it's not a question of if the chinese have operatives in canada, but a question of how many chinese operatives exist in canada.

the chinese appear to be rather unhappy with us, at the moment.

this is just such absolutely convoluted thinking that it's almost impossible to believe that hundreds of people around the country all think that the prime minister has anything to do with the girl's description of her attacker.

and, if i understand correctly, they seem to want the prime minister to walk back a statement of solidarity with a child that claimed she was randomly attacked. what planet does the chinese intelligence live on where this is a remotely acceptable thing to even think?

maybe i'm missing some cultural chinese thing, or something. but most canaduans aren't even going to understand what these people are protesting, and you can't agree or disagree with something if you can't even make sense of it.

i have no idea why the news covered this.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/protest-regina-victoria-park-asian-community-hijab-cutting-1.4508019

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"they're not real christians".

au contraire. these are the realest christians in the hood.

well, elizabeth, they may forgive you for the times that you expressed yourself clearly, but they might not forgive you for the times when you expressed yourself through jumbled, slurred words.

sour grapes, indeed.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/elizabeth-may-green-party-1.4507332

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i think trudeau phrased that a little bit frighteningly.

"Sexual harassment is a systemic problem. It is unacceptable. When women speak up, it is our duty to listen to them"

great. perfect statement. every decent person in the world agrees with you. that's what a snazzy politician produces.

"...and to believe them."

gah. you just lost the room, man. i know your strategists are telling you one thing about the political usefulness of projecting feminism, if you want to claim this is feminism, but you've really got the...you've got the entire political spectrum, save the hardest part of the pseudo-left, against you. and, worse, this pseudo-left is really feeding off of the corporate media, which is using the thing, however genuine, as a screen to get rid of people - i don't think it's a witch hunt, so much as i think there's a list, somewhere, and somebody's scratching names off of it. it's a purge. then, there's the opportunists, too.

i don't even completely disagree with him. i mean, sure, you should believe these women....if they're convincing. it's the implication of blanket belief that is rightfully drawing criticism from every direction on the spectrum. not because it's anti-feminist, but because it's inherently irrational.

i'm sure he'd clarify, if presented with an opportunity, that he was speaking in generalities, and not including the exceptions. but he said it in a way that...

either he's not being scripted closely enough, or he's not following it. he shouldn't have said that like that. that's going to freak people out.

it shouldn't, but it will.

but, flip past that and look at the response from the ministers - it's pretty much exactly what you'd want to hear a government say. they were clear to point out the need for due process.

the liberals are consistently legitimately good at governing. i'm way out here in left field, and i have the usual criticisms, but for capitalists? with all their flaws, true enough? there's a level of justified confidence in the party that i think pretty much every major industrialized country has lost, in their center-left.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/trudeau-says-women-who-speak-up-about-sexual-harassment-must-be-believed/article37760006/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

here's an idea that might actually work, regarding daca. you'll excuse my cynicism, but it's called for.

this is what you need to do: ambush paul ryan somewhere in public - a press conference, or a speech - and pointedly ask him the question that is really at the crux of the issue:

what kind of lobbying sum is required to get you to put the dream act on the floor? what's your price?

then, crowd source the cost and pay it out.

because this is the truth: nothing gets through congress unless it's paid for. the cost may be high. but, let me tell you: congressional leaders will surely change their tune, if you name them the right price.

right now, we're using crowd sourcing to elect politicians. maybe we should think about using it to control them with. and, after a few pay outs, they'll get the hint: these are bribes that they can actually win elections with.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what am i doing, anyways?

from a distance, it probably seems like i've just fallen through the ground and into a rabbit hole, as i was prancing through the rhetorical field of rhetoric.

yes, the rhetorical field of rhetoric. it's a rhetorical field, remember. of rhetoric.

i think christmas is going to end in the next few days. yeah, it's a long one this year. well, i wanted to deal with all of the alter-reality writing - from 12/1996 to 02/1998 and counting - and, as those who have been following this for a while know, my writing tends to get a little more expansive on, err, holidays.

yes, friday is a holiday. legally. really.

so, i've been maintaining the proper mindset, notwithstanding tolerance, since christmas, preparing myself for the writing in the alter-reality...

