Category: Politics

Presidential transport

An article about Air Force One.

The Boeing 747, that currently serves as the means of air transport for President Trump, has been written about on The Conversation.

Here is that fascinating article:

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Air Force One is more than transportation – it has defined how presidents run the country and meet the world

A man in a dark suit climbs a stairway to a large plane.
President Donald Trump boards Air Force One on July 1, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Finn Gomez/Getty Images

Peter Kastor, Washington University in St. Louis

Air Force One used to be a high-flying symbol of American technology, ingenuity and power. For many, it was also a source of national pride.

The current Boeing 747s that serve as Air Force One are a combination transport vehicle, command center, press room, medical center and apartment, complete with bedroom and office for the nation’s chief executive.

Now, to many, Air Force One has become scandalous.

On July 8, 2026, The New York Times reported that the latest version of the presidential aircraft – presented by Qatar as a gift to President Donald Trump – lacks the sophisticated countermeasures that were a ready defense for the 747s that had been in service since 1990. Critics immediately revived earlier claims that the new 747 was a corrupt transaction from the start. Trump later said the plane would be sent to be “maxed out” with upgrades.

This article is not part of that story. Nor is it the standard story of Air Force One that appears in numerous documentaries, which tend to be gee-whiz accounts of the amazing capacities of the president’s airplane.

I am a historian writing a book about the technologies that have shaped the long history of the American presidency, in which Air Force One looms large. I believe it is important to see Air Force One as more than a cool gadget or political flash point. Von Hardesty, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, certainly understood this when he wrote that “by the end of the 20th century, Air Force One had evolved into an essential arm of the American Presidency.”

Put simply, the presidency as we know it today would have been impossible without Air Force One, which has shaped and defined that role for decades.

A man, waving, and a woman at the top of a stairway leading down from an airplane with 'UNITED STATES OF AMERICA' painted on its side.
President Richard Nixon waves to the crowds from Air Force One with his wife, Pat, as they arrive at Ireland’s Shannon Airport on Oct. 3, 1970. Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

Horse-drawn carriage to the ‘Sacred Cow’

It was only recently that Americans or their presidents could imagine things this way. When presidents left the capital throughout most of the nation’s history, it was a lengthy, at times arduous, process that severed their connection with government offices.

As a result, presidents rarely traveled while in office and were more likely to depart Washington for extended vacations than for official business. Likewise, no serving president left the United States until Teddy Roosevelt visited the construction of the Panama Canal in 1906. Woodrow Wilson became the first sitting president to cross the Atlantic when he boarded the USS George Washington in 1918 to join the negotiations in Versailles at the end of World War I.

If few presidents got away from Washington to see the country and its residents before 1900, the flip side was also true: Few Americans saw presidential candidates or incumbents in person, especially Americans who lived outside the eastern third of the United States. Instead, the connection between presidents and average citizens was mediated through political parties, the press and eventually through broadcast media.

The first designated presidential aircraft arrived in 1933, but Franklin Roosevelt never flew on it. His first flight as president came in 1943, when American Airlines loaned a flying boat called the Dixie Clipper to ferry Roosevelt to meet with other Allied leaders at the Casablanca Conference. In 1945, Roosevelt traveled to Yalta on a Douglas VC-54C called the Sacred Cow, the first plane specifically built for presidential travel.

Two men, one in a suit and the other in a military uniform, sitting next to each other and talking on an airplane.
President Franklin Roosevelt and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower on the president’s plane en route to the Tehran Conference in December 1943. George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

Despite these flights to important international meetings, Roosevelt and successors Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made limited domestic use of aircraft, preferring instead to travel by railroad. International trips remained lengthy journeys in loud, propeller-driven aircraft that encountered the greater turbulence of lower altitudes.

All this changed in 1962, when President John Kennedy acquired a brand-new Boeing 707, the first jet-powered Air Force One.

Presidential ubiquity

Flying higher, faster and quieter than their predecessors, the jet aircraft used for Air Force One made possible one of the central facets of the modern presidency: The nation’s chief executive could be a ubiquitous player in national politics and world affairs.

Presidential travel increased dramatically, both in its frequency and in the number of stops on each trip. This was not simply the result of the growing use of air travel worldwide. Where Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower understood world leadership as their ability to coordinate American power from Washington, Kennedy and his successors sought to make themselves the center of the story.

This seemed particularly important during the Cold War. As the United States asserted its leadership in the struggle against the Soviet Union, American presidents positioned themselves as the symbols of freedom in opposition to communism.

Consider President Richard Nixon traveling to China in 1972 to normalize relations, or Ronald Reagan flying to Iceland for the 1986 Reykjavík conference with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate the future of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The presence of a president at these conferences elevated both the importance of the event and the image of the president as a statesman who was able to quickly pivot back and forth from national to international leadership.
As American presidents struggled to maintain their power and their relevance after the end of the Cold War, their international travel only increased. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama each made over twice the number of international trips as Ronald Reagan did.

These trips ranged from goodwill visits to maintain old alliances to attempts to build new connections after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Presidents specifically visited international hot spots, positioning themselves as global peacemakers. The sight of the American president descending the long stairs from Air Force One, smiling and waving along the way, became a symbol of American diplomacy.

A group of people seated on an airplane listening to a man speaking and gesturing with his hands.
President Jimmy Carter meets with reporters aboard Air Force One on July 1, 1979, while flying from Seoul, South Korea, to Honolulu. AP Photo/Ira Schwarz

Official business – and campaigning

If Air Force One enabled presidents to announce themselves as statesmen abroad, it also revolutionized politics at home.

During the 1970s, the two major parties moved from selecting their nominees at national conventions to a system where state primaries decided who would lead the ticket.

This change emerged from demands that political power move from party leaders to party members. But a primary system would have been unimaginable without aircraft to shuttle candidates around the country. That was particularly important for incumbents, as air travel enabled them to be both sitting presidents and active candidates.

