Wednesday, January 8, 2025

They Really Do Want To Reduce The Population...

   Are there really too many people on Earth? Well, as usual the answer is not clear cut. Yes and no.

   Considering the fact that we all live predominantly in a Western dominated economic system and that this so-called capitalist consumer society is fundamentally predatory, then, yes, in that paradigm, there are indeed too many people on earth and this has been the case since the early 1970s when we exceeded the 4 billion mark. Now we are well over double past that number. Many natural resources are close to their maximum availability (at an affordable price of course.)
 
   But if you travel the world, you will discover that immense areas are completely empty. Canada and Russia come to mind for obvious reasons but countries like Indonesia, Brazil and until recently most of Africa are for one reason or another devoid of people. Sometimes too cold or too hot but most often, it is the lack of water which limits human population. When you look at countries like India or the Eastern part of China where you find an especially high density of people, you also discover old civilizations which have discovered the secret of water management.
  Can we improve our way and learn to respect nature more? I doubt it deeply. What we couldn't do during the previous period of abundance will not be done now that the resources are becoming scarcer. Can we improve water management? Most certainly yes but short of other arrangements to use resources better, the only immediate result will be a further increase of population. 
 
  Historically, EVERY single human society has solved this problem the same way: War, famine, pestilence and death! The famous horsemen of the apocalypse! Can we escape such a fate? This would be the triumph of hope over experience!

  As we enter this period of 4th turning, we're about to see how we deal with the problem and if we handle it better than our predecessors but the early signs are not exactly favorable.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End Of The American Dream blog,

There is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that our world is facing today.

Many of them are completely convinced that humans are literally a “plague” upon the Earth and that extreme measures are required to prevent us from destroying the entire planet.  

To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to a lack of population control.  They warn that if nothing is done about our exploding population, humanity will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet.  They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote “family planning” in developing nations as a way to combat population growth.  Of course just about anything that reduces the human population in any way is a positive thing for those that believe in this philosophy.  This very twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of our most prominent websites, and it is being taught at top colleges and universities all over the world.  The people that are promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by controlling the growth of the human population. 

In fact, many of them truly believe that they are engaged in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet.

The population of the world is currently sitting just above 8 billion, and the UN expects it to peak at 10.3 billion later this century…

The world’s population is expected to grow by more than 2 billion people in the next decades and peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billion, a major shift from a decade ago, a new report by the United Nations said Thursday.

From the time of Charles Darwin all the way to today, we have been relentlessly warned about what would happen if something was not done to reduce population growth.

Of course the dire consequences that we were warned about have never actually come to fruition.

But that hasn’t stopped the elite from continuing to issue even more warnings.

The following are 47 shocking population control quotes from the global elite that will make you want to lose your lunch…

1. Charles Darwin: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

2. Bill Gates: “The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. (…) And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later.”

3. John D. Rockefeller: “The population problem must be recognized by government as a principal element in long-range planning.”

4. David Rockefeller: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”

5. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: “All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class”

6. CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

7. HBO personality Bill Maher: “I’m pro-choice, I’m for assisted suicide, I’m for regular suicide, I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving—that’s what I’m for. . . . It’s too crowded, the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death.”

8. UK Television Presenter Sir David Attenborough: “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now”

9. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson: “The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself…It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet…All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control.”

10. Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

11. Paul Ehrlich, a former  science adviser to president George W. Bush and the author of “The Population Bomb”: “Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality. But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem.”

12. Richard Branson: “The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.”

13. Environmental activist Roger Martin: “On a finite planet, the optimum population providing the best quality of life for all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare survival. The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean better lives.”

14. Al Gore: “One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principal ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children to have, the spacing of the children… You have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

15. MIT professor Penny Chisholm: “The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth.”

16. Julia Whitty, a columnist for Mother Jones: “The only known solution to ecological overshoot is to decelerate our population growth faster than it’s decelerating now and eventually reverse it—at the same time we slow and eventually reverse the rate at which we consume the planet’s resources. Success in these twin endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care, biodiversity loss, even war. On one front, we’ve already made unprecedented strides, reducing global fertility from an average 4.92 children per woman in 1950 to 2.56 today—an accomplishment of trial and sometimes brutally coercive error, but also a result of one woman at a time making her individual choices. The speed of this childbearing revolution, swimming hard against biological programming, rates as perhaps our greatest collective feat to date.”

17. Colorado State University Professor Philip Cafaro in a paper entitled “Climate Ethics and Population Policy”: “Ending human population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate change. Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may be necessary in order to do so.”

18. Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka: “I have two grandchildren and I want them to inherit a stable Earth. But I fear for them. Humans have overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal nutritional substrate on which bacteria and viruses (microbes) will grow and prosper. We are behaving like bacteria growing on an agar plate, flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another microbe colonizes and takes over, using them as their resource. In addition to our extremely high population density, we are social and mobile, exactly the conditions that favor growth and spread of pathogenic (disease-causing) microbes. I believe it is only a matter of time until microbes once again assert control over our population, since we are unwilling to control it ourselves. This idea has been espoused by ecologists for at least four decades and is nothing new. People just don’t want to hear it.”

19. Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General from 1997-2006: “The idea that population growth guarantees a better life — financially or otherwise — is a myth that only those who sell nappies, prams and the like have any right to believe.”

20. Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, UN Under-Secretary-General from 2000-2010: “We cannot confront the massive challenges of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental destruction unless we address issues of population and reproductive health.”

21. Bill Nye: “In 1750, there were about a billion humans in the world. Now, there are well over seven billion people in the world. It more than doubled in my lifetime. So all these people trying to live the way we live in the developed world is filling the atmosphere with a great deal more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than existed a couple of centuries ago. It’s the speed at which it is changing that is going to be troublesome for so many large populations of humans around the world.”

22. Actress Cameron Diaz: “I think women are afraid to say that they don’t want children because they’re going to get shunned. But I think that’s changing too now. I have more girlfriends who don’t have kids than those that do. And, honestly? We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.”

23. Democrat strategist Steven Rattner: “WE need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.”

24. Matthew Yglesias, a business and economics correspondent for Slate, in an article entitled “The Case for Death Panels, in One Chart”: “But not only is this health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms of life expectancy or quality of life.”

25. Stephen Hawking: “In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9 per cent per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.”

26. Gloria Steinem: “Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal chords has to be an opera singer.”

27. Jane Goodall: “It’s our population growth that underlies just about every single one of the problems that we’ve inflicted on the planet. If there were just a few of us, then the nasty things we do wouldn’t really matter and Mother Nature would take care of it — but there are so many of us.”

28. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

29. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

30. Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams in an article entitled “So What If Abortion Ends Life?”: “All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides.”

31. Paul Ehrlich: “Basically, then, there are only two kinds of solutions to the population problem. One is a ‘birth rate solution,’ in which we find ways to lower the birth rate. The other is a ‘death rate solution,’ in which ways to raise the death rate — war, famine, pestilence — find us.”

32. Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics: “[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”

33. Nina Fedoroff, a key adviser to Hillary Clinton: “We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people.”

34. Barack Obama’s primary  science adviser, John Holdren: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.”

35. Another quote from John Holdren: “If population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.”

36. David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club: “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

37. Maurice Strong: “Either we reduce the world’s population voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally.”

38. Thomas Ferguson, former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs: “There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…”

39. Mikhail Gorbachev: “We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”

40. Jacques Costeau: “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.”

41. Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola: “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die”

42. Author Dan Brown: “Overpopulation is an issue so profound that all of us need to ask what should be done.”

43. Prince Phillip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

44. Ashley Judd: “It’s unconscionable to breed, with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.”

45. John Guillebaud, professor of family planning at University College London: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.”

46. Bill Gates: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent.”

47. Charles Darwin: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

"Unprecedented Fires" Scorch 3,000 Acres In Los Angeles Area, Forcing 49,000 To Evacuate

 

   All you need to know about the fires in California. Entirely man made and the result of incompetence. (Or should we say "woman" made? - Read the more recent article above to find out!)

"Unprecedented Fires" Scorch 3,000 Acres In Los Angeles Area, Forcing 49,000 To Evacuate

LA Fire Summary:

  • Fast-moving, wind-driven fires are sweeping through the Los Angeles area, forcing mandatory evacuations for over 49,000 residents. The fires remain 0% contained.

  • The Palisades Fire (caused unknown) has burned nearly 15,000 acres, while the Eaton Fire has scorched 10,600 acres. 

  • AccuWeather Estimates $52 billion to $57 billion in preliminary damage and economic losses

  • Gov. Gavin Newsom deployed 1,400 firefighters & declared a state of emergency.

  • Nearly 300,000 residential and/or commercial customers are without power in the LA region.

  • NWS: Worst fire conditions (high winds) will peak Wednesday morning. 

  • Malibu residents warned about potential evacuation.

  • Fires ZERO PERCENT CONTAINED 

Evacuation Map (via NYT):

Fire Map (NASA VIIRS image overlaid LA via X user loosenedspirit): 

*  *  * 

Update (1915ET):

"The Palisades Fire, which has quintupled in size since this morning, has now prompted evacuations in the City of Santa Monica," meteorologist Matthew Cappucci wrote on X.

