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…

Is Europe Making The Same Civilizational Error As Rome? Not Advancing Technology Maximally While It Can, And Should?

Ecology never stands alone, it always rests on technology, since there is a genus Homo and it rules with its culture, tools and weapons [1]. Today’s Europe has, naively and in spite of history, opted for “degrowth“. So had Rome in its time… but unwittingly… It didn’t end up too well. Just as Putin invading Ukraine… The world’s largest metal mine, Rio Tinto, crucial to the Roman economy, evoked below, got attacked by the mysterious Tauri (under Marcus Aurelius) in 172 CE (and thereafter)… And didn’t recover. This caused among other things, a devastating devaluation of currency…

When tyranny got established in Rome, panem et circenses (bread and circus) were provided to the People. But what Rome needed was subsidized food coming from Egypt, and Taylor Swift, but hard core technology. Instead, it stayed stuck with slavery, and a semi welfare state, emptying the core (Italy) while enriching global plutocrats. 

Europe, having misinterpreted history under the influence of so-called “French Theory” is repeating that pattern. “French Theory”, a US term, was the original wokism, which infected US universities’ “humanity” departments decades ago… “French Theory” infected France, progressively and ever more, after the ruinous victory of WW1 stolen from France and Britain by the crafty and greedy US Deep State. “French Theory” is basically a general appeasement, fundamentally sensual defeatism, generalized to… all the way to… child molesters (those used to be esteemed in France up to very recently…) 

Europe, and the world, like Rome at its apex, have huge ecological problems. Rome depended upon a number of technologies which couldn’t be used anymore, because of their limitations. For example the extraction of metals… Although the subject has not been studied as it deserves by lazy academics, it’s clear that Rome came short in metals… and also probably wood (as Athens had, much earlier). Global trade depended upon thousands of cargo ships. That in turn caused military food and procurement problems. The world has the same situation now, fossil fuels and military advantage becoming increasingly problematic. 

The solution is to advance technologically. Even Obama understood that, by subsidizing SpaceX, for example. 

Europe has opted for panem et circenses at this point, whereas much of the advanced world has opted for advancing tech. Not just the USA, but also China, India, Japan, etc. At this point Europe can’t launch a satellite with its own means… Iran just launched three… with its own rocket…

As Rome collapsed under its own corruption, Gaul used the leverage of its more advanced and productive metallurgy to make heavy plows which overturned the rich soils of north-west Europe, enabling a well-fed and large population… By the Thirteenth Century France’s population was 20 million, at least a fourth of the maximal imaginable population of the Roman empire. The Franks outlawed slavery in the Seventh Century, fostering ulterior tech advances.

It goes without saying that the present European Union, with its institutionalized wokism, is refusing to develop, as much as it could, for reasons very similar to those of the Roman empire. Roman emperors, starting with Vespasian (circa 70 CE) refused to let engineer deployed machines under the pretext that machines would cause unemployment… We hear the same whining with AI now….

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Sun Chainik chimed in responding to me in the Wall Street Journal: “Fighting climate will kill both the EU and the US. Delusional.“

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Fighting the climate is silly, but adapting to it, smart.

If one burned all fossil fuels, there would be a runaway greenhouse. Not smart. 

The mistake Rome made was not to adapt to the changing ecology in such a way that it could keep on growing: Rome didn’t have the technology to extract metals once it had exhausted the old mines. It could have had it. But, under the fascist plutocratic emperors, choose not to develop tech. Rio Tinto, once massively exploited in Rome, saw no extraction for 17 centuries…. Until new tech arrived. The lack of metals made it impossible to resist even the Muslims (although all metal roofs of Rome were stripped in the effort!). Rio Tinto:

This is very much man-made, very beautiful pollution… 5,000 years old. Carthage exploited in for four centuries before Roman conquest… Traces of the man-made metal pollution from Rio Tinto have been found in the fossil clams and soil of the Gulf of Cadiz and all the way to Greenland… It was the Roman, and world’s, largest mine (region). The tunnels extended nearly 150 meters deep. Water was evacuated by giant water wheels, 6 or 7 meters acrodd… After a period of abandonment, starting in 180 CE, the mines were rediscovered in 1556 CE and the Spanish government began operating them a bit once again in 1724. As a result of the mining, Rio Tinto is notable for being very acidic (pH 2). Its deep reddish hue is due to sulfide-consuming bacteria and other extremophiles that amplify the acidification process. These organisms give the river its red hue in part from iron, copper, zinc and arsenic dissolved in the water…

Fortunately, right now, tech is adapting quickly in most places. And Europe could change policies.

Example: French Safran is providing US plane maker Electra with a hybrid turbojet that will load in flight batteries of a ten passenger plane that will be able to take off in 100 feet and fly 500 miles in two hours. Thousands of these planes, which will revolutionize transportation, have already been ordered.

So Europe has the capacity to advance. Right now, it’s killed by the advocates of degrowth. Degrowth is what happened to Rome after Trajan, under the Antonine emperors… And then it got worse. 

Perhaps Trump and Putin are Europe’s best friends, as they could well cause Europe to wake up technologically!

Patrice Ayme

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[1] So is man Homo Faber (Homo Tool, Homo the Fabricator…) or… HOMO ECOLOGICUS? The latter is more general: one of our tool weapon and effect is the ecology itself (see the savages using fire for ecological husbandry…).

Regulating Artificial Intelligence Is Regulating Intelligence: Tyrants Are Stirring

A tyrant… is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. (Plato.)

Some of the tyrants want a war against… Intelligence!

Europe has a deepening problem: long at the technological forefront of civilization, the EU does not want to be there anymore. Don Quixote was after windmills, Europe is after AI, Artificial Intelligence. In Europe’s vivid, but vile and woke imagination, civilization as a mission has been identified with colonialism, thus abuse, racism, etc. War against tyrant Putin is scarry and onerous, but war against the advancement of science and technology is easy, and an old European tradition: the first steam engine successfully installed on the first steam boat invented in Germany by a refugee Huguenot professor of engineering, was destroyed by monks stirred up by this devilish invention… which was clearly going to steal jobs away from the rowers and sailors of Europe… And indeed, has done so.

Now Eurocrats doing their Brussels dictatorial thing, want to be at the forefront of regulating AI. Some of humanity innovate, Eurocrats, in the footsteps of their Byzantine ancestors and mentors, regulate to death.

The New York Times, terrified from a possible loss of media plutocratic control soon to be, rises the alarm: “How Nations Are Losing a Global Race to Tackle A.I.’s Harms
Alarmed by the power of artificial intelligence, Europe, the United States and others are trying to respond — but the technology is evolving more rapidly than their policies.“

AI harms? Which harms? CHAT GPT is a wonderful way of learning… And CHAT GPT is what the terrified plutocrats are alluding to…. People are learning! It’s harmful!

Instead of advancing civilization, Europe wants to advance control by unelected tyrants who are cool with the powers that be. Europe prefers to be at the forefront of regulation of technology invented and deployed by others.

An example is space: right now Europe has no rocket which can launch anything to orbit. None. Zilch. Europa space kaput! Russia has them rockets to orbit, China has them, India has them (and landed a rover on the South Pole of the Moon, a world first!), and just one US company launched around two (2) rockets in orbit a week, throughout 2023… All right, SpaceX cheats: they land their rockets, as if they were vulgar planes, and then refuel them, and launch again. One has landed 18 times… Even a New Zealand rocket company, Rocket Lab, launched its state of the art carbon composite rocket nine times in the first nine months of 2023… The USA will end up 2023 with more than 100 launches and China around 60. And Europe? Europe, like Buddha, is contemplating its navel, fat ass anchored in something cushy. Who wants to launch?… chuckle the Europeans, as they roll the red carpet for Elon Musk of SpaceX, Sam Altman of Open AI, or any US tech billionaire they can find, and their Europeans eyes sparkle with joy and need…

The reason? European bureaucrats seem to believe that tech progress is puerile. Better go to “Net Zero” and enforce lots of “degrowth” to get there. Advantage: when Putin’s tanks arrive in the neighborhood, they won’t be able to fuel… As Europe will soon degrow out of fuel…

Artificial Intelligence will change everything.

AI is first about “Intelligence”. “Artificial” in “Artificial Intelligence” is just an adjective. 

