"Sure there are homeless camps all over the place, but the economy is doing fine really!"

 

Two articles from the "Week-end Wrap" at Ian Welsh's blog.

First: "Why are a record number of Americans living with their parents?" from Robert Bridge at Russia Today.

A record 25.2 million young American adults (about 33%) under 35 have returned to the family nest as the cost of living has become prohibitive.

There is a stereotype of Americans living at home with their parents as freeloaders, living in the basement and spending their ample free time playing video games. That is far from the reality. Around 70% of young adults (ages 25 to 34) living at home are actively employed and use their income to contribute to the household expenses, like groceries and utilities.

One of the main reasons for Americans opting to live with their parents is the high price of home ownership. The median sales price for a single-family home in the US is approximately $434,300. Compare that to 1975 when the average price was under $40,000. That demonstrates how much the dollar has shrunk in terms of purchasing power.

 

Second: "Voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong." from Eugene Ludwig at Politico.

Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as “employed.”

I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate. 

"Anything that threatens my ability to do what I've always done is a hoax!!"

 

Some people REALLY don't like change.  It's unsettling.  Threatening.  Hence, they don't like immigrants.  They don't like people embracing non-traditional gender roles.  They hate challenges to their religion.  Basically, if they grew up with cars, air-conditioners, bbq's, television, etc., ... they imagine that it's always been this way and that there's no reason to change.  So Global Warming is a hoax.  COVID is a hoax.  And they need a Big Daddy leader to stand up against the sources of change and make everything all right. 

Foreign Minister Anita Anand Slinking Away

 

I've seen videos on Instagram and Facebook (but, evidently, they're hard to find on Facebook) of Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand being interrupted from her lunch at some patio in Toronto, having to face accusations about Canada's complicity in Israel's genocide of the Palestinians.

If you ever see those clips (they're usually only from 5 to 15 seconds long) notice how she just gets up and slinks away.

Which is a clear admission of guilt by the way.

I've seen videos of child molesters (that is; known, convicted, admitted child molesters) being confronted by angry people.  And they behave the exact same way as Anand does.  They don't protest.  How could they?  They don't argue back.  The issue is settled.  They are guilty as charged and they just want to get where they're going without getting their heads kicked in.

Which is not to say that the people confronting Anand want to kick her head in.  Just that Anand knows that she has no defence against these accusations.  She can't argue or try to justify her actions.  They're unjustifiable.  She's a war criminal, complicit in the deliberate torture and murder and genocide of innocent men, women and children.

There are other videos of political lapdogs of Israel, sometimes male politicians dealing with male or female accusers.  Sometimes a female politician dealing with male or female accusers.  With the female politicians it's almost always the same.  They look scared and they're trying to get away as fast as they're capable of walking.  They're upset and some of them look like they want to cry.

With the men, when facing a male accuser, they usually make some grim face and move steadily forward.  Some of them do try to talk tough to a male accuser, but it's generally some stupid shit about how the anti-genocide male trying to hold them to account for genocide are idiots wasting everybody's time.  With female accusers, male politicians are more likely to smirk and toss out stupid accusations of those women being dupes of Hamas or in the sway of some other foreign power.

The one constant is that they're all contemptible scum. 

Mark Carney Represents the Sickness, the Emptiness, of Canada

 

I never held out high hopes for Mark Carney.  He said one or two things in the past that caused me to think he'd be a much better prime minister than he's turned out to be.  But those were just idle musings.  The difference between thinking "He might" and "I wish."

But in practice, Carney has been a disaster.  A self-important, delusional, ruthless servant of oligopoly.  Even when he made his big speech at Davos, about "middle powers" aligning with other such nations to pursue their "values" I knew it was bullshit.  He was still supporting Israeli imperialism and genocide to the hilt.

Carney, the human being, is intelligent enough to have a tenuous grasp of what is right and what is wrong.  But in practice, in his day-to-day life, he obviously can't differentiate between ideology, dogmatism, delusion, corruption and evil.

Whether we like it or not, Canada is founded on theft and colonialism.  Canada was a settler colony of the British Empire and now we are an appendage of US imperialism.  We remain saturated with the barbarism and obscurantism of religion.  We are capitalist, at a time when capitalism has become a bloated, stinking, psychotic ideology.  We've long been one of the staunchest supporters of the fascist (which implies racist) Zionist movement.

