i'm waiting for elizabeth warren's endorsement of the terrorist attack on aleppo.

the west has a second chance to get this right, to condemn the terrorists for what they are and to offer support to assad to fight them off.

estimates are suggesting that the "tax holiday" will cost the government, and it's ability to deliver social services, around 1.6 billion dollars.

i can't imagine that's the case. nobody is going to save $40-50 on beer and popcorn.

a better estimate is probably in the 400-500 million dollar range.

given the massive headache and extra costs this is going to force businesses to incur, the rebate was probably the better approach. everybody - businesses, governments and individuals - could have better absorbed this by mailing everybody a $20 check instead.

not $200. $20. that's a better estimate.

while i may be likely to criticize the text myself, the outgoing president has an obligation to understand what the fuck he's doing, and should never, ever be criticized for reading anything.

shut your fool mouths.

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-831368

as the situation in eastern europe develops over the next few months, it's worth remembering that ukraine is not a western-style democracy but is a few decades removed from despotism and is one of the most corrupt and politically rotten countries in the world. to the extent that criticisms of russian democracy are overblown but valid in principle, all of those same criticisms apply with equal or greater force to ukraine, which is linguistically, culturally, ethnically, sociologically, historically and politically indistinguishable from russia in any meaningful or coherent sense. ukrainian independence from russia is about as valid as the independence movement in texas.

the reason that the americans have been apprehensive about sharing military technology with the ukrainians is the realization that it would end up sold to the russians by corrupt actors within or russian infiltration of the ukrainian state. everything else aside, ukraine cannot be admitted to nato because it would be a security and intelligence breach and would create a backdoor for russian infiltration into nato itself.

it is likely that ukraine will be forcefully told it cannot join nato and the pentagon was just stringing them along the whole time as an excuse to inflict damage on russian defense capacities. nato doesn't give the slightest fuck about ukraine, ukrainian infrastructure or ukrainian casualties in the war. most recently, the americans have been asking ukraine to lower the age of conscription, which is enforced with extreme violence in ukraine by armed thugs in a stazi-like secret police that kidnap young people at gunpoint and send them off to war. the americans are increasingly and aggressively encouraging the ukrainian government to round up ever younger children to march them off to die, to kill some statistically greater percentage of russian conscripts and inflict some marginally greater level of damage on russian defensive abilities, which is reminiscent of what happened at the end stages of nazism in germany, where they started rounding up little kids and handing them machine guns and sending them after soviet tanks, to get entirely obliterated. does that sound like they care about ukraine to you?

a component of the ukrainian state may actually retaliate to that news by realigning with the russians and, if they do, it will likely get messy, but will demonstrate why they cannot be integrated into the west.

cutting them off will expose the depravity of the american policy, but that is already clear, and if trump is the fall guy he won't give a fuck. it is the correct thing to do to minimize threats of nuclear war and reestablish ukraine as a buffer state that can allow for some concept of tentative and uneasy peace.

the russians need something to exist between them and the nuclear arsenal in germany. that's not negotiable and trying to take that away was a mistake that led to the situation on the ground. they would rather it is poland, but ukraine will have to do for now and the ukrainians will need to accept their fate as what they are, which is a buffer state. that's too bad for ukraine. let them cry in their borscht, and sing their sad songs, and write their existentialist books and work together in communes to cope on the ground; they cannot transcend their condition, and must be told to suffer through it for the good of the rest of the world.

i'm not currently in the mood for a round of homo erectus jokes, but you can do that yourselves if you'd like.

homo erectus (when are they going to change this name?) was our ancestor, but paranthropus bosei was not, they were an extinct species of hominid-like great apes.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/early-human-footprints-1.7396753

i wouldn't get along with these guys much, but the difference between this display of silliness and trudeau going to taylor swift with his teenage daughter is that trump is demonstrating a level of self-deprecation and full blown surreal irony while trudeau was actually honestly trying to be a cool 50+ year old millennial, in clear evasion of his obvious gen x birth date.

ella-grace trudeau should have been legitimately utterly mortified. barron trump needs to lighten up and enjoy the party.

ironically dancing to ymca at thanksgiving with the richest man in the world in front of baffled conservative onlookers (kristi noem was certainly looking uncomfortable during the ava maria sway as well) may turn out to be the only policy promoted by the second trump administration that i am in full and clear support of. i wholeheartedly agree with this policy.

taylor swift can indicate if she agrees or not, but i suspect she might as well.

this is what democrats, liberals and other fake leftists are having difficulty understanding and have to find some way to grapple with: the reality is that donald trump is actually the cool kid, and they aren't, and that this is a cultural shift that nobody's seen before and nobody knows how to understand or react to. i am sure this is following as a corollary of the restrictions on social interactions pushed by fake leftists during the pandemic, in opposition to the libertarianism embraced by republicans which did not explicitly try to stop young people from having fun, which has enforced a flipped cultural reality on young people that the rest of us are going to need to get our heads around and adjust to.

i am, however, disappointed by stallone. c'mon, man.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-musk-barron-ymca-mar-a-lago-thanksgiving-b2656355.html