Why France's "progress" threatens to derail America

 

Brivael Le Pogam is a French entrepreneur and co-founder of a Paris-based artificial intelligence video generation platform.  He's in the middle of the social and cultural turmoil that's currently destabilizing France from within, and writes in two posts on X that it's a lesson from which we should learn.  I'm going to publish his remarks in full, as I think they're very relevant.

His first post describes how bad the situation in France really is.

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.

I come from your future.

In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.

Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.

The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.

The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.

I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.

Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?

Trust me. You don’t want to be France.

He followed that 24 hours later with this review of how things got that bad.

My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket.

After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.

Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.

Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.

Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system.

But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away.

At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.

Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it.

No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%.

Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are.

What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything.

There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us.

So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next.

Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong.

You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now.

Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians.

I come from your future. Don't make it yours.

We can already see for ourselves what such standards will produce in our country.  Go and live in the inner city and poorer suburbs of Seattle, or Portland, or San Francisco, or New York City, or Detroit, or Chicago, and you'll be able to experience it for yourselves.  It's precisely what we don't want in our country as a whole, and what we should strive with might and main to drive out whenever and wherever possible.

I sincerely hope and pray that Americans will heed these warnings.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 332

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

Here are a couple of traditional Chinese instruments, and an ancient and two modern settings for them.  First, the guzheng.

The zheng or guzheng is a Chinese plucked zither. The modern guzheng commonly has 21, 25, or 26 strings, is 64 inches (1.6 m; 5 ft 4 in) long, and is tuned in a major pentatonic scale. It has a large, resonant soundboard made from Paulownia wood. Other components are often made from other woods for structural or decorative reasons. Guzheng players often wear a fingerpick made from materials such as plastic, resin, tortoiseshell, or ivory on one or both hands.

It can have nylon, steel, or silk strings depending on the genre.

Next, a very similar instrument, the guqin.

The guqin is a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument. It has been played since ancient times, and has traditionally been favoured by scholars and literati as an instrument of great subtlety and refinement, as highlighted by the quote "a gentleman does not part with his qin or se without good reason," as well as being associated with the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. It is sometimes referred to by the Chinese as "the father of Chinese music" or "the instrument of the sages". The guqin is not to be confused with the guzheng, another Chinese long stringed instrument also without frets, but with moveable bridges under each string.

There's quite a lot of music on YouTube featuring both instruments.  Here's a traditional Chinese piece for the guqin called "Flowing Water" or "Running Water".  The video description states:

In the first paragraph, the whole song starts to flow, which vaguely implies the theme tone of the whole song. 2、 The third paragraph uses overtone to write all kinds of spring sounds of mountains, streams and waterfalls. 4、 The fifth section shows that the spring of thousands of gullies flows out of the mountain and into the flood, and gradually has a turbulent trend. Since the sixth section, the water flows into the vast ocean, and the rapids cross the gorge and beach, forming a momentum of rough waves and surging unstoppable, conveying the character of fearing difficulties and dangers and forging ahead bravely. 7、 The eighth segment is the afterwave after the climax, which is slow and urgent, released and closed from time to time, and gradually calmed down. The ninth paragraph is the finale of the passing weather. This piano song is full of the harmony between man and nature, and exudes the atmosphere of the harmony of nature, earth and people. This song has both lyricism and simulation, the combination of virtual and real, the integration of scenes and the lofty atmosphere.

A copy of this piece was launched into space aboard Voyager 1 in 1977, to be found by any race or entity that might one day intercept that spacecraft.

In lighter vein, I found some modern songs that have been rescored for the guzheng.  First, Hotel California by The Eagles.

And finally, Thunderstruck from AC/DC.

An interesting contrast between ancient and modern, and between two very similar instruments.  Explore both of them on YouTube.

Peter

How do you persuade a fanatical fighter that it's not his duty to die?

 

During World War II almost all Japanese military servicemen died in action, refusing to surrender.  They regarded it as their sacred duty to the Emperor of Japan, whom they regarded as having divine origins and authority.  However, in the Marianas campaign, one Marine, Guy Gabaldon, began to go out beyond friendly lines and persuade Japanese soldiers and civilians to surrender rather than fight to the death.  His efforts were extremely successful, and led to anything between 1,000 and 1,500 Japanese surrenders (the exact figure is disputed).  He was awarded a Silver Star in recognition of his efforts, which I think was to undervalue them significantly.  The Marines clearly felt the same, because some years later his award was upgraded to a Navy Cross:  and now, after his death, there are proposals to upgrade it further, to the Medal of Honor.

This twenty-minute TV documentary examines his activities and achievements, as well as how other service personnel began to take the idea further.  I'm told that after the Marianas campaign, when the war moved on to the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, such tactics were more widely used, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

If you're interested in World War II, and the Pacific War in particular, this documentary is a must-see.

That's an episode of World War II combat history of which I'd never heard before.

Peter

Musical notation as a tool of espionage?

 

It sounds weird, but it actually happened in the 1980's.

Imagine this as the scenario for a thriller. Four folk musicians with a social conscience decide on a daring humanitarian mission. They'll visit a country famous for its cruel repression, and risk arrest and imprisonment by secretly meeting with persecuted individuals to smuggle out vital information about them disguised as musical notation.

It seems too outlandish even for a film. Yet it actually happened. Forty years ago, in 1985, when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was still freezing, and no one suspected the Soviet system would collapse within four years, a quartet of American Jewish musicians visited the Soviet Union. Their aim was to help some of the millions of Jewish people who wanted to leave but were being denied the necessary exit visas. One of the four was Merryl Goldberg, who in the mid 1980s was a keen student of the saxophone and passionate about a form of Jewish folk music called klezmer.

Now she's co-authored a book, Notes of Deception, that describes those extraordinary few days when she and her fellow musicians defied the might of the Soviet Union.

But how would the information be smuggled out under the noses of the KGB officers, who would be sure to confiscate anything they deemed suspicious? The answer was: convert the names, addresses, telephone numbers and other information into musical notation, via a secret code. Goldberg admits it wasn't complex. "The important thing was it just looks like music, though anyone who read music would see it's kind of strange. It sounds like bad Schoenberg."

Vince Houghton, whose expertise in the history of spying and espionage made him an ideal co-author for the book, says there are two reasons it worked. "One is that hopefully there would be no KGB officer who was a professional musician who might realise that this is just garbage. The other is that the people using it were musicians. The code was actually a form of steganography, which means something that hides in plain sight, that no one would ever think was code. So it didn't need to be complex. I asked a cryptologist colleague how long it would take him to crack it, and he said he could do it over lunch."

There's more at the link.

The full article makes a fascinating read, and includes an example of the musical code.  I love the ingenuity of mind that could think of musical notation as a hidden-in-plain-sight form of cryptography, one that the most draconian of security states in the world at the time would be unlikely to detect.  That's really thinking outside the (music) box!

Peter