it would generate an inflationary revenue stream to offset the damages being done by trump while minimally altering supply chains.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
this is what pierre polievre is trying to say when he talks about "biological clocks".
and while he seems to have assigned intellect to the parties in backwards order, he is correct in his thinking.
i don't care about this stupid planet and hope it crashes into the sun. i've got a few years to live and want to spend it having fun. i don't care about children and family and houses and wealth.
if i did, i would have waited to breed and would have bred selectively and with minimal offspring.
how do we react to these stupid import taxes the american president is putting on his own people?
i've been clear that we shouldn't tax our own people but should focus more on export taxes, instead. however, i'm really suggesting we wait it out, and it might not take too long. republicans have voters to face in a year and a half.
out of all of the taxes, the ones that make sense are the ones that are about protecting american industry that does or could exist, probably for national security reasons. that's why we have import taxes. that would actually arguably apply to both steel and aluminum, in the united states.
is it a problem that the americans import so much aluminum? it could become one. fair enough. but, these tactics are usually reserved for developed industries and not raw industries. either the united states has aluminum or it doesn't; if it does, it will find it where it needs it.
like through recycling?
are they on the brink of starting a war? they're acting like it.
so, what industries does canada need to protect? fish. water. lumber. you put tariffs on that to protect your own.
however, i think that the insistence on holding to these metals tariff also requires a direct response in the form of an export tax on two specific metallic exports that america is reliant on canada for and cannot replace. it's become necessary.
the other thing is the auto tax. we had an auto pact going back to the 60s - this is before free trade. it kickstarted free trade. i think that if they're doing this, you mirror it, just to undo it. you want to relevel the playing field so that costs go up on both sides and not just entering the united states. you have to do that. and what else can you do?
is there some equivalent industry on the border that canada wants to protect?
let the senate pass the bill first, and see what the house does. export taxes are unilateral - easy to generate and remove.
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
i have been repeatedly drugged recently and it has at times been difficult to tell if i'm having a migraine or need to pass something through.
this is complete migraine, going on 23 hours. i've got these tylenol+caffeine tablets and they just knock me out anyways.
i'll stick with the caffeine. i would never take any sort of opiate, including codeine, on purpose.
i don't think there's a headache scale, like the richter scale, but these are the worst of the worst, and they make me sometime feel like the guy from pi, but i don't take drugs when the headaches get bad, they don't even really work, i just sleep it off.
well, it's april 2nd.
if you're a poor american that was dumb enough to vote for donald trump, here's your reward: a massive consumption tax hike on imported goods.
yes, he's laughing at you.
because you're stupid.
next step: once the import taxes are in place, they can pass giant tax cuts for elon musk.
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
canada needs a three party system to keep the liberals somewhere close to the centre and stop them from veering off to the far right like the democrats, but singh's consistent policy failures, which include things like trying to force the federal government to adopt provincial responsibilities, abolishing carbon rebates, removing consumption taxes on unhealthy food and taking away tax credits for low income housing corporations, cannot be singularly assigned to him. the ndp have always been a weird party. they don't come from industrial era workers movements, but from a western canadian conservative christian uprising against the amoral godlessness of the liberal banking elite. the ndp is a conservative party - more conservative than the conservatives - and it always has been.
let the ndp die.
the new left should be the green party, as the greens are what the new left actually is.
as carney is a conservative anyways, and polievre is obviously not one, it's increasingly irrelevant which party wins. the truth is that trudeau and harper were identical, policy wise, as reagan and clinton were in the united states. historians will talk about the mulroney-chretien-martin years, and then the harper-trudeau years. it doesn't matter anymore.
carney is winning because people prefer his personality. it's not about policy; the policies are indistinguishable. right now, people like the less flamboyant hair and the more tightly knotted tie of the liberal over the goofy fruitiness of the conservative. they think carney looks like he has a harder ass to fight off trump.
it's bullshit. nonsense.
the ndp offer nothing in response, but the same neo-liberal policies under a phony veneer of populism misbranded as vulgar socialism.
vote green, instead.
pro-tip: if you ever accidentally dump your entire pepper shaker on your eggs, don't just shrug it off and eat it anyways.
i slept all day and woke up with a fever and a migraine. my subsequent shit looked like it got basted in a turkey.
i didn't even got covid at all (unless i got it in 2019). i haven't been this sick in years.
Monday, March 31, 2025
i did my taxes this morning.
we're mid election and not a single one of the parties has explained how it's going to replace the carbon tax rebate for people that don't pay income taxes.
they gave me $560 last year in carbon tax rebates. as i use no carbon at all, i spent $0 on carbon taxes, and i know that the carbon tax had no discernible impact on the cost of food (especially the cost of imported food, which is 90% of the food i buy, because i buy actual food, produce, and not processed garbage).
my total net income from odsp last year was $16056. that means that the carbon rebate was 560/(16056+560) = 3.4% of my income.
cutting the carbon rebate checks will result in a 3.5% decrease in my total income. that's supposed to help me, in some way?
how do i replace that lost income?
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Friday, March 28, 2025
the liberals generally don't pretend that they don't represent the banks first and foremost, but they're also generally relatively enlightened about. it's noblesse oblige; it's charity. sure.
but, as a poor person, i almost always end up voting liberal (if i vote at all) because the ndp are just fucking clueless. their policies are often even worse for poor people than the conservatives, but they market themselves otherwise. it's worse than a charade, it's a scam.
yes, it's true that your average bourgeois middle class landlord is just trying to feed their kids, too. ok. fine.
the point is that they shouldn't be allowed to prey on the poor to do it. there should be laws that protect the poor from being feasted upon by the middle class, who are just being middle class. it's like criticizing a lion for being a lion; you don't tell a lion to behave, you lock it up to stop it from being a murderer.
i know better than to get frustrated with the ndp, it's just....
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.
The NDP also said that it wants to cut off low-interest federal loans, along with what it calls preferential tax treatment and mortgage loan insurance for large corporate landlords.
AAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!
fuck.
fuck.
FUCK.
so, let's instead have high interest bank mortgages for "small business owners", which will be passed on to working class and disabled renters in the form of higher rents.
winner: banks. loser: poor people.
what a bunch of fucking idiots.
