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

Two interesting bits of news, and a question for my readers

 

Two news reports caught my eye, both illustrating how dependent we've become on technology rather than older, mature methods.

Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack

Hundreds of French supermarkets have been hit by a cyber attack that caused their fridges and freezers to heat up, spoiling fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros.

Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected.

The chief executive of Coopérative U said several of its supermarkets had been hit by the "extremely serious and unprecedented" attack.

More than 100 of the chain's supermarkets were targeted, while 180 stores from Intermarché and its Netto brand were affected, with a spokesman saying that another 100 shops were urgently disconnected from the internet to prevent the same thing happening to them.

Britain urges ships to prepare for life without reliable GPS

Britain has warned shipowners that satellite navigation can no longer be taken for granted in some of the world’s busiest shipping regions, urging crews to practise navigating without GPS as jamming and spoofing become increasingly widespread ... interference across the Baltic, Black Sea, Middle East Gulf and parts of East Asia means satellite-derived positioning, navigation and timing information can no longer be relied upon everywhere.

The warning extends well beyond electronic charts. The agency identifies a long list of potentially vulnerable equipment, including ECDIS, AIS, autopilots, dynamic positioning systems, radar, gyrocompasses and GMDSS communications equipment. Ashore, vessel traffic services, pilotage systems, port management platforms and automated logistics systems are also exposed.

That navigation warning applies to any and every form of transport, of course, not just ships.  Some airlines now routinely double-check at least two, if not more, global navigation satellite systems such as GPS, GLONASS, BDS and Galileo against each other while in flight.  If too many of the systems show errors, they go back to taking star sights and navigating by what they can see on the ground.

As for the Internet-linked refrigerators . . . I can see that a large commercial enterprise might want to monitor its refrigerators and freezers in real time, so that repairs can be ordered immediately if something goes wrong.  However, what about security?  Isn't a major business vulnerability like that something that should have attracted serious attention long ago?  I'm sure it will get that attention now, but it's too late to avoid substantial losses.

I'm not by any means opposed to technology, provided it remains a reliable servant.  If it becomes a master instead of a servant, or if it can be corrupted and misused by criminals or other hostile actors, its usefulness has to be reassessed.  I can remember being taught navigation off the coast of South Africa back in the '70's, using compass bearings on shore objects, sextants, star sights, and the good old Decca Navigator system, first used to mark and sweep German minefields off Normandy prior to D-Day in 1944.  Decca has long gone now, of course, but there may come a time when something old but reliable like that will be sorely missed.

FIREARMS QUESTION

With the recent relaxation of regulations for the purchase and use of suppressors, I'm considering getting one or two of them to safeguard what's left of my hearing.  However, I note that most .30-caliber suppressors list their bore diameter as .308-inch.  That works fine for standard American ammunition, but several overseas equivalents (including the British .303-inch and the Soviet 7.62x39mm) are sized to .311-inch.  Can anyone tell me whether American .30-caliber suppressors have sufficient "safety margin" in their bores to allow their use with .311-inch bullets?  If not, do you think US manufacturers could supply their models slightly "bored-out" as a special order?  Alternatively, if one went up a bore size in the suppressor, what alternatives are there?  I don't know if suppressors are made for (say) the 8mm Mauser round, which would be .323-inch bullet diameter, and I'm not sure what the barrel threading would be.  What others might be suitable?

Peter

As with Britain, so with the USA???

 

So-called "welfare" payments (including entitlement programs, disability funding, and a host of other benefits) have all but crippled the British economy.  Here's how the Wall Street Journal views Britain's current crisis.

Disability payouts are no longer just for those most in need; they have become a financial crutch for a large swath of the population as wages stagnate and prices rise. 

It’s blowing up Britain’s welfare bill, hamstringing its politicians and imperiling its long-term financial stability.

Some seven million people—more than 10% of the population—now claim at least one or more sickness or disability benefits. The numbers are growing fastest among working-age people who should be powering the country’s economy, surging more than 60% in the past six years to 4.7 million from 2.9 million in 2019.

