The emperor's "terrible mathematics" - healing vs. destruction…
War is not our curse—it is our masterpiece. Forged in the furnace of human nature, it is our oldest addiction: coded in our cells, sanctified in our scriptures, romanticized by history. We do not merely wage war—we crave it. And now, its spectre resurrects in tailored suits and digital banners: neo-Nazi ideologies resurrecting blood hierarchies, racial purity, and the siren song of total control. This is not history repeating—it is history reprogramming.
War is not chaos. It is a cruel algorithm.
Like the gut-brain axis, it loops relentlessly: grievance → propaganda → dehumanization → violence → trauma → grievance. Sartre’s “Hell is other people” curdles into “Hell is expendable people.” His existential truth—that we are “condemned to be free”—haunts us. Overwhelmed by liberty’s burden, we flee into the false solace of ideology. War simplifies. It erases nuance. It demands no inner cultivation—only fields to burn.
Yet we are seduced—not by carnage, but by war’s neurochemical alchemy.
Dopamine floods, tribal chants. Cortisol numbs us to suffering. Oxytocin bonds “us” as we sharpen blades against “them.” War lifts Sartre’s weight of freedom, replacing Epicurus’ hard-won ataraxia (tranquillity) with the frozen ecstasy of a finger on the trigger.
But biology whispers rebellion.
The gut-brain axis reveals: harmony is not a fantasy—it is rewritable code. Microbes like Lactobacillus secrete GABA, which helps calm neural storms. Societies, too, can cultivate peace chemistry: libraries as sanctuaries, friendship as a tribal antidote, music and dialogue as social pacemakers. These are not metaphors—they are psychobiotics for the body politic. The Marshall Plan fed former enemies. South Africa’s Truth Commission rewrote the narrative of trauma. Open-source collaboration replaced hoarding. Peace is cultivated, not found.
Peace is achievable, of course, through such honest people…
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Understanding Iran’s Position: A Legacy of Betrayal, Revolution, and Defiance
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To begin to understand Iran today—and by extension, much of the world’s current geopolitical disorder—there are two interviews you must witness.
The first is David Frost’s haunting 1980 conversation with the exiled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, frail and bitter in Panama, abandoned by the very powers that once elevated him. The other is Oriana Fallaci’s fearless 1979 confrontation with Ayatollah Khomeini, in which she tore off the chador he insisted she wear and stared directly into the core of Iran’s new ideological order.
These two encounters—one with a fallen king, the other with a rising theocrat—bookend the violent transformation of Iran from a Western client state into a revolutionary regime. They do more than narrate a power shift. They expose the psychological architecture of modern Iran: one shaped by betrayal, anchored in resistance, and hostile not by whim, but by conviction.
This is why Iran’s present-day posture—its rejection of U.S. overtures, its nuclear brinkmanship, its regional militancy—is not a mystery. It is the expression of a political theology forged in humiliation and hardened by memory.
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The Shah’s Exile: A Parable Etched in Pain
Frost’s interview with the Shah is no mere postscript to the Cold War. It is a study in political death. Once celebrated in Washington and London as a moderniser and bulwark against communism, the Shah was swiftly discarded the moment his rule became inconvenient. As the Islamic Revolution roared into being, not a single Western nation offered him lasting asylum. Even the United States—his great patron—closed its doors under pressure from Iran’s new rulers during the hostage crisis.
To the revolutionaries, this was vindication. It confirmed what Khomeini had long preached: that the Shah’s throne stood not on Persian soil, but on the shifting sands of Western approval. When that support was withdrawn, the Peacock Throne crumbled.
For the Islamic Republic, this abandonment remains a formative myth. It teaches that reliance on the West is suicide—that empires are loyal only to power, and will betray even their most obedient vassals when politically expedient. That lesson continues to animate Iran’s strategic calculus: never again trust an international guarantee; never again allow sovereignty to rest on foreign promises.
