Trump Doctrine and Greenland; Macron's Nuuk

 President Trump, after eliciting comparisons to the Monroe Doctrine in his posture toward the western hemisphere such that it is also known as the Trump Doctrine, has been very active in negotiating Art of the Deal paradigmata in regard to Greenland. The president is so busy on various global affairs that it is challenging to keep track of all of these unexpected approaches to diplomacy that has set European politicians aflame.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trumps-year-anarchy

President Trump may have realized, unlike previous presidents, that the new European Union has brought those former more sedate post-W.W. Two recovering nations into a status comparable to the new China. Each is experiencing the maturity of growth to global power. China seeks to flex its global political and economic muscles as does the new European Union. The EU leadership seems to feel the United States will treat it as it formerly treated the E.C. in the post W.W. 2 decades and regard Russia as it did the former Soviet Union. While the EU has grown and continues to grow in power, military assets and geography, as does China, the United States largely remains the same. The President may have realized that allowing the EU to own Greenland- located in the western hemisphere, presents a potential threat to the United States equal to that of China owning Greenland.

The E.U. as a large military, economic and political unit that functions as if it were a nation in some respects, with a national political identity will not always agree with the United States on critical issues, and in the future it may exploit Greenland's location and resources for leverage or even attack upon the United States. Nuuk Greenland is 300 miles closer to Washington D.C. than Los Angeles. A missile launched from Nuuk would need only 10 or 15 minutes to hit Washington D.C. The EU expects U.S. support in expanding eastward into Ukraine. The BIden administration actually funded that and helped isolate the U.S.A. from good relations with Russia.

https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-calls-rutte-sets-greenland-summit-leaks-macron-text-taunts-canada-slams-uk/

It may be, except for President Macron who likes to express the French foreign legion's attitude of never respecting authority, that European leaders still respect the authority of the U.S. President in regard to sovereign concerns in the western hemisphere. Macron may feel that he has a beast in the fight- with Quebec being a French speaking province and France being one of the few democracies that continued to have colonies into the 1950s and 60s (i.e. Algeria and Vietnam).

It is difficult to know what President Trump really plans to do with the cards he holds internationally. Apparently he likes to play them at the high stakes table of global security and trade. Certainly the United States has some that would feel that standing pat at the table while China, the EU and the BRIC block rise wouldn't be a good plan- that the United States would proportionately continue to diminish in relative power. Certainly Macron can count on the Democrat party to act as a fifth column that hates Trump and prefers an 'enlightened’ European viewpoint on the U.S. President who they feel, as Macron said indirectly at Davos, that President Trump is a bully.

I am not sure that President Trump cares what the French President thinks. At least he did not go full Monty Python and say; "I fart in your general direction" in reply.

A Boating Story

Another boating story; In late October 2018 I went to Juneau and bought a 13’ skiff to return to Wrangell on the inside passage. I had taken a 2.5 h.p. motor with me on the ferry to power the vessel homeward. There were a million things to buy and get done before I set off. First thing that occurred when I pushed the used boat away from the boat ramp was that the drain plug was gone and water started rushing in the stern. So I returned to the ramp, pulled the boat out of the water and got a drain plug. Later in the day I finally took off motoring down Gastineau channel toward Taku Inlet. It is few miles and the water was calm, the sky overcast and somewhat dark with a wind forecast of 15 to 20 mph. A little strong for safety yet within theoretically acceptable limits. The temperature was in the 30s F for a low.

Waves increased a little as I ventured toward more open water. It was slow going with the 2 and a half- maybe 5 m.p.h. It is perhaps 15 miles to the far side of Taku Inlet from Gastineau Channel approximately. About 4 miles southward the Channel ends and the confluence of water from four directions occurs; water from the bay known as Taku Inlet with famous Taku winds from the Taku Glacier and Taku River, Frederick Sound and Stephens passage all with different tidal flow directions and volumes. The wind and waves continued to increase yet when I reached the point of no return the waves that had not been too visible increased to be quite a bit larger. They tended toward rolling down from the Inlet in the direction of Doty Cove on Admiralty Island. I had to go parallel to the prevailing wave direction to reach the far side, and the waves became at least six feet high and quite irregular as water from other directions entered in. Wind increases notably when one reaches the Taku Inlet wind funnel.

I was in a survival situation with no place to go beside forward. I should have felt some emotion yet I realized that if the boat capsized- and that was even likely, I would drown and die of hypothermia and the boat would end up several miles downwind on the shore of Admiralty Island. The waves were too high and tightly spaced to risk running with them. The bow would have buried itself in a wave trough or pitch-poled most likely, and going against them was an idiot’s choice. Instead I tried to surf them a little angling somewhat forward, speeding in troughs and sometimes surfing along crests while trying to let them pass beneath as I continued toward Slocum Bay on the south side of Taku Inlet. 

