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What is going on in Gaza is atrocious beyond precedent. Never before, in the history of mankind, have such crimes been committed so openly, under the nose of the so-called International Community, over such infinite periods of time and with such steady progress in redefining the limits of barbarism.
I am in Syros for my 47th birthday. Two years ago, I was thinking what would become of us from the inspiration provided by a detail of a monument erected to celebrate a victory of Prussia over France. The inspiration was a naked child scratching his head as if to ponder how to reconcile innocence with horror, which both define the world.
NATO authorized direct attacks with its weapons on Russia and it becomes increasingly confirmed that Macron will deploy French troups in Ukraine. We are about to reset the World War Three counter to zero.
Today marks the 2nd "anniversary" of the Ukraine war. I did not find the strength to write anything on the 1st one, as this was such a depressing omen, signaling the impossibility of a solution anywhere soon and an immediable rottening of the wound. On the 2nd year, I would like to just equally ignore it—which is what most of us do anyway on a daily basis—and postpone the snapshot of my perception caught in the moment to the 3rd, 5th or 10th year marking the event of what appears to be the beginning of the end.
2024 is celebrated around the World as two major wars ravage its surface. Children are dying, civilians are murdered and hate is spreading among those who are not yet fighting. We drink champagne—le vin du diable—awaiting our turn, though refusing to accept that it will come.
Ça va
Il y a toujours un peu partout
Des feux illuminant la Terre
Ça va
les Hommes s'amusent comme des fous
Au dangereux jeu de la guerre
Ça va
As I write this, a column of mercenaries is driving towards Moscow to topple down a government trapped in a never-ending conflict and under increasing pressure and hostilities from Western Countries.
Everything that I write now will be obsolete in a few hours.
Orwell wrote an enthralling essay on his time in private education ("Such, Such Were The Joys") in "an expensive and snobbish school which was in process of becoming more snobbish, and, I imagine, more expensive". He got there because such a place was "sometimes willing to sacrifice financial profit to scholastic prestige" to "bring credit on the school".
Today I played, for the first time, with OpenAI's playground (see also chat GPT), which is still in beta mode, and that people make write pieces of code or motivation letters. As someone who was already mildly interested in the Markov chains of Emacs Doctor several decades ago, I found myself pleasantly surprised that I could indeed almost have a non-boring, dynamic and close to a Turing type conversation with this engine. That is the record of my exchanges with Sarah:
My Scheherazadean tribute to twitter became timely again with another 1001 tweets written since those that I could, on the previous occasion, only trace back down to 2014. This time, a higher engagement with the platform allows me to overlap with the online record that is, at the time of writing, kept up to 15 March (2017) (a tweet commenting "It does not need to be imagined, it needs to be written down."). All tweets actually seem to remain accessible, if they are referenced. These are, for instance, my first & second tweet, and my third one, one year and a half later. Follows below a selection among the last thousand or so written since then.
If Van Gogh would have seen the world we now live in, after cutting off one ear, he would have poked one eye out.
I am in Freiburg for my 45th year on this planet that is also 7 months and 7 days (218 days) of what never looked so much like the 3rd world war, with the recent explosion of the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany (this was four days ago) and the annexation of the four regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson to Russia (this was today).
Did we notice that we were already 100 days into World War III? The Second one also started like this, almost unnoticed. One was speaking of a "Drôle de Guerre" (funny war) to describe the period between the French and British declaration of war to Germany on 3 September (1939) until the actual fighting, dated 10 May (1940). There was missing the destruction and desolation of a "serious" war so this term was employed instead (British people spoke of "phoney war" instead, and possibly one mistranslated the other. The Germans spoke of Sitzkrieg (sitting war) while the Polish, also part of the events, found it "dziwna wojna" or surprising. It is the same now as, for most of us, there is no obvious or direct consequences of destruction, death and calamities. At most the inflation. In fact, most people would probably say that we are not at war. So a funny if not surprising situation indeed, definitely phoney and, as time passes—it is already 100 days—aren't most of us sitting down? The basics do not really change in the great world-changing events, only details and specifics.
Last night, around 4:00pm CET, a quick look at twitter before going to bed kept me glued to the screen instead: Russia had started a large-scale military operation in Ukraine and deployed troops there. And this is what Putin had to say about it: [1]
An event that looks like one more in a long series of aggravating moves in our chaotic world has the same detonating flavour as the ones that can cause world wars. It might be that nothing more catastrophic than what we are getting used to will happen, but if it would take greater proportions, of the type that will be life-changing for everybody, I'd wish to record my feelings on the night that it happened.
Le Monde—the French newspaper of record—explains why it took it two days to confirm the death of Luc Montagnier.
It is now confirmed by mainstream media that Prof. Luc Montagnier, discoverer of the RNA replication mechanism and awardee of the Nobel prize for his work on the HIV, passed away two days ago. The information has been broken and circulated in a timely manner by France-Soir, which triggered either condemnation of the claim as fake or an embargo on its diffusion. This allowed a quite unique circumstance of a popular tribute by admirers of the character unpolluted by politicians and the authorized press, de facto silenced by their incompetence.
2022, it's full of two, full of "too" too, it's been years that—pondering on what the future will bring us—I keep commenting on how things keep worsening irremediably towards a catastrophic event that will snap and result in a major collapse of society, if not civilization. But since it remains true for all points on the curve, that even an exponential growth is locally linear, things never look so dramatic from one day to the next even if they are going much worse now than they were one year ago. Remember, indeed, such a year as the last one, where "quarantine camps" [1] have been opened, where mandatory vaccination has been ordered in several places [2], coercing people who refuse the inoculation of an experimental product of dubious interest for an illness pausing a dubious threat to the general population, by firing them ("no jab, no job") [3] and depriving them from social aid after that [4], limiting their right to go out in shops and businesses [5], facing incarceration in, this time, actual jail [6][7], and, overall, losing their status of human beings [8][9] to be qualified instead of monsters and sociopaths who don't belong anywhere [10]. Remember, as well, that people have been shot at with real bullets when protesting peacefully against such measures [11]. All this happened. And here is the real danger to humanity: segregation, coercion, mass hysteria and authoritarian abuse of a fraction of the population with the blessings, if not encouragement, of the state and another fraction of the same population. And above all, normalization of such atrocities.