....and i actually haven't even started yet.

as we can see, i've ranted here quite a bit, and quite nicely, since the 15th of january, when i closed the audio for the first two periods. today, i've been ranting nearly non-stop for like 18 hours or something - although i'm just about to stop. so, i've done a lot of writing, even if it's not in the topic i was intending. but, what i'm really doing is building a master list of album notes, so that i can pull the parts out that i need as i run through the alter-reality and close.

i need to reiterate that i only have to do this once and that, once it is done, the remaining process wil be much, much smoother.

so, what have i done over the last week?

i've built the first 350 pages of the master list up. the document is currently 700 pages, and has notes going to mid 2015 in it.

at this point, i would guess that the final document (1996-2018) will be around 3000 pages long - word, 8.5"x12", 12 pt - although i only expect to get up to around 1000 by the time i get to actually writing.

which will be when?

march.

christmas will be over before january is.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

oh, and, if it's unclear, the end of qe, combined with the ridiculous tax cuts, means that there will not be a trillion dollar infrastructure bill in the united states - or likely to be any government stimulus over the next several years at all.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

neither party wants to pass this bill.

so, trump floated a ridiculous offer, and the democrats provided a ridiculous response. now, they can credibly blame each other for being ridiculous, and people will buy into it without seeing themselves in the mirror for the literal clowns that they are.

both of these positions are ridiculous.

i would have liked to see this passed in congress. the votes are there, if the speaker would just let it come to the floor. but, trump will reauthorize the order in march, and in the process have himself a good excuse for not building a wall - the democrats won't let him do it.

never mind that he controls the entire government - the democrats won't let him do it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-25/trump-would-double-daca-to-1-8-million-give-path-to-citizenship

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

no, i'm not shy about this, i've posted it here before, albeit maybe not in a cohesive argument.

if america were serious about immigration reform, what it would do is dismantle ice and redirect the funding to a regulatory body that ensures that employers follow proper hiring practices, and face serious consequences if they don't. i will argue strenuously that, yes, it is an employer's responsibility to determine that their employees are legally allowed to work in the country, and that they should face severe punishment if they are caught breaking that law.

like, jail time.

this is the actual problem: the labour laws aren't being followed, and absolutely nobody is doing anything to ensure that they are. the debate is entirely on the migrants, which is totally backwards.

but, america is not serious about immigration reform. the democrats take their massive checks from their big donors, and look the other way as they exploit workers that literally have absolutely no rights, then argue it should be easier for those corporate donors to exploit those workers. the republicans also look the other way, but they scapegoat them like they're jews in order to quell dissent from the native born population and win votes. neither party has any vested interest in changing the status quo at all; it's just all political theatre on both sides, with no intent to change anything.

i think that nobody is illegal, and free mobility should be universal - globally. but, until we can get rid of capital altogether, the viability of such a system relies on a violent enforcement of labour regulations. migrants deserve a living wage, like everybody else - and native born workers deserve the rights to a collective bargaining process that prevents migrants from undercutting their wages...

there are thousands of immigration officers working for ice. redeploy them to go after the businesses. you'll see immediate results.

but, it will never happen, because nobody wants the status quo to be altered.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

actually, i'm glad i'm getting the opportunity to live blog america's fall.

it's kind of a wet dream for an asexual, actually.

no, really.

i mean, it's inevitable. but i didn't think i'd get to see it.

or gloat about it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, after turkey, who will be the next us ally to bail on america, both for it's shrinking influence and it's dishonest provocations?

the germans will move once the gates are open, and that will likely be the point of no return. they are slowly, but surely, moving to align themselves more closely with the russians.

i'm going with japan as the second major defection, spurred on by annoyance over the tpp and the desire to tap into the chinese market, which is rapidly increasing it's amount of disposable income. and, they will take the south koreans with them.

the sun will set on the american empire.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/china-says-it-hopes-to-get-japan-ties-back-on-track-126409

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-28/china-sees-obstacles-to-repairing-ties-with-japan-as-envoys-meet

https://www.rferl.org/a/nord-stream-2-u-s-poland-oppose-russia-germany/29002097.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i will accept the argument that qe might have an effect in preventing deflation, which is what you would actually expect in a situation where:

1) the money is trickling up.
2) the population is increasing.
3) the money supply is stagnant.

in that situation, more mouths to feed and less money to go around should lead to deflation, as people have less to spend - or it least it should under market conditions. and, people are probably actually going to mark the food down if people can't pay for it, yes.

the elite might not care, except that the corollary of such a situation is civil unrest, and that's likely the actual reason underlying the policy.

but, it also cuts to the criticism that obama's stimulus was too small. i mean, i'm sure he had lots of political discussions about the size of the stimulus, and how it might be a liability for fiscally conservative democrats. but, the numbers picked were lower than suggested - and lower than the near simultaneous stimulus announced by the chinese, who seem to have been legitimately concerned about growth.

america's stimulus seems to have rather been about preventing deflation. meaning that this qe was just designed to stop the ship from sinking, not get it up and sailing again. meaning that even if you have faith in the market to set things right once the government has intervened, a faith borne out of zero evidence, and a faith that i do not hold, it still follows that the stimulus that is being withdrawn was too small to put the market on the right footing, in the first place.