*sigh*.
this is utterly stupid. again.
the problem right now is bourgeois professionals in the middle class buying cheap houses with small downpayments and having to hike the rent to pay off interest rates. that's what is happening to me. the people that bought my home are not corporate landlords, they're a middle class family trying to find a way to pay their own bills by offloading them to renters. this is called rentier capitalism and it is not about faceless corporations, it is about regular people in the middle class acting like parasites by using rent as a side hustle instead of working a second job to raise extra money. it's the latter that needs to stop, not the former.
in fact, if a large corporation bought this house (it wouldn't, but go with me) outright with cash instead of with a minimal downpayment and a huge loan with a high interest rate, it could charge less rent because it would have lower margins. that's actually what low income people, need - more upper class owners buying property that aren't paying interest rates and can operate at lower margins. i'm probably going to end up in a corporate apartment building with a higher margin because i can't afford the offloaded hike on interest rates that smaller landlords are paying right now, which is blocking me from renting another basement apartment.
a far more informed, intelligent and helpful policy would be to ban people from renting property until they have paid off more than 75% (or more) of the mortgage on the property, first. the middle class should not be allowed to offload their bills on the poor by buying up cheap property that they'd never live in themselves and then inflating the rent to levels that drive the poor further into poverty, and which they have no choice but to pay. this is predatory and parasitic; it's "rentier capitalism" at it's worst. this cuts the banks and the middle class bourgeoisie (who are the problem) and not the corporate sector out of the process. it would discourage bourgeois middle class people from becoming rentiers and shift the process of renting properties back to the wealthy (and to the corporate sector), which would lower rent costs because it would require less borrowing from the bank and because it would assert an economy of scale, rather than five million "small business" independent mom and pop entrepreneurs that need to raise money to pay for their kids and fund their cocaine habit somehow.
but this is the ndp, canada's protest party for rebellious 12 year-olds, and they're instead going to blame it all "on corporations", without any sort of analysis, which they simply don't have. the ndp should have a deeper class consciousness and a coherent class analysis. they don't. they want to appeal to the alienated children of the bourgeoisie to send them funding and donations, instead.
google recently announced it has developed a new quantum chip that is not always wrong, but merely usually wrong. it may get a correct answer, occasionally.
this is being hailed as a giant breakthrough.
this is the device they need to put the chip in to lower it's temperature to close to absolute zero:
absolute zero is colder than outer space.
it's colder than the end of the universe.
colder than margaret thatcher's dead remains, and this is very much a race to the bottom, the bottom of existence, itself.
it's so cold that matter halts to vibrate, although it's important to be careful in understanding the difference between what we call absolute zero in existing models and an actual bottoming out of existence, which is something lower than it.
you are never going to have an absolute zero enclosure in your pocket calculator walkie talkie, but you maybe you can pay mit to log into their computer, if you need to solve some np problem for work before the end of the universe.
if you want a serious way to address solving np-complete problems in polynomial time with reasonable amounts of energy and using reasonable amounts of memory, quantum computing is an extremely poor approach. if quantum computing ever works, it's going to be for mainframe computing, strictly. your phone will never be a quantum computer.
using bacteria is a far more serious idea that could very seriously be mass manufactured.
it's the hindus that are leading the way on this, right now.
i'm giving elon musk an ultimatum to immediately cease and desist copying conan obrien's appearance or to let conan run the world instead. if elon musk does choose to continue running the world, he needs to make his appearance more conducive to the purpose. for example, he might base his appearance on michael jackson, instead.
your choice, e-lo.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Municipal data confirm the negative effects of federal discrimination against the child care sector.
corporate daycares want a dei program?
of all the oppressed and marginalized groups in society, for profit childcare providers are the least of my concerns. the subsidy system that harper brought in was the most inefficient, market-breaking thing imaginable, making daycare providers wards of the state with federal contracts that looked like lockheed martin deals. it was crazy. i'm not a fiscal conservative, but childcare is a basic service, and it can't have this unsustainable model attached to it.
the simple reality is that if people actually wanted to pay for expensive childcare spots then the providers that skipped out of the subsidy system wouldn't be going bankrupt. they are failing due to lack of demand; they say so themselves. the market is speaking, and it's choosing the cheapest spaces possible and driving the expensive ones out of the market. in response, big daycare wants government to step in and hand out higher corporate subsidies to stop their business model from failing.
it looks like hypocrisy, but it's actually normal. this is how markets actually function in real life - they fail without government regulation.
the system that the liberals brought in was less inefficient than the system it is trying to replace, but it's still extremely wasteful. as people clearly want the cheapest daycare options possble, the government should listen to them and start looking at bringing back the dryden plan.
in the longrun, what we want is government run ece centres at cost, not expensive private nannies, subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
mulcair is wrong on it's face.
however, canadians are not going to vote for jagmeet singh because he looks like a clown, and they're entirely correct to reject him strictly on the basis of his absurd appearance and his goofy religious views. the ndp made a severe error electing him leader of the party.
canada will never have a sikh pm, and that's a good thing. it would be a tremendous step backwards to elect this guy or anybody that looks like him or believes the things he believes pm. there is nothing progressive or forward thinking about making space for silly belief systems and unsanitary cultural practices.
he has no chance.
he should resign tomorrow and endorse the liberals.
what it's demonstrating is that youngish canadians (this applies more to gen x than millenials, from what i can see and isn't that new) have a very poor understanding of economics due to an insufficient level of education in the topic.
young canadians are correct to identify problems in distributive justice with the neo-liberal status quo, but they are demonstrating incredible ignorance in voting for more of that status quo in order to solve the problem.
polievre's policies will make every problem he identifies, most of which are real, a thousand times worse.
only canada would be stupid enough to try to align with the french on the brink of a global conflict. we know what will happen to france in five minutes, right?
but, smart americans have always known that the germans are no ally. there's no surprise in seeing europe bolt for china on the earliest opportunity.
canada's cold war policy was to stay out of the dirty fighting. we need to retreat back to the pearson-trudeau-chretien position that was consciously and very foolishly (as we see now) aggressively reversed by the previous government.
canada should not be given the opportunity to choose between a europe-china alliance and us-russia alliance.
the american occupation of europe must be enforced, with violence if required, to prevent them from revolting against washington.
european insolence will need to have a price, if it comes to it.
canada cannot make the mistake of expecting otherwise.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
a 25% tariff on assembling cars in canada and shipping them into michigan pretty much kills ontario's automotive sector.
the government is responding by planning to ship oil from alberta to quebec (the national energy program) and generate an industrial policy around made-in-canada cars. but, this is dumb. it's backwards - it's bringing back the 50s. it's responding to trump with trump.