. . .

Many of the newer disability claims are for mental-health issues like depression, anxiety and ADHD, which can be harder for the government to verify than a physical disability. Between 2017 and 2025, disability claims for cancer doubled. But benefits claims for all psychiatric issues surged fourfold.

One benefit, created to help those with disabilities be more mobile, allows people to give up part of their welfare cash handout in return for a new car lease every three years. It now accounts for around one in every seven new car sales in the U.K. Among those who got new cars last year: 40 people whose primary medical condition was tennis elbow, 50 with wheat intolerance and 320 with dyslexia, according to government figures.

The scale of the payout has become a scandal. No other western country has seen such a rise in disability claims. In the U.S., the number of people getting federal disability payments has fallen in the past 15 years. The most recent figures show some 10.6 million working-age people in the U.S. claimed one or both main Social Security programs for people with a disability, in a country with a population five times bigger than the U.K.

There's more at the link (may be paywalled).  Whether the British economy (indeed, the British nation as we know it) can survive this ever-increasing burden remains to be seen.  Anytime any politician or party talks about reducing welfare expenditure, the beneficiaries of such welfare rise up in vehement, vocal opposition:  so the politicians dare not touch the subject, for fear of never being elected again (and/or of being un-elected as soon as the next election comes around).  The whole nation is caught in that trap.  Can't afford to pay for the benefits, and can't afford to cut them.

In the USA, the federal government has done a lot to cut back on entitlement spending, as the last paragraph above shows.  However, many states have implemented their own entitlement programs.  For example, a couple of weeks ago it was revealed that California is spending up to $11 billion every year on benefits for illegal aliens, who are not entitled to federal benefits at all.  "All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two US-born children and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year."  That's just one state, out of 50 in the Union.  How many others are taxing their citizens - and claiming refunds from Washington D.C. - to run their own such programs?  How much is it costing us, the taxpayers of this country?

The mainstream media is strangely silent about such matters, even when they're exposed through other sources.  Anyone would think that the media wants to grow the "dependent economy" at the expense of the market economy, and make taxpayers liable to support the millions who don't pay taxes.  There's a word for that.  They call it "socialism".

If you pay taxes, remember on November 3rd, and vote accordingly.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 331

 

Back from vacation, with memes collected from the Web while on the road and in our hotel.  Click any image for a larger view.

Vacation update 2

 

Nothing exciting to report - which is the point of a vacation, after all!

We've spent a while on the beach, enjoying the pleasantly warm (rather than ridiculously hot) weather and the equally warm Gulf water.  To my unpleasant surprise, my difficulties with balance (due to my spinal injury and nerve damage) turn out to be magnified as I get into deeper water;  if I lose my balance when waves are pulling me around, it's difficult to get to my feet again.  I really don't like that, but there's nothing much I can do about it.  I'll be starting another round of physiotherapy when I get home, so I'll mention it to the therapist as another symptom to be addressed.

We spent a few hours yesterday aboard the USS Lexington, an Essex-class aircraft carrier that was the last World War II-era carrier to be retired from active service in 1991.  This was my second visit to her, having seen her a couple of decades ago during a visit to southern Texas, but my wife's first.  Due to my mobility limitations, this time I restricted myself to the hangar and flight decks, where everything is on a level.  The ladders and stairs below decks don't lend themselves to using a walking-stick!  My wife went through them all while I enjoyed a leisurely stroll around the flat bits.  We enjoyed our visit.

We've taken the opportunity to visit several local restaurants.  The fresh seafood is great - we both enjoy it.  (I'm sorry, but fresh water fish is not "sea" food - it's just fish, not sea fish.  The real thing tastes much better, IMHO!)  There's also a German restaurant in town, where we tucked into schnitzel, strudel and Black Forest cake.  So much for our diets . . .