CHAT GPT is first of all a marvelous tool for those who want to understand the world. CHAT GPT is much superior to conventional searches, and one can argue with CHAT GPT and actually make it recognize that its first answer(s) on a complicated subject, are inadequate or completely misleading, and then CHAT GPT becomes a way to explore new logic and worlds of knowledge which had been neglected by Conventional Wisdom (Conventional Wisdom and Conventional Knowledge is generally CHAT GPT first logic… but, if challenged by correct facts, it can excuse itself and correct completely its initial answer!)

When talking about “regulating” AI, one is talking about regulating “Intelligence”… And that, regulating intelligence, has always been the core consideration of tyrannies.  

The AI panic among the authorities and plutocrats was started by a CHAT robot who is mostly engaged in intellectual pursuits. Could it simply be that these potentates are afraid of the truth coming out more easily? The collective intelligence of the plutocrats who rule the world, is not very high, the competition that AI brings to the flawed plutocratic view of the world coming from the establishment could expose all the conspiracies which constitute the elite’s life support…

Even Plato, one of Athens’ golden youth, is right, sometimes…

To the preceding, Minkybear, from Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts, USA, replied: @Patrice Ayme Let me guess. Your job, unlike mine, is not at stake here.

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My reply: @Minkybear Indeed, you are correct Actually as an intellectual and philosopher, I find CHAT GPT extremely useful: I argue with it, and we get somewhere… in unexpected mental places, full of nuance and advanced facts. I find CHAT GPT more open than many, if not most, human colleagues…

As a scientist, I have a fancy non linear theory for the foundations of physics, the mathematics of which I cannot handle. Probably nobody can: Quantum Mechanics is about linear waves, my theory uses nonlinear waves, QM is an approximation of. I hope that AI will be capable of making the computations.

Make no mistake: I feel for you. Goldman Sachs said 300 million jobs are threatened by AI.

However, 2,000 years ago, 99% of the population was in subsistence agriculture. Now peasants are less than 2% of the population in advanced countries. Should we return to planting seeds by hand?

There will be new jobs we can’t even guess now. Morally, humanity is too large right now to be sustainable with the technology we have: we are destroying the planet, with that obsolete tech. We need much more advanced technology: AI will be crucial to develop it. An example is that AI solves proteins extremely fast, in fractions of a second… when it takes humans a decade to do so… For just one protein, it it is complicated enough….

So sorry, we humanity have to advance tech. It’s a question of survival of intelligence, let alone civilization, on this planet…

Patrice Ayme

Perverse History, Perverse Civilization.

Civilizations, like people, have moods, and act accordingly. Kremlin Russia’s successfully vile and hyper violent history has brought us minds like Putin’s, vile, hyper violent, claiming there are only “sovereigns” and “colonies”.

In 2016, Putin asked students if they knew where Russia ended. A boy rose and stood:”Russia ends at the Behring Straight, Mr. President!” “Wrong,” replied Putin. Putin corrected the miscreant:”Russia never ends!” 

President Vladimir V. Putin views himself as carrying on the task of the Russian czars. Sprawling back in an armchair, spread like an octopus, basking in chuckling self-satisfaction, Mr. Putin started a televised meeting with young entrepreneurs in Moscow on Thursday June 9, 2022, by reflecting on Peter the Great’s 18th-century conquest of the Baltic coast, describing that land as rightfully Russian.

“He wasn’t taking anything away — he was returning it,” Mr. Putin said of that territory, before hinting that he was doing the same thing in his war in Ukraine. “He was returning it and strengthening it. Well, apparently, it has also fallen to us to return and to strengthen.” And he laughted. A scared old 5 feet 5 inch, anti-western, backward looking, regressive poisoning weasel, compares himself to the young and unafraid Peter the Great, a 6 feet 8 inch, forward looking, fanatically pro-western, forward-thinking progressive fighting to death the religious establishment and all old ways, who succeeded to change Russia from the past into the future.

The Baltic nations, then, are next to be “returned”. Thus, like Ukraine in Putin’s estimation, those Baltic nations are not nations at all, but confiscated Russian territories… Just like Ukraine, which Putin has insisted, is not a country, but a piece of Russia ruled by Nazis. According to Putin it seems as if Eurasia should have just one country, to which everything has to be “returned”.

That reasoning was rejected, even by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. That, arguably infernal, trio knew well that the Moscow led empire could survive only if the nations that the Czars had conquered were given a lot of autonomy. So Ukraine joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a “republic”… And, as a “republic” was one of the 40 founding members of the UN. 

Contrast this with Putin’s position, expressed June 9: “It’s impossible — do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we do not intend to build that fence,” Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, were talking about an union of republics, thus recognizing a measure of democracy, individuality and autonomy. Putin is just talking about “Russia”. And “Russia” has “no fences”, it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. Putin: “Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.“

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And what does “Russian” mean? In a nutshell, around 12 centuries ago, Novgorod hired Swedish warriors to rule itself, and those warlords promptly went down and conquered what became Ukraine, an exceptionally wealthy land, for agriculture and minerals. Rus was thus created, and then expanded eastward. However, by the 1200s, the centrifugal forces which had affected Novgorod 4 centuries earlier made themselves manifest again: Rus was too extended, too wealthy, too diverse… Unfortunately at that point of disunion, the invading Mongols show up, asking for submission, in the footsteps of their ancestors the Huns. 

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Putin in presidential transcript, June 9, 2022: We visited the exhibition dedicated to the 350th birth anniversary of Peter the Great. Almost nothing has changed. It is a remarkable thing. You come to this realisation, this understanding.

Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.

… Narva is in Estonia… I sent the following to the New York Times which had claimed the door was shutting with Russia, and it was sad. It was censored, showing, once again the complicity between new York oligarchy and Russian oligarchy:

Moscow’s autocratic run, launched with Ivan I “Moneybags” started with a cynical collaboration with the Golden (Mongol) Horde, as tax collector for all Russias. It was highly successful, creating the world’s largest empire, colonizing many nations and religions.

However, overall and in the fullness of time, democracy has proven more adept to create the civilization we need to exist. Now, though, tyrants can muster greater powers than ever before. And the planet has become very small: rockets can go around in an hour or so. A final confrontation looms, as Biden correctly pointed out, many times.

Just today Putin declared that Peter The Great was “returning” the Baltic nations to Russia in the 1700s, not conquering them… and that he, Putin, was doing the same. 

As many a tyrant through history, and Kremlin rulers for seven centuries, Putin is distracting his oppressed population with a foreign war which enables him to declare all his opponents, “traitors”, “Nazis”, “criminals”, etc. Nothing new here… Except for one thing Putin has been leveraging: nuclear weapons. This is the first time in history a tyrant can, and threatens to destroy the world, if he does not succeed to conquer. 

A sad moment, for sure. But also a moment that cannot be denied.

We are confronted to the choice of submitting to the will of one man, his vision of humanity, or utter destruction. It is crucial that this one man doesn’t get his way: other tyrants, starting with Xi, would follow his path. It is not a question of imposing democracy, but surviving this.

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Putin wants to do the same as Peter: getting back what was Russian all along… Notice that, right now, Russia occupies Prussia, something even Peter the Great didn’t do.

How did Russians become the way they are? Because tyranny has ruled Russia, and Kremlin led tyranny has been so highly successful… as a tyranny and land gobbler The enormous physical size of Russia has created imperviousness to other influences, which have been kept at a distance. The mood created by the tyrant in Moscow ruled without a rival, or even an awareness. Russia’s enormous geography made it isolated, and propicious to intellectual and mental fascism. It was all so suffocating that Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, created a new capital far from Moscow and its Kremlin, a kind of fortress full of churches.

In the rest of Europe, the situation has been different: diversity ruled, very different ways of thinking and even emoting have been entangled. As Blaise Pascal put it in the 1600s: Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà. Truth before the  Pyrénées, error beyond them.  When Pascal wrote this, France and Spain, separated by the  Pyrénées, were in the middle of a war which lasted more than 2 centuries, creating the Netherlands and finishing with the Duke of Anjou, Louis XIV’s second-eldest grandson, becoming Philip V of Spain in 1700. Louis XIV had ejected 10% of the population of France, the Protestants who kept on protesting at a distance, creating elites in other countries who hated French autocracy. That in turn caused the next monster war, the war of The Succession of Spain, which brought enormous losses of French territory, and immense misery, especially in France (although the grandson stayed in place, and the present king of Spain is a descendant…)

In non-Russian Europe, it has become impossible to be unaware of opposite points of view and how maddening the differences could get… About nothing much. The Franco-English war, the so-called “100 years war” which lasted nearly 5 centuries (1300s until 1815), originated as a civil war, French plutocrats against French plutocrats… They called themselves aristocrats, power of the best, but they were not good for the majority of the population.