Presidents and their handlers learned how to combine official government business, which permitted the use of Air Force One, with campaign opportunities. These moments not only changed how presidents operated; they changed how Americans understood their presidents.

This change began with Kennedy’s use of the jet-powered Air Force One for domestic travel, including the tragic decision to visit Texas in November 1963, where he was assassinated. In just his first year in office, Bill Clinton visited 37 states over the course of 73 days.

Air Force One is a symbol of presidential power, but its problems only reinforce the fact that technology shapes the presidency.

The clearest demonstration was on 9/11. President Bush was in Florida that morning. Air Force One whisked him into the air, delivering him first to the safety of an Air Force base in Louisiana and then to the fortified headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska, and still had him back at the White House by the end of the day.

It was a grim reminder of the other task for Air Force One: a safe transport for the president during a national crisis or nuclear armageddon. While the aircraft fulfilled its promise to keep the president safe in a crisis, its legendary communication systems faltered. Crucially, Bush struggled to coordinate with senior officials in Washington, leaving him momentarily out of the loop at a terrifying historical juncture.

The role that presidents have assumed at home and abroad, as well as the ways Americans interact with their presidents, have taken form through the possibilities – and the limitations – of presidential aircraft. Air Force One is not just a great way to travel or a nifty gadget, nor is it peripheral to the presidency. It is central to it.

Peter Kastor, Professor of History & American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The last sentence of the last paragraph spells out how Air Force One is central to the presidency. The aircraft serves as a symbol of presidential power.

Trashing the living world

The latest post from George Monbiot.

In a weird way, this post published by Geo Monbiot on the 24th July, 2026, reveals a similar vein to yesterday’s post about the Save Europe Act. I mean they are both about the unfair and unreasonable power held by those in political command.

Over to Mr Monbiot (and I have his permission to republish):

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Chickened-Out

Posted on 24th July 2026

Trashing the living world on behalf of corporate power: is this really all we can expect from the ministers in charge of protecting it?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd July 2026

There’s a slightly mean question I often ask British people with an interest in the living world: can you name the Environment Secretary? I don’t intend to show them up: it’s not them I’m testing. I watch the brows knit, a finger go up, the mouth open and close. “It’s, you know, the one who … no, they went, didn’t they? That other one …” It’s been like this for seven years.

Why? Because throughout this period, we’ve not had environment secretaries. We’ve had portals through which corporate lobbyists may pass. The last incumbent to represent the wider public interest (and I can scarcely bring myself to type these words) was Michael Gove. In his other roles, he’s widely remembered with loathing and disgust. Out of office, he continues to poison public life, as editor of the Spectator. But in this role, to general astonishment, he placed the public good above special interests.

Standard operating procedure, by contrast, is exemplified by the final acts of the outgoing secretary, whose name, to put you out of your misery, is Emma Reynolds. To give just one example – which could be seen as an embodiment of everything that has gone wrong here – she spent her last weeks in the post trying to remove the brakes on industrial chicken farming.

In front of a parliamentary committee this month, she railed against the planning constraints holding back yet more giant chicken factories (let’s not grace them with the name of farms). If only these obstacles were demolished, she mused, “there is great investment out there waiting to be made … I want to bring down these barriers as much as you do”. She said she had spoken to other departments to ensure permission for new chicken factories was easier to obtain.

Neither she nor the MPs questioning her gave any hint of why these buildings have run into trouble with the planning system. In fact, there was no mention of any of the problems the factories cause: the MPs’ only apparent interest was in what the industry wanted. What’s the point of MPs if they simply channel corporate demands? But these factories are killing some of our most beautiful rivers. They generate far more dung than the surrounding fields can absorb. The surplus washes downhill into the nearest stream.

The only decision that counts is the planning decision. As soon as permission for a chicken unit is granted, the local tributary, and possibly the main stem of the river it drains into, is as good as dead. It’s not even as if these factories support jobs and growth: by killing the rivers, they help to destroy local economies.

I thought we’d won this argument. But argument, it seems, is no match for economic power. Reynolds’s loyalties appeared to lie not with the ecosystems she was meant to protect, but with the lobbyists threatening them. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising: before she joined Keir Starmer’s government, she worked as a lobbyist, representing the financial sector.

Disturbingly, it was the new environment secretary, Angela Eagle, while working as Reynolds’s deputy, who sought to drive through the “planning reforms” the poultry industry is demanding, telling chicken lobbyists “planning should enable ambition, not stifle it”. Will she now take Burnham’s “circuit breaker” promise seriously, and junk this appeasement of one of our most destructive industries?

At a recent farming festival, Reynolds claimed that boosting the poultry sector would enhance our food security. I don’t know how many times we need to point this out, but isn’t it bleeding obvious that it has the opposite effect? The feed sustaining chickens in these factories must be either imported or grown on land that could otherwise directly feed people. There could be more soya in chicken than in tofu: one report estimates that it takes 109g of soya to produce 100g of chicken breast. Yet this is just one of several components of their diet.

The chicken business in the UK is also controlled by a handful of giant companies: another security red light. If food security were the objective, the government would encourage us to eat fewer chickens and other animals, and more plants. But in parliament, Reynolds also proudly announced that she was disregarding the targets set by the government’s Climate Change Committee to reduce livestock numbers. I find myself asking, over and again: “Are they trying to harm this country?”

To advance their dismal agenda, Reynolds and Eagle set up something called the Farming and Food Partnership Board. Its aim is to encourage “closer collaboration between farming, industry and government”. How could it possibly be closer? The environment department, Defra, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the farming industry. The only members of this new board are government ministers and corporate representatives and lobbyists. Among its objectives is a “poultry sector growth plan”, to address the issue of “planning barriers”.