We're thinking of driving down to SpaceX Starbase tomorrow or Thursday.  It's about three hours from here, making for a long return drive, but we're much closer to it now than we're ever likely to be again, so it seems like a good idea to take advantage of that.  The main road goes right past the SpaceX compound, so one can see almost everything going on around the launch complex.  Furthermore, the upper stage from Starship flight test 13 is due to return to Starbase this week, after splashing down in the Indian Ocean and being recovered intact.  It'll be great if we can see it coming home.  We're both big fans of SpaceX and Elon Musk.

The nicest part of this break is that we don't have to do anything.  We can sleep late, go where we wish, eat whenever and wherever we want, and ignore our normal daily routine.  Just what we needed!  Of course, come next Monday it'll be back to normal, with my wife returning to work and me heading for another physiotherapy session, but we'll take what we can get this week.

Peter

Vacation update 1

 

We left on Friday morning, much to the woe and lamentation of our cat.  She'll survive, we're sure, particularly because friends from the North Texas Troublemakers will look in from time to time to restock her food, pet her, and generally reassure her that she hasn't been abandoned.

We spent Friday night in San Angelo, TX.  Friends there were flooded out by the tragedy last year, and left all their guns with us while they dried out and began remodeling their home.  Repairs have now progressed far enough that they've been able to move in again, so we took their guns back to them.  I must admit, I was half-hoping that a traffic cop would stop us and ask, "Any guns in the car?"  I'd have invited him to take his pick of a score or more!  In some places that would make the cop nervous, but here in north Texas he'd probably have spent the next half-hour on an impromptu show-and-tell.

We drove down to Corpus Christi today.  It was a relatively cool run, thanks to widespread light rain.  We're going to spend the next week in the area, playing tourist, walking along the beach, swimming, and generally relaxing and unwinding.  We're both under doctors' orders to let go of all our cares and concerns, which have been rather heavy over the past while, so we'll be lazy and enjoy the abundant seafood.  We started that tonight;  I had a grilled snapper, while my wife tried a "black drum", a type of fish of which I'd previously never heard (but which tasted great).  Key lime pie and turtle cheesecake finished the meal, with some coming back to the hotel with us for a midnight feast (if we can hold out that long).

Laid back and lazy will be the order of the next few days.

Peter

On the road again

 

My wife and I are heading south for the winter to the Gulf of Mexico for a week lazing in the sun.  We've both been far too busy for the past several months, me with medical issues and her with being the the primary technical adviser to her employer's support staff.  We need breathing room, and space to unwind.

I'll post to this blog occasionally, as and when I feel the urge, but I don't want to commit to daily posts.  I really do need time to relax.  For the same reason, I'll only moderate comments at irregular intervals, so if you comment and it doesn't appear soon, please be patient.  Amuse yourselves with the bloggers listed in my sidebar until I'm back in harness.  Regular blogging should resume on Monday, October 12th.

I'll leave you with these encouraging thoughts from Rat.  Click the image to be taken to a larger view at the comic's Web page.

Sadly, no gin for me.  I'm driving!

Peter

Sadly, it takes war to spur improvements in emergency medical care

 

During my military service four to five decades ago, our medical training was pretty basic.  You could call it slightly more advanced first aid, if you like.  There were none of the techniques, equipment and medicines that emergency medicine offers today.  Pretty much all a grunt in the field could do was try to stop the bleeding, then get the injured person to a combat medic (if one was available - they weren't always around).  Anything more required evacuation to a forward aid station, which might be dozens or scores of miles away, and often could only be reached by vehicles bouncing around dirt trails or even through the bush.  It could be a nightmare experience for the wounded soldier, often causing more pain and suffering than the original injury.  (Allow me to assure you, I know this from personal experience!)

I was reminded of that by an interesting article at Strategy Page, looking at how, most recently, the Ukraine war has brought a new perspective to battlefield medicine, and examining some of the new technology and techniques that have evolved in recent decades.  Here are a couple of excerpts.