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Fallaci vs. Khomeini: The Ideology Unmasked
If Frost’s interview reveals the trauma of Iran’s past, Fallaci’s reveals the fire of its future. Her 1979 face-off with Khomeini, published with razor-edged clarity, captures the moral architecture of the Islamic Republic in its rawest form.
Fallaci’s fearless line of questioning—culminating in her symbolic refusal to wear the veil—was not just an act of feminist rebellion. It was a confrontation between two civilisations. Khomeini, draped in black, articulated a worldview rooted in divine authority, permanent resistance, and absolute certainty. The West, in his telling, was arrogant, corrupt, and spiritually bankrupt. The revolution, he insisted, was not just for Iran—it was for the world.
Embedded in that interview are the pillars of the regime’s ideology:
Anti-imperialism rebranded as divine duty,
Israel and the U.S. are metaphysical enemies,
Compromise is apostasy,
Resistance as salvation.
These ideas are not rhetorical ornaments. They are doctrinal mandates. To compromise with the “Great Satan” is not merely risky—it is heretical. Fallaci understood this. Her confrontation remains one of the most incisive portraits of political theology ever captured on tape or page.
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The Hostage Crisis: The Scar That Shaped a Generation
Then came November 4, 1979.
The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage ordeal that followed did more than rupture diplomacy—it permanently altered the psychological landscape of both nations. In Washington, it shattered illusions of order and impunity. In Tehran, it became the revolution’s crowning act of defiance.
For the U.S., the hostage crisis was barbaric, a violation of sacred diplomatic norms. For Iran’s new rulers, it was a necessary exorcism—the symbolic expulsion of American control. The embassy was no longer a sovereign compound; it was “the Den of Espionage.”
And when the hostages were only released the moment Ronald Reagan took office—replacing the “weak” Carter with a man who projected force—Iran drew a lasting conclusion: the U.S. does not respond to respect; it responds to power.
Thus was born the mutual pathology: America saw Iran as irrational, lawless, and ideological. Iran saw America as duplicitous, vengeful, and exploitable through calibrated confrontation.
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A Nation Divided: The People vs. the State
But Iran is not a monolith.
Its people are far more complex, vibrant, and diverse than its regime. The revolution of 1979 began as a broad uprising—liberals, Islamists, socialists, nationalists—against dictatorship. But it was the clerics who seized the aftermath.
Since then, popular discontent has erupted again and again:
The student protests of 1999,
The Green Movement of 2009,
The economic uprisings of 2017 and 2019,
And the women-led revolution of 2022–23.
Each wave has carried echoes of secularism, nationalism, and a yearning to rejoin the global community. Yet the regime has endured through repression, surveillance, and a shrewd manipulation of foreign threats to consolidate power. Every Israeli missile strike, every American sanction, is spun into a justification for internal control.
That is why diplomatic overtures must be viewed through a double lens: not only can they help the state, but will they empower dissent? Will they erode the regime’s claim to legitimacy?
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The Trump Offer: An Empty Gesture in a Loaded Theatre
In this context, Iran’s dismissal of a Trump-era offer—reportedly $30 billion in sanctions relief in exchange for halting 60% uranium enrichment—was not a surprise. It was inevitable.
From Tehran’s perspective, the offer was not an olive branch—it was a slap:
A Fraction of Justice: The $30 billion represented a mere fraction of Iran’s frozen assets—money Iran sees as unjustly seized.
A Legacy of Betrayal: Trump has unilaterally withdrawn from the JCPOA, inflicted devastating sanctions, and ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Why trust an arsonist with water?
No Guarantees: Iran knows how easily American administrations change course. Without ironclad guarantees (impossible under the U.S. system), any deal could vanish in four years—or four months.
Too Narrow: The offer addressed only uranium enrichment, ignoring deeper grievances—ballistic missiles, regional influence, and the legitimacy of Iran’s regime.
To accept such a deal would be, in the eyes of hardliners, an act of surrender—not diplomacy. It would echo the Shah’s fatal reliance on Washington. And history has taught them what that brings.
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Power, Dignity, and the Politics of Memory
Iranian leaders do not merely negotiate—they remember.