This chickening out is just one of many examples of how, by working for special interests, the environment department has harmed the ecosystems and the people it is supposed to protect. Another is the government’s “delivery plan” to restore nature, released by Reynolds just before she left office. It’s not a plan, and it won’t deliver: just a catalogue of vague hopes and blandishments. It could be summarised as “do nothing, for fear of offending landowners”. Far from meeting its promise to protect and restore 30% of the land in England by 2030, Reynolds’s department has presided over continued decline. That’s her legacy: less nature, less resilience, less security.

Much worse is planned: Starmer’s government proposed a “regulating for growth bill”, whose text we haven’t yet seen, but which appears to threaten even greater assaults on nature protection. It may contain one of his government’s most alarming proposals: creating a system that could be described as pop-up freeports, in which companies all over the country would be able to operate in temporary “sandboxes”, where the usual rules don’t apply. We should see this as a key test of Burnham’s promise to end neoliberalism: will he drop this nonsense?

I’ll keep asking the question, regardless of who occupies this office: do you know the name of the environment secretary? The answer is likely to depend on one factor: whether they are ready to break the grip of corporate power, and defend us and the rest of the living world. Whether, in other words, they want to do their job.

http://www.monbiot.com

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It makes for grim reading.

Thanks to George Monbiot for revealing the truth as to what is going on with the United Kingdom Government.

Save Europe Act

This is very important to all people, not just Europeans. This is vital for every citizen across the world.

Dan originally sent me the link to this video. I thank him enormously.

Here is the video:

I repeat, all persons who care about freedom, should sign this Act.

Has this UK Government gone insane!

A post by George Monbiot on the 9th July explains.

I looked up quotations about government, and this one caught my eye: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” — Thomas Paine.

Here is that post by George, republished with his permission.

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In Deep

Posted on 9th July 2026

The numbers are simply mind-blowing: up to £264 billion for a climate “solution” that will increase emissions. Has the government lost its mind?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th July 2026

The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.

Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.

Yes, £264bn. More than a quarter of a trillion. This cost will be divided between the public and private sectors. Given the record of CCS programmes so far, we can expect the public to carry most of it.

An investigation by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that roughly 25% of the public costs of CCS will be borne directly by the government, while the remainder will come from extra levies on our energy bills. The government should explain to the electorate that it intends to slap up to £198bn on our bills. Then see how that lands.

Even this might not be the end of it. Buried in an arcane side document is a government commitment to pay a “premium” for the hydrogen produced by the CCS programme for 15 years. This commitment is uncosted, but could run to tens of billions more.

But surely CCS is essential for cutting carbon emissions? That’s how the government has pitched it. On the contrary, this programme will massively increase them. The Climate Change Committee claims that the role of CCS is “limited to sectors where there are few, or no, alternatives”. But this is simply untrue. Its own data shows that only between 5% and 6% of the CCS deployment in the UK will be used to address the emissions of industrial sectors such as chemicals and cement, whose impact is hard to abate (though even here there are partial alternatives).

The great majority of CCS will be attached to new fossil fuel-burning power stations, wood-burning power stations and hydrogen production from fossil gas. In fact, almost all the projects in the government’s first tranche are for fossil fuel-based schemes. But there are abundant alternatives to these highly destructive plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is evolving, enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply without any use of fossil fuels, the committee’s claim is bunkum.

Its insistence that we need hydrogen made from fossil gas is also baseless. Its own figures show that producing hydrogen from gas with CCS will cost twice as much by 2050 as producing it from the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity.

The new CCS plants will mean massively more gas use than the UK would otherwise have required. Ultimately, that means more imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). We now know that, thanks to methane leakage along the production and transport chain, LNG has higher emissions than coal. Two-thirds of its greenhouse impact occurs before the gas arrives in this country. So that’s all right then – it doesn’t count towards our national figures.

If the real aim were to cut emissions, we would push fossil fuel use in the electricity sector down to zero, and scale up renewables and battery storage instead. The net effect? Much lower climate impacts and much lower bills. Instead, the programme will greatly ramp up both. Why?

Well, the whole thing has been built the wrong way round. It appears likely to be the result of massive lobbying by fossil fuel companies. In 2023 alone, as the key decision on deployment loomed, the oil companies Equinor, BP and ExxonMobil attended 24 meetings with Conservative ministers to discuss CCS. Why? Because they know it’s the only way they will be permitted to keep burning gas. Governments have sought to find a way of meeting their demands while adhering to the climate budgets, so lo, a £264bn white elephant is born. As the Climate Change Committee admits, “gas with CCS accounts for around half of the remaining demand for fossil fuels in 2050” in the UK. In other words, this is their lifeline.

And now we know something else: that the scientific credibility of CCS as a climate solution was shaped by the oil company BP. Investigative work by ProPublica and Drilled discovered that BP both financed and helped steer one of the most famous of all climate papers. The “Wedges” paper, published in 2004, became a foundation of government policy around the world. It purported to show how climate stabilisation was compatible with continued fossil use. And one of the major policies its plan relied on was carbon capture and storage.

BP’s chief executive suggested the “wedges” concept. Another BP executive was so heavily involved that the scientists suggested he should be named as co-author. He declined: the industry tries not to leave fingerprints. The paper greatly oversold CCS, presenting it as “already deployed at an industrial scale”. In reality, it had barely been tested. Yet it underpinned three of the 15 climate actions the paper proposed.

Since then, there has been a long record of shiny promises followed by partial or total failures. In the UK alone, three attempts (the 2005 Peterhead plan, a 2011 demonstration project and a 2012 funding competition) have been abandoned, thanks to cost escalation and infeasibility. As the Public Accounts Committee remarks, the government “is taking a high-risk approach by backing first-of-a-kind, unproven technologies with large amounts of taxpayer and consumer funding”.

But success is not the point. The point is to provide a gigantic, publicly-funded reason for the fossil fuel industry to stay in business. Guess who the lead operator of the government’s first CCS cluster is. Hello, BP.

So we come round full circle. From cradle to grave, this programme appeases the world’s most antisocial and destructive sector. The wasted money, the lost years, the lost lives: for how much longer will this farce continue? And how many more warnings will the government ignore?

http://www.monbiot.com

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I am towards the end of my days, and we live a pretty frugal (as in use of fossil fuels) life.