Now Europeans, outside of Russia, understand that differences enrich, and otherwise do not matter that much, and one shouldn’t go to war about them. Indeed the price for not understanding Vive La Difference is atrocious wars. And their consequences (100 millions killed by the so-called Spanish flu of 1918)… At least differences do not matter between Europeans… and their cultural descendants… and, in some ways, ascendants, the Americans. I said ascendants, because Europe learned quite a few things from the Americas, not just tomatoes, potatoes, and rubber… But also the Nature God and various ecological, or martial ways. 

Russians also learned a lot, and maybe too much, fighting the Mongols, Tartars, Tatars, and other bellicose nomad nations. Nomads have to be bellicose, but, ultimately, once the nomads have been pushed away, aggressivity from a civilization becomes perverse.

It is traditional among the woke and other pseudo-progressives to criticize European imperialism… But careful studies show that the reality was more about empires of the weak proposing deals that the Natives could not refuse, either because they were dead from Euro-African pandemics, or because said deals were irresistible. This is what I have long believed and it is now found in an academic book  “Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order”.

Actually, one should consider that the greater degree of democracy of Europe facilitated directly (nicer power) and indirectly (ideological, scientific, technological) European domination.

Although some of these aspects also applied to Russia (for example Behring was a German officer employed by the Czar), the bottom line in Kremlin Russia stayed the mood set up by Prince Alexander Nevsky and his grandson Ivan Danilovich Kalita. The mood was not to stand for progressive principle and democracy, but instead for power at any cost. Alexander was installed as the Grand Prince of Vladimir (i.e., the supreme Russian ruler) in 1252… by the Mongols. Alexander, made previously Prince of Kyiv by the Mongols, faithfully supported Mongol rule within his domains. In 1259 Alexander led an army to the northern city of Novgorod, an independent republic (at the origin of Rus), and forced Novgorod to pay tribute it had previously refused to pay to the Golden Horde.

Some will say that Alexander had no choice, that the ends justified the means. Maybe or probably. But the fact remains that, with Russian civilization in balance, Nevsky and his grandson Ivan I collaborated with evil. A traditional mentality was founded, of reverence to an evil leader, often wholeheartedly supported by many Russian intellectuals. And that mood was made sacrosanct: Alexander Nevsky was canonized in 1557 CE. These observations have not escaped Ukrainians, and they are starting to remove statues of Alexander Nevsky and various famous “Ruscist” (Russian + fascist) writers.

The situation with imperial Russia is completely different, and deeply perverse from the rest of Europe, because aggression was used as a method of extermination, relentlessly, for centuries, against fellow MASTER CIVILIZATIONS (Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, etc.).

As Putin put it on June 9 2022: ” I promise that I will try to respond to all your proposals and ideas. It is easier for me to do this than for you. I just give instructions; you need to come up with ideas, while I just need to listen to you and give instructions. (Laughter.)”

Return it all! It’s all mine! We Russians own all of this, Peter said so! I have no ideas, just instructions!

This is why the Kremlin dictatorship has to be crushed: the model of one smart idiot giving instructions to everybody, according to a perverse vision of history he erroneously claims to share with Peter the Great (who tortured and killed his one surviving son… one of many people Peter was very familiar with and had to kill in very torturous ways… Some of them he argued with as they were dying, broken by him)… has to be crushed. 

Maybe Peter had to do all this killing and fighting: surely he couldn’t let the Swedes won at Poltava… But Putin did not have to cause mayhem. Comparing himself with Peter the Great, a two meter tall giant, Putin, in his shortness of vision, forgets that Peter had many excuses, excuses which Putin does not have, and three centuries have extinguished the context in which Peter thrived… with a real Swedish invasion and before that, extremely obdurate Christian fanatics, the “Old Believers“, organizing conspiracies, plots, and coup after coup… who had to be broken at the wheel just so the country could live. Instead, Putin is allied to the present day version of the Old Believers…

With its gigantic territory and interesting civilization, Russia has a lot to offer… especially while the planet warms up. But, as it strays into nuclear plated fascism, democracy can’t make any quarters… Should we falter in our defense of democracy it would surely be our ride to hell!

It goes without saying that similar charges can be made against the English American colony’s descendant regime, for somewhat similar reasons. Many of our essays have adressed this.

Perversity brought domination of the beholders. But now this is not a sure thing anymore. Times have changed: they are more subtle. It is time to understand this, what role perversity played, and why, and thus how to transmogrify it.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The core of the present essay, found in italics above, was censored by the New York Times propaganda machine as a comment to an article on June 9, 2022, written by a Russian, who claimed it was so sad that the door was closing between the US and Russia. Never mind that it is Russia which is slamming the door to democracy, while Putin is playing Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator, with the twist of threatening to blow up the planet… It stays troubling that the newspaper of record in the USA keeps on rejecting isegoria and parrheisia…

TYRANNICAL GAS: European Union Feeds The Nuclear Tyrant.

Europe’s TYRANNICAL GAS:

The EU must “GET RID OF” the gas provided by Putin and his henchmen, the head of the European Commission said on Wednesday February 16, 2022. Let’s call it TYRANNICAL GAS.

Speaking to a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, (German born, polyglot and polycultural) Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, criticized Russia for “weaponizing the energy issue” in its conflict with the EU and its associate, Ukraine. (The European Union has three presidents right now presiding over different part of the European government; the rotating presidency is held by Macron, that is, France, just as it was when Putin invaded Georgia, a weird coincidence…)

Arguing that Moscow is not a credible energy supplier anymore since Gazprom restricted natural gas supplies to Europe in the last few months despite high demand, while claiming it didn’t, von der Leyen noted that the EU has since stepped up efforts to diversify its energy imports, securing more liquified natural gas supplies from international partners.

She claimed that the Union possessed enough gas reserves for the winter in case Russia disrupts the supply.

“We must diversify our energy sources, to get rid of the dependency of Russian gas, and heavily invest in renewable energy sources,” she said, asking the bloc to draw lessons from the current crisis with Russia.

Turning to the rising tensions between Russia on one side and Ukraine and the rest of the West on the other, von der Leyen said: “Ukraine today is a stronger, freer, and more sovereign country than in 2014. This is precisely why the Kremlin is threatening it again,” she observed.

Von der Leyen said Moscow sent “conflicting signals” over the past two days by announcing the withdrawal of troops from border regions, even as Russian lawmakers voted in favor of recognizing the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine as independent.

She called on Moscow to de-escalate tensions with deeds and not just words.

Ex-Belgium PM Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, also addressed EU lawmakers. He explained that EU and NATO officials were in daily contact “working at a level of intensity and quality never seen before.” The president of the European Council presides over the meetings of EU leaders elected in the various nations constituting theEuropean Union. So contrarily to what Europhobes claim, it is a completely democratic position (limited to 2.5 years; election by double majority). 

Michel called on Russia to find the “courage” to choose diplomacy over conflict and warned that Moscow would have to face “massive consequences” in case of an invasion against Ukraine.

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What really bothers Putin is Ukrainian DEMOCRACY and its ASSOCIATION with the EUROPEAN UNION [1]. Putin knows that his military edge on Ukraine, in particular his hypersonic advantage, is going to diminish as . It’s a case of use it, or lose it, while everything else goes to waste: the Kaiser Trap.  

Putin’s advanced weapons are full of Western electronics. If Putin had no cash, he would have no advanced weapons.

The European Union has fed a deadly cancer, the mood that the Kremlin should rule over Eurasia. Dictator Putin proposed it initially with sotto voce. Now Putin is using his nuclear voice. It could not be any clearer.  

Patrice Ayme

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[1]

To enlighten the gullible who look at Putin with love eyes here is a (small) part of the Association Treaty Between Ukraine and the EU (including Great Britain):

Article 1 Objectives 1. An ASSOCIATION between the UNION AND ITS MEMBER STATES, OF THE ONE PART, AND UKRAINE, OF THE OTHER PART, IS HEREBY ESTABLISHED. 