if we're going to build our own cars just for us and are no longer going to be able to export, the most obvious thing to do is to completely phase out fossil fuels entirely, which makes the nep strictly obsolete thinking. if all new cars are to be electric, and only electric vehicles are allowed by some upcoming date like 2035, canadians will need to buy electric vehicles to replace their old economy ones. this will drive the sector for a while.
we may need to nationalize some of the plants.
then, you reroute the electricity we're exporting back to canada to get the grid up by hiking up export taxes, which drives up the cost of manufacturing in the us rust belt at our benefit.
in all of this is an opportunity to retrain workers to build more houses in a massive make work plan, which we clearly need.
the canadian political spectrum is once again asleep at the wheel. this could be an opportunity to transition off carbon, at least in our populated great lakes and st lawrence region. let alberta export it to texas all it wants, until it starts to see the value of export taxes, itself.
your brain is a quantum computer, it's not a turing machine. all chemical reactions in real life are quantum reactions. classical computers are also quantum reactions, but those quantum reactions are obscured, as they exist at a lower layer.
your brain error corrects, but the amount of data it requires to do so is immense and the way we're approaching quantum computing has no resemblance to the way our brains work, at present.
there's likely better possibilities in building supercomputers out of bacteria bioengineered into behaving like synapses, but we need to get something like wave packets happening in the quantum computer, not pretend we can rely on this concept of superposition, which we don't even have a viable theory of. we don't know what superposition even is, yet we're trying to design computers around it, then getting frustrated when they don't work.
it's a dead end.
ai as it exists is just a computer program that does a google search for you.
i can already look up facts on google without asking ai and that does 90% of what a doctor or teacher does. they're already obsolete. the other 10% is never going to be replaced by any computer searching decision trees, ever.
but i learned something when i went through my cancer scare a few years ago - doctors are trained to use the same algorithm an ai would. i actually took graduate level courses on ai at carleton about ten years ago, and it's really not any sort of magic. it's a decision tree, a database search.
we have no idea at all how to make computers actually think and won't until we understand how we ourselves think. quantum computing may never happen, but real ai is likely outside of the possibilities of binary logic.
if trump wanted to break the canadian political system, he's already done it.
i have absolutely no interest in this election at all. the issues being discussed are idiotic, and the proposals on the table are moronic, across the board.
the canadian political establishment is using trump as an excuse to push policies they otherwise couldn't get away with, like hikes in military spending. nobody wants to waste money on the military, and i'm not falling for the bullshit.
trump's stated goals of the tariffs are to generate a revenue stream he can use to offset cuts in income taxes. he's trying to oversee a giant tax shift from progressive income taxes to regressive consumption taxes. in response, both of the parties in canada are proposing the same copycat tax shift. then, they're arguing that they have to do it to fight trump, when they're actually both adjusting tax policy in alliance with trump.
this whole thing is a facade. a charade. theatre.
nobody wins in the end, but the big losers will be the canadian people.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
i strongly support annihilating the barbarians in yemen and hope that canada participates in a global mission to erase them from the planet.
anybody standing up for the yemeni terrorists - anybody - should be seen as a national security threat by both the united states and canada. there is no acceptable argument for aligning with this particular group, which has absolutely no redeemable qualities, whatsoever.
the developing talking point from the white house is that america prefers to deal with russia than canada.
this is absurd, but the old tory canadian apparatchiks should not write this off as nonsense. the intent is to take canada down a notch because the trudeau government was vocally and aggressively pushing itself as america's bestie, and it was actually starting to piss them off. the trudeau administration appears to have ignored years of subtle hints to tone it down. worse, the canadian government has adopted an extremely anti-russian policy position since 2015, which is a direct move away from the non-alignment that canada tried to hold through the 60s-00s. an aggressive, pro-war, anti-russian government in ottawa is a major liability to washington. the truth is that it's a major liability to canadians, too. i don't want to die in estonia, fighting a war i don't give the slightest fuck about.
trudeau was not his father, he was an intellectual lightweight and shallow thinker brainwashed by the hollywood propaganda he grew up on, into seeing the american-led west as being in an existential struggle with the commies that doesn't end until william shatner (a canadian) becomes dictator of the united nations. canada's foreign policy has become delusional and in the interests of nobody in the country or on the continent at all.
this isn't the ideal way to direct a policy shift in canada, but we need to change course. they're basically right. the cold war ended decades ago. it's time to let go of the blockbuster film 70s and 80s hollywood propaganda and we certainly shouldn't be driven by 40 year old propaganda when the propagandist has justifiably shifted direction and changed course in an overdue reaction to actual reality, which is that russia is a democracy with a difficult spectrum.
in the west, our parties are all about the same and nothing really changes after the election. in russia, there are legit fascists and legit stalinists running every single election, and the system has to navigate that harsh reality. putin represents a grand coalition of the liberals and conservatives and has held power for so long because he can keep the stalinists out. there is a social democratic party, but it's outside of the grand coalition and would end up in 3rd or 4th in open elections.
in order for a multiparty system like exists in the west to develop n russia, russia needs to address the lingering threat of a return to stalinism, which remains serious and real. the stalinists remain the only other competitive political force in russia and the only viable alternative to putin and his grand coalition.
reliving rambo over and over again is not what canadians or washington needs or wants from the pmo.
in a properly regulated market, supply shouldn't be driving demand, but that's not exactly what i'm saying. what i'm saying is that a lack of supply is inflating prices, and those inflated prices (called a housing bubble) are suppressing demand. this is a subtle but important point. supply side economics is the theoretical mistake that you can control demand by changing levels of supply, generally - that it goes up and down the graph, proportionally. i am not remotely making that argument, although i realize that a novice might think i am due to the language. to the extent that i'm arguing that demand is low due to artificial scarcity hiking the price too high, and that you fix the demand issue by hiking supply via direct government spending, i'm explicitly describing that as a market failure, and presenting direct government investment as the solution to the broken market.
these are very different analyses and very different arguments, but i acknowledge that the language is confusing.
housing in general has become so scarce that new housing in canada has become so expensive and so out of the reach of canadians that builders have stopped building, because nobody is buying, because nobody can afford to buy. a modest suburban house in canada is going to cost something like two million dollars. it's insane.
the market is not correctly assigning value to new housing, but inflating it due to artificially generated scarcity, which has become systemic due to a failure by government to intervene (specifically by deregulating and privatizing the immigration system). this is generally what happens when governments fail to correctly intervene in markets and instead allow them operate without regulation, they fail to assign value correctly.
we consequently are not facing a failure in government oversight, but a failure in a lack of government. we're facing a market failure.
this market failure requires government to intervene by directly building housing itself in order to increase supply to lower costs to increase demand.
the cause of this overwhelming market failure is multiple governments at multiple levels "leaving it up to the market" rather than intervening and fixing it. the market will not fix itself; it hasn't fixed itself yet. a hands off approach will simply lead to more market failure and continued impossible housing costs.
both major party candidates, however, are true believers in the religion of markets. their faith will not be shaken no matter what evidence is placed in front of them and we have no expectation in front of us as voters and citizens besides another four years of market failure and another government that refuses to intervene to fix the broken market.
it's an utterly terrible idea right now. it's the opposite of a responsible government policy, and the trivial amount collected will have no effect on demand.
both of the major parties are broadcasting very clearly that those workers harmed by the tariffs will be cut out and left behind, with little to no government support. rather, we're going to get austerity, cuts in services, subsequent high unemployment and lower taxes whether we want it or not.