However, that does not mean that I am not very concerned about George’s essay. I have a son, a daughter, and a grandson. They are a tangible group who will be affected by this proposed legislation. As will millions of other people.

I really hope, and this is truly meant, that the UK Government does not push ahead with this Act.

The Emperor’s New Mind

I have finished this fabulous book.

The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics

Book by Roger Penrose

Here is a summary of the book that is first, a very deep read, and, second, full of detailed mathematics that were beyond me. I just skipped those parts. However, it is an incredible book and one that has extended my knowledge in so many ways. I think that it isn’t going too far to say that it has amended my knowledge tremendously and I am so glad to have read it, even at the age of 81.

If you wish, you may refer to my thoughts when I first obtained the book, written down on April 14th.

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The Emperor’s New Mind (1989) by Roger Penrose argues that human consciousness involves non-computable processes, meaning a computer can never fully replicate the human mind, even if it can simulate its functions. Penrose uses Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and quantum mechanics to support his view, suggesting that consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain that are not algorithmic, and that a deeper understanding of physics, possibly involving quantum gravity, is needed to explain the mind. The book explores the “mind-body problem” and challenges the idea that all thinking is computation, proposing that human understanding can grasp truths that formal systems cannot. 

Key arguments and concepts

  • Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems: Penrose argues that human mathematicians can see the truth of certain mathematical statements that a formal system (like a computer program) cannot prove, demonstrating a non-computable aspect of human thought. 
  • Non-computability: He posits that certain mental activities, like mathematical insight, are inherently non-algorithmic and cannot be simulated by a computer, even a powerful one. 
  • Quantum mechanics and consciousness: Penrose suggests that consciousness is linked to quantum mechanical processes in the brain, specifically involving microtubules, a theory he later developed further in Shadows of the Mind. 
  • Critique of Strong AI: The book challenges the “strong AI” hypothesis that a sufficiently complex computer can achieve genuine consciousness, arguing that it misunderstands the nature of human understanding. 

Reception and legacy

  • The book won the 1990 Science Book Prize. 
  • It sparked debate and collaboration, notably with Stuart Hameroff, leading to the “orchestrated objective reduction” (Orch OR) theory of consciousness. 
  • It remains a significant work in the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and the physics of consciousness, influencing discussions on the limits of computation and the nature of the mind. 

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Penrose won the Science Book Prize in 1990 for The Emperor’s New Mind.

I am not surprised.

Geo. Monbiot’s Grim Message

Action regarding the climate crisis.

The following essay from George Monbiot is a difficult read but it is also a necessary read.

With the news that the polar ice caps are retreating, just read yesterday: “Polar ice caps and sheets are shrinking at alarming rates due to global warming, with Arctic sea ice decreasing by over 12% per decade and polar ice sheets losing 7,560 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2020. Greenland and Antarctica are losing hundreds of billions of tons of ice annually, significantly contributing to rising sea levels. [1, 2, 3, 4]”

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Alternating Current

Posted on 29th April, 2026

If this crucial circulation system shuts down, the civilisational impacts will be irreversible. So why isn’t it a top priority?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd April 2026

The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.

They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.

Amoc’s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.

Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.

This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happenedbefore. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.

The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur.

Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century”.

So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.

It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests that a “socially optimal” level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.

As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk.

The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts – that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems – releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a “hothouse Earth” in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.

Bizarrely, the modelling also applies discount rates to future people: their lives, it assumes, are worth less than ours. In other words, it has taken a method used to calculate returns to capital and applied it to human beings. As the three economists point out, “it is very difficult to find a justification for this in moral philosophy.” Moreover, climate impacts disproportionately affect the poor – but under the models, their lives are also priced down.

Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (£2.6m) to a junktank run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus’s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense – and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.

A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Until I came to live in the the USA permanently, in 2010, I used to live in South Devon, near Totnes. Thus the AMOC was very familiar to me and the local population. AMOC stands for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Much more information on AMOC may be read on the WikiPedia site.

Although the future of the AMOC is uncertain, many scientists are concerned that the AMOC will weaken.

The above article by George Monbiot is potentially frightening. As Monbiot says at the end; “… a few thousand people can destroy civilisations.“

What we need is a few thousand people to make this the number one priority! Not tomorrow but today!

Picking a fight ….

…. with a mathematical function!

This is another republication of a George Monbiot post. The title of his post is Total Futility Rate.

It is another great article!

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Total Futility Rate

Posted on15th December 2025

Let’s focus our campaigning on things we can actually change.

By George Monbiot, published as a BlueSky thread, 15th December 2025

Because the issue of population change is so widely misunderstood, I’ll seek to lay it out simply. This note explains why there is almost nothing anyone can do to change the global population trajectory, both as numbers rise, then as they fall.

The residual rise is due to:

A. The birth rate 60-100 years ago, which created a larger current base population. This means more children being born even as birth rates are in radical decline. The global total fertility rate, by the way, is now 2.2, just above the replacement rate of 2.1.

B. Infant mortality has declined very fast and longevity has risen very fast. Again, there’s nothing you can do about either of those things and, I hope, nothing you would want to.

All women should have total reproductive freedom and full access to modern birth control. Because it’s a fundamental right. Not because old men on other continents want them to have fewer children. Even if total reproductive freedom became universal now, it would scarcely nudge the curve, due to the factors mentioned above.

Before long, people will be fretting instead about the downwave, a very rapid decline in populations as the impact of 60+ years of falling birth rates overtakes the effects mentioned above. There’s almost nothing we can do about that either. It’s about as locked in as any human behaviour can be. As the opportunity costs of childcare rise (i.e. as prosperity increases), the birth rate declines.

Of course, if economic and social life collapsed, the process might go into reverse, and birth rates could be expected to rise again. But is that really what you want? For my part, I’m heartily sick of people who think collapse is the answer to anything.