2. The aims of this association are: (a) to promote gradual rapprochement between the Parties based on common values and close and privileged links, and increasing Ukraine’s association with EU policies and participation in programmes and agencies; b) to provide an appropriate framework for enhanced political dialogue in all areas of mutual interest; (c) to promote, preserve and strengthen peace and stability in the regional and international dimensions in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter, and of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the objectives of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe of 1990; 

(d) to establish conditions for enhanced economic and trade relations leading towards Ukraine’s gradual integration in the EU Internal Market, including by setting up a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area as stipulated in Title IV (Trade and Trade-related Matters) of this Agreement, and to support Ukrainian efforts to complete the transition into a functioning market economy by means of, inter alia, the progressive approximation of its legislation to that of the Union; 

(e) to enhance cooperation in the field of Justice, Freedom and Security with the aim of reinforcing the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; 

(f) to establish conditions for increasingly close cooperation in other areas of mutual interest. 

GENERAL PRINCIPLES 

Article 2 

Respect for democratic principles, human rights and fundamental freedoms, as defined in particular in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe of 1990, and other relevant human rights instruments, among them the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and respect for the principle of the rule of law shall form the basis of the domestic and external policies of the Parties and constitute essential elements of this Agreement. Promotion of respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, inviolability of borders and independence, as well as countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, related materials and their means of delivery also constitute essential elements of this Agreement. L 161/6 EN Official Journal of the European Union 29.5.2014 Article 3 The Parties recognise that the principles of a free market economy underpin their relationship. The rule of law, good governance, the fight against corruption, the fight against the different forms of trans-national organised crime and terrorism, the promotion of sustainable development and effective multilateralism are central to enhancing the relationship between the Parties. TITLE II POLITICAL DIALOGUE AND REFORM, POLITICAL ASSOCIATION, COOPERATION AND CONVERGENCE IN THE FIELD OF FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY, etc…

Here is Putin’s answer: Hundreds of Iskander missiles already deployed more than a decade ago, and now with much more advanced versions:

Iskander Hypersonic Mach 7 missile. Explosive power is probably at least 3 tons of TNT (personal computation). It flies at 50 kms altitude, one mile and a half per second, and does evading maneuvers at 30 gs…

Scary European Energy Cost Rise… From Fake Green Policies

The crazy energy policies of Europe are finally bringing the penury they carefully prepared… A Scary Energy Winter Is Coming. Don’t Blame the Greens… dissembles the New York Times. Indeed as I pointed out, many times, fake greenery is leading us into a very scary situation. Strategically erroneous so-called “green” policies, led by European and Californian “green” lobbyists, are leading the world into a fossil fuel abyss. India is running out of coal, its main energy source. India competes against buyers such as China, the world’s largest coal consumer, which is under pressure to ramp up coal imports amidst a severe power crunch.

Including nuclear, the world  went from 6% LOW CARBON PRIMARY ENERGY PRODUCTION, to 16%, in 50 years. And energy is only 72% of CO2 emissions. “Green” has been a joke narrated by stealthy fossil fuel advocates.  

Renewables without energy storage is a Trojan Horse for fossil fuels, including “natural gas”. Indeed what happens when the wind stops, the sun does not shine and the dams are empty? As the heating of the planet proceeds, the winds will shift north, bringing drought. No more wind, no more dams…

One has to develop storage. Electric motors and generators compete for the same rare materials: batteries are not feasible for mass storage. What’s left? Hydrogen. “Green” hydrogen generated from solar and wind. Hydrogen can use existing natural gas infrastructure. That was done in France for decades… 

Then, of course, to replace fossil fuels for base load, new technology safe nuclear reactors.

We have to go hydrogen and nuclear. 

Hard logic? The fundamental enemy of progress and understanding, let alone empathy, is simplemindedness. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.

The world is often propelled by Machiavellianism: crafty ones force some issues in such a way that the opposite effects are, in the end, obtained. 

In this light one may ponder Biden’s decision to give tons of Weapon Grade Uranium to Australia in the guise of submarines. HEU to Australia helps Iran and other would-be nuclear weapons states…

Europe, slave to Putin & coal, and US, nukes for all?

Technically the crisis is due to Europe making itself dependent upon world Liquid Natural Gas carried by ships. This LNG is disingenuously viewed as a “transition fuel”, whereas it is just a fossil fuel. And EUROPE CANNOT AFFORD IT ANYMORE, due to increased demand by Russia and especially, CHINA. So LNG addicted Europe is running out of gas. The Fossil Fuel Lobby Is Turning Fake Green Into Real Green, as in the color of the US Dollar… With the Complicity Of The Self-Described “Greens”

My comment above was published by the NYT, and brought a fierce debate… Most readers detesting what I wrote, of course, because they are electric sheep programmed by Google. Smilodon7 from Missouri came out of its prehistoric cave and snarled ignorantly that:

I have yet to hear of any nuclear technology that couldn’t have a melt down if enough things went wrong.  That and the waste problem would have to be solved first.  Nuclear waste is NOT green and ignoring it does not make it go away.

William Starr, from Nashua, New Hampshire correctly replied that: “Nuclear waste? Put. It. In. A. Hole. In. The. Ground.” My answer:

@Smilodon7: You should read more. Present nuclear tech was made to produce Plutonium, for bombs. Energy was secondary. The grotesque catastrophe at Fukushima resulted in no less than three nuclear meltdowns…. From the resultant loss of reactor core cooling brought by incredibly bad management… Yes, three nuclear meltdowns, three hydrogen explosions, and the release of radioactive contamination in Units 1, 2 and 3 between 12 and 15 March 2004. Still, no one died. Better an exploding Fukushima than a functioning refinery….

The Thorium reactor cycle solves the waste problem: its radioactive waste pollution lifespan is 1% (one percent) of the present U235 nuclear energy…. 

China is turning on the first Thorium reactor since 1959. With the aim of converting all their coal boilers to Thorium, if the tech works commercially.

We have a CO2 calamity and catastrophe of unparalleled proportions in 65 million years. Civilian nuclear energy in the West killed basically no one (even Fukushima’s spectacular disaster)… whereas fossil fuels kill a minimum of ten million humans a year, besides entire eco systems dying right now. In California, Giant Sequoias (Sequoia Giganticus) are threatened with immediate annihilation, more than 25% already died in the last 14 months alone… Apocalyptic fires in California show clearly that the anti-nuclear lobby works for the fossil fuels industry and its allies on Wall Street.

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Alan Stanley from New South Wales Australia got completely confused: @Patrice Ayme Australian scientists found 20k sites on the east coast suitable for pumped hydro capable of supporting the entire Australian energy grid in partnership with variable green power sources. The USA probably has more capacity in the Rockies. And Europe in the French central massif and the Alps further east. So are we building cheap reservoirs with pumps and generators? Of course not, there  is more money to be made in big expensive batteries or bigger expensive nuclear plants. The governments and billionaires need to get on with building cheap stuff that works instead of promoting expensive stuff that stores up trouble for your grandchildren.

The poor Alan Stanley confused the existing small dams, 20,000 of them, with future dreamland.

An other Australian, Reuben, disagreed with Mr. Stanley:

@Alan Stanley “Australian scientists” are ideologically deluded, should it be true what you say: i.e., it is reasonable enough for some scientists to propose that it might be possible for “20k sites on the east coast” of Australia to be developed for “hydro capable of supporting the entire Australian energy grid in partnership with [other renewables]”; but any reasonable scientist should be willing to also acknowledge that is an extremely far-fetched claim, and therefore for “Australian scientists” to be truly scientific, it should be challenged by other scientists, to test the degree of plausibility. Reading between the lines of your comment, it seems unlikely that the claim has been challenged; and instead it has been accepted as dogmatic truth or gospel: that is, yes, Australia can go “green”, and primarily with hydro. Thus to be consistent with your comment, “Australian scientists” must think like a flock of sheep. The leading sheep, who presumably is the Prime Minister and/or Treasurer of Australia, has proposed spending a large amount of taxpayer money on hydro, and “Australian scientists” have followed his lead, and declared that yes, that is the way to go. Such behavior is inconsistent with scientific discipline.

@Alan Stanley: In California dams are so dry, they cannot be used as batteries as they were in the past. There is literally no more water. 

