behind lowering to 60 was that the fewer older people worked, the more young people would go to work“That is a key part of the flawed socialist outlook – they believe in a zero sum economy. In other words, there is a fixed pie, and for young people to work, old people have to exit the workforce. That is inaccurate, in fact reality is the opposite.

PA: Absolutely! I have a friend who is a senior French executive (C suite) long detached in the USA in a fully owned subsidiary company of a major international French company. When he decided to return to France he discovered that all his mentors had gone into “pre-retirement”. So those senior executives retired at a time when their expertise had fully matured! Their US equivalent had 8 years of maximum productivity, leadership and mentorship to contribute. My friend then discovered he had nothing to return to….

I think to call that self-destructive behavior “socialist” is too nice a euphemism. It’s more like vampirism: suck the blood until the victim collapses. Epic failures are multiplying in France and much of the rest of Europe. Some are totally self-inflicted, like the ban on gas fracking in France: French ecologists believe gas is OK, as long as it comes from Putin, Qatar, or Wyoming… Ironically, but as a direct consequence of these nonsensical policies, France is more and more controlled by the… hyper rich… thanks to the stupidification they generate…

***

AS FRANCE GOES, SO DOES THE REST 

Some will say: oh, but the retired French just want to party. However, it’s not that simple: France was the core of Western civilization, over a millennium, creating in the process Italy (freed from the Lombards, 8C, and Islamists, 11C), Spain (north freed from Islamists circa 800 CE), Germany (christianized, civilized and unified by Frankish conquest, 400s to 800 CE), England (conquered and re-romanized, 1066 CE), the Netherlands (80 year war against Spain in the Netherlands, part of the 200 year war between France and Spain, which Spain finally lost). 

France is also the geographical core, the crossroads, in more ways than one. 

As France goes, so does the rest (with the notable exception of the US, child of Britain and France, with its own teenage personality…. 

Actually Britain has been going through a similar process of deindustrialization, no better than France (better GDP behavior in the UK was correlated to more input from Russian oligarchs and their ilk… the result of which was the Brexit insanity ). Italy has been even worse.

Right now, the French population is clueless. It has been clueless before in similar sitation of grave danger.

In 1939, courageously, the French government declared war to Hitler who was allied to Francoist Spain, fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and the genocidal Stalin… among others. However, thereafter, France sort of relaxed: the mood, deep down inside was grim, but superficially all about dancing and the good life. It was called the “Drole de Guerre” (Fynny War). 

Well, come Spring, the gory Norwegian campaign started, with victory but severe Franco-British losses to the invading Nazis. Then came the catastrophe of May 1940, when the french army was sent on a foo’s errant, while the Nazi army fueled by Stalin cut it from behind. 

Let it not be the same!

Patrice Ayme 

***

[1] For more background see WSJ: The Party Is Ending for French Retirees
All advanced economies face demographic strains, but France’s stand out; now President Macron wants to raise the legal retirement age to 64.

***

[2] Pétain  was a complicated figure, and he had a hopeless task. Pétain had to navigate among the fascists (Pétain told Franco not to collaborate with Hitler to the point of letting Hitler’s army through Spain…). After Allied landings in November 1942 in North Africa, Pétain secretly ordered Admiral Darlan, then in Algeria, to merge the French forces in Africa with those of the Allies. But, at the same time, he published official messages protesting the landing.

Pétain’s double-dealing was probably necessary. But Mitterand embraced only one side of the double-dealing, the fascist side (although, like many fascists he proclaimed later it ain’t what it looked like… enough French believed him to elect hi president.)  

The inventor of retirement at sixty, Mitterand, on the right (of course!) receiving from Marshall Pétain, the fascist-in-chief, the highest medal of the Vichy junta. From Travail, Famille, Patrie to Chomage, Famine, Party.

France Wakes Up In Ukraine Bringing Fatally Comical Kremlin’s Antics

PUTIN, TERRORIZED BY FRENCH & US ADVANCED WEAPONS, CALLS FOR A CEASEFIRE!

Abstract: Victim of its own philosophy of  hedonism, laziness, entitlement, superficialism, wokism, Politically Correct thinking and judiciary, Europe disarmed to the point that most European weapon programs were experimental and demonstrative, rather than practical and capable of fighting a serious war. Meanwhile Europe encouraged the Kremlin to believe it could get away with being a force that mattered, and still mysteriously profited from the aura of decolonization from way back in the 1950s, when the tyrannical USSR and its gigantic empire was presented as good and liberating, and democratic Europe colonizing and oppressive..