In the short run, we can survive the decline in wealthy countries by reopening the door to immigrants, which would also offer sanctuary to people fleeing from the climate breakdown and conflict we’ve caused overseas. Two wins, in other words. In the long run, we’ll steadily shuffle away.

Whether you think that’s good or bad will not affect the outcome. I see demographic change as an underlying factor, like gravity, we simply have to adapt to as well as we can. If you want to pick a fight with a mathematical function, be my guest. But it seems to me as if you’re wasting your time.

But surely there’s no harm in it? Surely we can seek, however hopelessly, to change the population trajectory while also campaigning against environmental breakdown, inequality, injustice? Some people who worry about population do. But in my experience, most fixate on population to the exclusion of other issues.

Something must be done about them breeding too fast, rather than us consuming too fast. All too often, residual population growth is used as a scapegoat to shift blame from rich-world impacts, which means that the people in places where growth is still occurring are themselves scapegoated. The result, broadly speaking, is wealthy white people pointing the finger at much poorer Black and Brown people and saying, “You’re the problem.” It’s more than a distraction, it’s a grim and sometimes racist alternative to effective action. It’s an excuse for inaction.

So yes, do both if you want to, while being aware that one activity is useful and the other is futile. But be aware that for most population obsessives, it’s either/or, and is used to avoid moral responsibility and effective citizenship.

http://www.monbiot.com

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If you read this you will understand why Mr Monbiot explains clearly the changes in the global demographics: That the global population is falling. My own guess is that in the lifespans of those who today are in their teens, the global population will be remarkably lower. I can’t forecast the changes that will bring about but I’m certain they will be significant.

George’s last point is key “(It) is used to avoid moral responsibility and effective citizenship.“

The Truth about Gods, part two

The concluding part of this essay by Patrice Ayme.

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Endowing aspects of the universe with spirituality, a mind of their own, is stupid in this day and age, only if one forgets there are natural laws underlying them. But if one wants to feel less alone and more purposeful, it is pretty smart.    

Patrice Ayme

Here is the inventor of monotheism: Nefertiti. Once a fanatic of Aten, the sun god, she turned cautious, once Pharaoh on her own, backpedalled and re-authorized Egyptian polytheism. (The sun-God, Sol Invictis, was revived by Roman emperor Dioclesian 17 centuries later, in his refounding of Romanitas and the empire. His ultra young successor and contemporary, emperor Constantine, used the revived monotheism to impose his invention of Catholicism. Funny how small the conceptual world is.)

***

The preceding part (see Part One yesterday} contains many iconoclastic statements which made the Articial Intelligence (AI) I consulted with try to correct me with what were conventional, but extremely erroneous, ill-informed data points. AI also use the deranged upside down meta-argument that it is well-known that Christianism is not like that, so I have got to be wrong. Well, no, I was raised as a Catholic child in two different Muslim countries, and also in a Pagan one; the Muslim faiths I knew as child were as different from Suny/Shiah faiths as Christianism is, overall, from Islamism. In other words, I know the music of monotheism. So here are:

***

TECHNICAL NOTES: 

[1] To speak in philosophical linguo, we capture two civilizational “ontologies” (logic of existence):

  1. Polytheistic-personal: relational, distributed, ecological.
  2. Monotheistic-fascistic: hierarchical, authoritarian, abstracted.

[2] Paganus, in a religious sense, appears first in the Christian author Tertullian, around 202 CE, to evoke paganus in Roman military jargon for ‘civilian, incompetent soldier‘ by opposition to the competent soldiers (milites) of Christ that Tertullian was calling for.

[3] ‘FAIR OF FACE, Joyous with the Double Plume, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favour, at hearing whose voice one rejoices, Lady of Grace, Great of Love, whose disposition cheers the Lord of the Two Lands.‘

With these felicitous epithets, inscribed in stone more than 3,300 years ago, on the monumental stelae marking the boundaries of the great new city at Tell el Amarna on the Nile in central Egypt, the Pharaoh Akhenaten extolled his Great Royal Wife, the chief queen, the beautiful Nefertiti.

Nefertiti (‘the beautiful one has come‘) co-ruled Egypt with her older (and apparently famously ugly, deformed by disease) husband. Egypt was at its wealthiest. She was considered to be a DIVINITY. All her life is far from known, and revealed one fragment of DNA or old text at a time. She ruled as sole Pharaoh after her husband’s death, and seems to have offered to marry the Hittite Prince (as revealed by a recently found fragment: ”I do not wish to marry one of my subjects. I am afraid…” she confessed in a letter to the amazed Hittite emperor.). She apparently decided to re-allow the worship of the many Egyptian gods, and her adoptive son and successor Tutankhaten switched his name to Tutankhamen). Both her and Tutankhamen died, and they were replaced by a senior top general of Akhenatten who both relieved the dynasty from too much inbreeding (hence the deformed Akhenaten) and too much centralism focused on the sun-disk (‘Aten’)  

[4] Those who do not know history have a small and ridiculous view of FASCISM. Pathetically they refer to simpletons, such as Hitler and Mussolini, to go philosophical on the subject.. Google’s Gemini tried to pontificate that ‘labeling the structure of monotheism (especially its early forms) as ‘fascistic’ is anachronistic and highly inflammatory. Fascism is a specific 20th-century political ideology. While the author means authoritarian and hierarchical, using ‘fascistic’ distracts from the historical and philosophical points by introducing modern political baggage. It would be clearer and less polemical to stick to ‘Hierarchical’ or ‘Authoritarian-Centralized.‘

I disagree virulently with this cognitive shortsightedness of poorly programmed AI. The Romans were perfectly aware of the meaning that the faces symbolized (they got them from the Etruscans). So were the founders of the French and American republics aware of the importance of fascism and the crucial capabilities it provided, the powerful republics which, in the end, succeeded the Roman Republic (which died slowly under the emperors until it couldn’t get up); those two republics gave the basic mentality now ruling the planet.