In France the 58 nuclear reactors’ operation have been often slowed down by low river flow, or even completely stopped. France is building “mico-centrales” everywhere, mini dams, with horrendous ecological consequences. Indeed, to give power, water has to be dropped, and that is done inside tubes. So nature is completely deprived of water, and all species which need water disappear. 

Moreover, as I said, the desertic belt is going towards the poles, so hydro is a myth. In equatorial regions dams created devastation, and turn into methane producing engines, as their fluctuation periodically blossom and rot CH4 producing vegetation… defeating the purpose for having them in the first place…

Hydro is fully tapped out. 20K dams in Australia? Those are small dams. They already exist. failure of small dams less than 15m high caused 88% of dam fatalities… Nuclear doesn’t kill, but dams do.

***

Meanwhile John D., “Out West”, discovered the distant past, when there was rain, calling it the future:

@Reuben: Alan Stanley was referring to pumped hydro storage (paired with renewables). Look it up. It’s a massive storage form of infrastructure. They’re big projects, but once in place, a game changer.

My answer:

@John D. Pumper hydro storage worked in California when there was water and several nuclear plants. Now, though, there is no more rain, no more water in the dams… And just ONE nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon… Diablo Canyon two reactors provide the state with 9% of its electricity and 23% of its low carbon energy! 

Hypocritical and secretly pro-fossil fuel Californian powers that be, plan to close the last nuclear plant. 

Meanwhile the Biden administration enabled California to go over the limits in producing electricity from fossil fuels (until November 2021). So we now have fossil fuel electric cars… The present governor, Newsom, made his fortune from the Gettys, once the world’s wealthiest family… from Getty oil, based in...

Europe United States’ (Of America!) What Deep Greek and Frankish History Teaches On Brexit Pettiness

Brexit repeats a mood of enmity from hysteria and pettiness, seen in Ancient Greece, feeding Greek hatred for Greeks. That self-defeating obsession was Greece’s undermining, enabling Rome to subjugate Greek mindfulness with Roman greed. Greece subjugation, when not outright annihilation, brought, in turn, two millennia of fascism and plutocracy, thereafter, having forgotten what democracy truly is.

However, the Greeks had the excuse of variegated origins, and the intrusion of an alien superpower, Rome. Instead, right now the USA and the Europe have a common origin, the latter being not just parent of the former, but having long been one superpower made of bits and pieces. Common Euro-American origin undermines the division ideology, not just because we don’t want to go down the Greco-Roman, dog eats dog suicidal slippery slope, but also because this common origin deprives division of its motivation.

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Empires are a fact. Not just a theory, but a fact. “Empire” means the government is endowed with imperium, a powerful, sometimes lethal command of elected authority. It does not necessarily mean fascist dictatorship. The Roman Republic was an empire, before it got rotten, fascist, mass exterminating and inhuman. The USA is certainly an empire, and a representative democracy, and nearly a direct democracy in California. Empires present advantages, by breaking down barriers, and petty local regulations, corruption, creating big markets, powerful defense, etc. Ancient Greece failed because it failed to constitute an empire. Athens tried, and failed, because of the plutocratic alliance of Sparta and Persia. A century later, Macedonian plutocracy imposed plutocracy to Athens. Later, while Greek city states fought each other, Rome came in, and annihilated Corinth, viewed as too democratic because it was fighting Sparta. Then Rome proceeded to reduce all of Greece into slavery (with a few tiny counterexamples, to justify the rest).

This shows only a fraction of the Greek world (which extended to Egypt, Libya, Crimea, Georgia, etc.) Moreover the map itself oversimplifies. For example Thessaly, in blue, south of green Macedonia, was, itself, a CONFEDERATION of cities. So this is a map of confederation, mostly! So far, so good, but they were actually fighting each other. So cities with, say 20,000 citizens, fought each other… And the Roman legions showed up. Republican Rome in 150 BCE had a population of at least three million, and that expanded enormously, by a factor of ten, as many states (say other Italians, Provincia (“Provence”), Africa, Iberia) became part of the empire. With a demography at least 40 times the most populous Greek city-state, Athens, Rome could do whatever its increasingly brutish instincts told it to do with Greek civilization. Civilizationally speaking, Rome, relative to Greece, was a big noise and fury, signifying nothing… Had the Greeks being federalized, with a Greek army, Rome could not have subdued them. But that was completely impossible: cities such as Sparta and Athens had just the love of (their own) freedom in common… Whereas the USA is the child of France and Britain 

There was no Ancient Greek empire, because the Greeks were too busy developing crazed out peculiarities, and putting lots of pride in this… similar to Brexiters. The ancient Greeks were obsessed by their little selves and quirks [1]. A Greek empire could have instilled some reason, and enabled ancient Greek civilization, the most advanced to survive. Same nowadays in Europe.

For example, Great Britain is corrupt. Corrupt in a way peculiar to Great Britain. Thus, being part of a larger ensemble may enable the UK to come out of this corruption. Indeed, the EU tried to make Great Britain less corrupt, but the corrupt ones rebelled, and, through their dominance of the minds of their unenlightened subjects, got them to decide against their best interest.

113,000 potential taxpayers are living in Britain while also being a ‘non-domiciled’ in the U.K… as far as taxes are concerned. Those extremely wealthy individuals control the UK media… to the point even intelligent Brits don’t know any better.

Tax avoidance by the global elite is eating the world’s social structure with extreme inequality. It was high time to do something about it within Europe, starting with the most egregious behavior.

EU member states have until 31 December 2019 to make this sort of blatant tax avoidance scheme by plutocrats illegal in their own national law. British plutocrats paying tax? Unimaginable! God save the queen of tax evasion!

This tax evasion is the driving force behind Brexit: the advocates of Brexit, pigeons paid by some of the world’s richest individuals have imprinted millions of parrots, who love to imagine themselves as “Non-Doms”. Why isn’t this motivation advertised more?

Why? Consider France: the media there is owned by plutocrats too, just as in the UK, and they have huge tax avoidance schemes in place as laws in the tax system. If the Pluts were stupid enough to call attention to the non-Dom reason for Brexit, they would bring along a mood questioning tax avoidance schemes in general…. and in particular, the schemes contrived in the legal system they profit from…

British Plutocracy Hates Losing Its Tax Advantages, hence Came To Hate Europe. And made sure to make the minds of the British that way, through its control of media. We The People should control control of the media by the few and wealthiest. It is a case where absolute control is needed.

The world is divided in empires, and some are vassal to others. One empire is dominant: the USA. One recently decided to be uppity: China. It’s put back into its proper place by its former sponsor, the USA.

The European UNION is an empire, yet just a subsidiary of the USA, and will stay that way forever, just as parents become dependent upon their child. A standing alone UK would be even more of a US puppet.

The present world picture is enlightened by considering what happened in the Middle Ages, or in Ancient Greece. In the Middle Ages, the two superpowers, England, the child, and “France”, the parent, were in conflict. The kings of Francia, a number of Valois, versus the Plantagenets, the guys who planted genets… It was a big mess, roaring about, signifying nothing.

The EU is a confederation vassal to the USA, similar to the “free” Greek Confederacies, themselves made of many city-states, vassal to Rome in the First and Second Centuries, BCE. The UK breaking away from the EU is similar to a Greek city-state separating from the Confederacy it belonged to. It happened many times, fostering divisions among the Greeks… thereafter to be gobbled up by Roman fascism…   Brexit is more of this petty hysterical nationalism which characterized the Greeks, while Rome was thinking universally…

However, on second, deeper inspection, the relationship between France, Britain, Germany, the USA (and their ideological satellites, including Australia and Italy) is not as in between Greek city-states, or Greece and Rome. Indeed Greek city-states had just one language, but various origins.

And Rome was still something else, tracing itself to Ilion (Troy). Whereas, in the “West”, all can be traced to Celts, Romans and Greece, through the gauntlet of the Franks (Imperium Francorum, by 800 CE the Renovated Roman Empire, RRE).

Things get even more complicated, when one realizes that France and Britain, in a number of ways, gave birth to the USA.

Now, indeed, the Greeks brought to the Romans knowledge, and even the alphabet (through “Magna Grecia”,as in Neopolis, “Naples”, to the south). So this way, Greece gave birth to Rome, intellectually speaking.