to be clear: i'm going to argue that the economy needs stimulus all of the time, no matter what and that qe should be permanent. more moderate keynesians will suggest that the government only needs to intervene when investment dries up, and that once the economy is back on it's feet, the stimulus can be withdrawn. ok. but, even those that accept the more moderate position are mostly going to argue that the stimulus was too small to get the economy back on it's feet, and was really only enough to put off the inevitable deflationary spiral that going bareback for too long will inevitably produce.

this is bad policy, all around. and, i know the business press has it's head stuck up it's ass. but wait for it.

this is the reason that they tell you that leftists don't understand the economy.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i guess i missed this.

when the economy crashes in a year or two, this will be the reason why, and not the tax cuts. america could go to a 0% federal tax rate without affecting the economy, so long as it prints what it needs - and can find somebody to buy the debt. but, when the country stops printing money, the economy will always start falling apart before the next election happens. it's a very short time window before the effects are felt.

"capitalism requires capital!".

and, perhaps it really is that simple. but, you can make this argument a dozen different ways...

i mean, i could run through the mmt charts.

but, i think even something as simple as population growth is a reason for permanent quantitative easing. and, maybe nobody has presented this to you, this way. i'm always surprised by how many activists sound like ron paul, when the topic of banks come up - probably because it's the only information they've ever received on the topic.

just think it through.

every given year, the following things happen:

1) the number of people in the country increases.
2) the value of the dollar decreases relative to itself (this is called inflation).

so, just through simple population increases, a roughly fixed money supply would mean that, year-over-year, there is going to be less money to go around, and it will be worth less. so, gdp per capita has nowhere to go but down.

now, you can argue inflation can be minimized (and i'm not going to take your arguments seriously, as there is no evidence at all that quantitative easing does cause inflation, despite many attempts to force it to; it's usually the reason it's brought in...) by reducing the money supply, or eliminating the ability to manipulate it, but you can't make that argument about population growth. if you don't increase the money supply to compensate for population growth, you're going to run out of money; if you have x dollars, and you split it fairly amongst y people, you're going to need a lot more than x dollars to split it just as fairly amongst y^2 people, and if you only have x dollars then the result is going to be a recession...

you won't find that in a textbook, but it's maybe the easiest way to understand the necessity of qe in the existing capitalist economy - and the sheer logic underlying the policy.

https://www.ft.com/content/caf45d6a-9e28-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf946

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

yeah.

the tax cuts won't do much at all, but the end of quantitative easing is certainly going to kickstart a recession. the american form of capitalism requires quantitative easing, and will collapse without it. or, at least that's what empiricism teaches us.

i actually didn't expect that from trump, and hope the article is reaching a little. i expected him to throw money around all over the place, and print what he needed. tax cuts. boosts in military spending. how do you make up the difference? i guess i assumed that trump would walk down the same path as reagan: truly believe that government is spending too much on poor people and not enough on guns, then cut everything you possibly can besides the guns, then realize the government barely spends any money on poor people at all and is actually spending all it's money on guns and so instead just print even more money for the guns, without bothering to restore funding to poor people. that's how republicans do this, right?

and, we got the expected bill. i mean, maybe that's why i didn't bother to analyse it or even read it - it's exactly what i expected. we got the military increases. we got the tax cuts. we got the slashing of services. the next thing that a republican is supposed to do is print the money to offset the tax cuts...

again: maybe he still will. maybe this is reaching.

but, he did just replace the fed chair.

and, i did tell you he was going to dismantle the empire.

what happens after quantitative easing stops is going to look a lot like the end days of the soviet union for a lot of people, even if it doesn't lead to political reform - or at least not immediately.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/26/imf-chief-warns-trumps-tax-cuts-could-destabilise-global-economy

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

in case i haven't been clear: i would have voted against brexit, for the reason that it's not likely to actually solve anything. the same bankers end up in control, in the end. it's going to be mostly smoke and mirrors, by the time it's done. but, now that it is upon britain, i think there's certainly a lot of tweaks that could be made to improve the condition of the british working class. i guess you could say i would have been in favour of renegotiating terms, rather than fully withdrawing.

i don't expect this to turn out to my liking. i guess that's the other reason i would have voted against it.

on an issue by issue basis...

1) free movement of goods: no. get rid of that.
2) free movement of capital: no. get rid of that.
3) free movement of labour: yes. maintain this.
4) customs union: no. get rid of that.

what will actually happen, probably?