“Housing starts are collapsing in large parts of the country, including Ontario, and especially in Toronto. This is due to restrictive land use rules, Byzantine approvals processes, and high tax burdens,” said Spoke.
no. supply is not driven by bureaucracy. that is the height of economic ignorance. supply is driven by demand. housing starts are low because demand is low due to impossibly high prices. yet, latent demand to purchase housing is sky high.
the solution is that government needs to buy up more houses through the cmhc in order to drive down prices, in order to generate more demand. the solution is more government intervention to fix a market failure, not less red tape and more market failure.
Monday, March 24, 2025
trump, who has become president of an arts institution in washington named the kennedy centre along with his role as commander in chief, wants to alter the programming by removing a play that has transgendered people in it.
he wants to replace it with the 1980s commercially successful and critically panned andrew lloyd webber production, cats.
he would be more into furries than the trans, it would seem. well, look at his vp; he thinks he's a dog.
the truth is that, as melania has dumped him, he really just misses ivana. i promise you ivana loved cats.
and he's irked that barron didn't go to columbia.
right?
does schumer have a point that a shutdown would be worse than the awful spending bill he voted for?
on it's face, but only on the assumption that it's better to have peaceful coexistence with brutal austerity than it is to grab yer pitchforks and rise up against it.
in the short term he's right, but you want trump to generate as angry a backlash as possible so you can organize around it. preventing trump from doing awful things just restricts the reaction to him.
you don't want to stop him from shutting down the government so you don't have to fight him, you want to let him do it and then fight him to stop him.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
how would i rank gabriel's records, up to 2002 (which is the last one i know well)?
his discography is intrepid. staggering, even.
1. selling england by the pound (1973)
2. nursery cryme (1971)
3. long walk home (2002)
4. lamb lies down on broadway (1974)
5. passion (1989)
6. III (1980)
7. trespass (1970)
8. IV (1982)
============================= records above this line are almost flawless
9. up (2002)
10. ovo (2000)
11. foxtrot (1972)
12. so (1986)
13. us (1992)
14. birdy (1985)
============================= records above this line are merely extremely good
15. I (1977)
16. II (1978)
17. from genesis to revelation (1969)
============================= the last three are just pretty good, but most artists operating for 60 years would kill to have car and scratch be their worst records.
it makes absolutely no economic sense whatsoever to cut income taxes when you've got a brutal trade war in front of you, and you're raising inflationary import taxes (a regressive consumption tax hike) and are dealing with slashes in revenue due to an imminent recession. you're going to end up with a structural deficit and be unable to pay for the social services required by the trade war.
it's the most asinine, sophomoric, amateur tax policy imaginable.
it's something i'd expect from the conservatives.
i'm not voting against my self-interest, and income tax cuts are the last thing we need right now.
as far as i'm concerned, his credibility as an economist is out the fucking window. he's just another dumb right-wing populist with naive ideas about markets that is trying to pull one over on us.
“Why would we want to subsidize economic development in the United States when their president is assaulting our communities? We receive almost no benefit in return,” Dilkens said last month.
because if i can't get to detroit on a city bus, i don't want to live in your boring as fuck city at all, and i'm going to move to somewhere where i can get to toronto.
windsor is a suburb of a detroit. it's sole selling point as a place to live is access to the big city. without detroit, windsor is just a boring small city in the middle of nowhere. there are no cultural events here, no concerts, etc. it's a totally dead, completely boring place to live, and dilbert here just wants to make it even more boring.
windsor is more boring than ottawa, even.
that said, the bridge will open soon, and i can just ride my bike over, anyways.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
the liberals have developed a disturbing habit of being extremely pro-muslim and extremely anti-hindu, to the point of repeatedly targeting individual hindus. this isn't the first victim.
i don't support this. at all.
if i had to pick, i would decide that hinduism, as a sister religion to european paganism, is more aligned with secular european values than islam, which is similar to catholic papal despotism, is.
the direction that the liberals are heading in is extremely concerning.
i actually don't think this would be very difficult at all, because the united states has mountain ranges across both sides of it - the rockies and the appalachians. simply setting up two long strings of missile defense interceptors across the two mountain ranges would be highly efficient and not very hard.
they would have to work with us to set up a similar set of interceptor sites across the northwest territories, but they are largely defended from attack in the mainland us by the depth and size of the canadian frontier sitting in front of it.
i clearly remember when george w. bush tried to push for missile defence - before the israelis proved it was possible - he showed a map demonstrating how the system would knock down incoming nuclear missiles that had the debris making a direct hit on an area in canada called EDMONTON, which was unmarked on the map, and which the americans doing the presentation were entirely oblivious of. they had no idea. needless to say, paul martin wasn't very excited about this.
it would make more sense to do this through norad and extend the shield through the canadian rockies into alaska, and then across the north to greenland. maybe something falls on baffin island. i wish no harm on the inuit, but we can't save everybody and we should be realistic about that.
but a shield across the continental american states? i don't think that's such a hard engineering problem at all. this is the country that built the hoover dam and beat the nazis to the bomb. c'mon guys. rediscover yourselves.
the point i'm getting at is that white muslims from the middle east and north africa need to question their origins and understand their history as one of violent colonization. they've been violently separated from their roots and their history and their culture by the process of islamification and arabization. decolonization of the middle east and north africa means dearabization and deislamicization.
reconnect with your indigenous roots, whatever they are, as hebrews, as phoenicians, as berbers, as egyptians, as persians, as greeks, as armenians, as assyrians, as hittites. find out who you really are.
you're no arab. you're no saracen. you're no ethiopian.