When Russia invaded in 2022, one of the many shortages was blood for transfusions to wounded soldiers and civilians. Using the slogan, “Your blood can fight too”, Ukraine made it easier to donate and converted blood collection from local hospitals and regional networks to a unified national network. Donation centers were prepared to run 24 hours a day when needed, accepting donations around the clock if the emergency lasted. Ukraine created an Operational Headquarters to monitor and coordinate nationwide blood collection and distribution activities. This conversion to a national system came several decades after the United States made the move. In turn, the Ukrainian experience has much to teach America and other NATO nations.

Russia provides less frequent and effective medical care for its wounded soldiers; military and civilian leaders are appalled at how the Ukrainian efforts have substantially reduced the number of combat deaths. Prompt blood transfusions are a key part of this and one of several reasons that for every Ukrainian combat death there are eight or more Russian losses.

. . .

Now, new medical tech is coming in the form of band-aids or bandages for people with minor bleeding injuries like cuts or scrapes. Some people do not heal as quickly, and these minor injuries can take a long time to heal. The solution is self-monitoring polymer band-aids or bandages. This smart bandage tech has completed animal testing and now faces up to a decade of human tests and development of larger bandages before it is generally available.

This smart bandage is worn for a week or two until the chronic bleeding is healed. The smart bandage consists of two parts. The most obvious part appears to be a disposable Band-Aid or bandage containing biosensors, electrodes, and hydrogel with medications, along with a device that delivers low-level electrical stimulation to speed healing. The second component is a flexible, reusable electronic patch that monitors the healing process by tracking temperature, pH, and other factors, allowing a doctor or medical technician to monitor healing. Each year, millions of people have slow-healing wounds, and smart bandages are designed to speed healing.

The smart bandage builds on two decades of major advances in emergency and combat medicine. These new technologies and procedures led to a reduction in combat deaths by more than half since 2003.

. . .

... since September 11, 2001, over two million American troops went off to war and about two percent of them were killed or wounded. Only 12 percent of the 57,000 combat zone wounds were fatal, the lowest percentage in military history. This was largely due to major improvements in dealing with rapid blood loss from a major artery being severed and the increased speed with which complex medical care could be delivered to wounded troops. New medical technologies also made it possible to detect injuries (like brain trauma) that, in the past, were very difficult to detect and treat.

There's more at the link.  Interesting and recommended reading.

If you'd told us, way back when, that "smart bandages" would be a thing, we'd have accused you of drinking entirely too much of the field hospital's rubbing alcohol, probably using it to wash down morphine tablets!  For the sake of today's soldiers, sailors and airmen - not to mention civilian EMT's and paramedics and their patients - I can only hope they perfect this new technology as quickly as possible.

I guess being wounded in combat kinda changes one's perspective on the importance of military medical care in particular, and general emergency medical care as well.  When one's lying there, not knowing whether it's safe to close one's eyes because one can't be at all sure of being able to open them again . . . it re-orders one's priorities, to put it mildly.

Peter

The Pachyderm Prescription?

 

The title of this post was suggested by this news report from Kenya.  It might make a good title for a novel, who knows?

A new study suggests that adult elephants prepare concoctions of plants to administer to their young as medicine.

The finding is based on observations of Mount Elgon's cave elephants in western Kenya by local indigenous people who spent more than 20 years monitoring their routines.

According to their accounts, the elephant herds clustered around Elgon use at least 25 different plant species.

They reported that elephant mothers processed roots and leaves, combined it with their breast milk and administered it to calves, for apparent health benefit.

In one testimony, a wildlife scout described seeing elephants using a plant known as Angurweet, which is used locally as a remedy for ailments such as stomach ache, "as medicine to give to babies".

The scout described elephant mothers "removing the leaves and chewing it until smooth, along with the roots of some other trees".

He also recounted that he had seen mothers mix this plant material with their own milk. "They give it to the babies, who chew on it themselves and spit out the solids," the scout said.