1) free movement of goods: this will likely be restricted.
2) free movement of capital: this will likely be maintained.
3) free movement of labour: this will likely be restricted dramatically.
4) customs union: the british will likely synchronize their tariffs, one way or the other.

but, that doesn't mean i can't agitate.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

thank god* for vice news.

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gq9m9j/he-left-wing-arguments-on-the-eu-referendum-brexit-for-against

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

*clearly, there is no such thing as god.

see, i think labour ought to be using the xenophobia as a wedge issue. if it becomes the ballot question, it could both help ukip split the vote and increase the turnout by both creating a movement amongst often non-voters and really riling up the base.

it requires some careful framing, but there's no issue more populist than fighting xenophobia.

maybe some hard numbers from internal polling might make me rethink it. but, if it were me, my thought process would be something like "what do i care if i piss off some white trash tory voters?".

i know, not very statespersonlike. whatever. politics is a dirty business.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/12/brexit-jeremy-corbyn-keir-starmer-labour

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

yeah, i can't imagine the british signing up to a system that they pay into without have voting powers, given that they still like to pretend they're a colonial power. they couldn't deal with that.

i mean, they have a veto at the united nations. you're going to tell them they can't vote on cheese tariffs?

the canada-style deal is, indeed, the better option, but i don't agree that the single market is an indivisible idea. i don't see any reason why corbyn can't push for the free flow of labour, while denying the free flow of goods and capital. i mean, he's in opposition, he can be a little loud about something that might be hard to negotiate, right?

i think he might find that this liberal opposition he's facing is mostly concerned about britain losing it's cosmopolitan character, rather than about the economics of the situation. and, so long as demand settles, brexit shouldn't directly harm the british economy, once production relocates or transforms itself accordingly to meet demand. job losses is what the establishment always says when it's facing a backlash. we can't get rid of oil, because jobs. we can't get rid of war, because jobs. so why is it a surprise that we can't get rid of the eu, because jobs? and it shouldn't be a surprise when that turns out to be the same old contrived bullshit, either. jobs are created by demand...

britain was key in the industrial revolution, remember. this was a society that was built on the strength of exports to foreign markets (often opened with gun boats). but, if they're going to bring production back, maybe they can clean it up this time. and, maybe it could even act as a model for a new industrial revolution, to sustainability.

if i'm right, and the opposition to brexit is more cultural than economic, while the support for brexit is mostly economic, he can probably get away with opposing brexit on cultural terms and supporting it on economic ones, if he just focuses his agitation on that one point of maintaining free mobility, if he can win the argument that the real cause of migrants stealing jobs is employers that don't follow labour laws.

it's lonely out here on the left, sometimes. this probably sounds delusional, even if i'm right, as i usually am.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/01/27/canada-style-brexit-deal-obvious-rapid-solution/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

let's not go back in time and talk about andrew jackson, who, excluding washington, was probably the closest thing america has had to a king.

the real demographic split hasn't changed, not through all the shifts in american history, not through slavery, not through civil rights - the democrats remain the party of the educated elite, while the republicans generate the bulk of their support from the masses. you can pull out different alliances. but, you're more likely to meet a democrat at a high gala event, whereas you're more likely to meet a republican in a small town working class tavern.

because this was always the real divide in british politics: between the party of the court and the party of the people.


jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's just...

after decades of having the socialist party overrun by liberals, the party membership finally gets it's machinery back, maybe, at least it finally has somebody that has left-leaning instincts, and as soon as he makes a stand in favour of native workers, he has to deal with protest from liberals inside his own party.

they're in the wrong party.

they're liberals.

tell 'em to piss off, and to go back where they came from...


jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

for those that don't follow british politics...

there was of course a liberal party in britain back in the day, from which both the canadian liberal party and the american republican party claim ultimate descent, with the republicans doing so through the whigs. the democrats can't really claim historical descent from the conservative party, but they have usually been more like conservatives than liberals. in traditional british politics, blue means right-wing (with it's monarchist tendencies) and red means left-wing (this is of the people), so long as we're not eating bread at the circus, in which case they're both the same, anyways..

somebody might get me on a technicality, but i believe that the last liberal prime minister of the united kingdom was neville chamberlin, who casual readers of history no doubt know solely through his fascist appeasement policies and subsequent declaration of war against germany in 1939. the brits never forgave him for this, and the liberals were replaced by labour - a socialist party - after the war. the early years of ingsoc had some positive influence in britain, as well - even if the most socialist thing they did was allow the empire to collapse without a fight.

the liberals sputtered for decades, after that, before merging with a smaller party in i believe the 80s to form the liberal democrats. but, this is basically the continuation of the party of gladstone. it's still there, man.

