Sam Altman's STUNNING Statement, "We're Working on Superintelligence" (Video - 15mn)

  Alignment is utterly meaningless. Not my opinion, o1's opinion! AI will soon understand problems in a way we can't envision them. It is not yet quite the case but we are extremely near this point. Then what? We truly have no clue. Thinking about this problem might have been a good idea a few years ago, now we can only sit and watch! Whatever happens, soon enough it's going to be spectacular!

 

Japan Betrayed? US Cancels $15B Lifeline Deal, Raises Questions For G7 Economies & Allies (Video - 11mn)

  What an accent! :-) But the analysis is sound and to the point. Japan and Europe should worry! Changes are coming!

 

Countdown To The European Collapse by Lucas Leiroz

   This article confirm what I have been saying for the last 3 years that the US has done its very best and succeeded in separating Europe from Russian gas. Great achievement but then what? With a crumbling Europe, the US will now be rather "alone" in its fight against Russia and China. We are now on the verge of a major recession which may quickly turn into a depression thanks to accumulated debt all over the world. This alone, to my opinion, indicates that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East will not be winding down as they should but could easily escalate out of control. Let see what Trump does. I believe he truly wants to wind down these conflicts but what is the chance that he can? I won't be holding my breath!

 by Lucas Leiroz,

With the ban on the flow of Russian gas to Europe through Ukrainian territory, little remains before the absolute economic and social collapse of the European continent...

Finally, energy cooperation between Russia and Europe is (almost) completely over. After nearly three years of sanctions and sabotage, the bilateral Moscow-EU energy partnership suffered its greatest historical blow. Kiev fulfilled its promise not to extend its contract with Gazprom, which was allowing the arrival of Russian gas to Europe, then creating an extremely uncomfortable energy insecurity situation for its own “partners” in the European Union.

On the morning of the first day of 2025, the Russian Federation stopped supplying gas to European buyers via Ukraine. Even amidst the conflict, the Russian Gazprom and Ukrainian Naftogaz had kept in operation an energy transit agreement signed in 2020, which expired on the last day of 2024. Previously, Kiev had already announced it was unwilling to renew the contract with Gazprom, although some European countries repeatedly asked Ukraine to do so.

Despite the sanctions imposed on Russia since 2022, some European countries continued benefiting from the import of Russian gas, particularly Slovakia and Hungary – nations that refused to participate in the Western-sponsored anti-Russian boycott – as well as Austria, a country historically neutral in Europe’s geopolitical and military disputes. Other nations, even adhering to the sanctions, continued hypocritically receiving Russian gas, such as Italy, Poland, Romania, and Moldova. There were also cases of gas resale, with receiving nations re-exporting the commodity to countries seeking to bypass the sanctions.

With the end of the Ukrainian route, all these states lost any guarantee of a safe energy source – precisely during winter, the time of year when gas consumption in Europe is at its highest. Obviously, there are currently energy reserves that may be enough to cope with the challenges of the current season, but the situation will progressively become more critical over time. European nations will have to find new sources of gas or expand the use of the only two remaining routes for Russian gas (via Turkey and the Black Sea). Recent indicators show a substantial rise in gas prices among Asian exporters. Ankara is also expected to take the opportunity to gain more profits from its pipeline.

There is currently hope among Europeans for a cheap gas supply through the long-awaited Qatari-Turkish pipeline project via Syria. With the fall of Bashar al Assad’s legitimate government, energy giants from Turkey and the Gulf have revived the proposal, although they are waiting for domestic pacification in Syria by the Al-Qaeda junta to begin the construction. Some optimistic analysts in Europe believe this would be the antidote to Europe’s dependency on Russian gas – or Asian and American, as in the current circumstances.