The experience was surreal as my survival was in a state of suspense for an hour. There was no or little emotion for that was obviously without purpose. The experience was like watching a movie. To remain alive required constant attention to motion from several directions- wind, waves and prayer without ceasing. Even though I got a little water splashed into the gas tank when I ran out of gas three times and had to refuel, eventually I drew closer to the Slocum Bay. John Slocum incidentally was the first solo sailor to sail around the world- he was lost at sea on a different solo voyage.

When I made it to Slocum Bay I continued south along the mainland into Frederick Sound and spent the night at Limestone Inlet. I anchored and the rain began to pour. I anchored in the water instead of letting the boat rest on the mudflats because the area is strong brown bear turf. A pair of teenagers were killed by a brown bear years before while they were dressing a deer they’d shot at Taku Harbor a couple of miles away. In the middle of the night a very strong wind from the north flew down a mountain and slammed my boat into the rocks downwind were it bounced and dent the boat in the dark. Eventually I got my collapsed tent over the boat out of the way and started the motor to run to the other side of the bay where a crabber had left his pots in the only deep place suitable for anchoring out of the wind in Limestone Inlet. I put the boat on the mudflats and watched uneasily through the night for the approach of brown bear. That was the start of the journey.

On Emotions

 II think of emotions as if they are machine or assembly language, and consciousness as a higher level language that is self-aware. I took several computer programming courses in the early 1980s and so like to use that as a way to illustrate emotions. I believe that emotions are a primitive holdover and forerunner of the development of the conscious and subconscious thought- they are all on a spectrum. Emotion is less accurate than conscious thought, yet it expresses imperatives meaningful to those experiencing them- fear, love and hate are examples. Usually one has good cause to experience sudden emotions- they can recognize circumstances faster than rationalization sometimes. 

I feel like emotions are something of a self-reflection event too. They are for-oneself, and something that one cannot communicate directly to others, as one may language representing conscious thought. Philosophers have a criterion of solipsism- the belief that one can only really know one's own mind exists, and what it experiences- anything else is contingent. That is a hard idea to be aware of in a social environment, yet technically that is accurate. Sartre wrote that God is the only one who could know one's own mind and that of another as the other experiences it simultaneously (or at all). Emotion is a lesser primitive communication system occurring within one-self. Yet it is so powerful- I wonder what the origin is of that? 

So pragmatically one has to accept the naive reality perspective on relationships. A woman can bring herself and bonding to a man. The right woman brings happiness. Actually I believe that scientists have shown some sort of bio-chemical bonding occurs to a certain degree as well. Emotionally one might enjoy emergent experiences perhaps, as time and a relationship move on. Soldiers and philosophers usually are better off being objective and rational rather than emotional, yet not perhaps, always. I would think that people find conscious fulfillment in another before emotional. I would not even know how to program or store emotional satisfaction in a mind, or know if that can be done. To what extent does emotion have a memory for-itself? Or do emotions just have their own governor different than a conscious mind's?

Bolshevik Revolution Moved Life for Ordinary Russians Closer to Equality

 The average Russian for the better part of a millennium lived as subjects of royalty. The royals and aristocrats weren’t always corrupt and in a pre-modern world that form of government tended toward being practical. When the Kaiser’s army kicked the Romanov Army in August 1914 the end of the Romanov dynasty was greased especially well and eventually the Kaiser would help put V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power.

Lenin cut a treaty to buy time to reorganize Russian society. The Kaiser got part of Ukraine in exchange for an end to the war on Russia. In Ukraine today a peace should be established with a comparable rationale. The world and Europe need time to reorganize in order to form a stable post-Cold War balance of powers globally. Russia will not stop without the return of the Donetsk, Donbas, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia  and other areas of Eastern Ukraine securely within its borders with a non-threatening Western Ukraine beyond the Dnepro.

The communists swiftly and with much loss of life democratized Russia in comparison to the former aristocrat-serfdom, master-slave formed social environment. Plainly there is quite a difference between free enterprise democracy and communism in regard to individual self-determination and freedom to build capital, own private property and so forth, yet on the theoretical equality of the individual citizen in regard to the laws of the land, each shares the idea of social and legal equality. In time Soviet society discovered that communism did not bring a practical citizen’s paradise or optimal environment, and modern Russians being practical in a search for the best way for ordinary citizens to have a good life seemed in the popular realm to defect to the western way of free enterprise and democracy. 

A democracy was being built in Russia at Cold War’s end and a free enterprise environment was growing when Boris Yeltsin wrote a new Russian Constitution founded on principles of democracy. The Russian President was given super-powers in order to defend Russia internally and externally while the nation was emerging from its century of neo-autocratic communist leadership and transitioning to democracy building new institutions for governance and taxation internally. Then the west continued expanding N.A.T.O., unified the E.C. to become the E.U. and of course took Ukraine from Russia when it was as weak as a newborn puppy. Those elements would lead eventually to a Russian military effort to secure Ukraine against western hegemony comprising economic and military threats to Russian security.