Fascism is actually an instinct. Its malevolent and dumb confiscation by ignorant  morons such as Hitler and Mussolini ended pathetically under the blows of regimes (the democracies on one side, the fascist USSR on the other) which were capable of gathering enough, and much more, and higher quality fascism of their own to smother under a carpet of bombs the cretinism of the genocidal tyrants. It is actually comical, when reading old battles stories, to see the aghast Nazis out-Nazified by their Soviet opponents (discipline on the Soviet side was a lethal affair at all and any moment.) Or then to see SS commanders outraged by the ferocity of their US opponents. At Bir Hakeim, a tiny French army, 3,000 strong, buried in the sands, blocked the entire Afrika Korps and the Italian army, for weeks, under a deluge of bombs and shells, killing the one and only chance the Nazis had to conquer the Middle East. Hitler ordered the survivors executed, Rommel, who knew he was finished, disobeyed him.   

***

Early Christianism was highly genocidal. The Nazi obsession with the Jews was inherited from Nero (who, unsatisfied with just crucifying Christians (64 CE), launched the annihilation wars against Israel) and then the Christians themselves. There were hundreds of thousands of Samaritans, a type of Jew, with their own capital and temple (above Haifa). Warming up, after centuries of rage against civilization, the Christians under emperor Justinian, in the Sixth Century, nearly annihilated the Samaritans; a genocide by any definition.

Later, by their own count, at a time when Europe and the greater Mediterranean counted around 50 million inhabitants, the Christians, over centuries, killed no less than 5 million Cathars from Spain to Anatolia. Cathars, the pure ones in Greek (a name given to them by their genociders), were a type of Christian). In France alone, in a period of twenty years up to a million were killed, (not all Cathars, but that accentuates the homicidal character). As a commander famously said: ”Tuez les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens” (Kill them all, God will recognize his own). The anti-Cathars genocide drive in France, an aptly named ‘crusade‘,  something about the cross, lasted more than a century (and boosted the power of the Inquisition and the Dominicans). The extinction of Catharism was so great that we have only a couple of texts left. 

Want to know about Christianism? Just look at the torture and execution device they brandish, the cross. Christianism literally gave torture and execution a bad name, and it’s all the most cynical hypocrisy hard at work. 

And so on. To abstract it in an impactful way, one could say that much of Christianism instigated Nazism. That’s one of the dirty little secrets of history, and rather ironical as the dumb Hitler was anti-Christian, and still acted like one, unbeknownst to himself, his public, and his critiques; those in doubt can consult the descriptions of the Crusades by the Franks themselves, when roasting children was found to relieve hunger.

Chroniclers like Radulph of Caen (a Norman historian writing around 1118) described it vividly: “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.” Other sources, such as Joinville, Fulcher of Chartres and Albert of Aachen, corroborate the desperation and brutality, though they express varying degrees of horror or justification.   These acts were not systematic policy but extreme responses to the hunger and chaos of war, and they were preserved in Frankish narratives as part of the Crusade’s grim legacy. (There were also cases of cannibalism in WW2).

Christianism, when not actively genocidal, certainly instigated a mood, a mentality, of genocide; read Roman emperor Theodosius I about heresy. Here is the end of Theodosius’ famous quote: ‘According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one deity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We order the followers of this law to embrace the name of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, we judge them to be demented and ever more insane (dementes vesanosque iudicantes), we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the PUNISHMENT OF OUR AUTHORITY which in accordance with the will of Heaven WE SHALL DECIDE TO INFLICT.‘

The ‘Men In Black‘ of the Fourth Century destroyed books, libraries and intellectuals, ensuring the smothering of civilization, as intended (destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria, the world’s largest library) around 391 CE. Contemporary writers like Eunapius and Libanius lamented the ‘rage for destruction’ of the Men In Black. Some non-Christian texts were preserved in monasteries, true, but the point is that Christianism made possible the destruction of non-Yahweh knowledge. This is the problem king David himself already had, the fascism, the power obsessed little mind of Yahweh. Monasteries were often built with a covert anti-Christian mentality, things were complicated. When queen Bathilde outlawed slavery (657 CE), her closest allies were bishops, yet she had to execute other, slave-holding bishops. She also founded and funded four monasteries. Soon the Frankish government passed a law enforcing secular teaching by religious establishments.

The uniforms of the Men In Black were copied later by the Dominicans (‘Black Friars’) who led the genocide of the Cathars, in co-operation with the Inquisition, also dressed in black, and then the SS. Luther. Saint Louis expressed explicitly that nothing would bring them more joy than Jews suffering to death. Saint Louis was more descriptive, evoking a knife planted in the belly of the unbeliever and great pleasure. In Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis (c. 1309), Louis recounts a story of a knight who, during a debate with Jews, stabbed one in the belly with a dagger, saying it was better to “kill him like that” than argue theology.  Louis presented this approvingly as zeal for the faith, and wished he could partake. Although he warned, he wouldn’t do it, that would be illegal. With a faith like that Louis IX could only be canonized in 1297 CE. And, following Saint Louis’ hint, the Nazis removed his legal objection by changing the law in 1933, when they got to power.

Luther gave multiple and extensive ‘sincere advices‘ on how to proceed with the genocide of the Jews in his book: ”The Jews and their Lies”. Here is a sample: “If I had to baptize a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone around his neck and push him over, with the words, ‘I baptize thee in the name of Abraham.” 

But Musk’s AI, ‘Grok’ informed me that its basic axiom was that Christianism was never genocidal, but instead ‘suppressive‘. Then it thought hard for ‘nine seconds‘ to try to prove to me, with biased context, that I had exaggerated.

I had not.  