The main problem with this hope is believing in the goodwill of the Western hawks to “pacify Syria.” Without Assad, Damascus became a “failed state,” with territory divided between different factions in constant hostilities. It is unlikely this will change – simply because, despite the tactical operators of the Syrian crisis (Turkey and Qatar) wanting pacification, the strategic mentors (Israel and the USA) are not interested. Tel Aviv prefers a polarized and war-torn Syria, unable to do anything to prevent territorial progress in the Golan and beyond. Washington, which is subservient to Israeli interests through the international Zionist lobby, is interested in the same – along with, of course, fostering Kurdish terrorists to worsen the internal Syrian situation even further.

In other words, Western analysts still do not understand that the decision-makers of the unipolar axis simply do not want to solve Europe’s problems. It is not in the US’ interest that its “partners” in Europe regain cheap energy and a strong industrial base. For Washington, the collapse of Europe is not a tragedy but a strategic goal, whose roots lie in the science of geopolitics itself. According to the fundamentals of Western geopolitics, Russian-European integration would be disastrous for the US-UK Atlantic axis. Therefore, in the face of Russia’s imminent military victory and Moscow’s rehabilitation as a Eurasian geopolitical power, the Americans and the British have adopted a “scorched earth” strategy in Europe.

Germany's New Morgenthau Plan by Victor Davis Hanson,

   Great article by Victor Davis Hanson. What is happening currently in Germany is in fact very sad. A slow version of hara-kiri the German way. It could be stopped anytime but for ideological reasons it won't, probably not until it's too late and Germany plunges the rest of Europe into decline. This has happened in the past: Spain in 1900 was little more than the shadow of its former self of the XVI century. In the Middle Ages, a few tens of thousands of people were living in the ruins of Rome which earlier counted more than a million inhabitants. An let's not mention Greece!    

  What is special about Germany, is that no barbarians have conquered the country, no calamity has devastated the countryside and the cities are still prosperous. To no avail, the Germans, trudging in the snow, are adamant that the planet must be saved from a warming which is late at its rendez-vous with apocalypse. Like the Maya fighting a secular drought with more human sacrifices, the Germans will fight "climate change" with even less carbon, while the rest of the world scratch its head, contemplates the silent tragedy of collective suicide...and goes back to business as usual.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

Less than a year before the end of World War II, then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.

After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II — along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919 — the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised.

After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany.

Postwar Germany would have resembled something akin to the ancient, pre-civilized frontier that the first-century AD historian Tacitus wrote about in his Germania.

The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany’s surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be dismantled.

The Ruhr, the renowned center of European industrial strength, was to be permanently neutered, starved of its energy, raw materials, and infrastructure.

After the war, the plan demanded virtual complete disarmament of Germany. Its once-feared armed forces were to be rendered nonexistent.

There were also promised massive reductions in Germany’s borders. Various countries, such as the Soviet Union, Poland, and France, were to be given large slices of the old Third Reich.

Future German security would hinge only on the power and goodwill of the victorious United States and its allies.

When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had a field day. He screamed to Germans that they were all doomed to oblivion if they lost the war, even growing opponents of the Nazi Party.

Even many Americans were aghast at the plan.

Gen. George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, warned that its mere mention had galvanized German troops to fight to the end, increasing American casualties as they closed in on the German homeland.

Ex-President Herbert Hoover blasted the plan as inhumane. He feared mass starvation of the German people if they were reduced to a premodern, rural peasantry.

But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and discovered that their “ally,” Russia’s Joseph Stalin, was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Truman administration backed off the plan.

There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.

Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.

Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.

The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.

German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force.

Just a few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians are dead, wounded, or missing — in the costliest European battle since the horrors of Stalingrad.

Yet the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower, munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an ascendant Russian invader.

More than 1 million immigrants have entered the country illegally, the vast majority of them from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile to European values and culture, as recent terrorist killings have shown. One-fifth of the population was not born in Germany.

The shrinking German people are growing angry, divided, and depressed. Their 1.4 percent fertility rate is one of the lowest in the Western world.

A tragic irony now abounds.

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan — as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.

Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders — without a United States-led NATO.

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing — and destroying — itself.