The statements of the Sabaot tribal experts appear to demonstrate a level of sophisticated self-medication among the elephants, which are already renowned for going into caves to mine for salt to supplement their diet.

There's more at the link.

I'm fascinated, but not surprised, to learn of the pachyderm pharmacists.  Elephants are very intelligent indeed, probably at least as much as a pre-teen child, and (judging by some of the teens I've met) possibly even higher on the scale.  I've never heard of them actively medicating their offspring as described in the report, but that they'd develop such knowledge and abilities doesn't surprise me.

Baby and junior elephants are just about the cutest things you can imagine.  Back in the day, Skukuza (the administrative center of the Kruger National Park in South Africa) housed a center for the care and rearing of animals orphaned after the death of their mothers.  This included several baby elephants at the time I visited it.  I was invited by a ranger I knew to join them at feeding time.  That involved filling a two-liter soda bottle with their concentrated milk ration, then applying an outsize rubber teat to it.  The elephants would be waiting impatiently for their food, dancing from foot to foot and being very noisy about it.  I got to hold the bottle for a six-week-old mtoto, who slurped it down with great enthusiasm.  I turned around to put the bottle back on the table, only to be rammed in the small of my back by what felt like a freight train.  I picked myself painfully off the ground and turned around, to be greeted by a juvenile elephant dancing from foot to foot and tootling at me in a way that freely translated as, "Gee, that was fun!  Let's do it again!"  When young elephants want to play, they want to play, and they won't take "No!" for an answer . . .

Of course, once they're grown, they're much less frolic-y and a darn sight more dangerous, particularly because they're intelligent enough to learn about threats and deal with them.  In Africa, they've grown accustomed to poachers using Soviet-made AK-47 rifles, with their distinctive "banana" magazines;  and when they see anyone carrying that shape, they'll often charge them at once and do their best to trample them into the mud before they can take aim and shoot.  (That's why South African game rangers on the Mozambique border carry - or used to carry, when I was still there - FN FAL rifles with a shorter, straight magazine, which didn't resemble the AK.  They lived longer that way!)

I love elephants.  They're majestic creatures, and dominate any location where they're found.  Forget that business about lions being the "king of the beasts".  When a herd of elephants arrive, the lions get out of the way.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 330

 

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

Sunday morning music

 

The British group Uriah Heep are regarded as one of the original hard rock/folk rock groups from the 1970's.  One of their early hits was "Lady In Black" from their 1971 album "Salisbury".

The group went on to record many more albums, but "Lady In Black" remained one of their best-known and most-loved songs.  It's been recorded by many groups, straying into many different genres.  I thought it might be fun to play a few this morning, for those interested in such things.

Here's a 2004 version, a collaboration between Uriah Heep members Mick Box and Bernie Shaw and the Romanian group Iris.  The joint version is titled "Doamna in negru".  The lyrics are bilingual, in Romanian and English.

Also in 2004, Spanish folk metal group Mägo de Oz (a translation of "Wizard of Oz") recorded this version, with Spanish lyrics.

In 2006 Finnish folk metal group Ensiferum recorded their somewhat heavy-metal version.

Later that same year, German band Gregorian released a medieval-mystical-Gregorian-chant melange of the song, which is rather attractive (and perhaps the truest of all cover versions to the theme and mood of the lyrics).

There are many more versions of the song out there.

Peter

Sounds very African to me...

 

I'm amused to read about a Dutch drug hitman who has apparently "captured" the entire African nation of Sierra Leone, effectively making its government and security forces dance to his tune.  The Economist reports:

In the shadowy world of international narco-trafficking, Jos Leijdekkers is a gangster of flair. Over the past five years, bricks of cocaine stamped with his underworld moniker—“Holly”, short for Hollywood—have been found everywhere from the Ecuadorian banana port of Guayaquil to the North Sea. In his native Netherlands, his exploits have spawned biographies, podcasts, comedy skits, battalions of YouTube sleuths and, this February, a portrait of his unsmiling face and a seven-foot knife blade, spraypainted on a railway carriage in the somnolent city of Eindhoven. For criminologists, Leijdekkers’s career is a marvel. Less than a decade ago he was a hitman stalking the streets of Antwerp. He has since created a trafficking network spanning Latin America, Europe and the Middle East that brings in more than $2bn a year.