you're white. you're caucasian.
so, decolonize yourself and reclaim who you really are.
the wikipedia map is very conservative.
this map better describes the three regions, and the areas they controlled at the end of antiquity, before the muslim invasion north.
it's easier to see what happened by consulting this image.
when the romans and persians were done killing each other, the saracens and axumites moved in and established a new religion in the elite. but they were quickly absorbed into the local population.
this was a period of chaos and anarchy. in addition to the heraclean wars, there was an outbreak of plague that devastated the population and a breakdown in trade that was probably the result of the ethiopians controlling all of the red sea ports for the first time, blocking roman access to the indian ocean and persian access to the mediterranean. what the archaeology shows is that the middle east underwent a period of massive depopulation from about 600-800, not that it underwent a period of invasion or replacement. the cities of antiquity in the levant were overgrown with weeds. the fields reclaimed the land.
when the dust cleared, people wanted to know what happened, so they made up this history in the 9th century to explain what happened. the truth is that the people alive in the 9th and 10th centuries, writing this stuff in syria and iraq, had no idea what actually happened, and no way to figure it out. so they made it up.
the origin of islam, and the people that spread it, is almost certainly as a heresy of the type of christianity practiced by people that lived in the kingdom of aksum, which is the geopolitical entity that dominated ethiopia, which again was christian during late antiquity and the early middle ages.
there were wars fought between aksum and rome and they probably took an unclear side in the long roman-persian wars, which allowed them to overrun the middle east at the conclusion of the catastrophic heraclean wars, and basically take over the area permanently.
this is obscured in the history but it is clarified by the genetics.
if mohammad existed, and he almost certainly didn't, he looked like an ethiopian. he was african black.
if jesus existed, and he also almost certainly didn't either, he looked like a greek or a persian. the oldest pictures we have of jesus make him look pretty white. most residents of the levant at the time of jesus' life would have been light-skinned. he would have been quite light-skinned, contrary to the attempts at revisionism that developed out of the 60s and 70s to make him look olive-skinned or brown.
that said, i don't support attempts to deport mohammad khalil, unless he is convicted of a serious offence, which i do not believe he has been charged with.
i would consider aiding or abetting hamas to be a serious offence worthy of deportation, but those charges have not been proven in court, nor has he even been charged with them, to my understanding.
you can't just deport people without convicting them of anything, first.
however, if there is evidence, i hope there's a lengthy show trial, that he is convicted on live television and that he's deported with flair. if they actually have evidence of him working with hamas, he should be made an example of.
In February, Trump announced he was revoking Biden's security access. In a social media post, Trump said Biden "set this precedent in 2021, when he instructed the Intelligence Community (IC) to stop the 45th President of the United States (ME!) from accessing details on National Security, a courtesy provided to former Presidents".
that's correct.
biden shouldn't have done that.
and nobody should be surprised that trump isn't acting like a grown-up about it.
i want to react to columbia's instant shift in policy in reaction to trump's threats by side-stepping the issue. in fact, the administration likely agreed with trump in the first place and was happy to use the threats as an excuse to change course in a way it probably wanted to do anyways. trump is giving them an excuse.
the genetic studies indicate that the palestinians are directly descended from the hebrews that lived in the period during antiquity. this has been interpreted by many as a fact that requires a rewriting of history, but that is not true; it is a fact that requires the reassertion of written history and the discarding of the attempts to rewrite history that developed out of 1960s and 1970s social movements, which is the true revisionism. the genetics have undone the recent post-wwII, largely post-1970, revisionism and reasserted the narratives from the classical, medieval and early modern periods. the hard science of genetics has actually upheld the importance and primacy of written history and undone the attempts to rewrite and revise that history that developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
what the older histories state is that the hebrews were largely converted to christianity after the destruction of the temple and the "expulsion of the jews" (which was overstated. more jews stayed and converted to christianity than left for europe or iran.), that they remained christians deep into the middle ages and early modern period and that they were only converted to islam by force in the late middle ages and early modern age, largely after the year 1700. they then became arabs in a process referred to as "arabization", in line with the islamicization. this happened across north africa and the middle east through different stages, over a long period. the carthaginians of north africa were quick to convert to islam, whereas the hebrews, assyrians, armenians and other indigenous groups in the middle east were actually very slow to convert, and in the end faced attempts at genocide in the 19th and 20th century for refusing to do so. this is actually ongoing; it's what isis is trying to do, and what hezbollah is in a real sense all about, in it's vicious persecution of the remaining christians in lebanon.
if the palestinians are indigenous, it's because they're converted hebrews, not because they are arabs.
are the palestinians arabs at all?
well, this word "arab" has had shifting meanings through time, and it's important not to conflate the word "arab" as it exists today with the word "arab" as it existed 2000 years ago.
the roman sources clearly distinguished between regions it called arabia, which were the areas in the middle east under roman occupation, and the peoples that lived in what we today called the arabian peninsula, which is where islam originated, who they called "saracens". the people in the roman arabian provinces were actually largely of greek extraction, but had integrated with the canaanite/hebrew/phoenician branch of semitic culture. for example, the nabatean kingdom of petra was a hybrid greek-hebrew region that spoke a language similar to hebrew and worshiped the greek god zeus. the romans called these people "arabs" and the people that lived to their south, along the coast of the red sea, "saracens". the saracens spoke a language more similar to arabic, and were the northernmost expansion of a people that have an origin point in yemen and ethiopia. these saracens were described in the roman sources as barbarians, occasionally fought wars with the romans, were at times conquered by the romans (there was a roman province along the red sea that it called arabia, but was in a region that saracens lived) and at times fought as mercenaries in the roman armies as distinct units from the arabs/ghassanids. the migratory bedouins on the direct boundary of the empire were called arabs.
