🇨🇭 Geopolitics & kitten pictures
Switzerland
Joined February 2020
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ShoreKnight retweeted
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
ShoreKnight retweeted
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
ShoreKnight retweeted
AI will split humanity into two unequal halves, similar to the white-collar revolution, but much more drastic.
"Exercise" as we know it didn't exist. The work itself was "exercise." Now, people have to create artificial environments and routines so their bodies don't fall apart. But how many people exercise? What percentage of the population? Not much. It takes very little effort to be healthier than 80% of the population.
The AI revolution will be more drastic. People are already getting dumber and lazier. To fend off the decay, we must set up artificial routines that keep our minds sharp.
Just like physical exercise.
But like physical exercise, only a minority of the population will do what's necessary to keep their minds sharp and active. The alternative is just too easy.
The difference, however, will be much starker than physical health, though at first it won't be as obvious. And the differences will grow.
One of the groups can't help but be slaves. They will have surrendered all of their agency and will to the machines they blithely dismissed as mere "tools."
The other group will build the future.
You want to be in the latter.
ShoreKnight retweeted
By age 30, you should realize that news, politics, and pornography have one thing in common: they can consume your life while giving you nothing in return.
ShoreKnight retweeted
You hollowed out your own town’s machine shops so you could buy plastic garbage from China for three dollars less.
Now your son has no trade to inherit, your neighbor’s boy is strung out on fentanyl behind an abandoned strip mall, and you’re bragging about your quarterly EBITDA.
You did not beat the market. You cannibalized your own grandchildren’s patrimony.
A Christian man does not feed his balance sheet on the ashes of his own countrymen.
Bring the machining home. Accept the tighter margin. Stop funding your own people’s destruction.
ShoreKnight retweeted
The opening paragraph to AJP Taylor's "The Course of German History" remains my absolute favourite start to a history book. Nobody's ever hit this hard right off the bat before
ShoreKnight retweeted
The Stages of Civilizational Collapse
Jean-Michel’s Ten Years in Paris.
Meet Jean-Michel. Fifty-eight, Paris, 11th arrondissement. Thirty years at the prefecture. An apartment nearly paid off, savings in an assurance-vie, a vote for the left. The state has always taken care of him.
Here are his next ten years.
2027 – Small decay. The metro breaks down twice a week. His doctor's next appointment is in four months. His favourite brasserie closes – rent, rules, taxes, and the owner had enough when the windows got broken one more time. It reopens as a kebab shop. His daughter, an engineer, leaves for Montreal. In Marseille, the drug gangs settle their accounts with Kalashnikovs – but Marseille is far away. Everyone shrugs.
2028 – Disorder becomes normal. On New Year's Eve his neighbor's car burns, along with hundreds of others. His wife's bag is snatched on the metro, and she stops taking it after nine. In the summer riots, police in Lyon come under fire from weapons of war. The news calls it "a feeling of insecurity."
2029 – The bill. The government falls again. The rating agencies downgrade France again. One week, the lenders stop pretending, and interest on the debt becomes the biggest line in the budget. One Monday morning, a notification: withdrawals from his assurance-vie are "temporarily suspended" – under a 2016 law nobody read. That night, a police patrol in the 18th arrondissement is met by a teenager with a Scorpion submachine gun.
2030 – Austerity. His salary frozen. His pension de-indexed. An "exceptional solidarity contribution" on savings. Property tax doubled. The garbage collectors strike for six weeks, and rats run through the courtyard. His wife's bag is stolen for the third time. The neighbor from the fourth floor is beaten up coming out of the metro at Place de la République.
2031 – The exodus. The doctors, the engineers and the entrepreneurs leave – quietly, one family at a time. Transfers abroad are capped, "temporarily." The good restaurant where he took his wife for their anniversaries is boarded up. His son, thirty, still lives at home. The apartment is worth a third less, and nobody is buying.
2032 – Paralysis. Governments last weeks. Every reform triggers a general strike. One night, someone fires fireworks through the window of the apartment downstairs. The family puts out the fire in time. Now the first-floor windows are boarded up. A police station in the suburbs is overrun and burned; the officers escape through the back. Jean-Michel stops watching the news.