But in Western Europe, most of the Greco-Roman law, organization, moods, let alone language, and religion, survived through the Franks, and then drove the unification of Europe, complete by 800-1066 CE. See the Franks conquering all of Germany by 800 CE, and Eastern Europe, finding silver there, thus relaunching a currency economy, which Rome didn’t have enough precious metal to run; see the Franks conquer England by 1066 CE, and freeing the slaves… Or conquering Sicily against the Muslims, a few years later.

This is this united Europe, yet fighting with itself, which gave birth to the USA. As I said, even when fighting itself, as Greece was fighting itself, Europe was much more united than Ancient Greece, because of the common Greco-Roman-Frankish origin: the Greeks never had any such unification event: even when they went to attack Ilion/Troy, that was an alliance of city-states with very different origins (for example Sparta had nothing in common with Athens, their origins, Dorain for the former, were different).

European unification is actually very old, older than Rome: the big god of the Celts was… Hermes, the Greek god of commerce, travel, etc. Later, the rising Roman military power depended upon (purchased!) Celtic metallurgy.

Delusional Brexiters claim California will someday want to secede. They don’t understand that the US empire is an advantage and amplifier, for California. Why would California want to leave an Union it leads by the nose… with an average of a few referendums every few months?

The real problem of Europe right now is not enough local, direct democracy. Switzerland should be imitated, instead of going the Napoleonic route favored by Boris I Johnson… Because that the funny thing: Brexiters are proposing to impose the Napoleonic “Continental System“… complete with blockade…

Certainly, if the British people understood that the Brexit scheme was just motivated by having the wealthiest British citizens keeping on avoiding taxes, they would vote through referendum for exactly what the EU is trying to impose on December 31, 2019. That sort of EU decisions is taken actually by all the elected governments getting together inside the European Council, and hashing down a consensus. It would be better if such decisions were assisted by global EU referendums.

The EU will stay vassal to its child, the USA. Because the US is a stronger federation (some of its strength due to luck, some to diligence). The US is already a European Union… But on its own (conquered) continent.

Meanwhile, the pettiness of Brexiters waste all Europeans’ time away from more significant issues. And it will never end: the present drama is just about the transition period. After that, there will be ten years of exit negotiations. Brexit is Brexinfinity, because Britain is in Europe, whether it likes it or not, and whether it’s led by Henry VIII, Boris I, or Napoleon… Dumb stuff.

Meanwhile an hostile agent (Iran or proxies) made at least 17 impacts on the world’s largest oil installations, in Saudi Arabia, using GPS guided cruise missiles. (yes GPS is a US system). That took out 7% of the world oil production (5.7 million barrels out of 81 millions). At the limit, that doesn’t’ affect the ruling empire, the USA… which is the world’s top oil producer, and also the world’s top sustainable energy producer. But it does affect its European vassals, which are livid… And soon to feel much more affectionate to Uncle Sam, and its big muscles… Trump doesn’t want a war, especially now with a tough election ahead. Iran knows this. But, when the Deep State is really smart, and really capable, it knows nothing beats maximal force.

In an empire, force, applied well and best, is more important than elections, because survival is more important than formalities [2]. Not just my opinion: the Roman Republic, the longest Republic, ever, lasted five centuries. Rome had the function known as the “dictatorship” (for special emergencies as when a Gallic horde sieged, sacked, and blackmailed Rome, before being justly annihilated…)

Patrice Ayme

***

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P/S: The preceding is not meant to assert that, say, British fishermen are wrong, when they complain French fishermen come over and fish in their more fish rich waters… That seems to be true, and is, at first sight, an injustice. However, the first reasoning is fishy, because much, if not most, of the British fish production is sold on the continent… Without custom duties! The EU, as it exists, doesn’t have the means to impose its laws: they are enforced by the member states. The fish quarrel can, and should be, solved on a local level. There are thousands of those, no problem.

***

[1] As I said, Athens had an empire for a while… and needed one because of its wheat coming from the Pont (hundreds of kilometers east of Byzantium). That empire was broken because of the satanic alliance of Sparta with Persia… And later, again, by Macedonia’s Antipater…

***

[2] Greek city-states, most of them real, that is, direct democracies (to Cicero’s disgust), had emergency provisions to suspend all laws in case of vital emergencies… Just like the Roman Republic.

Why Is Portugal Collapsing? From Deindustrialization and Dummification. Same As Rest of EU

The problem for Portugal, and, more and more for all European countries, more or less: what are they living from? What do they sell? What’s their job? European countries need gas, oil, and high technology: but (differently from the USA) they import all this… well, OK, France has Airbus … But France used to have much more! 

Europe has fallen asleep. The Court of Auditors in France has said that Arianespace is two years old to find a solution to the competition of SpaceX, Blue Origin (with their reusable rockets). Meanwhile, SpaceX continues its experimental efforts at a torrid pace, staggering, India is trying to land on the moon, or a Chinese robot has just made a weird discovery.

China, India and, of course, the US have fully understood that the future and independence can come only from technological dominance, so they make enormous efforts. Europe concentrates on tourism, museums, comfort and widespread mediocrity … And especially on the German industry secretly financed by small bankrupt banks financed by the German states … Unfortunately, the rest of Europe suddenly deindustrializes. ..

Population Collapse, Working Population Collapse: Thank You, Great EU Planners

All vital imports for Europe must be paid: with what money? Unlike the United States (or even Great Britain!), Europe does not create enough funding to finance industries that could create currencies for Europe to pay for what it needs.

In the fourteenth century, Portugal, then a tiny country of a million inhabitants, just released from five centuries of Muslim yoke, had the most advanced technology (maritime) in the world (and against attacked Muslims in Morocco). And now? Where is the Portuguese or even European technology? Now, technology is asking for the moon…

Historians are often baffled by the undeniable rise of the European society and economy by the Eleventh Century [2]. Soon north-west Europe had around the same demographics as the entire Roman empire (more 54 millions), and achieved greater productivity. It doesn’t take very long to find out why: Europe was stuffed of windmills, water wheels, heavy steel ploughs (to turn over fat rich soils of northern European plains), hydraulic hammers, and slow or fast ships all over, enabling trade all over, for example between Scandinavia and the Middle East, Norway and Sicily…

It’s so obvious that many non-European powers have perfectly understood the lesson. So why has Europe forgotten it? Because Europe is the revolutionary center …that mostly came from the driving engine of the early Renaissance, Western Francia, which was divided in 60 states in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. because Europe is the revolutionary center, the European media, owned by the plutocracy, has been excellent at making Europeans believe in the opposite of common sense and their self-interest. Instead, they learned to play, sing, dance and get drunk on their past…

As long as this is not understood, Europe, and Portugal in particular, will sink [3].

Patrice Ayme

[The preceding was machine translated from French original below!]

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[1 ] After all transistors were mass produced, and invented, in France, in 1948, with the help of two German scientists… and not by US, as corrupt Swedish Nobel organization claims…).

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[2] Berengar of Tours (c. 999 – 6 January 1088), in Latin Berengarius Turonensis, was an 11th-century French Christian theologian and archdeacon of Angers, a realistic scholar whose spectacular leadership of the cathedral school at Chartres set an example of intellectual inquiry. He was excommunicated for his fostering of reason, but, protected by the enlightened William of Normandy, kept on prospering and his ideas spread all over, forever after…

***

[3] Even the crazed out Boris Johnson understands perfectly well that the fate of Great Britain rests in developing more advanced technology (hence is extolling of the… JET, the Joint EUROPEAN (!) Torus…).

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

French Original:

Le problème pour le Portugal, et, de plus en plus tous les pays Européens, plus ou moins: de quoi vivent-ils? Il leur faut du gaz, du pétrole, et de la haute technologie: mais ils importent tout cela (bon d’accord la France a Airbus…).

L’Europe s’est endormie. La Cour des Comptes en France a dit qu’Arianespace a deux ans pour trouver une solution à la concurrence de SpaceX, Blue Origin (avec leurs fusées réutilisables). Pendant ce temps, SpaceX continue ses efforts expérimentaux à un rythme torride, sidérant, l’Inde essaye d’atterrir sur la Lune, ou un robot Chinois vient de faire une découverte bizarre. 

La Chine, l’Inde et, bien sur, les USA ont parfaitement compris que le futur et l’indépendance ne peuvent venir que de la domination technologique, donc ils font des efforts énormes . L’Europe se concentre sur tourisme, musées, confort et médiocrité généralisée… Et surtout sur l’industrie allemande financée en secret par des petites banques en faillite financées par les etats allemands… Malheureusement, le reste de l’Europe du coup se désindustrialise… 

Toutes les importations vitales pour l’Europe doivent être payées: avec quel argent? Differemment des USA (ou même de la Grande Bretagne!), l’Europe ne crée pas assez de financements pour financer les industries qui pourraient créer pour l’Europe des devises pour payer ce dont elle a besoin.

