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The author said nuclear-powered ships had existed for decades and wrote that companies in Russia, China, Europe and the U.S. were pursuing designs for nuclear-powered cargo ships and floating nuclear plants that could be towed or rented. https://t.co/7hCik9yGai #NuclearEnergy #ShippingIndustry #Innovation #RU #CN #EU #US

The post described the situation in the Black Sea as deeply alarming, saying a Turkish vessel had been struck by a Russian drone the previous day and three more civilian ships had come under attack that day, two within Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone. It said Estonia condemned the attacks in the strongest terms. #BlackSea #Estonia #Peace #TR #RU #BG #EE

The author described the situation in the Black Sea as increasingly concerning, saying commercial vessels and their crews were being targeted and lives had already been lost at sea. They said two commercial vessels had been hit in Bulgaria’s economic zone in the Black Sea that day and began to refer to a Turkish ship the previous day, but did not complete the sentence. #BlackSea #ShippingSafety #MaritimeSecurity #BG #TR

The author said the attack showed that Iran could see ships with their AIS turned off just as well as other vessels. They questioned why ships would disable AIS, suggesting it could be for propaganda: creating a “shadow fleet” hidden from the public and shaping perceptions of its size to influence markets. https://t.co/jf3xByyUi1 #Iran #AIS #Shipping #IR

The author said few people were asking why the IRGC was attacking ships, given claims that the number of vessels transiting the Strait was far lower than advertised. They described the counterargument as relying on blurry images comparable to Bigfoot sightings. #StraitOfHormuz #IRGC #MaritimeSecurity #IRGC #STRAIT

OIL GLUT 2.0 has just provoked fresh missile salvos launched at ships. This nonsense does not just further wreck the economy, it costs lives. The people who purposely should be ashamed tbh. 🛢️ #OILGLUT #Economy #MissileSalvos #Nospecificcountrycodescanbeidentifiedinthetweetprovided.

“The Abolition of Slavery — and Its Unfinished History Slavery is far older than the transatlantic slave trade. It existed for thousands of years in societies across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. It was therefore not invented by Europeans or white people. But another part of the history deserves recognition. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, predominantly European and Western abolitionist movements developed sustained political campaigns against the slave trade and slavery. Britain is a major example. British abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, together with Black activists and formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano, campaigned for abolition. Parliament abolished Britain’s slave trade in 1807, and slavery throughout most of the British Empire through the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, with emancipation beginning in 1834. Britain then used its navy and diplomacy to suppress the international slave trade. Between 1808 and 1870, British naval forces seized roughly 1,400 slave ships and liberated around 160,000 enslaved people. This does not erase Britain’s earlier role in the slave trade. Nor was abolition exclusively a white achievement. Black activists, former slaves, religious groups and others were important to the movement. Nevertheless, Western societies became leading forces in creating political, legal, diplomatic and military mechanisms to suppress the Atlantic slave trade and abolish slavery. And slavery has not disappeared. The latest global estimates, based on 2021 data, put the number living in modern slavery at 49.6 million: 27.6 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. About 29.3 million were in Asia and the Pacific, 7.0 million in Africa, 6.4 million in Europe and Central Asia, 1.7 million in the Arab States and 5.1 million in the Americas. Slavery is ancient and global; Europeans became major participants in the transatlantic system and later major forces in its abolition. Yet an estimated 49.6 million people were still living in modern slavery in 2021” - ChatGPT

“The Abolition of Slavery — and Its Unfinished History Slavery is far older than the transatlantic slave trade. It existed for thousands of years in societies across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. It was therefore not invented by Europeans or white people. But another part of the history deserves recognition. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, predominantly European and Western abolitionist movements developed sustained political campaigns against the slave trade and slavery. Britain is a major example. British abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, together with Black activists and formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano, campaigned for abolition. Parliament abolished Britain’s slave trade in 1807, and slavery throughout most of the British Empire through the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, with emancipation beginning in 1834. Britain then used its navy and diplomacy to suppress the international slave trade. Between 1808 and 1870, British naval forces seized roughly 1,400 slave ships and liberated around 160,000 enslaved people. This does not erase Britain’s earlier role in the slave trade. Nor was abolition exclusively a white achievement. Black activists, former slaves, religious groups and others were important to the movement. Nevertheless, Western societies became leading forces in creating political, legal, diplomatic and military mechanisms to suppress the Atlantic slave trade and abolish slavery. And slavery has not disappeared. The latest global estimates, based on 2021 data, put the number living in modern slavery at 49.6 million: 27.6 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. About 29.3 million were in Asia and the Pacific, 7.0 million in Africa, 6.4 million in Europe and Central Asia, 1.7 million in the Arab States and 5.1 million in the Americas. Slavery is ancient and global; Europeans became major participants in the transatlantic system and later major forces in its abolition. Yet an estimated 49.6 million people were still living in modern slavery in 2021” - ChatGPT

Russia’s persistent attacks on Ukraine’s ships, ports, trains and railway infrastructure are part of a systematic effort to isolate Ukraine from the world and leave its civilians hungry, cold and in the dark. This is not only a grave weaponisation of civilian infrastructure and #Ukraine #Russia #CivilianSafety #RU #UA

Unclear if these ships were definitely hit BUT in the video released by the IRGC you can clearly see a Qassem Basir being launched. If these missiles have terminal infrared guidance I see no reason why they couldn’t hit a moving vessel. 🚀🚢 https://t.co/XjEcNimQTY #missiles #IRGC #navalconflict #IR #QA

“Let the message to the IRGC be clear: If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost — taking out three of yours,” Admiral Brad Cooper, who runs Central Command, said in the post. 🚨LITERAL GRUGS ARE IN CONTROL OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY! 🚨 https://t.co/hncWYBXQ5V #IRGC #GlobalEconomy #EconomicSanctions #IRGC

When FG came to power in 2011, the strength of the Irish Defence Forces was 9,650 personnel. Its now 7,767. In 2011, the Irish Navy had 8 operational ships patrolling our seas. Its now less than 4. FG is the biggest threat to Irish security. https://t.co/aTf8czjcKx #IrishDefence #SecurityThreat #FGAccountability #IE

Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”