When Putin invaded in a way that couldn’t be denied anymore, European countries found themselves defenseless. This greatly explained the apparent French and German reluctance to help Ukraine: they were not ready to fight Russia, from lack of armaments. This has not changed much: building weapons takes years. But the Russian military power has been considerably degraded.

French president Macron suddenly changed his ways, deciding to send to Ukraine the world’s most sophisticated anti-ballistic … And then… tanks!

Finally!

But there may be a method to the madness: European countries, NATO, were too weak militarily to counterattack boldly. Within a day, tyrant Putin proclaimed a unilateral ceasefire!

Just as in a comic book for little kids: the Putin chicken was not playing anymore!

***.  

So the ex head of Roscosmos, the Russian NASA is a fanatic of Putin and the Kremlin Above All spirit. So Dmitry Rogozin goes to Ukraine to fight.Next he and a vast throng of Kremlin grandees gather in a hotel to celebrate Rogozin’s 59th birthday. What do you think happens? Shells fired by Ukrainians explode, the head of Roscosmos is hit in the spine. He is evacuated, operated on. He is a man of the world, he has negotiated and collaborated with NASA, ESA, and the French CNES, among others. 

The surgeons extract shrapnel from the Roscosmos chief’s spine. The Kremlin grandees thought they were too far from the front to be shelled. But not far enough for GPS guided rocket assisted shells from a French Caesar gun. 

The French shell shrapnel is identified in that Roscosmos’ spine.

The head of Roscosmos thinks of himself as smart. So he sent the shrapnel to president Macron of France, the one who provided the Caesar guns. “Please pass on the fragment cut from my spine by surgeons to Emmanuel Macron,”

What does Macron do? Well, he reacts as he should have had, from the start. With a bit of delay, Macron has become smart too. Macron may have finally discovered that talking to Putin is like talking to Hitler: no point talking to hate personified, and self-delusion of such grandeur, one can remake history as it never was.

Or maybe Macron and France, just as Scholtz and Germany, confronted to the unthinkable, Hitler reincarnated, thermonuclear version, were trying to gain time. Eastern Europe gave lots of weapons to Ukraine, but often from old Soviet procurement.

You see, unbelievably, the leaders of the West didn’t see the obvious: in a mechanism very similar to what happened with Hitler, the leaders of the West and their think tanks, or more exactly their Western oligarchs, had decided that, because Putin, like Hitler, had been enabled by them, they owned him, just as in the 1930s their predecessors thought they owned Hitler, or Mussolini, or Hirohito, or Stalin… But all they were left with was Spain’s Franco.... 

Indeed, vainglorious vengeance minded idiots like Putin and Hitler resent being owned, and they are too stupid to know their masters. 

The end result is that the West, including to some extent the US, but particularly Western Europe, was not ready for war: they thought that, since they wanted peace, they should make war impossible, by being unable to conduct it. Putin only saw he could grab the cake, and nobody could stop him. The tyrant said so explicitly in 2014: “the problem Europe has is that I can be in Kyiv in two weeks“. To appease Putin, Obama sent MREs (Meals Ready to Eat to the Ukrainians). Later, Trump would send some anti tank weapons… But then, shortly after Biden’s election, the US Democratic Congress stopped the planned delivery of those weapons. Delivery was resumed six months later, in November 2021, but by then Putin had decided to attack (because he withheld gas delivery to Europe as soon as summer 2021)

Germany was, and is, incredibly weak, Britain had no army, as usual, and France was only strong in her aviation and nuclear forces. Western European weapons were better than the Russian ones (which used crucially Western electronics, or even French military equipment)… But there were all too very few. 

Thus France and Germany had little to provide, and budget constraints. Ukrainians, though, were told to pass direct contracts with the French and German military industrial complexes. Until recently, they didn’t (I don’t know why; maybe they have no  money; US weapons are free… They just buy good will…)

In any case, Macron gets Rogozin’s shrapnel… back to the sender!

What does he do? Macron suddenly sees at last that he is confronted to madmen who feel so entitled they take for granted that them getting hurt when they invade a democracy is… An outrage! In other words Putin and his entourage are maniacs beyond belief (Macron had already said this about Putin who, Macron said, was laughing when hearing about alleged atrocities of the Russians in Ukraine: those are actors, he told Macron… who added he really didn’t know what to say, in front of such a level of lunacy…

Once I knew a mad woman, and tried to help her. I even visited her in her psychiatric asylum (she apparently became psychotic from smoking pot, by the way…) I remember listening to her. She thought the CIA was after her… They were really coming, at the door… Listening to the entourage of Putin sounds similar… 

Macron decides that France will send French made tanks to Ukraine! These are the first  Western tanks sent to Ukraine… (And from a NATO founding member!).