This is a sick, ignorant, deluded, corrupt, inhuman culture with nothing worthwhile at its core, aside from the rudiments of failed attempts to implement the rule of law, representative government, democracy or human rights.  Those faint gleamings can barely be recognized under the pile of shit that explains why Mark Carney is behaving like stephen harper. 

Good Article About Doug Ford [Ontario PC's] Ruinous Energy Policy

 

It's from Rabble.Ca:  "Ford's deficit funded Ponzi Scheme" 

High hydro rates were a big problem politically. So, In the 2018 Ontario provincial election Doug Ford promised to lower hydro rates by 12 per cent. Ford has not lowered hydro rates by even one per cent. 

What Ford did do was hide and protect private profits with his electricity rebate program subsidy. The Financial Accountability Office has reported the cost to the public treasury from between $6 billion and $7 billion per year.  

Last November first the Ontario Energy Board raised electricity rates by 29 per cent. This was done, as it has been done every November 1 and April 1 since June 2002 to pay the rates the deregulated electricity market charged.  

Knowing this would not be good optics for him, Ford increased the electricity rebate program from 13 to 23.5 per cent, hiding the increase. Ford never talks about his 2018 promise anymore.

Just doing the math, $6.9 Billion plus 23.5 per cent equals a whopping $8.5215 billion and growing, that figure does not include the November 1 increase of 29 per cent.  All paid for by the public treasury.

...

The crisis in both healthcare and education as well as other public services we all depend on is due to the underfunding and cuts to our critical public services to fund this scam and worst of all, Ford is also borrowing from future taxpayers by using deficit financing to pay for his scheme. 

     In a nutshell Ford is financing his scheme with social deficits in healthcare, education and public treasury deficits. 

     The deficit for 2026-27 is now $13.8 billion, indebting future generations.

In the middle of an affordability crisis, Ford’s scheme only protects private profits.

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Any working class person who votes for this party of full-time grifters is either a total ignoramus, a hopeless shithead, or both. 

The Difference Between Defeat in Vietnam and Defeat AGAINST Iran

 

Not to take away anything from the accomplishments of the Vietnamese, but what the USA calls "The Vietnam War" was supposed to be a war against Communism.  "The Domino Theory."  The narrative was that communism was spreading.  The USA was the leader of "The Free World" and its job was to stop the spread of totalitarian tyranny.  The defeat of the USA in Vietnam was traumatic for the Washington elites, in that it showed that there were limits to US power.  Still and all, the simplistic "domino theory" (which camouflaged what was actually anti-colonialism that was often [naturally] associated with socialism) held.  Vietnam was an example to the world of how much suffering and death was required to break out of the US-led capitalist/imperialist order.  And postwar Vietnam was made to suffer, with no international reconstruction assistance beyond what the cash-strapped, ossifying USSR could provide.  In other words, despite the defeat in Vietnam, the USA was still the leader of the "free world" and it was going to go on to be an example for others to emulate.

But the "Cold War" ended in 1991.  And since that year, the USA has gone from the world's only "super-power" to de-industrialized, financialized, debt-ridden, super-corrupt, politically unstable ... "Things fall apart.  The centre cannot hold."  ... Perfectly represented by the senile "Genocide Joe Biden" and the doddering, bloated, serial-grifter, rapist "Genocide Donald Trump."  The differences in living standards and technological development between the USA, Europe, Japan and the Anglo-American countries (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the rest of the world have shrunk.  China is now a major world power.  Russia is back on its feet.  Leftist movements in Latin America and anti-colonial movements in Africa are arising.  And Iran has just won its war against Israel and the USA.  

So what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz is that the last vestige of European Imperialism (which is at the core of the insanity that calls itself "zionism") is dying and Donald Trump is the ego-maniac who has to face that. 

