if this government is really insistent on budget cuts and belt-tightening, we can't be wasting money by throwing it away on palestine. there could be nothing more frivolous or more wasteful than that.

this is an actual real man-made famine that people are actually starving to death in and that you could mobilize to actually save lives in, if you weren't too busy being a fucking nazi:

https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/sudan

if we were going to send that aid out, we should be sending it to people that deserve it, like the victims of the actual famine being enforced on sudan right now by arab colonists and slave traders. the people of gaza are getting their just reward for decades and centuries of deplorable behaviour and should be left to starve, but the jews won't let them starve. it would be doing the world a favour to slaughter them all and get rid of them, but the jews won't do.

as it is, it's easier to blame the jews for eating children, as a distraction from the real problems in front of us. it has no basis in reality. 

when we have real famines, and real problems, and real genocides, we ignore them.

we should be ashamed of ourselves. but, we're not, because we have no sense of morality and no sense of decency. we just have the legacy of catholicism, that won't die, and should be sent to the guillotine.

they're announcing funding cuts on social services in canada, and sending $40 million to feed rapists and murderers and religious conservatives in gaza.

every single dime of this money should be spent here in canada, not sent to backwards countries that still believe in god.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/israel-hamas-war/article/conflicting-ideas-about-identity-legitimacy-driving-middle-east-conflict-anand/

there was a concert worth taking note of in toronto today:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/blue-rodeo-40th-anniversary-toronto-show-1.7595864

it's not as easy as buying private insurance, to the limited ability it's even allowed here, either. this isn't a right-wing argument, it's a left-wing argument; i'm not bitching about taxes, i'm concerned about central planning and resource allocation. 

the applicants that should be prioritized are the ones young enough to continue working, and who are likely to find work when they get here. even at 55 or 60, a few years contribution into the system is justification to start getting benefits when you get into your 70s.

i can think of no logical argument that justifies dumping people that lived the first 70 or 75 years of their lives in another country into canada's overburdened public health queue. these people should be accessing health care in the countries they came from.

i mean, there's no transfer system between columbia and canada. there's no way to do this accounting.

she paid however many tens of thousands of dollars into the columbian system over 70+ years and 0$ into the canadian system over that same period. if she moves to canada, she's abandoning that investment. it doesn't magically show up in canada, and there's no way to make it show up.

it's real life: taxes already paid aren't mobile. you bought into what ya bought. it's yours.

columbia has a universal health care system. the woman paid into that system and she should be served by it, not ours.

this shouldn't be a lottery process.

these walking fossils use up a lot of resources in a system that's already over-stressed, and there's little rational justification for dumping people into the system that haven't paid into it. at all. literally. it's an utterly stupid policy decision.

decisions should be made on the ability of the applicant to contribute to the system they're walking into, and the idea that this isn't and shouldn't be and can't be a free pass into a free care system needs to be gotten across at every point of the way. applicants with more resources to contribute should be chosen ahead of those with less resources to contribute.

it's not fair to tell a tax paying citizen that spent their whole life working and paying into the system that they have to stand in line behind somebody that got here from columbia last week. that's a serious problem and it needs to be taken seriously.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/is-canadas-parents-and-grandparents-sponsorship-program-working-heres-what-families-and-an-expert-think/

if you know your history, you know that roosevelt didn't go into europe to stop hitler, and that he didn't bomb japan to end the empire, but in both cases was trying to prevent endless russian expansion. up until pearl harbour, the americans were sending the nazis weapons. they were trying to create a war in eastern europe to weaken germany and russia simultaneously. that was their foreign policy - make a war in ukraine to keep europe down. we're back where we were, then. the germans were built up as a capitalist counter to the russians and set on them like killer bees, which hadn't been invented yet. in the end, the americans and british had to rush to france to stop stalin from rolling all the way to spain.

if you understand what actually happened at the time, this idea of forcing the germans to rearm almost against their will should scare the hell out of you, because it is history repeating as farce, and we might not get through it this time.

this needs to be palestine's last chance to release the hostages, before it gets wiped off the map.

there's been an apparent shift in rhetoric in western capitals, who no longer appear to think it's important to release the remaining hostages.

if it's being decided that hamas won't release the hostages, the palestinian people need to be collectively punished for it. they certainly cannot be rewarded for this with the recognition of a state. netanyahu cannot appear weak here. he needs to start saturation bombing and just clearing the corpses out.

bmw doesn't really compete much with dodge.

sorry to break your heart, al bundy.

and, is there much to criticize about the premise?

hey, you want to import that bottle of wine from italy instead of getting something from new jersey, maybe you ought to pay a luxury tax for it. that's not such a bad thing.

a big part of what gets sent to the us from the eu is medical equipment and drugs, which gets paid for by insurance, whatever it costs. maybe your premiums go up, if you still have insurance.

almost everything else being sent to the us is a luxury item, and it now has a 15% luxury tax, and maybe it should.

that logic wouldn't apply to canada-us trade, though. 

the news is keying in on the tariffs in the trump-eu deal. it's the sideshow, right? it's the main attraction.

tariffs are in truth of little importance in the kind of trade the us does with either the eu or japan. the japanese will just do everything in the us to begin with, where there are no tariffs. the eu exports items like drugs, luxury cars and specialty foods. are you going to buy the local cheese or wine instead due to the 15% markup, if you want the import from france, which you were going to pay twice as much for anyways? are you going to buy a different lifesaving medication? or a bmw copy?

these are the kinds of goods i've been telling canada to tax, and that's what a tariff is here, in context. imports into the united states from europe have low elasticity in demand, so you can tax them. that's actually smart. it doesn't matter if it's 15 or 20 or 30, it's the same demand curve. people will just shrug and pay.

so, i don't even care about this. i'm more concerned about these investment agreements.

if we have no choice but to position ourselves for a long competitive slog, we should buy in while we can, and buy tactically.

if this is how this is going, if ottawa or washington will emerge victorious, we want as much control over their manufacturing as we can get.

how much of this $750 billion dollars worth of energy being shipped to germany is sourced from canada, anyways?

canada doesn't want to buy a half trillion dollars of american capital infrastructure, unless they want to sell us the refineries. that deal makes no sense to us, even as it makes sense to japan and is a windfall for germany.

however, if it's what's on the table, canada could look at it pragmatically. we could buy up auto factories, pipelines and other infrastructure that stabilizes our investments. is that really being floated? that kind of investment could more seriously flip the 51st state rhetoric on it's head.

...because this is what's in front of us. we don't want to compete, but if they're forcing us to, we ought to play to win. right?

if trump is legitimately demanding we invest that kind of money, we could capitalize off his mistake. he's forcing us to take advantage of him. i mean, that's what the germans just did, even if the context is different.

you might start seeing g6 meetings without canada.

it was always obvious that trying to build a front against trump by aligning with europe wasn't very smart. why would europe take our side?

it made more sense to call mexico, but we missed that boat.

and we insist on hating the russians, when we shouldn't.

canada is finding itself kind of cut out, and our politicians are oddly all on holidays instead of working.

the reality is that we've been falling down all of these rankings for years, and we're going to land somewhere around a top 25-40 economy, not in the g7. really, it's unclear how much longer we can keep up the charade.

if the americans insist on competing with us, we might have to do it.