The French decision was “the first time a Western-designed tank will be delivered to Ukraine. Symbolically, it’s important,” said François Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

In the following days the US and Germany decided to send armored personnel carriers (which are not tanks)… because France decided to provide tanks with powerful guns, the AMX 10. Germany and the US followed, with simple armored personnel carriers a day later. Those APCs are armed with a 26 mm gun. The AMX10 French tank can pulverize dozens of armored personnel carriers in minutes with its 105 mm gun. By comparison, the famous M4 Sherman tank of WWII had a 75 mm gun…  AMX 10 are also mounted on enormous wheels, not tracks, and this means that they can move much faster, and further, than tracked vehicles… And Ukraine favor swift advances through bewildered Russian orcs (the “orc” label to qualify savage eastern invaders is more than 1,000 years old…)

France is also sending to Ukraine ASTER 30 NT, an anti-aircraft, anti-ballistic, 60 gs acceleration (that is 600 meters per second change of speed, per second, one mile per second interceptor also known as MAMBA, or “Sea Viper” (on UK Royal Navy ships). ASTER is for AeroSpatiale TERminale.  It’s the French Patriot, but more modern.

Finally. Advanced Western heavy weapons for Ukraine.

France often congratulates herself to be the country of human rights, and rightly so… Not just for enabling the USA to win its war of independence, or for the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789… Or for recognizing the equal rights of gay people in the… Sixteenth Century. But also for creating England, Germany, repelling enslaving Islam from 721 CE to… much more recent times… and for outlawing the slave trade of citizens as early as the Seventh Century… And even earlier than that, by putting an end to Christian anti-heretic terror.

One must crush infamy, as Voltaire put it.

What’s more infamous than Putin?

Even Hitler didn’t threaten to extinguish all of humanity, but Putin did (and his allies, friends if not lovers like the head of Russia Today insist that Putin will engage in a nuclear world war, and believe that’s a good thing! [1]. After the war, they should all be tried for crimes against humanity.)

Suddenly, apparently struck and dumbfounded by large Western weapons coming his way, Russian Tyrant Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russian forces will conduct a 36-hour ceasefire in observance of Russian Orthodox Christmas. It is likely an information operation intended to damage Ukraine’s reputation… but it may also reflect the desperate state of the Russian Donetsk front, and an attempt to reposition and arm units damaged by Ukrainian fire.

Putin has to be relentlessly defeated. Anything less will actually augment the risk of nuclear war. By encouraging him and his helpers 

Patrice Ayme
Sent to Ukraine now: French tank AMX 10 firing its main 105 mm gun in Afghanistan [2]:

[1] Margarita Simonyan, an intimate of Putin, obviously, and one of the primary mouthpieces for the Kremlin, said: “Either we lose in Ukraine, or the Third World War starts. I think World War Three is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our Putin.

“The most incredible outcome, that all this will end with a nuclear strike, seems more probable to me than the other course of events….“This is an horror… But on the other hand, it is what it is. We will go to heaven, while they will simply croak… We’re all going to die someday.”“

(She said that as early as April 2022. Shortly afterward, RT and similar Nazi Kremlin propaganda was banned from Europe. Since then she repeated it many times. 

***

[2] The French invented tanks… Actually, French tanks were the first motor vehicles on land (18th Century; just a few were made). Here’s an excerpt from a former US Marine that once served together with the French forces in Afghanistan, detailing his experience about this Armored fighting vehicle in particular.
“One giant advantage the French had over us was with their use of tanks. We maintain an armored force that’s fantastic at defeating T-80s crossing the Fulda Gap, not quite so fantastic at fighting insurgents in mountainous valleys. The French had AMX-10(RCR)s, light wheeled tanks that were perfect for counterinsurgency combat. They were a tremendous force multiplier.
One night before a major operation, I was laid out in the dirt on an outpost perimeter. I had fallen asleep at midnight. At 3 a.m. a tremendous explosion woke me. I lay still for a few moments, then asked a Marine on guard, “What the hell was that?”
He answered, “I don’t know, but something went right over our heads.”
When the sun rose, I was stunned to see an AMX-10 halfway up a mountain behind the outpost. A brave and/or stupid tank crew had rolled up a narrow trail in the dark, and hit some Taliban.
I didn’t envy the poor driver who had to negotiate that trail. Or the loader who I’m sure had to walk ahead of the tank, knowing that if he made a mistake his crew was rolling down the mountain. As a former tanker, I can tell you that driving a tank up a mountain in the dark isn’t something cowards do.” ~ Chris Hernandez, Former US Marine tanker and infantryman-turned-author.