They remember the Shah’s exile.
They remember the Embassy siege.
They remember sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and betrayals.
They remember Fallaci’s defiance and Frost’s melancholy.
They remember being cast as pariahs, even when they complied.
And so they demand not just deals, but dignity.
Not just money, but memory restored.
Not just leverage, but recognition—as a regional power, as a sovereign actor, as a state that will not kneel.
This is why understanding Iran’s position is not about agreeing with it. It is about understanding that beneath every rejection lies a scar, and behind every negotiation, a ghost.
Even the fiercest of allies know this.
Even Benjamin Netanyahu—long the architect of pressure campaigns against Iran—knows betrayal is possible.
He has seen empires change course.
He knows that in this region, trust is never permanent, and memory never dies.
By Germán & Co.
Karlstad, Sweden | July 14, 2025
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Introduction: The Terrible Mathematics Fulfilled
In January 2024, when sirens had yet to wail and algorithms had yet to calculate ballistic trajectories, Germán Toro Ghio—recognized by the North American platform Energy Central as a 2023 Top Voice in energy and political analysis—wrote on www.germantoroghio.com:
"The intention to trigger a worldwide conflict should be readily apparent..."
We warned about surprise attacks that reshape history: from the Trojan Horse to Pearl Harbor, from 9/11 to COVID-19. We predicted Hamas understood the repercussions of its actions; that ultra-fundamentalist groups were secretly planning to "ignite an unprecedented regional or global conflict".
(Somewhere in Gaza, a child who drew planes on a wall now hears real planes. The difference is these are not drawings.)
Today, as the world teeters on the edge of the nuclear abyss, those predictions materialize with nightmare precision. The Emperor chose not to heal—he chose the "terrible mathematics" of power: that sinister equation where healing takes generations, but destruction takes minutes.
This essay, written when hope was still possible, now reads like an autopsy of the future. Because the terrible mathematics of power always adds up to the same result: ZERO.
[Original article: "The intention to trigger a worldwide conflict should be readily apparent..." — Germán & Co, January 28, 2024]
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Abstract
The Emperor Without a Throne, or The Empire No Longer Imposes Silence, but listen—listen, because summaries are lies we tell ourselves at diplomatic cocktail parties—this essay is about the precise moment the emperor realises his voice echoes in an empty cathedral. It’s about Trump’s fevered monologues, Putin’s chess moves played in slow motion, and China’s silence that speaks louder than artillery. We are witnessing the collapse of the imperial theatre, and the audience has learned to laugh at the wrong moments.
These reflections interrogate the transformation of global power in the era of ubiquitous communication, disinformation wars, and the collapse of imperial mythologies. It analyses the decline of American exceptionalism, the performative nature of modern geopolitics, and the psychological algorithms of war, drawing connections from Trump’s vanity diplomacy to Lavrov’s veiled nuclear threats. The essay also reflects on President Vladimir Putin’s extended meeting with international journalists in Moscow, where he outlined a post-Western vision for global governance, rejecting U.S.-centric narratives and promoting a multipolar order based on state sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and geopolitical reciprocity. His multi-hour dialogue, unprecedented in transparency and tone, was not just an assertion of power but a deliberate recalibration of narrative authority. While Western media remains obsessed with spectacle, the Kremlin courts foreign correspondents as architects of a new ideological map, seeking to recast Russia not as aggressor but as bulwark against Western hegemony.
At the heart of this essay lies a crucial claim: the central crisis of our time stems from a catastrophic miscalculation by President Donald Trump, whose erratic trade wars, tactical provocations, and impulsive diplomacy failed to recognise the new configuration of world power. The clash between Iran, Israel, the U.S., Russia, and China is no longer about conventional war but about control of global legitimacy, energy routes, and technological supremacy. Trump’s approach not only destabilised traditional alliances—especially in Europe—but also catalysed authoritarian convergence among his supposed adversaries. His tariffs alienated allies while North Korea quietly armed Russia, and today, according to Swedish press reports, 30 million grenades are en route to Ukraine’s border.
