carpoftruth

another scandal from nonce island, in which blairite and former minister of defence under blair during the iraq war, Ivor Caplin, was tagged for soliciting sex from a minor. the british chud press is going pretty wild on this but to avoid linking the daily mail, here's a story from the canary with details.

caplin was also the chair of the 'jewish labour movement' during 2018-2019 over the corbyn years. in 2023 the JLM bragged about having taken down corbyn

A long and not super worthwhile article by kagan on ukraine and trump. There's nothing really to learn from this beyond the change to pessimism from once stalwart ukraine dick riders from the US foreign policy blob. The jist of it is that Trump is inclined to bail on project ukraine but doesn't want to look like a loser. In this way, trump's circumstances mirror his rhetoric - he is the same as his predecessors but is gauche about it.

The shift from "bringing the war to an end on day one" to "hoping to wrap it up in 6 months" (paraphrased) suggests a return to A Decent Interval thought, similar to Vietnam in the early 70s and Afghanistan in 2021.

https://archive.is/ghX7v

The big serge year end roundup is more worthwhile https://bigserge.substack.com/p/total-kievan-debellation on war nerd things

see here's where AI slop would be useful - I want this parody to be made into a video mimicing the scene in game of thrones when daenarys gets torched and emerges with the dragons, except biden walks out with dragons that have the faces of blinken, pelosi and hunter

Another thing I don't really get about rent imputing is that an over-valued housing market drives up the GDP even more, without adding anything new

I'm definitely not an expert on this but it sounds like you get it just fine :D

yeah I guess but that's not really how month over month change happens in practice

Building and living in a house doesn't generate value in the same way that building and running a widget factory does, but it generates value nevertheless. If a place is rented, its easier to measure the value of that activity because the transaction is mediated through the marketplace and reflected in income/expenses. Actual money changes hands, so the value of that transaction is right out in the open. If a place is owned, there's only one party so there's no transaction and so the value generated by someone having a roof over their head is not directly measurable. Imputed rent is a way to fill that information gap. Your link on wiki frames it another way - if you consider a house an asset that the owner has invested in, living in it for free is the return on that asset.

More terrible numbers out of Germany

https://archive.is/lU1j3

Demand fell 5.4% in November from the previous month, far worse than the 0.2% decline economists had predicted in a Bloomberg survey.

Late fall/winter food is the way it is because fresh vegetables aren't available seasonally and food preservation generally softens food. It's not psychology, it's the reality of growing and eating food when you're not in a globalized economy

this is it - newmedia and most people are reacting to this 'annexation' based on aesthetics, not based on actual reality. trump is not proposing something new, he is continuity in all but rhetorical style.

Particularly because the main things of interest to the US in Canada are resources and access to the North, both areas where indigenous people punch above their weight in Canada's political economy.

As far as resources, I suspect that we'll see further "joint development" of resource projects in the Canadian North and in Greenland, along the lines of this bit of funding that happened under Biden/Trudeau:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/mactung-mine-fireweed-metals-us-department-defence-1.7412022

arrival