There is no logical basis for the continuation of the Ukraine war on the basis of forms of governance disputes although those are often revived by Westerners without enough education or objectivity to recognize that Russia made a good faith effort to transition to democracy at the end of the Cold war and has been largely rebuffed by the west that preferred to regard Russia as a Soviet Union trying to recover Eastern European lands it had held in trust for about a half century after the German occupation. Russian leadership gave all of those lands up- returning them to independence, because they were independent nations before the Nazis blitzkrieg to conquest. The leadership of the late Soviet era were seeking glasnost and perestroika- openness and reconstruction and got that in abundance. The west tended to fail to realize that Russians sought the best for its citizens as members of democracy. 

They didn’t bargain for a west that would regard them as former and latent communists with mal intent. The policies that have brought maximum sanctions since 2014 when the Russians returned the Crimea to their nation through military action, also drove the Russian toward China for reinforcement. It would have been far better for U.S. interests if Russia had found the United States its ally in security and an adjustment of the Ukraine land distribution at the end of the Cold War instead of an enemy.

Progress in Weapons Tech Upgraded Much SInce World War Two Battle of Kursk and Kharkov at Kharkiv

During the Russian military campaign to retake lands lost to the west at the end of the Cold War the line of combat contact is reaching toward the city known during W.W. 2 as kharkov. Russians called western forces fascists, and that has an historical origin. A battle for the renamed city of Kharkiv would be in the city of what was known as Kharkov during the Second World War- known to Russia as The Great Patriotic War would be like an eternal recurrence. Presently the line of battle has reached Kupinsk- 65 miles from Kharkov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Battle_of_Kharkov

The battles of Kursk and Kharkov were the turning point in the Russian war to halt and reverse the fascist invasion of Russia. Russia had more than 6 million soldiers on the Eastern front and the  fascists about 3 million. This is an historical circumstance of the same battles occurring repeatedly in the same region for similar reasons. Kharkov and Kursk are the frontier borderlands where access to attack or defend Russia and Moscow are crucial. In this round the new Nazis have far better weapons and numbers than the Third Reich had. The U.S. Army invasion of Italy occurred at the same time forcing Germany to relocate troops south to defend Italy against Bob Dole and his army buddies.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641cf64bd375

The Russians/Soviets had better intelligence than the Germans about the opfor for the campaign and used trenches and minefields to force the nazis into kill zones. Russian T-34 tanks reliability and numbers countered new German panzers that were difficult to service in the field. The Ukraine war today has been funded by the western nations like France, Germany and England and until recently, the United States. They have provided weapons, intelligence and cash to the government of Ukraine to continue the war on the eastern front.

The United States finds itself once again in a comparable position of having the capacity to substantially influence the outcome of the conflict by choosing to support one side or the other by commission or omission. If the Trump administration simply halts all support to the government of Ukraine that will increase the Russian’s prospects of achieving its goals of recovering much of the land east of the Dnepro and creating a northern security zone that prevents Ukraine from being able to launch drones so easily to attack Moscow and other locations deep inside Russia.

It is difficult to say what the world would have become if the fascists had won the Eastern front. If the west defeats Russia through attrition over time, we may find out.

Color and the Phenomenology of Mind

 In reply to; "what is your favorite color?"

Angstroms… frequencies of wavelengths, mechanics of perception and cognition to brain interp -

What color is a mirror set on a beach facing the ocean to the west?

I  look at colors objectively; as phenomenal appearances of surfaces reflecting light waves, or generating electro-magnetic spectrum frequencies in the case of radiant heat, that my brain interprets as colors. There isn't any color in nature. Color is all in-the-mind of an observer. It is like asking what color an atom is, or a quark, or a particle-wave.

One could make- and DARPA and others probably already have, surfaces that change reflecting qualities to make themselves able to present different colors reflecting from their surface. Something like that is also perhaps how one creates invisible army tanks or spaceships.

Someone asked me; "Tell me, when you allow yourself to step out of analysis for a moment, what kinds of experiences still move you the most? What reaches you without needing explanation?"

I replied; I suppose there are two; one would have to be sacrifice of life and the other would be the suffering of others. I met a medal of honor recipient once- an amazing fellow. Here is a video- the first made, of a medal of honor action filmed by a predator drone above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7GXN-lZKQs

Christ of course accomplished both of those in a day. Remarkable people- good examples to try to emulate a little.