***.  

The entire church was into assassination madness, glorifying in its own cruelty; the chief assassin of Hypatia, a sort of Charlie Manson to the power 1000, was made into a saint: Saint Cyril. Cyril’s minions grabbed Hypatia who had just finished giving a lecture, dragged her in the streets, and stripped her clothing, and then stripped her of her own skin, flaying her with oysters shells, causing her demise. She was the top intellectual of the age. Hypatia met her torturous end in 415 CE. Cyril was made into a saint 29 years later, in 444 CE! With saints like that, who needs Hitler?

Not to say Catholicism was useless; the jealous and genocidal, yet loving and all-knowing Yahweh was always a good excuse to massacre savages and extend civilization on the cheap. The Teutonic Knights, finding the Yahweh fanatics known as Muslims too hard a nut to crack, regrouped in Eastern Germany and launched a very hard fought crusade against the Prussian Natives, who were Pagans. After mass atrocities on both sides, the Teutons won.

The Franks embraced the capabilities of the cross, fully. Having converted to Catholicism, they were in a good position to subdue other Germans, who were Arians (and that they did, submitting Goths and Burgonds, Ostrogoths and Lombards). Three centuries later, Charlemagne used Christianism as an instrument to kill Saxons on an industrial scale, in the name of God, to finally subdue them, after Saxons had terminally aggravated Romanitas for 800 years, driving Augustus crazy. 

Charlemagne, in daily life, showing how relative Christianism was, and its true Jewish origins, used the nickname ‘David’ for king David, the monarch who refused to obey Yahweh, who had ordered David to genocidize a people (petty, jealous God Yahweh then tortured David’s son to death). 

Charlemagne lived the life of a hardened Pagan, with a de-facto harem, etc. More viciously, Charlemagne passed laws pushing for secular, and thus anti-Christian education. Following in these respects a well-established Frankish custom. Charlemagne knew Christianism was a weapon, and he was careful to use it only on the Saxons; internally, there was maximum tolerance: Christians could become Jews, if they so wished.

PA

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I found the full essay quite remarkable. Jean has heard me rattle on about it numerous times since I first read the essay on November 2nd. I sincerely hope you will read it soon.

Finally, let me reproduce what I wrote in a response to Patrice’s post:

Patrice, in your long and fascinating article, above, you have educated me in so many ways. My mother was an atheist and I was brought up in likewise fashion. But you have gone so much further in your teachings.

Your article needs a further reading. But I am going to share it with my readers on LfD so many more can appreciate what you have written. Plus, I am going to republish it over two days.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!


The Truth about Gods, part one.

A brilliant essay by Patrice Ayme.

Patrice writes amazing posts, some of which are beyond me. But this one, The Personification Of The World, PAGANISM, Gives Us Friends Everywhere, is incredible.

My own position is that my mother and father were atheists and I was brought up as one. Apart from a slip-up when I was married to my third wife, a Catholic, and she left me and I thought that by joining the Catholic church I might win her back. (My subconcious fear of rejection.)

My subconscious fear of rejection was not revealed to me until the 50th anniversary of my father’s death in 2006 when I saw a local psychotherapist. Then I met Jean in December, 2007 and she was the first woman I truly loved!

Back to the essay; it is a long essay and I am going to publish the first half today and the second half tomorrow. (And I have made some tiny changes.)

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The Personification Of The World, PAGANISM, Gives Us Friends Everywhere

Abstract: Personification of the world (polytheism/paganism) is more pragmatic, psychologically rewarding, and ecologically sound than the hierarchical, abstracted structure of monotheism, which the author labels “fascistic.” [4]

***

Switching to a single fascist God, Ex Pluribus Unum, a single moral order replacing the myriad spirits of the world, was presented as a great progress: now everybody could, should, line up below the emperor, God’s representative on Earth, and obey the monarch and his or her gang. The resulting organization was called civilization. Submitting to God was the only way Rome could survive, because it provided a shrinking army and tax base with more authority than it deserved.

However peasants had to predict the world and it was more judicious to personalize aspects of it. The resulting logico-emotional relationship had another advantage: the supportive presence of a proximal Gods… All over!.[1]

*** 

personification

/pəˌsɒnɪfɪˈkeɪʃn/ noun

1.the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something non-human, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

***

Before Christianism, Gods were everywhere. When the Christians took over, they imposed their all powerful, all knowing Jewish God. Some present the Jewish God as a great invention, symbolizing some sort of progress of rationality that nobody had imagined before. 

However, the single God concept was not that new. Even Americans had it in North America, as the chief of God, the Aztecs, had a similar concept, and even Zeus was a kind of chief God. Zoroastrianism had Ahura Mazda, who did not control Angra Manyu, but still was somewhat more powerful. The Hindus had Vishnu and his many avatars.

Eighteen centuries before those great converters to Christianism, Constantine, Constantius II, and Theodosius I, there was an attempt to forcefully convert the Egyptians to a single God. Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic experiment (worship of Aten) caused turmoil and was erased by his immediate successors.

According to the latest research it seems likely that the famous Nefertiti became a Pharaoh on her own, after the death of her husband, and retreated from monotheism by re-establishing Egyptian polytheism [3]. In the fullness of time, the infernal couple got struck by what the Romans, 15 centuries later, would call damnatio memoriae. Their very names and faith were erased from hundreds of monuments

Shortly after the Aten episode, there was another confrontation between polytheism and monotheism. The colonizers of Gaza were apparently Greek, of Aegean origin, and, as such, over more than a millennium of conflict with the Jewish states in the hills, Greek Gods confronted Yahweh. The Greeks obviously did not see Yahweh as a major conceptual advance, as they did not adopt Him (until Constantine imposed Him, 15 centuries later).

While the area experienced enormous turmoil, including the permanent eclipse of Troy after the war with Greece (see Homer), and later its replacement by Phrygia, then followed by the Bronze Age collapse, then the rise of Tyre, and the Assyrian conquest, the Greeks survived everything, and their civilization kept sprawling (the early Christian writings were in Greek).