Au quatorzième siècle, le Portugal, alors un tout petit pays d’un million d’habitants, juste libéré de cinq siècles de joug Musulman, avait la technologie (maritime) la plus avancée au monde (et contre attaqua les Musulmans au Maroc). Et maintenant? Ou est la technologie Portugaise, ou même Européenne? Maintenant, la technologie, c’est demander la lune…

Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine”, Or When Schizophrenia Causes Globalization. And Reciprocally.

Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine”, or when an anti-hero dies of sadness induced by globalization and lack of moral compass (of which globalization is a consequence)…

To my surprise, I read (among other things) a new book, Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine”. I don’t usually read novels because most novel authors and the resulting works they give birth to, are neither smart nor interesting enough (whereas a crocodile, although not too smart, is quite interesting, while being much more direct: the croc wants food, or, if tame, scratching of the neck, while not claiming to have higher pursuits such as wealth, fame and respect). 

I bought and I have tried to read Houellebecq several times in the past, and failed miserably within a few pages. I was put off by the sort of universe Houellebecquian heroes evolve in, a sort of universe I always avoided studiously, carefully, exhaustively, successfully, on various continents. (I remember some sort of cults trying to incorporate me at Columbia U, and another at Stanford U… For decades all my environment was academic, and an eminently stern academia …) So there I was in a bookstore, waiting for family, and I got intrigued as I sampled pages within Sérotonine. I was stunned. Was the famous author from the little Paris pseudo-intellectual scene, really attacking globalization, with an intensity similar to what presidents Trump or Cristina Fernández de Kirchner exhibited in the past?

When I say I cautiously always avoided Houellebecq’s style universes, I am not just talking about the chain smoking, and also the general aura of frantic sex with strangers, depression, etc., a perpetual fog with Houellebecq. I cordially despise serial sexers. Moreover I hate smokers, because not only are they drug addicts (a general indication of an unworthy brain, unworthy of my social skills, just there), but smokers aggressively direct their gases to poison others. They truly hate humanity, they are symbolic portable Auschwitz (I won’t tweet that one…) So smokers are actually lethal aggressors, differently from those who pump heroine, who are just idiots (this one I tweeted).

For me, the only positive side of smoking, definitively attractive, is that it gives me all the moral superiority to experimentally deploy my aggressive skills in retaliation, and study how creeps do to justify their creepiness (a science which can be put to good use in other domains). In the last few days I had US family visiting and that meant restaurants, hence the occasion of personally enforcing French law on smoking, beyond what timid French restaurateurs do. In one notable situation, a smoker held her cigarette as far from her lungs as she could, while her smoke went straight to my nine year old daughter’s innocent lungs fifteen feet away, thanks to a pernicious and persistent mountain breeze… The situation attracted my own counter strike (of the verbal type, but it was a scorcher designed to inflict maximal psychological pain).

We used to have pot types, with useless brains, just good enough to step in front of garbage trucks. It happened to a professional pothead friend of mine, a famous cover-of-magazine US climber. Ruined by pot, he confessed to me:”Patrice, my brain doesn’t work anymore.” (Pay attention, dedicated pot heads!) The next day, my pot head friend stepped in front of a garbage truck. Pot glues up synapses (yes, thus it may work for chronic pains, though)…

Now we also have the very worst, vaping. Vaping has been presented as an enormous progress: plenty of nicotine, for the nicotine addicts, no more smoke for their victims. Instead, the victims get dispatched with poisonous gases. Indeed. Killing from smoking kills in decades (although it degenerates people faster than that)… Whereas vaping can kill in hours (accordingly the WHO/OMS came out last week with a scathing, amply justified attack against vaping). It does that through innovative organic chemistry, generating deadly poisons such as formaldehyde.  [1]

Houellebecq observes the disaster, the self-immolation of Europe, its destruction by globalization. And Houellebecq thinks about it, but does he think enough? Baboons also think, but they are incapable of producing civilization, they don’t think enough for that… Or even survival: the baboon species now lives, just depending upon our good will, our human good will… which is not that good, much of the time. Dies Houellebecq think enough? No (as his idiotic opinions on Europe amply demonstrate, especially with someone living in Ireland!) Egyptian baboon, 4,000 years old, Museo delle Antichità Egizie, Egyptian Museum, Turin, Piedmont

Vapers are out of their drug riddled minds. I saw a (French) mom vape in her toddler’s face… At a climbing area. The toddler was coughing without stopping. I came upon the scene, and could smell the formaldehyde from ten feet away. I chewed her head off about killing her child in public. She replied that, if it bothered me, as it did, she would stop. But I was still bothered by her little plan to vape her own child to death behind closed doors.

Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine” theme is all-too real and important. The hero is an expert agricultural engineer employed as a private consultant by the French government. His task? Helping to dismantle European indigenous agriculture and food production, by providing a flow of reassuring and mitigating reports, as the Titanic of European food production sinks under the assault of treaties with distant countries such as Argentina.   

Serotonin mediates an animal’s perceptions of resources; In less complex animals, such as some invertebrates, resources simply mean food availability. In plants serotonin synthesis seems to be associated with stress signals. In more complex animals, such as arthropods and vertebrates, resources also can mean social dominance. That’s when “Will to Power” appears, endowing social groups with a well-ordered structure (in the mathematical sense).  In response to the perceived abundance or scarcity of resources, an animal’s growth, reproduction or mood, may be elevated or lowered. This may somewhat depend on how much serotonin the organism has at its disposal.

Houellebecq does not explain why such treaties, those treaties destroying Europe, have been signed, and are still signed (his livelihood depends a lot upon not explaining it). But I can explain it, and I have (however, my explanations are no explanation Houellebecq wants to read). On the face of it, it  may sound strange that Europe would waste so much energy, destroying itself. Why? Why signing treaties which ensure the eradication of European agriculture? Houellebecq does not explain that, not at all. He just implies over and over again, that this is the general mood of despair and destruction, from lack of solidarity now rampant in Europe, itself tied to glittering, flittering, fluctuating, chaotic activities which lead to irreversible disasters (as when the hero holds hands with a British black lawyer he just slept with, in  a train station, and they come across the hero’s real love, Camille… who is shattered irreversibly). 

The (anti) hero, this French engineer, is delivered to the deepest despair, as his job, his worth, consists into killing the means Europe has to feed itself. A subsequent girlfriend of his, a Japanese princess (of sorts; with government employ and connections, that’s why such a princess: governmental types rule the world, just below the Pluto class). The Japanese princes is all into Appearances, and secret, wild promiscuous sex with the multitudes, just like French agricultural policy is all into Appearances (and probably wild sex too, with undefined multitudes). In truth there is nothing there in European policies, and in the anti-hero’s muddled mind, below those Appearances: the core is fully empty. Houellebecq explains that human beings are made to live in small groups the size of a hamlet, a theme I have harped on for many years. Thus, living in cities guarantees solitude… And even worse one guesses from the mood of the book, it fosters not caring about humanity at all.

Taking medical drugs does not  solve the problem at all, it just destroys the hero hormonally and neurobiologically.  

So why is Houellebecq, so good at describing Europe’s self-destructive madness, yet incapable of suggesting its causes (besides anti-smoking regulations, speed limits on freeways, etc.)? It’s just because the novelist lives, admittedly on a small scale, off what is at the origin of what he decries.

More on this interesting contradiction… or is it feeding at two throughs (that’s always better than just one)? Latter…

Meanwhile, what we have now is not just dictatorship. It’s much less than that, we are even more deprived. Globalization has become annihilation, nihilism of realism. Minds in conflicting pieces. Serotonin has been implicated in cognition, mood, anxiety and psychosis. There is increasing evidence for a role of serotonin, as well as dopaminergic mechanisms, in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia means minds in pieces.