Amid these changes, the betrayed hopes of the Venezuelan exile—especially after Trump’s election—serve as a tragic reminder of how fossil fuel reserves and ambitions over rare earth elements override human dignity. The suffering of millions displaced has become a footnote in a demented war for electric supremacy. As Juan Luis Guerra once sang, “crossing Niagara on a bicycle”—a metaphor for fragile hope in the face of the impossible. His lyrics evoke not only the surreal balance of survival but also the exhaustion of populations trapped in systemic crises: medicine shortages, bureaucratic cruelty, the absurd dance of exile. The song resonates today as entire nations teeter on the brink of collapse, invisible to those waging wars over lithium and cobalt.
With references ranging from Epicurus to Sartre, and from Gandhi to Snowden, this text critiques the algorithmic allure of conflict and proposes an alternative grounded in radical empathy. It aims to contribute to ongoing conversations about the post-imperial global order, the digital fragmentation of diplomacy, and the moral limitations of transactional leadership.
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I. The Last Monologue
"I could fix the world in 24 hours."
(The emperor adjusts his tie. Somewhere in Caracas, a child draws planes on a concrete wall. In Buenos Aires, someone reads this and wonders if it matters.)
Twenty-four hours to fix all illness of the world—or create a rain of nuclear inferno.
Twenty-four hours. As if the world were a broken refrigerator, as if geopolitics were a plumbing problem solvable with the right wrench and enough arrogance. But here's the emperor's terrible math: healing takes generations, destruction takes minutes. You can't cure cancer in 24 hours, but you can turn children into shadows on walls in 24 seconds. But empires don’t collapse in 24 hours—they take centuries to die, like enormous whales beaching themselves on the shores of their contradictions.
The emperor speaks to the cameras, but the cameras now belong to everyone. Every phone is a rebellion. Every live stream is a witness. The monologue shatters against ten billion screens, each one asking: Who permitted you to speak for us?
(What if the emperor, in the end, is asking himself the same question?)
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II. The Birth of Imperial Sound: From Gunboats to Radio
Once upon a time (but when was that time, really?), The empire travelled by ship. Heavy, slow, inevitable. Colonisers brought brass bands, bureaucrats, Bibles and bullets. They erected radio towers like crosses on conquered hills.
Gandhi understood it first: power is performance. So he performed differently—silence where they expected speeches, spinning wheels where they expected submission. The Salt March wasn’t just a protest; it was a counter-programming effort. While the British Empire broadcast authority, Gandhi broadcast dignity.
(In the café where I write this, a woman argues with her ex-husband on WhatsApp. Her thumb moves like a weapon. Now everything is transmission.)
But Gandhi knew something we have forgotten: that silence is also a language. That resistance can be as simple as refusing to participate in the conversation that power wants to impose.
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III. The White Elephant: A Dying Spectacle
The American empire has become what Thais call a white elephant—too sacred to abandon, too expensive to maintain. It stumbles through the world like a drunken millionaire, throwing money at problems it helped create, demanding gratitude for solutions that solve nothing.
Trump’s "24-hour" fantasy isn’t strategy—it’s the last gasp of a dying theatrical tradition. However, the audience has learned to read between the lines. They know the emperor’s promises are written in disappearing ink.
(My grandmother used to say: "Never trust a man who hugs you while looking over your shoulder.")
The white elephant walks, but each step sinks it deeper into the mud of its own impossibility.
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IV. Modi’s Embrace: Irony as Strategy
Imagine this: Modi and Trump embracing at some gilded summit, cameras clicking like insects. But Modi’s smile carries the weight of history—the colonised man who learned to play the coloniser’s game better than the coloniser himself.
Today’s India is not America’s disciple. It is its ironic friend, the kind that laughs at your jokes while secretly pitying your delusions. Modi speaks with BRICS in the morning, courts Washington in the afternoon, and invests in yuan diplomacy at midnight. He isn’t choosing sides—he’s choosing to survive.