Leijdekkers’s greatest caper yet looks to be the takeover of a country. In half a decade Leijdekkers has turned Sierra Leone, a place previously best known for blood diamonds, into a hub for billions of dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine, disguised as rice or plantain chips, which pass through each year en route to Europe. By funnelling a share of the profits to Sierra Leone’s political elite and funding large parts of the state itself, Leijdekkers has amassed perks that would be the envy of a Bond villain. He is believed to have a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport. The police and military establishment bow to him, squadrons of container ships and submarines ply the shores at his command, and he is escorted in a motorcade by the presidential guard beneath a cloud of drones. Leijdekkers is celebrated in krio rap, the English-based creole spoken in Sierra Leone—“Ar change di game e name lek Umar Sheriff” runs a lyric of Drizilik’s recent hit “Sabi Road”—and, last September, he fathered a child with Agnes Bio, the president’s favourite daughter.

Go to Freetown today and behold a nation in the throes of narco-capture. Its beaches thrum with nightclubs, its skyline bristles with empty highrises, its streets shimmer with Corvettes and Tesla trucks. It took gangs decades to transform Mexico and Montenegro. In Sierra Leone it has taken just four years for a 35-year-old Dutch convict, boasting little more than a smartphone and a network of suppliers, to transform a beautiful stretch of west Africa into his personal fief. How did he do it?

There's much more at the link (which may be behind a paywall:  if so, you'll find an archived, paywall-free version here).

It's yet another variation on an old, familiar African theme.  A strong man arises, and forces or subverts a tribe or clan or entire nation to bend the knee to him.  How he does it may vary from criminal or military force, through tribal loyalties, to plain old-fashioned bribery and corruption.  Sierra Leone is a very clear example of the latter.  (It's nothing new there - consider the RUF catastrophe a few decades ago.)

How do we fix such situations?  There are two ways.  One is to cut off the offender's supply of cash, so that he can no longer bribe his way to the top.  That's difficult to do when it comes to illegal drugs, because that business is awash in "dirty" cash, and it has myriad ways to flow around the globe.  It can be done, but it's an enormously complicated (and expensive) process.  The other way is much simpler:  remove the bad guy from society.  You can do that like a Maduro, snatching him from his secure compound, or you can do it by the judicious application of ballistics and/or high explosives.

Whatever method you choose, it presents the problem that it only removes one offender.  Pretty soon, others will be lining up to replace him.  The most vicious, most corrupt, wealthiest and most ruthless of them will rise to the top of a new sewer, until his turn comes to be replaced . . . and then the process will repeat itself ad nauseam.  It always does.

I suspect Mr. Leijdekkers is going to find out, very shortly, that he's become too conspicuous in his success.  Western governments don't like being upstaged or embarrassed by flamboyant criminals.  I think he'll shortly either have to disappear into obscurity, or be disappeared into eternity.  As for Sierra Leone itself?  Well, if they really want to solve that country's problems, they could always hire the modern equivalent of Executive Outcomes.  That company sorted out Sierra Leone's security issue very quickly, and very successfully, in the 1990's - until international squeamishness and political correctness got in its way.  Bring it back, and there'd be much less turmoil in West Africa as a whole.  (There would also be a whole lot of pissed-off leftist politicians and diplomats, which would be a satisfactory bonus.)

Peter

Exit left, pursued by medical hobgoblins

 

Very long day yesterday, and a very early start this morning for more medical misadventures.  I'm afraid I haven't had time to cook up a blog post for today, so please enjoy yourselves with the bloggers listed in the sidebar.

Peter

Notes to self

 

1.  If you find an old bottle of Miralax, don't assume that just because it's old, it may not work as well as a fresh product would.