this is where the remainers ought to vote, if they want to uphold the neo-liberal status quo. and, it's rational. you want liberalism? vote liberal.

that should be the campaign slogan. at the end of the ads.

are you a liberal? then vote Liberal.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liberal-democrats-challenge-labour-european-single-market-vote-parliament-brexit-latest-a7915106.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's some serious mental gymnastics to argue that opposing a free trade deal, and not supporting a single market, is in some way a betrayal of socialist values.

the british didn't lose their liberal party, it just fell into disuse. but, this is a good reason to bring it back. and, that is what i would say to the remainers: if you're so in love with neo-liberalism, why don't you marry it? why don't you join the liberal party?

i understand that the party wants to win elections. but, they really ought to take a stand on this, and go tell these liberals to be liberals, and stop the doublespeak around the situation. there's not a socialist on the planet that supports the euro. i mean a lot of us don't even support the concept of currency.

that said, there are aspects of the eurozone that most socialists would support, and that activists should be pushing labour to try and maintain some kind of continuity on. free mobility, for example, is certainly a socialist aim. i understand that the push back was largely about open immigration, and what the british people really said was that barely half of the people that voted wanted to restore some sovereignty around immigration. so, there's a large minority of voters that want less immigration. but, as a long-time opponent of nafta, i actually think that one of the major problems of nafta - that it created a lot of economic migrants - would be best solved with the kind of mobility rights that exist in the european union. i mean, that would be one of my major fixes for nafta: it should have eu-style free mobility. i've made that argument forcefully, for years. not decades, but maybe a decade. such free mobility would actually make it easier for workers to be tracked as they cross borders and harder for unscrupulous employers - which are the actual problem - to evade labour laws. what the british people are going to see, in the event of stricter limits on immigration, is a situation more comparable to the southern parts of the united states, where illegal migrants work without legal protections and under the table. employers will benefit. but this is going to actually exacerbate the economic problems that created the backlash vote in the first place. labour ought to be trying to win this argument, but, instead, they're not making it.

socialists, however, are not concerned about things like religious freedom, as we seek to abolish religion, and multiculturalism, as we seek to abolish nationalism. this is all boiler-plate liberal bullshit. so, these people should be told where they ought to go with it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, should america be angry with the turks for their betrayal?

the turks have actually been very compliant allies, and they had to be, because they were all of a sudden back to where they were in the fourteenth century, and under imminent threat of russian invasion of the dardanelles. there was a war in greece over this, right after world war two. without western support, turkey would have certainly become a soviet socialist republic. it was the first major proxy conflict of the cold war.

and, since then, turkey has been compliant because they've been reliant. i've gone through great lengths here to stress turkey's role as a european power, and one half of the legacy of the byzantine empire - the geographic half, if not the cultural half. hey, listen - the turkish emperors themselves were well aware of this, and picked up where the romans left off, launching multiple invasions of rome to try and unite the empire.

historical reality is that if the turks had succeeded in conquering italy, they would have almost certainly moved their capital to rome, and what i'm saying here would be mainstream history, although it's not particularly obscure, as it is.

the turks demonstrated every inclination that they wanted to be an important part of the western alliance, from the embrace of secularism to the construction of important nato military facilities. they've fought and died in western wars.

but, now, we see what america has done - and this is obama's fault - to spit in the face of this willing and compliant ally, in backing extremists funded by the saudi theocracy to redraw the maps in the middle east, in ways that put the very premise of turkish civilization under existential threat. much of the fighting in the syrian war was between turkish-backed groups and saudi-backed groups for control over who gets to recreate syria in their image, in the then-perceived vacuum of russian power, with the americans overwhelmingly supporting the saudi-backed groups, which convincingly defeated the turkish-backed groups, before the russians came in and beat the saudi-backed groups. the turks have been fighting a proxy war against deep american interests the whole time! it may have taken them a few years to understand this, as no doubt nobody told them. so, some allies. america has refused to take these concerns seriously, to the point that it has essentially been treating turkey like an adversary - just another bunch of barbarians to divide and set at each other.

erdogan is dumb as a plank, but he's right about this: this is not the behaviour of an ally. it is the behaviour of an imperial force set on setting everybody against each other. the turks do not have real friends or serious allies in washington.

to put it another way, turkey may have demonstrated enthusiastic willingness to be in the empire, but the empire has refused to consolidate turkey within it, instead seeing them as outsiders - barbarians with weird customs that need to be kept in a state of inter-warfare to prevent them from challenging american interests. america would be just as happy to see turkey collapse into a set of buffer states.

no, do not blame turkey. this is america's fault.

and, it's america's addiction to oil's fault.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.