How did the European psyche get into pieces? Ever since World War Two, the European (pseudo) intellectual mainstream has claimed we had to save all of humanity from European rage and destruction… Not noticing that the courageous and high minded powers who declared war to Nazism, France and the UK, were European powers… while the USSR and the USA helped Hitler, on an enormous scale (Hey, let me remind indignant cackling turkeys, that I am talking about 1933-1941, here. Not that such turkeys would know what happened in those eight years, which have been misinformed not to say deformed as convenient “isolationism“). Indeed it’s France (first) and Britain (belatedly following France as a contrite proverbial French poodle) which forced Hitler in a world war he wasn’t yet ready for… and thus that he could only lose.

So, instead of thanking France (especially) and Britain, for their good and heroic service, against Nazism, against mass-extinction fascist racism, the pseudo-intellectual European class embarked on a campaign of denigration of Europe, and its highest ideals, the mission civilisatrice, fostered by, and profiting (who were by then) Europe’s masters, Stalin and the US Deep State. Percolating down, this hatred of Europe’s best masked by highest principles, brought up a deep, murderous contradiction, the desire to serve distant masters, while murdering one’s neighbours (in “Serotonin”, death occurs). Despair is the only hope out of it.

Thus Europe is being destroyed in guise of saving it (for the greater profit of global plutocrats). No wonder we swim in an ocean of serotonin.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] I consider likely that my own mom got Inflammatory Pulmonary Disease (IPD) from a close relative who vaped in her face (makes for vigorous family dynamics). IPD kills in a median 5 years. There is no cure. It’s becoming the most frequent disease. My mom took more than a year to die. Once a 28 year old died in the US, within hours of being exposed to vaping…

“Free Market”Can’t Sustain Global US Military Rule: Trouble Incoming May Trump Trump

The “Free Market” is another expression for Global Plutocracy Unchained. It mauls all states, replacing the rule of law by the most basic, most cruel instincts… Even the mightiest genitor of “Free Market”, the USA, is not immune. In other words, a mess, a mess we have seen before, when Rome collapsed… from the same exact syndrome.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, whose experience and stability were a balance to the unpredictable president, resigned in protest of Trump’s decision to withdraw American forces from Syria and his rejection of international alliances.

On Thursday, in a rebuke of the president, 4 star general Mattis decided that Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw roughly 2,000 American troops from Syria was insufferable.

US withdrawal makes the other imperial Republican democratic power, the French Republic, the sole crucial provider of life for the Kurds who have been fighting and crushing the Islamist State (of which they hold thousands of dangerous prisoners, many crazed out European converts to Lethal Islam).

Now, of course, France has been under terminal economic, financial and social stress from vicious EU policy targeting the Republic, to profit so-called “free market”, actually dirty, obscure, global plutocracy. And Franco-British strength has been broken, mostly thanks to the obscure and obscured machinations of their own child, the USA!

Resources of empire. Part of the British Grand Fleet, before the war, in 1914. It comprised around 18 modern battleships, 29 older battleships, 150 cruisers, etc. By 1914, six brand new Elizabeth class battleships were under final construction, and were engaged in battle by 1916. As the British empire collapsed, these resources stopped being available. Something for the USA to meditate: if the US empire collapses, thanks to Trump, US resources will shrink… That would trump Trump.

The British Navy lost 35,000 sailors in battle during WWI. The USA, more than a century ago, enticed and supported the fascist foolhardy imperialist Kaiser Wilhelm, for the first three years of WWI.

https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/U.S._Protests_Against_Maritime_Warfare

“… Britain tread lightly in this grey area of legality because… from the beginning of the war that the U.S. would be the principal supplier of financial capital and munitions to the Entente during the war.10 Therefore instituting a full blockade of Germany imports when war broke out could have been the death knell not for Germany, but for Britain and its allies.”

Britain and France established total blockade of Germany (UK) and Austria-Hungary (France), after 4 months of war, once German mass atrocities against civilians in France and Belgium became widely reported…

Trade from US cotton, camphor, pyrites and saltpetre producing states to Germany through the Netherlands, enabled the fascists German invaders to keep on making cotton based explosives (although much less than they needed, less than Great Britain which was itself less than France… By 1917, France was producing around 200,000 artillery shells per DAY, whereas total German annual  production was only a tenth of that…)

Britain and France, with a little tiny help from Italy won the First World War, starving invasive Germany into submission, thanks to their world empires… Then the USA came to the rescue of the Franco-British victory, controlling the latter in such a manner as to weaken morbidly France and Britain (vast subject).

When Europe dominated militarily: Naval forces, 1914. Notice the democracies, France & Britain together had 5 times more submarines than fascist Germany…. and nearly three times as many modern battleships soon available… Fascist Germany really went into that war without thinking, as fascist regime are prone to do…

More of the same US strategy, helping fascism through rogue US plutocrats, made the Nazi catastrophe possible (in particular by smuggling US weapons to the Nazis, before 1933…). The Nazi madness terminally exhausted Europe, enabling US plutocracy to install the so-called “American Century”, worldwide. Trump’s intuition is that this free market empire has turned out to be economically unsustainable, as the USA can’t afford the giant military establishment necessary to keep it going…. Allies don’t pay enough tribute. Devolution is needed.

Unfortunately Europeans have lost their empires thoroughly, and can’t step up, where the USA is stepping down; even China seems better able to invest in Africa than Europeans themselves… US thought empires could be replaced by “free market”. “Free market” is neither free, nor a market… And the USA, handicapped by the enormous military spending can’t afford it either (in spite of the free ride the GAFAM got so far…)

Rising powers are all over. Pakistan’s nukes, not just North Korea’s, have to be kept in mind. The world is out of control. We know what that means: it’s at the mercy of a fascist, invasive team of crazed generals, as happened in Germany in 1914.  

If such a war came. The obvious winning strategy for the USA and its closest allies would be a repeat of what the USA did in 1914-17 and 1933-1942: wait for the participants to exhaust themselves… So, paradoxically, “America First” may result in Britain, France, Western Europe getting closer to the USA in all ways…  

The past has to be harnessed to lead into the future optimally.

On the most macro-analysis, Europe let herself be manipulated into suicidal wars. Or, more exactly, Germany let itself be manipulated into Europe killing wars by US manipulators (Wilson, FDR, and a cornucopia of US plutocrats and bankers). Is Trump another of these “America-First” manipulators?

Well, at least, Trump admits it. That makes him more authentic: his reasons can be explored, debated, counter-acted.

On the face of it, Syria is a European problem: it was the wealthiest province of Rome, when it fell to crazed, mass murderous Islamists… in the Seventh Century (Islamists, after winning a crucial battle by great luck, killed all the males capable to bearing arms in Syria, just to prevent a Roman counter-attack). Arguably Russia is a European state, partly heir of Constantinople. So it would make sense that a combination of Western Europe and Russia would solve the Syrian problem, and similar problems caused by 13 centuries of fascist theology.

However, to do this, one would need Western Europe to have a military power similar to Russia’s. That can be done: French GDP, by itself, is higher than Russia’s. However, what’s lacking in Europe, at large, is the will… and more: a mind? It’s no surprise: Germany’s will was broken in the 1914-1945 war it made against France, Britain and Russia, and lost so badly, that even the sewer thinking that had become German philosophy went down the drain. And in Europe, only those three actors (supported by Belgium, Serbia, Croatia, etc.) had the clarity of mind to fight fascism.

So now Trump is saying sayonara… Just as the US refused to help democracy at crucial junctures in 1914, and 1939 (and even doing the exact opposite). The French have long proposed a European defense force, on and off. Short of that, at least other European states should let France access the means of the necessary power projection.

And if that means a 20% French deficit, let the Germans and the like, consent to policies which will make that sustainable (for example a devaluation of the Euro which would extinguish the debt by as much, etc.)  

One may think US policy unwise. But Europeans better beware: Rome came into Greece, and left, twice. The third time, it stayed. Now, of course, Rome had not been created, but inspired by Greece, whereas the USA was, indeed, created by Europe… In more way than one… France in particular is not just the parent of the USA, but also that of Britain… One more reason for the USA to give France the means to fight… By influencing other European states…  

Patrice Ayme

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Extracts from General Mattis’ Resignation Letter:

Dear Mr. President:

I have been privileged to serve as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense…

I am proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance. Our troops continue to provide the capabilities needed to prevail in conflict and sustain strong U.S. global influence.

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world. Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.

Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions — to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time… I pledge my full effort to a smooth transition that ensures the needs and interests of the 2.15 million Service Members and 732,079 DoD civilians…

Jim N. Mattis