Ultimately, the lack of ideological bending, the obsession with pigs and other silliness, helped to bring devastating Judeo-Roman wars. By comparison, the much larger Gaul bent like a reed when confronted with the Greco-Romans, absorbing the good stuff. Mercury, the God of trade, preceded Roman merchants. Gaul didn’t take religion too seriously, and went on with civilizational progress.

The lack of elasticity of the single God religion of the Jews brought their quasi-eradication by Rome; Judaism was tolerated, but Jewish nationalism got outlawed. By comparison, the Greeks played the long game, and within a generation or so of Roman conquest, they had spiritually conquered their conqueror. Christianism was actually an adaptation of Judaism to make Yahweh conquer the heart and soul of fascist Rome.

***

To have Gods everywhere? Why not? Is not the Judeo-Christian God everywhere too? Doesn’t it speak through fountains, and the immensity of the desert, and the moon, and the stars, too?

***

Yahweh, the Jewish God Catholic Romans called “Deus” was deemed to be also the ultimate love object. Yahweh had promised land to the Jews, Deus promised eternal life of the nicest sort – To all those who bought the program. 

Christians were city dwellers and their power over the countryside and barbarians came from those who had imposed Christianism, the imperial powers that be (at the time, more than 90% of the people worked in agriculture). Already as a teenager, Constantine, a sort of superman born from imperial purple, terrified the court which was supposed to hold him hostage. Such a brute and excellent general could only get inspired by Yahweh’s dedication to power.

The country dwellers, the villagers, disagreed that they needed to submit to a God organized, celebrated and imposed by the all-powerful government (god-vernment?). In classical Latin paganus meant ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-combatant’. In late imperial Latin it came to mean non-Judeo-Christian (and later non-Judeo-Christo-Islamist) [2].

Christianism found it very difficult to penetrate the countryside, where the food was produced. It never quite succeeded (Even in Muslim Albania, Pagan rituals survived until the 20th century; much of the cult of saints is barely disguised Paganism).

Peasants knew that power was distributed throughout nature, and they had to understand those powers, thus love them – That enabled them to predict phenomena.

Peasants could ponder the mood of a river, and even predict it; flooding was more of a possibility in some circumstances, and then it was no time to indulge in activities next to the river. Peasants had to guess the weather, and the earlier, the better. Peasants had to know which part of the astronomical cycle they were in, to be able to plant crops accordingly; that was not always clear just looking outside, but the stars would tell and could be trusted to tell the truth.

We can be friends to human beings, and sometimes it’s great, but sometimes we feel betrayed and abandoned. But a mountain or a sea? They will always be there, they are not running away, they are never deliberately indifferent, and generally exhibit predictable moods. It is more pragmatic and rewarding to love them more rather than an abstract Dog in Heavens. Call them Gods if you want.

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Part two will be published tomorrow.

I am publishing the notes, on both days, so you can look them up now rather than waiting another day.

TECHNICAL NOTES: 

[1] To speak in philosophical linguo, we capture two civilizational ‘ontologies’ (logic of existence):

  1. Polytheistic-personal: relational, distributed, ecological.
  2. Monotheistic-fascistic: hierarchical, authoritarian, abstracted.

[2] Paganus, in a religious sense, appears first in the Christian author Tertullian, around 202 CE, to evoke paganus in Roman military jargon for ‘civilian, incompetent soldier‘ by opposition to the competent soldiers (milites) of Christ that Tertullian was calling for.

[3] ‘FAIR OF FACE, Joyous with the Double Plume, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favour, at hearing whose voice one rejoices, Lady of Grace, Great of Love, whose disposition cheers the Lord of the Two Lands.‘

With these felicitous epithets, inscribed in stone more than 3,300 years ago on the monumental stelae marking the boundaries of the great new city at Tell el Amarna on the Nile in central Egypt, the Pharaoh Akhenaten extolled his Great Royal Wife, the chief queen, the beautiful Nefertiti.

Nefertiti (‘the beautiful one has come‘) co-ruled with her older (and apparently famously ugly, deformed by disease) husband, Egypt. Egypt was at its wealthiest. She was considered to be a DIVINITY. All her life is far from known, and revealed one fragment of DNA or old text at a time. She ruled as sole Pharaoh after her husband’s death, and seems to have offered to marry the Hittite Prince (as revealed by a recently found fragment: ”I do not wish to marry one of my subjects. I am afraid…” she confessed in a letter to the amazed Hittite emperor). She apparently decided to re-allow the worship of the many Egyptian gods and her adoptive son and successor Tutankhaten switched his name to Tutankhamen. Both her and Tutankhamen died, and they were replaced by a senior top general of Akhenatten who both relieved the dynasty from too much inbreeding (hence the deformed Akhenaten) and too much centralism focused on the sun-disk (‘Aten’).  

[4] Those who do not know history have a small and ridiculous view of FASCISM. Pathetically they refer to simpletons, such as Hitler and Mussolini, to go philosophical on the subject. Google’s Gemini tried to pontificate that ‘labeling the structure of monotheism (especially its early forms) as ‘fascistic’ is anachronistic and highly inflammatory. Fascism is a specific 20th-century political ideology. While the author means authoritarian and hierarchical, using ‘fascistic’ distracts from the historical and philosophical points by introducing modern political baggage. It would be clearer and less polemical to stick to ‘Hierarchical’ or ‘Authoritarian-Centralized’.

Me sharing a political interview

It is not something I have done before.

This is a blog about dogs in the main and many different subjects as well. For example, I am very interested in the formation of the planet; see the post coming up soon.

However, my good buddy, Dan Gomez, a Californian, sent me a link to an interview, and I quote “After the Israel-Hamas deal was signed earlier this month, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoys and the leading brokers of the agreement, sat down with Lesley Stahl to discuss their unconventional deal-driven approach.”

It is a 60 Minutes interview.

I found it most interesting and completely at odds with the majority of all types of media that think that President Trump is despicable.

My view of politicians of democracies is that 99% of them are talkers. Presumably, Trump is a doer.

I would be interested to hear what others think, especially those who were born in the U.S.A.