the people that spread islam in the 7th century were not arabs but saracens. it is worth noting that the islamic history as we know it was not actually written until hundreds of years later, and by syrians initially and then kurds, not by saracens. these syrians would have been a mix of greeks, romans, persians, kurds, assyrians, hebrews and arabs and had little cultural or ethnic association with the saracens that spread the religion via the sword. these histories gloss over the distinction between arab and saracen made in the roman sources, for the precise reason that they were intended to generate the historical fiction of a united semitic race called "arabs", which did not exist at that point, but was generated into reality by the fabricated islamic history, which occurred in conjunction with a massive "translation event", in which islamic theologians scrubbed the secular greek texts (which they controlled because they controlled the land with the libraries, most importantly in egypt) for ideas that were inconsistent with islamic theology and then rewrote or burnt the ones that they didn't like. this is described in islamic history as a "translation event", but it was actually a giant process of historical revisionism under the guidance of vicious islamic fundamentalism, and it resulted in the alteration or destruction of virtually the entire greek cannon of history, science and philosophy. we only retained a small percentage of classical writing, and had to translate it back from severely distorted arabic translations. they wouldn't let christians access the greek sources until after they'd scrubbed and distorted them and translated them into arabic, first. it's for that reason that the renaissance didn't really pick up until after the fall of constantinople, which resulted in a mass migration of byzantines back to rome and the reintegration of ancient greek texts back into roman civilization, which the byzantines had themselves hoarded and prevented access to (although, the fact is that the latins and germans couldn't speak or read greek, anyways).
so, the term "arab" was initially the roman description of it's most south-east provinces, the areas south and east of judaea, and was inhabited by greco-canaanite tribes who were essentially hellenized jews or hellenized phoenicians. the people that lived to the south of these hellenized jews or phonecians, along the coast of the red sea, were called "saracens" by the romans and are the people that spread islam in the 7th century. however, their history was not written until the 9th-11th centuries, and by syrians and kurds (who were not saracens) that had been converted to islam, and sought to generate a falsified history to create a new empire using the roman name for the area, arab. this process of arabization occurred alongside the process of islamification, from roughly the years 1000-1700, with the levant actually being the last area to be islamicized and consequently arabized.
something else that the roman sources, and in fact some of the early islamic sources as well, are clear about is that the people that spread islam (the saracens, not the arabs) were black. the romans knew the difference between tanned and black. shakespeare, in his description of othello, might not have; the roman historians did. they had provinces in africa. they knew the existence of ethiopia. when the romans describe the saracens as "pitch black" or "as dark as the night", that should be taken literally and seriously. mohammad probably did not actually exist but, like jesus, was probably a fictional character. nonetheless, the people that came out of the desert in the 7th century and walked into the vacuum left by the end of the roman-sassanid wars were africans. they were ethiopians.
this makes sense based on what we know about genetics and linguistics, which places the urheimat of the saracens as in yemen, and indicates the saracens had previously migrated across the red sea from ethiopia into yemen. the roman-ethiopian conflict isn't well studied and is largely forgotten but it's every bit as important as any of the other roman border conflicts. the romans conquered egypt and moved south up the nile, to be blocked by the nubians and ethiopians somewhere in modern day sudan, as the greeks, persians and egyptians had been before them. however, they sent christian missionaries into ethiopia, who were quite successful. when europeans made contact with ethiopians, they couldn't conquer or enslave them because they were christian and the papal bull that gave them authority to conquer and enslave the rest of africa indicated they could only enslave and conquer non-christians. because they were christian, ethiopia maintained independence from european colonialism until mussolini tried to conquer it in the 1930s. the roman sources initially described islam as a christian heresy that developed on the arabian peninsula, and that also makes sense.
the classical history consequently describes an african black people moving north from ethiopia via yemen with a new religion called islam that probably began as an ethiopian coptic christian heresy and walked into the vacuum of power left in the middle east by the heraclean wars and converted an elite of hellenized jews and persians before being very quickly absorbed into the population. this is a modern example of the "elite replacement" model developed by the archaeologist jp mallory, which would appear to be the best way to describe how these things actually happen in real life.
the terms arab and saracen have different meanings in the latin and greek histories up until about the year 1500, after the end of the reconquista. they then become used interchangeably, but they were not initially the same thing and initially referred to different ethnic groups and geographic regions, with the arabs being the largely light-skinned hellenized semites in the roman controlled regions, who were most similar to hebrews and canaanites, and the saracens being the dark-skinned muslims outside of roman control, with an origin point in yemen and ethiopia, and who successfully invaded the area called arabia by the romans in the 7th century.
it follows that the palestinians are indigenous hebrews that were colonized by converted syrians and egyptians to the african/saracen religion of islam and had an islamic identity violently enforced upon them, and then were consequently "arabized", but not until as late as the year 1700. this is what the classical, medieval and early modern histories say, which was revised after world war two by archaeologists using questionable methods and a lot of magical thinking to develop a new history of peaceful coexistence, to eject the old history of war and conflict. this revisionism has now been upended by the genetics, which has reasserted the value of history, and the genetics should be seen as the type of evidence that has greater priority, over the archaeology. currently, these pro-palestinian protests are operating on the debunked revisionist histories made by archaeologists pushing magical thinking, to uphold the revisionism presented by islamic theologians. a school like columbia should make sure it is getting this right and is advancing modern theories, not the discarded ideas of late twentieth century archaeology or, shockingly, of dark age islamic theology.
what does that mean, functionally?
it means that palestinian nationalism is a fraudulent concept and that if palestinians want to celebrate their indigenous identity, they should do so by rejecting arab and muslim colonialism and reembracing their indigenous hebrew ancestry. as it is, palestinian groups pushing the primacy of islam are guilty of advancing colonialism in the region, not of fighting against it, and they should be called out for and condemned for their hypocrisy and ignorance. certainly, white european socialists should not be confused or misled and should assert and understand the facts. the role of an institution like columbia must be in asserting and teaching the facts and not in obscuring or confusing them, to advance ignorance and backwardsness.
when i was a little kid, back in the mid 90s, i wrote a song called "circus". i remixed, rewrote, reapproached and rerecorded this track a few different ways, but it's the original demo i recorded in my basement studio in 1997 that has the vocal section that has tended to confuse a lot of people.
i've clarified this a few times but feel the need to do so again.
the song is a critique of media, and i don't know how anybody could not realize that this is obvious. it's built on a dropped-d riff-out of the byzantine circus theme, which like much of byzantine culture ended up lost to history everywhere except in russia. you'll know it when you hear it, but you might not know it as byzantine circus music, you might associate it more with dancing bears. the dropped d riff through digital distortion (played on an ibanez with an awful bridge locking mechanism) made sense in 1997.
i am not suggesting that i actually want to be like the menendez brothers or like the unabomber in the sense of wanting to copycat their crimes, i'm mocking the media coverage and it's tendency to turn criminals into media stars. it's a similar message to a movie released in the 90s called "natural born killers", with woody harrelson and juliette lewis, that is also a critique of the media and that a lot of stupid people didn't understand.
you can hear a lot of who i turned into as an adult, as written into this site, on this track that i recorded as a kid. my media critique is a little more sophisticated than it was then, but basically the same.