Elite soldiers are like pro athletes and it takes luck and effort to be one- I wasn't. Jesus was the Son in the Trinity and thus also elite lol. I read formal logic at the shed for a couple years when I was unemployed many years ago, and followed that with readings in the philosophy of logic and language. Strawson, Kripke, Quine, Wittgenstein etc. I consider what is possible and what is the ideal and act if I think it would be effective.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge as a field of philosophy. Mind and its language content is somewhat phenomenal. There is an in-built, implicit logic to thought that exists even in the subconscious because mind is adapted to nature and the environment, yet intentional thought is to some extent a result of self-programming and learning. It tends to occur in a linear way as if it had a thermodynamic arrow of time, like time and the matter of the Universe do as well (although physicists say that it is at least mathematically reversible regarding symmetry of the entire physics of the cosmos - like a film that could be run backward. Others might disagree and say that quantum uncertainty would make it impossible to reverse the arrow of time. Consider that for a second though; if time is reversible then quantum uncertainty need be deterministic lol. Quantum mechanics and the physics of general relativity (and math) haven't been harmonized or unified as a continuum yet, and possibly never will since either or both may be superficial or penultimate accounts of the structure of Universe fields.

So one, if objective, might find better thought solutions or configurations upon which to act, if acting to correct things is possible.

Gaza Board of Peace, Greenland, Ukraine and Macron Leading the Charge

 President Trump sits at the head of the Gaza Executive Peace Board and is letting select others join as permanent members for a billion dollars. President Trump hasn't yet rescinded Canadian P.M. Carney's invitation. Plainly he won't invite French President Macron to join since Macron is urging the EU to deploy the 'economic bazooka' of trade sanctions on the U.S. - Macron has already deployed troops to Greenland to defrappe U.S. military takeover of the high ground of Greenland. https://www.politico.eu/article/hit-back-donald-trump-europe-mulls-unthinkable-options-greenland-threats-ramp-up-tensions/

The French President is an agitator for continuing war with Russia in Ukraine and may send troops there as well "to guarantee peace". That may be his motivation for sending French neo-N.A.T.O. member troops to the western hemisphere, and possibly French nuclear missile carrying submarines as well.

Gemini said of those- "French nuclear submarines, particularly the new Suffren-class (Barracuda program), are considered very good, representing a major technological leap with advanced stealth, sonar, and multi-mission capabilities like land-attack cruise missiles, making them potent assets for both deterrence and conventional warfare, though some experts debate their exact standing against top US/UK designs. They excel in acoustic discretion, making them hard to detect, and offer significant strategic advantages through their advanced weaponry and ability to deploy special forces. "

Peace is almost always a better option than war. Yet the Europeans are restive and eager to test out their new strength against the United States that they developed after the end of the COld War with the Soviet Union and unification as a single economic block. The strategic international elements and alliances are far more malleable than in prior centuries- although there was a lot of that in Europe as well. It is possible that the perfusion of crypto-currencies so useful for covert economic actions are also playing a role- what a great way to pay spies and bribe politicians without possibility of detection. Defense contractors are also enjoying the mass confusion and Democrats and European media have countless, profitable new opportunities to blame President Trump for a litany of anti-agenda activities on their bucket list from the ideal world.

While Europe's N.A.T.O. forces are conducting military exercises in Greenland with the United States as the theoretical enemy, it may be worthwhile bringing Japanese naval forces to Baffin Bay in the spring to conduct joint naval activities and field test new Japanese naval weapons.

Gemini described those as- "Japan's most significant new surface ship weapons are its advanced High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) for drone defense and an Electromagnetic Railgun prototype, both being tested on the JS Asuka, alongside developing next-generation hypersonic glide weapons (HVGP) for ship interception, all aimed at countering modern threats like drone swarms and hypersonic missiles. The 100kW laser offers unlimited shots against drones, while the railgun uses electromagnetic force for high-speed projectile launch, and the HVGP provides a stealthy, wave-riding capability for longer range. 

1. High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) 

• Function: Combines multiple 10kW lasers into a single 100kW beam to burn through drone hulls and mortar rounds.
• Platform: Installed on the JS Asuka test ship.
• Advantage: Offers "unlimited magazine" capability, limited only by ship power, making it ideal for swarms. 

2. Electromagnetic Railgun

• Function: Launches projectiles at Mach 6.5 (over 2,500 m/s) using electromagnetic energy, not explosives.
• Platform: Also on the JS Asuka for testing.
• Advantage: High velocity, longer range, and cost-effective for intercepting various threats, including hypersonic missiles. 

3. Hypersonic Glide Weapon (HVGP)

• Function: A supersonic, wave-riding missile with a seeker and networking for enhanced anti-ship attacks.
• Development: Planned for deployment around FY2026 to defend remote islands and target large surface ships.
• Advantage: Uses aerodynamic lift for extended range and can coordinate with other missiles in swarm attacks. 

These systems represent Japan's focus on developing advanced, cost-effective, and technologically superior naval defenses for the evolving maritime security landscape. "