Evacuations are expanding.

Fire is zero contained. 

*  *  * 

Update (1830ET):

Just awful. 

*  *  * 

Update (1545ET):

Via Bloomberg Top Live Desk: 

"In California, nearly 500,000 people have turned to the state's insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, which has doubled in size over the past five years. The state is now exposed to nearly $458 billion in potential damage, Mark Gongloff writes for Bloomberg Opinion. The neighborhoods in the path of the Palisades and other fires burning this week have been among some of the hardest-hit by insurer defections in recent years."

Via Bloomberg's Brian Sullivan: 

"The Los Angeles region has a high risk of exposure to wildfires: More than 460,000 homes with a reconstruction value of $300 billion in LA and the Riverside region have a moderate to very high risk of exposure, according to CoreLogic, a property analytics firm.

"CoreLogic noted that not all the homes deemed at risk are directly exposed to the current fires."

Via AccuWeather:

Estimates $52 billion to $57 billion in preliminary damage and economic loss has occurred from the raging Los Angeles area wildfires.

*  *  * 

Update (1534ET):

President-elect Donald Trump on Truth Social: 

"The fires in Los Angeles may go down, in dollar amount, as the worst in the History of our Country. In many circles, they’re doubting whether insurance companies will even have enough money to pay for this catastrophe. Let this serve, and be emblematic, of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newscum Duo. January 20th cannot come fast enough!"

Meanwhile... 

Clown. 

It is time for Californians to usher in an era of accountability after radical leftist politicians and officials have left the state in chaos.

*  *  * 

Update (1115ET):

LA County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told reporters, "We have well over 5,000 acres that have burned and the fire is growing. We have no percentage of containment. We have an estimated 1,000 structures destroyed."

Trump was right...

There's nothing like waking up to a fire apocalypse that morning...

*  *  * 

Update (0700ET):

The Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst wildfires raging in Southern California show no signs of abating.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department reported on X that nearly 3,000 acres—roughly 4.5 square miles—are ablaze, and the fire is 0% contained as of early Wednesday morning.

According to PowerOutage.US, nearly 300,000 customers across the area are without power.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X that 1,400 firefighters have been delayed in the area to "combat these unprecedented fires."

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

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!


 

Monday, January 6, 2025

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.


Sunday, January 5, 2025

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.

Saturday, December 28, 2024

The AI Cambrian Explosion: OpenAI o3 Sparks a Big Bang (Video - 13mn)

  Calling it "Cambrian Explosion" or "Big Bang" is just a lighter version of the Singularity. We are truly on the verge of something big and nobody knows what it is! 

  From my experience, o1 is already at AGI level. It's just that we will not call it that for obvious psychological reasons. There are still a few gaps but you truly need to format your questions in specific ways to probe these gaps. Soon, they'll be gone. Conversely, the reasoning capabilities will continue to expand far beyond our human level. 

  As I mentioned in previous posts, the singularity could happen any time now, We simply won't see it coming. What we will see in 2025 are new applications of AI and the beginning of widespread use in multiple sectors. We can expect: AI doctors far more efficient than humans, already 80% accuracy in diagnostics vs 30% for real doctors as announced recently! AI pilots will be tested in 2025. In fact, it is likely that drones will expand so fast from now on that planes will be a minority in the sky in just a few years! China has just launched the fabrication of 1 million military drones in 2025/2026! And these are just two examples. By 2027, talking on the phone to a human will become a rare experience. The Internet will become full of AI created fake artists, fake news, fake almost everything! It will be more and more difficult to find human artifacts and creations. They will soon be at a premium! 

  In other words, as we begin to spiral around the "singularity" changes will accelerate at exponential rates with no end in sight, until... 

  Well, let's hope it doesn't happen too soon but I am afraid that the fire is already out of Prometheus' hands!


Friday, December 27, 2024

The Next Scary AI Phase in Your New Windows and iPhone 16 is Here Now! (Video - 22mn)

   Those who read this blog will know that as a Data specialists, I have from the beginning been a great proponent of AI use. I use it everyday of the week, several times a day in fact for multiple purposes with great satisfaction. 

  So the worry here is not about the AI itself but about what you (or rather "they") can do with the AI. And on that subject, the prospects are truly frightening. The control will very quickly become insidious and more or less complete. Within a short 2 to 3 years at most, you won't be able to do anything at all without constant monitoring from the AI, not by choice but by default!  This is why the companies that control you mobile devices are worth so much: They indirectly control our future!