2.  Having taken a dose of the old Miralax that morning, don't assume that just because nothing is moving by that evening, it's definitely not working properly.

3.  Even though you think the Miralax isn't working properly, don't unthinkingly take two stool softener tablets that same evening to "hurry things along".

4.  When you wake earlier than usual next morning, and spend the next half-an-hour or so disgorging quantities of the usual, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

5.  When this is repeated later that morning, with even more disgorgement, you still have nobody to blame but yourself.

6.  Notwithstanding your despair, don't even think about buying a cork or a plug, because it would probably end up dislodged with about the same chamber pressure as a firearm cartridge (producing equally explosive, albeit less sanitary results).

7.  By evening, sad and sore, engrave the memories of this day upon your mind so that you don't do it again!

That is all . . .

Peter

Diesel fuel and overall inflation

 

Ed D'Agostino points out that skyrocketing diesel prices will impact our entire economy.  It's not the President's fault, nor the Republican Party - it's conditioned by many events all around the world - but it's going to affect all of us.

Unless you own a trucking company, run a farm, operate heavy equipment, or drive a really big pickup truck, you may not have noticed how expensive diesel has become.

On September 15, AAA’s national average diesel price was $6.27 a gallon, compared with about $3.69 a year ago— a roughly 70% increase ... a 70% increase in a single year is an enormous shock to the economy.

Even if diesel prices were to fall from here, the shock will be working its way into grocery bills, freight charges, construction costs and home heating bills for many months.

. . .

What is unique about diesel, and why is its price outpacing oil and gasoline?

EIA expects U.S. distillate inventories (the category that includes diesel and heating oil) to fall below 100 million barrels in October, for the first time since 2003, and remain below the five-year range through the first quarter of 2027.

At the same time, refiners were already running at about 98% of capacity in late August, the highest utilization rate since 2018. In one sense that’s good news: refineries are responding to high prices by making more fuel.

The problem is they are already running near full capacity. That leaves less room to offset another supply disruption: an outage, a hurricane, a refinery accident or a further escalation of conflicts in the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine.

There may not be much relief coming. Several refiners have delayed planned maintenance to keep their refineries operating. At some point, they have to do the maintenance or risk an unplanned failure. Industry executives warn that diesel and heating-oil markets could remain tight well into next year, even if the Iran conflict ends.

. . .

For millions of households, winter means heating oil bills. Heating oil and diesel come from the same distillate pool. The differences are minimal, coming down to dyes for color and additives to help with either engine combustion or tank storage. You can run a diesel engine on heating oil, and you can fire your oil furnace with diesel.

. . .

Last winter, I relied primarily on oil to heat my New England home. It was a cold winter. On many days the electric heat pump did not make economic sense. Oil was the cheaper option.  A typical monthly oil delivery was about 150 gallons and cost around $550.

A 60% increase would put a delivery to my home at roughly $900. Ouch!  Thankfully, I can pay it.  It won’t change my lifestyle.  But for many, it will force hard decisions and uncomfortable compromises.  If you are on a fixed income or living paycheck-to-paycheck, an increase like that is a serious problem. 

For them, from their very real perspective, inflation will be sky high.

There's more at the link.

I'm worried that many voters will blame the Republican Party and President Trump for this, and punish them at the polls this fall.  Sure, some of the blame is undoubtedly theirs, but a great deal also belongs to the Democratic Party and his predecessor, who "kicked the can down the road" for four years before his inauguration and did little or nothing to stop Iran's adventurism (particularly using Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis as proxies in their ongoing war with Israel).  If President Trump was right about the threat Iran made to him concerning nuclear weapons, he had no choice but to act right away, without delay.  A nuclear threat from intransigent religious fanatics can't be dealt with in any other way.  However, people with hurting bank balances and empty wallets won't stop to consider that - they'll vote their pain, not something they can't directly and immediately feel for themselves.

I think we're in for a rocky ride until the elections . . .

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 329

 

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