2033 – Services break. Blackouts in winter. Schools closed one day a week "for lack of staff." The police no longer come for a burglary – you file it online. Two streets from home, Jean-Michel is stopped at gunpoint for his phone. He hands it over and says nothing. Neither does anyone else. His building installs a steel door.
2034 – Fragmentation. Whole neighborhoods are now openly run by armed gangs, and the city negotiates with them to get the trash collected. Militias from both political extremes fight in the streets. After a football match, the riots reach the Louvre. One wing burns. Luckily, not the one with the Mona Lisa.
2035 – Street guerrilla. Shootings in broad daylight. A bombing at a train station. A politician assassinated outside his home. Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides is looted. Armored vehicles at Place de la République, curfew at nine. Jean-Michel's son joins a militia "for protection." Jean-Michel doesn't ask which one.
2036 – The failed state. Paris can't pay its civil servants. Whole districts are held by armed groups. The euro is "under review." An international administration arrives, with conditions. The state still exists, on paper.
Jean-Michel, sixty-eight, packs two suitcases and applies for a visa – to Poland.
Science fiction? French police have already faced rioters and gangs armed with Kalashnikovs and Scorpion submachine guns – in Paris, Marseille and Lyon. The first stages are not a prediction. They are the news.
It won't come as a revolution. It will come one notification, one closed shop, one burned car at a time. And every step will be explained away – until the last one.
🎯 Collapse bingo. How many of these will happen in France over the next ten years?
The Louvre is next.
Someone has suggested that the Louvre's magnificent and priceless works of art should be moved to Poland. To keep them safe – but also so they can be appreciated in a civilized environment.
A year ago today, thieves walked into the Louvre in broad daylight and walked out with the crown jewels – in seven minutes. Activists had already thrown cake and soup at the Mona Lisa. Only the glass saved her.
It may sound like a joke. Until you imagine if they were to burn the Mona Lisa.
Notre Dame burned after all…
We are talking about the heritage of Our Civilization.
Can the French government be trusted to protect it?
Centuries of Western genius, in a country that can no longer protect its own streets.
We would take good care of her.
Civilization is best kept by the people who would never throw soup at it.
ShoreKnight retweeted
Germany messed up.
@energybants made one of the greatest charts about Germany's energy transition three years ago.
It shows France utterly mogging it with nuclear and it shows how much damage Germany has inflicted on itself by getting rid of its own nuclear.
The left prefers feelings and beliefs, but facts and data are sometimes worth examining. Shall we?
1. Germany has spent about €400 billion on its “green” energy transition, an unbelievable amount.
2. Higher energy prices have imploded energy-intensive industrial production, costing countless well-paid jobs.
3. By shutting clean nuclear plants while keeping coal and gas, German energy production generates 10 times more emissions than France’s. Yep, 10 times more.
4. Production moved to Asia, where the same products generate far more emissions in manufacturing and shipping. A Chinese-built car shipped to Europe causes 70% more emissions than one built in Germany, cement production causes twice as many.
In short, €400bn spent to ruin German industry, destroy jobs, and harm the climate badly. Why do the Germans do this to themselves and the planet?
ShoreKnight retweeted
Humans are great survivors since we excel at worrying about potential threats.
However, there are infinite threats and we have limited time & resources. Beware becoming an extremist doomsday prepper who wastes tons of resources mitigating a threat that never appears!
ShoreKnight retweeted
As an autistic person when I first learned about the concept of networking I thought it was highly manipulative and lacking any integrity because what do you mean I’m expected to know people in order to get a job instead of relying on my experience and work ethic?
ShoreKnight retweeted
I think I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of this one.
🤖 Made with AI
Mathematicians are coping so hard they might abolish irrational numbers again and turn the field into a guild
terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/…
ShoreKnight retweeted
Without the fake smile you can see all the hate and resentment this man has for his own voters in those black lifeless eyes