  Usually, I tend to offer an alternative or different ways to look at the future. But here I see none. The technology is so overwhelming that it will soon become, first ubiquitous, then unavoidable. Worse, most people will see absolutely nothing! Just a very convenient tool added to their mobile. A "tool" which very soon will be in charge! 


 

US-Russia Relations Today Akin to US-Japan Relations before WWII (by Martin Armstrong)

  I fully concur with Martin Armstrong, the parallel with the period before World War 2 are surreal, almost uncanny. The big difference is that we now have nuclear weapons. The consequences of war would be beyond horrendous!

Post by Martin Armstrong

Embargo on Japan 2 15 20The US government is treating Russia just as it treated Japan before World War II fully took hold.

President Roosevelt was inflicting embargos on the Japanese, freezing their money, and cutting them off from all energy. When they turned to buying fuel from other nations, Roosevelt threatened to blockade their ships. Is it any wonder why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to eliminate the US fleet after the threat of an embargo?

7 26 1941 US Freeze Japan Assets

The neocon strategy is taken right out of the war book used during the Roosevelt Administration. This is precisely what FDR did to get the United States into World War II. He was frustrated because Congress would not authorize joining the war. When FDR went to Boston, the Irish lashed out at him, saying that the British starved the Irish and they were now not going to go defend them. Many people who fled Europe to America wanted to be free of the hatred and politics in Europe. So, it was NOT a popular idea to come to the rescue of Europe, which they fled.

It may come as a surprise, but the US public was sympathetic toward China during this period. America saw Japan’s actions during the Second Sino-Japanese War as predatory. Similarly, many now view Russia as the aggressor and believe it must be quelled. The hatred of the Japanese later came to a head during the war as the US government imprisoned all Japanese people, women and children, and those born in the US.

1942 Japanese internment Camps

The Neocons, during the FDR Administration, followed a clever agenda to circumvent Congress as they are doing right now. They were racists and simply hated the Japanese, as is the case with Russians right now. They started in 1938 with a series of escalating highly restrictive trade restrictions imposed on Japan. The Neocons terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan in 1939. They then tightened the Export Control Act of 1940, which was intended to prevent the scarcity of critical commodities in a likely prewar environment. In addition, this act directly targeted Japan to restrict the exportation of material to Imperial Japan.

This was followed by the United States embargoing scrap metal shipments to Japan and closing the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping. The Neocons were seeking to isolate Japan without engaging in a war that only Congress could declare Japan, at the time, imported about 74% of its scrap iron from the US and over 90% of its copper.

Then, on July 26, 1941, the US seized all Japanese assets in the United States in retaliation for the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China as they have done today with Russia’s reserves. This was followed on August 1 with an oil embargo and gasoline exports to Japan which also came from the United States. The oil embargo was the last straw when 80% of its energy supply came from the USA. The US also was proposing intervening to prevent Japan from getting oil from other sources.

The complete US oil embargo was the last straw. The Japanese had to then seize Southeast Asia for resources which expanded the war instead of the old hatred between China and Japan. They needed to do that before they ran out of resources. To secure themselves in the Pacific, they attacked Pearl Harbor with no intention of actually invading the United States.

What we are doing to Russia is exactly the same way Roosevelt treated the Japanese. There will be only one resolution – World War III. I do not believe that those in Washington and Brussels are this stupid. This is a deliberate attempt to provoke Russia to attack. They will then claim we wear the white hats and Russia is the aggressor with an unprovoked attack. It worked before. There was even a Senate investigation after the war into the fact that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was to be attacked and pulled out the important ships, all to force Congress to enter the war.

BREAKING: UFOs Are Monitoring Nuclear Weapons GLOBALLY (Video - 2h08mn)


  This is one of the most complete and interesting video on the subject of UFOs.

  Clearly something is going right now but why? The explanation of this video that the phenomenon seems to be linked to our use of Nuclear weapons is striking and  compelling. 

  We are being swamped by bogus sightings, false video and lights in the sky. That much is not new although probably amplified by social medias. But behind that there are also countless sightings by pilots and military officers above and around military based which are both intriguing and alarming. 

  Of course, so is the fact that we are withing earshot of a nuclear war! Is this linked? Some people believe so. I find some of their evidences convincing. Well, what do you think?  

  PS: forget about abductions and "holes in the Matrix". The subject is interesting enough without SF thrown in!

American Free Speech Vs European Censorship

   Whatever you may think about America and the problems the country is facing as we saw in several recent posts, they pale compared to Euro...