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Fabrice's Blog
Two years of war in Ukraine
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.
Nothing New under the New Year
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
Napoleon, Hitler, Prigozhin
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.
Such, Such is the Contract
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".
My first dialogue with an AI
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:
Another 1001 tweets
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.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
If Van Gogh would have seen the world we now live in, after cutting off one ear, he would have poked one eye out.
Brooding by the Siegesdenkmal
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).
A Hundred days into the 3rd World War
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.
A month into the 3rd World War
Ten days into the 3rd World War
Russia invades Ukraine
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]
- A few important, very important words for those who may be tempted to intervene in the ongoing events. Whoever tries to hinder us, or threaten our country or our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to consequences that you have never faced in your history. We are ready for any turn of events. All necessary decisions in this regard have been made. I hope that I will be heard.
Russia recognizes Donbass
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 et Montagnier, la boue et l'or
Le Monde—the French newspaper of record—explains why it took it two days to confirm the death of Luc Montagnier.
Leçons d'outre tombe
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.
Luc Montagnier passed away
Or did he? As I write, the information has been announced by France Soir over 23h ago
but there is no mention whatsoever on any mainstream, official source.
Another New Year
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.
![[2]](https://www.reuters.com/busihttps://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi2.wp.com%2Fcanadianflorist.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F04%2Fadrian-raeside-cartoon-april-30-2020-flower-cart.jpeg%3Ffit%3D804%252C555%26ssl%3D1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcanadianflorist.com%2Fadrian-raeside-cartoon-flower-power%2F&tbnid=E64RbiuecoVa2M&vet=10CAsQxiAoB2oXChMIgM-csbuT9QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEGk..i&docid=piJkDhACKbz6kM&w=804&h=555&itg=1&q=insulting%20unvaccinated&ved=0CAsQxiAoB2oXChMIgM-csbuT9QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEGkness/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/countries-making-covid-19-vaccines-mandatory-2021-08-16/){kind=link}
Halloween literature
«Back in September, I told my 9 year-old that he'd get his first shot of a COVID vaccine by Halloween»
This is not the opening line of a horror novel, but a serious comment from Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH @ashishkjha, a Dean of something somewhere. If you do not feel the thrill of such a morbid association, maybe the comments, that I screenshot below as a snapshot of growing insanity, will clarify the tones of this picture. To me, they are beyond belief, painting a world where children's greatest aspiration is to "get the jab", celebrating "Vaccine-o-ween" and being "independently minded kid" for demonstrating frustration and anxiety at the delay of their injection. This is child abuse from people that have been indoctrinated at an embarrassing level. Read again the opening line. Do we want medical doctors and childhood to make such bondings?
What a picture can say
Look at this man.
What does he inspire you? Friend or fiend?
Are we looking at a benefactor of Humanity, a medical doctor, a philosopher who soothed our angst at existence, a poet, maybe?
Or are we instead looking at a corrupt banker, a fanatic who agitated the most vile passions, a war criminal maybe?
A new visage whose good or criminal deeds are yet unknown always raises the question of whether the deeper inclinations of the person behind the face can be resolved from their appearance.
Censoring Luboš Motl
Censorship is going at a speed never seen before in any society that qualifies itself of democratic and remotely believes to hold some amount of freedom and liberties. Some of the recent highlights include censorship of the president of the United States and then in its wake, of a series of other officials, politicians, intellectuals, scientists, artists, etc., in addition to many less known activists. All this happens chiefly on YouTube and Twitter, with a worrying silence from the big majority of people, not to say consent and approval. It went one step further today with direct censorship of someone's private blog. This is not anecdotical because it's one thing to monitor a wide-audience platform, with the invalid but at least plausible excuse that you have to play by their rules, and to go after someone's personal property.