can we get a nice spot in siberia for the gazans?

listen, i actually support this. it's required. what else do you do with these barbarians that won't give up? they think they're going to win, eventually. you have to pack them up and move them out.

as marco rubio would say, and perhaps he ought to, let us dispel once and for all with the fiction that there will ever be a palestinian state in the levant.

the world needs to move on. i want a less insane way, but we've got what we've got.

gaza delenda est.

we all know this is true.

can we say it out loud?

donald trump is a stalinist.

somebody is going to stand up and say,

i think america should make the stuff and buy the stuff. it even kind of makes sense, because you buy the stuff with the money you make selling the stuff. we don't need to do one or the other.

it sounds reasonable. but, it is unfortunately very naive.

in practice, albeit not in theory, that is the system we labeled communism in the 20th century. that was "really existing communism" when it really existed. oversimplified. nobody's expecting that, but it does seem to be what's in the back of don the coyote's sneaky head, and i don't think he fully realizes it.

the president is not supposed to run the economy from the oval office. that's not what "commander in chief" means.

congress would be correct to pare back powers.

the reality is that the president isn't using his authority well, correctly or appropriately.

reciprocal tariffs aren't about reciprocity or even about tariffs, they're about trade deficits. trump is irritated by countries that sell americans more than america sells them, but that's how the system was designed - everything comes to the centre of the empire. trump fundamentally, foundationally doesn't get it, or is at least pretending not to.

if you want to evade the wrath, then, you should sell less items to the united states, and that's what the policy will result in if it suceeds, the united states being removed from the centre of global commerce. i suppose that would most likely return europe to the centre of the global economy, as china's middle class is still far too small to adopt that purpose. trump's attempt to punish europe will re-establish the pre-nixonian status quo. our neo-nixon is going to undo the old one.

this isn't so complicated, really. somebody needs to make the stuff and somebody needs to buy the stuff. for the last 50 years, since the nixon shock, america has bought the stuff and china has made the stuff. before that, america used to make the stuff, and europe bought the stuff (china was cut out). this was supposed to be the postwar order - europe buying the stuff america makes. it did work well for america, but nixon blew it up and there's a narrative in the investor class that americans had become lazy and entitled, which there is some truth to. there was a particular push back on white people, who won reforms in the union era, pushing for civil rights for black people to mirror those reforms; rather than help pull the blacks up, the bankers reacted by pushing the whites back down off the ladder to whence they came. progress was over. go back to the fields, okie; it's feudalism all over again.

we can pinpoint where this whole progress thing broke to a few months in 1971 and it's been falling apart into smaller pieces ever since.

does trump want to bring that back? i don't think his intent is to go back to 1970, but he seems to want to immediately undo nixon first and foremost, and, i mean, that's what american workers would indeed want. this being in the centre of the empire thing benefits the banks, not the workers. the workers want to make the stuff and sell it. 

what's unclear is whether this is a quixotic journey by an individual named donald trump to save the world economy or if the system is desiring this outcome, potentially as it gears up for a world war. if it has already been decided that there will be a war, america needs to reshore. this seems feeble and wrongheaded, but is it a function of incompetence or irrelevance?

we're not used to seeing america or americans act like this. they're supposed to know what they're doing, or convincingly bullshit it. anybody can see that trump has no clue and that nobody around trump has a clue, either. i don't think there's a precedent for this outside of the worst roman emperors.

if america seriously wants to make the stuff again and re-establish other countries - canada, europe south america, the midde east - as export markets rather than suppliers of raw goods and finished products, it is going to need to do more than this to get to that end point. massive government investment to rebuild industry would be a start. they will need to make some kind of deal with east asia to get wages up or get cut out again. if they had an excuse 50 years ago, they don't anymore.

if it is merely trying to create a revenue generating import tax to offset other revenue streams (like income taxes), that, however, might work quite well. after all, americans are reliant on imports.