There’s something beautiful in this silent betrayal. Modi uses the words the empire wants to hear while building a world the empire cannot control.
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V. Internet vs. Empire: A Chorus of Witnesses
The emperor no longer speaks alone. He cannot speak alone. He will not be allowed to speak alone.
Gaza live-streams its own siege. TikTok teens mock every presidential blunder with surgical precision. Displaced voices find each other across oceans, weaving solidarity networks that mock the old geography of power.
Mass communication doesn’t just fragment authority—it vaporizes it. Every citizen is now a correspondent, every phone a newsroom, every tweet a potential revolution. The imperial monologue dissolves into a planetary conversation the emperor cannot control.
(But what happens when the conversation becomes so noisy no one can hear the truth?)
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VI. AI and Surveillance: The Algorithmic Crown
But wait—the plot thickens, as plots always thicken.
Power adapts. If it cannot control the conversation, it learns to predict it. If it cannot silence voices, it learns to manipulate them. The throne is now digital, invisible, and algorithmic.
Snowden showed us the truth: the empire doesn’t just command—it listens. To everything. Your searches, your purchases, your 3 AM googled anxieties. The surveillance state doesn’t wear military boots; it wears the friendly face of a search engine asking, Did you mean...?
The crown is now made of code. And it’s heavier than gold.
But here’s the trick: algorithms learn from us. We are the ones teaching the machines to control us. Every click is a vote for our own enslavement.
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VII. Russia’s Reframing: The Kremlin’s Narrative Renaissance
Putin’s live dialogue with foreign journalists—did you see it? Did you see it? Not the headlines, not the clips, but the actual performance?
He sat there, almost grandfatherly, dismantling the American world order with the patience of a chess master who knows the game is already won. No shouting, no theatrics. Just the quiet confidence of someone who has realised empires don’t die from external attacks but from internal exhaustion.
Lavrov’s nuclear warnings weren’t threats—they were stage directions. Putin’s whispered certainty was the real weapon. They aren’t just challenging American power; they’re rewriting the entire script.
Putin speaks like someone who has already seen the movie’s ending. And perhaps he has.
But here's where the plot becomes truly Borgesian—the Kremlin’s sublime blackmail, whispered through diplomatic channels like a fever dream: *A Trump Tower in Moscow. Miss Russia herself. All yours, Donald. Just give us Ukraine.*
The emperor’s weakness isn’t ideology—it’s vanity. Putin understands this with the precision of a psychoanalyst who's spent decades studying his patient's dreams. The offer isn't political; it's pornographic. Not conquest, but seduction. Not war, but the promise of golden toilets and beauty queens in a city where winter never ends.
(Somewhere in Kyiv, a child draws different planes on different walls. The difference is that these planes are real, and they're coming.)
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VIII. China: The Strategic Shadow
China plays an active and silent role, like a Chinese shadow.
Beijing watches from the sidelines as America and Russia perform their noisy drama centre stage. But the real action happens in the shadows—infrastructure deals in Africa, currency swaps in the Gulf, satellite networks spreading across Asia like digital silk roads.
China’s strength lies not in spectacle but in strategic opacity. While empires shout, China edits the subtitles. While others make threats, China makes itself indispensable.
The masterstroke: letting everyone else exhaust themselves with performance while you silently rearrange the furniture.
China doesn’t want to be the next empire. It aims to be the last capitalist in a world where capitalism is no longer viable.
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IX. Venezuelan Exiles: Footnotes in a Lithium War
Somewhere in this great geopolitical chess game, millions of Venezuelans exist as footnotes. Not people—footnotes. Their displacement is reduced to logistical problems, their suffering measured in rare earth minerals and cobalt reserves.
Juan Luis Guerra sang about crossing Niagara Falls on a bicycle—impossible, absurd, desperate. That is the Venezuelan tragedy: forced to attempt the impossible while the world argues over who owns the water.
(I know a woman from Caracas who carries photos of her country on her phone like relics. "Venezuela," she says, "now only exists in memory.")