I started this post almost a week ago.  A day or two ago, the libertarian website antiwar.com provided a link to a foreignpolicy.com article by Paul Musgrave, entitled "Iran Defeat Is Bigger Strategic Defeat Than Vietnam."   I'm not saying that I'm astonishingly prescient.  Just that this sentiment is shared by many others.  The USA could walk away from Vietnam and Afghanistan.  In those cases they lost control of a small, poor country.  In both cases the USA left those countries to rebuild with their own resources from the destruction that America inflicted on them.  Iran is different.  Iran threatens the entire world economy.  It might expel all US military bases from the region.  It might defeat Israel, the last bastion of European colonial-imperialism.

 

And now, tonight, Danny Haiphong is speaking with Mohammad Marandi about Israel's sabotaging of the ceasefire

 

Furthermore, ... there is but no question that this war is bad for the United States.  I have said all along that Donald Trump himself knew this was a bad idea.  I have also said that if one combines the very strong possibility that Trump raped adolescent girls on property owned by Jeffrey Epstein.  And Epstein was a blackmailer.  And Epstein worked for Mossad.  Which would naturally mean that Donald "President of the United States" Trump is being blackmailed by Israel to sacrifice his country on behalf of Naziyahoo's Israel.

 

Let's not beat about the bush here.  There is a growing movement on the right-side of the political spectrum, represented by people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owen, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and (before Israel assassinated him) Charlie Kirk, that also saw the insanity of the imperialism of the Clintons and Obama and Biden (and all their media sycophants) and status-quo Repugnicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, as being bad for the United States.  It's generally the fans of these people who enlist in the "poverty draft" and who find themselves or their loved ones dying in the stupid, useless "forever wars." And those were the people who voted for Trump to bring an end to that insanity.  And Trump violated their trust.  

Don't get me wrong.  There are portions of MAGA so stupid and debased that they forgive Trump for not releasing the Epstein files, and who hypocritically blame Reneé Good and Alex Pretti for their own deaths because neither of those fine, upstanding people would bow to tyranny.  And don't get me wrong that by ascribing to some intellectual and perhaps moral consistency to Carlson, Owens, Taylor-Greene or Kirk, that I now think they are awesome.

I'm just saying that there is a significant portion of right-wing, isolationist, Christian-Nationalist and (sorry Candace) White-Supremacist US-citizens who absolutely DESPISE Israel, and AIPAC hirelings, and ordinary Jewish people.  And maybe some of Trump's top generals are a part of that, or maybe they're just realists, but either way, the people I was just talking about are on their side.  If there's any real-time hope to end this insanity it won't be the lefties milling about for an afternoon.  It'll be people with real material-world resources.  Christian-nationalist members of the US military, who may or may not harbour antisemitic beliefs.

Iran has won this war.  Israel is merely digging its own grave.  Here's Ian Welsh:

The Iranians have not gone to Geneva for the signing or negotiations. They are holding firm on Lebanon. And that means Trump can either rein in the Israelis or the vise starts tightening around America’s balls again.

America cannot win this war. It is impossible. Even using nukes probably wouldn’t work fast enough. That’s why they agreed to a deal that is very pro-Iranian.

That has not changed. They can rein in Israel or cut it loose now, or they can do it in two months when the US is in much more pain, or in 4 months when there are food riots.

There’s a real world. America lost a war that matters. There’s going to be a price for that. If America is smart and not completely controlled by Israel, they’ll pay that price now and if necessary cut Israel lose, because the price will go up every day if the MOU fails.

This is a momentous time.   Here's Nate Bear:

With Israel still bombing Lebanon and oil reserves at critical thresholds, however, this is all far from over.

Iran has sketched out two futures for the US and it now has a decision to make: stand behind the deal which Trump has loudly proclaimed as necessary to save the world, and force Israel to stand down, or let Israel dictate the process, return to war and drag the world into an economic depression. Anything is still possible, of course, but I judge the latter extremely unlikely.

And Trump, in his egotism, venality and conceited self-interest, might just be the man for the moment.

Blog-on dudes and dudettes! 

The Carney Government's AI Strategy

 

Recently, the Carney Liberal Government either released or had leaked their strategy for Canada's participation in the AI Revolution.

But given that AI is a towering mass of shit that nobody normal ever asked for, and, given that Mark Carney and any degenerate willing to be associated with him (that includes Pierre Poilievere) is/are complete shit-heads, nothing in it is of any value.