in 1997, my biggest lyrical influences came from punk rock singers like dexter holland, greg graffin and jello biafra. i was also massively influenced by college rock singers like michael stipe and bono that were punk rock musicians in disguise. as such, i want to insert the disclaimer from the 4th offspring record, as narrated by jello biafra, before i post the song.
please try hard to understand. it's a sarcastic media critique. it's not a sick fantasy.
now, here's the song:
Thursday, March 20, 2025
should there be federal standards for education?
there should, in principle; the shrinking of the world would imply more standards and not less. facts are not different in idaho than they are in new york. however, it's extremely difficult to enforce and uphold them.
in some states, deferring to local agencies is likely to be an extremely retarding process that severely harms young children. in some states, greater freedom to modernize and advance the curriculum will be used to great betterment.
there's good and bad in this and how it turns out depends on what the people in these states let and don't let happen. i'm reminded of the backlash against the abortion ruling.
this decision could very well cost republicans the house.
but why would canada want to cut off oil exports to the united states when it can increase the price instead?
the reason these pipelines don't exist is that there's no business case for them. alberta oil is high cost, dirty and low quality. we export it all to the united states because nobody else wants it. further, cutting supply to the united states will increase profits for venezuela and saudi arabia, and cut us out.
there's a saying about cutting one's nose off to spite one's face.
it's an utterly stupid idea.
the correct tactic is an export tax.
this is nonsense.
increasing taxes can cause inflation, but this tax is so small that the level of inflation has been measured at 0.25%.
decreasing taxes never reduces prices and those arguing it does are stating what amounts to a religious belief taken on faith that has been thoroughly debunked by decades of empirical science.
nothing gets cheaper on april 1st, except mark carney's credibility as an economist.
the flip flop in the presidency has perhaps obscured the fact that this is trump's second term and he's a lame duck on arrival. he has at most three years, probably less. there are midterms in 2026, which is now a year and a half away.
is trump going to conquer canada in six months?
further, the likelihood of this policy surviving trump is essentially nil. the reason mark rutte laughed is because it actually is a joke, although i happen to remember mr. rutte in his previous job, and this is not uncharacteristic of him, as an individual. mr. rutte is a longstanding asshole. he also laughed when bush invaded iraq.
you never know with trump. maybe it's an elaborate loyalty test. i think that would be giving him too much credit. however, we see that there is a subset of the elite in canada that did not require much of an incentive to abandon north america as a project, of which we are a part of, as a sovereign country.
canada should look in the mirror and see itself for what it is and understand the truth; trump is accusing us of being a bad ally and to a large extent we're proving him right. it is true that we have values that are different than theirs and we can't allow them to be compromised. we should absolutely be telling them to fuck off and spitting in their face if they want to put tariffs on us. defence contracting should be on the table, at least. we have to demonstrate via empirical fact that we're not the 51st state and expect them to get it when we do. however, talking about supplying weapons to military alliances in opposition to the united states that would put us in direct conflict with the united states military is too much and needs to be rejected - that's not in our self-interest and not what's going to happen. voices calling for this outcome should be identified and isolated for what they are, which is stupid and dangerous and borderline treasonous.
the chinese are not communists, they're the most vicious capitalists in the history of the planet and arguably have tipped over into fascism. workers in china not only do not control the means of production but have absolutely no rights at all. i've been over this before - china is unique in the world as being the singular standing non-greek culture. all of europe is greek, all of the regions colonized by europe are greek, the russians are the most greek, the muslims are greek, the indians are greek and most of southeast asia is even greek, too, as the furthest extension of greek colonialism. what's left is the very bottom of subsaharan africa, but it is emerging from colonialism as functionally greek, and the far east of asia, which was massively influenced by greek thought via the spread of buddhism (which we know today was invented and spread by greek colonists tailgating on alexander), but which retained it's unique identity - china, korea and japan. japan and korea are under massive american military occupation. only the chinese are left standing as a non-greek cultural force that is alien to the rest of the world.
the chinese neither view the american continents as competitors or as adversaries, but as half empty lands awaiting colonization. the west needs to understand the chinese as an alien race with a unique culture, because they see us an inferior race to be replaced by chinese colonial expansion. if the chinese get their way, they will do to america and canada what the europeans did to the native americans. i don't want to get into it, but covid may have been a 21st century smallpox blanket, and it may have worked better than we realize.
this isn't about ideology. it's not a clash of civilizations....although it is. it's about race and it's about race because the chinese have made it about race.
trump is a goof and his policies won't survive him. we need deeper thinking that can see more than a foot in front of us and can plan for more than two years in the future, when a new president comes in and completely reverses course. however, there's a kernel of truth in recognizing the need for north american defence because the chinese are coming and we will need to work with the americans to stop them.
the thing we should be on the lookout for is chinese expansion in north eastern asia, which is nominally russian but historically chinese. there were previous skirmishes between russian and chinese emperors around the amur river, but the japanese had a brutal and genocidal occupation of manchuria during world war two (which collapsed the chinese state entirely) and the soviets annexed it in the process of driving the japanese out, thereby stealing a large area of and from historical china. in recent years, the russians have largely ceded sovereignty over greater manchuria back to beijing and they have in the process allowed chinese capital to move in, which is exporting raw resources to china without giving moscow a cut. all evidence suggests that they're just taking over with the intention of annexation. they're aggressively moving north up the coast very quickly. it will be when we find ourselves face to face with chinese jets rather than russian jets running chicken runs into alaska that we will know the day of conflict is upon us, and the chinese are ready to go.
the canadian policy needs to be to find a way to juggle it's need for sovereignty with it's need to help the americans contain the chinese by slowing them down. detente with russia would help us do this and should be seen as in our self-interest.
further, our massive border with russia should be strongly incentivizing us to support trump in minimizing tensions with the russians. our support for ukraine has been self-defeating and stupid - it's not at all in our interest to stoke tensions with the russians like this. you have to remember that trudeau is a failed actor that grew up on 80s blockbuster films full of anti-russian propaganda, and he saw russia as an enemy for that reason. he was not a deep thinker and this is not a well thought through policy for canada. he also had chrystia freeland, who is ukrainian, nipping at his heels like a chihuahua about it. we have a big border with the united states that is undefended; i believe our border with russia is actually bigger and less defended. the best way to protect ourselves from russian incursions is to become friends with the russians, which has been how we've defended ourselves from american incursions. for decades, it was the americans that were stopping us from doing that. if trump is seeking detente, and detente survives him, which it might, we should be taking advantage of that, not fighting it. turning russia into a friend will prevent our need to defend ourselves against them and potentially open up very lucrative markets across the arctic.