These crises aren’t natural disasters. They are the engineers of a power that has forgotten its humanity.
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X. Radical Empathy: Beyond Transactional Leadership
Power must evolve or dissolve—there is no middle ground left.
From Epicurus to Sartre, philosophy has warned us that domination as a virtue is the beginning of all tragedy. Trump’s 24-hour peace fantasy proves the point—speed without care produces collapse, and solutions without empathy create new problems.
Genuine leadership must slow down, listen, remember its duty is not glory but to protect. The emperor must learn to serve, or abdicate.
But here’s the question no one wants to ask: What if power, by its very nature, corrupts empathy? What if the only way to change the system is to destroy it?
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XI. The Throne Crumbles into Echoes
The emperor remains, but the throne—once elevated above the crowd—is now surrounded by ten billion witnesses, each with a camera, each with a voice, each with the power to say: *"We saw what you did."*
Today’s audiences don’t applaud blindly. They watch, challenge, remix, and resist. They fact-check in real time. They remember what you said yesterday, last year, last decade.
The monologue is broken. The future will be co-written by voices once silenced, now amplified by the very technology meant to control them.
The empire still performs, but no longer alone. The conversation has become planetary, and the emperor’s voice is just one among billions.
The throne crumbles not from external attack, but from the weight of its contradictions, echoing in chambers that no longer listen.
(And perhaps, somewhere, a child in Caracas finishes drawing his plane on the wall and wonders if one day he might fly.)
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Epilogue: The Clock Strikes Zero
...The throne crumbles not from external attack, but under the atomic weight of its own contradictions. And in this very hour—as Lavrov stands frozen in Phnom Penh under the hypnotic observation of Maria Zakharova (Kremlin’s Medusa, her gaze turning hope to stone)—the terrible mathematics achieve their final sum.
Tonight’s Epilogue:
40,000 North Korean shells slither toward Kursk.
Tehran’s envoys leak Mar-a-Lago’s coordinates to dark-web auctioneers.
Micro-drones map the golf course’s 18th hole.
Yet Trump—sweating through his makeup, afraid—still believes he can flip Tehran with a threat. Truly believes. As if the Islamic Republic were an Atlantic City casino deed to seize. He is totally prepared to betray Israel to get it.
The same illusion which Putin sold him:
"Power is not duty—
It is a golden toilet.
Alliances? Flush it away."Meanwhile, in Rome:
Meloni’s voice cuts through the static: "Words will never fix this conflict." She builds walls where bridges burned. Kissinger labels it "the belligerent job"—but the bunkers are sold out.Final Frame:
The emperor without a throne
stares at his palm
and finds it
stained
with the ink of betrayed covenants.We chose minutes over generations.
Trump chose toilets over treaties.
Zero...
...is the only deal he closed.
You can't possibly deny me...
Have a wonderful day filled with good health, happiness, and love…
In December 2023, Energy Central recognized outstanding contributors within the Energy & Sustainability Network during the 'Top Voices' event. The recipients of this honor were highlighted in six articles, showcasing the acknowledgment from the community. The platform facilitates professionals in disseminating their work, engaging with peers, and collaborating with industry influencers. Congratulations are extended to the 2023 Top Voices: David Hunt, Germán Toro Ghio, Schalk Cloete, and Dan Yurman for their exemplary demonstration of expertise. - Matt Chester, Energy Central
Gratitude is our heartbeat.
Inflation bites, platforms shift, and every post now fights for survival. We’re holding the line with premier tools, licensed software, and striking images—but we can’t do it alone.
Help us stay loud:
One click: Like, repost, or share on X, LinkedIn, or Energy Central—free, private, game-changing.
One gift: PayPal gjmtoroghio@germantoroghio.com | IBAN SE18 3000 0000 0058 0511 2611 | Swish 076 423 90 79 | Stripe (donation link).
Each gesture—tiny or titan—powers the words you read.
Thank you for keeping the flame alive.
You can't possibly deny me...
Have a wonderful day filled with good health, happiness, and love…