i know this got dumped on our lap, but we need better thought out policy than knee-jerking into a position where we define ourselves as enemies of the americans. i know they tend to piss us off. that's not a reason to shoot ourselves in the foot.
whatever policy positions are preferable to us, smart, enlightened leadership right now would begin with the realization that trump is a lame duck and that we should avoid rash overreactions. unless we ourselves decide otherwise, which would be very foolish, it is exceedingly likely that this is a blip in time and we'll look back and laugh at it.
the chinese have infiltrated mainstream western media very badly. i don't exactly want to call for a mccarthyite purge of media, but i would have tentative support for an investigation to figure out the depth of it.
more important than that is that, as readers and analysts of western media, individuals should be constantly on the lookout for pro-chinese biases.
china's official eu policy is support for "EU strategic autonomy.", which means helping it free itself from american occupation.
as i pointed out yesterday, the american occupation of europe is necessary to prevent it from returning to fascism, and the europeans will be nazis again in ten minutes if the americans ever leave.
talk of the europeans aligning against the united states is somewhat premature given the 100,000 american troops on the continent in major bases like rammstein in germany.
so, the reaction to trump's tariffs should be that canada should become a colony of europe, again.
no thanks.
worse, this is pre-modern carbon/industrial age thinking. we should take advantage of the opportunity to build a post-carbon economy and increase trade networks with south america, not turn into a factory to send tanks to neo-nazi germany.
what is underlying this kind of thinking is actually a desire to build an alliance with china, which europe may very well find itself in. while the americans are intelligently looking for detente in russia, the chinese are looking to steal europe, and the european elite has a lot to benefit from aligning with the chinese, especially if it expects china to win.
when the shit hits the fan and war breaks out with the chinese, and it is inevitable, the russians will be more reliable allies than the french, if they can be. the truth is that europe is the weakest link, as it is not in their self-interest to remain under the american jackboot, and it never has been.
europe is not our friend and we need to stop pretending that it is.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
have all you people opposed to "bank bailouts" not yet figured out that they were loans?
do you know what happens to your savings when they're put into a bank that goes bankrupt?
it was franklin roosevelt - not ronald reagan - that legislated the lender of last resort, to ensure that people didn't lose their savings and their mortgages when their banks collapsed, due to no fault of their own. this is a good and necessary policy, and it's why we have government, and what government is for.
the ceasefire in ukraine isn't a deal, but it's an agreement to keep talking about getting to a deal.
the russians have been pushed around for decades. they withdrew from east germany and handed over poland without a fight in return for security assurances about the expansion of nato that have been repeatedly broken. nato has a history of breaking it's promises and taking up a return to aggressive positions partly because there's a change in leadership every four to eight years. the russians can't stand this - they demand and need certainty and predictability. the russians hate chaos, chance, randomness. they are themselves extremely predictable, in turn.
there was a coup in ukraine in 2014, followed by a shifting of nato military assets into eastern europe. biden then immediately pulled out of afghanistan and the middle east and dropped everything in eastern europe. any observer would clearly conclude that biden was planning an attack on russia via militarizing ukraine as cannon fodder. so, putin hit first. the outcome has not been pretty, and russia has demonstrated a distinct level of operational incompetence, but it was a calculated move that was probably correct.
the russians moved into ukraine to block nato advances and are demanding their reversal to pull out. it's consistent, it's clear and it's rational. that's their position - to ensure their defenses cannot be breached by a swift nato offensive. their primary fear ought to be german rearmament.
the media is framing this as something like "putin will agree to a ceasefire if ukraine eliminates it's defenses" and are presenting that as unacceptable. they are deducing that trump has failed. this is dangerous and unhelpful as it's trying to prolong a war that's got us on the brink. this is because trump is a republican; they wouldn't frame the issue this way if trump were a democrat.
what is the truth here? the proposals being put forth by nato to defend ukraine include positioning offensive weapons systems in ukraine (labelled as defensive) and occupying ukraine with nato soldiers, called "peacekeepers". the nato peace proposals have consistently been ways to strategically move deeper into the iron curtain. nato must know that the russians know that they're bullshitting them.
yes, the price of peace will need to be an acknowledgement that ukraine - whose very name means buffer zone - will need to be abandoned. if nato will not abandon or partition ukraine, it is telling the russians it continues to plan to march eastwards. the russians have no choice but to put on their hats and say "nyet. enough. you stop here.".
will trump agree to this? i'm going to suggest he has to.
i have repeatedly pointed out that it is necessary for the united states to occupy germany. we've completely forgotten this, somehow. the russians have not forgotten this. it was trump that shifted american troops eastward in order to enforce a protection racket, and as soon as america lifted one pinkie toe off their jackboot on the german neck, the spectre of german fascism instantly returned.
it is more important that america occupy germany than that it try to conquer pockets of russia via ukraine, and the russians have proven that nato forces are not getting through the russian defences. they should give putin what he wants because they have to. the alternative is endless trench warfare and millions more dead for a few more inches of land, like world war one. we said never again, but here we are.
but i know my history and i know you want the russians on your side in a world war or protracted conflict. you don't want to fight the russians; that doesn't generally work out well. churchill was an asshole, which is why stalin got along with him.
the world's not a disney cartoon. there's bad people running worse empires. i want putin and russia to fight with the west in the imminent apocalypse and not against it; we need them, we can't win without them. in the long run, only the chinese win by a continuing russian-american hot or cold war.
i want detente.
only trump is crazy enough to do it.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
i appear to have had a post disappear around 13:17 this afternoon. weird. if that's the case, i don't remember what it was about. i was responding to emails and housing ads at the time.
(actually, i think t was an unwritten post about trump getting charged with criminal contempt. yeah. ok. i opened it but got distracted and didn't write it. the point i wanted to make was in determining responsibility, and it wouldn't be assigned to trump at all.)
this is another example of real world data completely debunking the religion of market theory, but it won't deter the faithful.
the religion says that if you cut consumption taxes the businesses will pass on the savings to the consumer. you take that on faith. in fact, they seem to have just increased prices and pocketed the difference, which actually makes far more sense and is far more rational and should have been predicted with a moment's though. it turns out it was a tax cut for businesses, not for consumers.
i actually don't blame them. it would have been a pain in the ass to change everything for a few weeks and the liberals seemed to be clueless about it.
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