We are so totally screwed.

If you’re curious to know what the future holds for us, here’s a demonstration by Candace Owens.

She babbles about how the moon landing and dinosaurs were all conspiracies by satanists to destroy our faith in a god, based entirely on disconnected factoids floating like rotten little raisins in the pudding of her brain. I fear that this kind of thing is what the world sees when they look at Americans.

Have any of you foreigners popping in here got any good American jokes? We’ll probably affirm them all for you.

TikTok was banned. TikTok has been restored.

It’s hard to really care anymore. No matter what he does, the MAGA fan base will praise it.

I just don’t give a fuck anymore what these people say.

Prior to the election, I think we were all aware that Joe Biden was an ineffectual waffler on Middle East issues. He would wag his finger and then do nothing but wobble along the status quo line. I had this wishful hope that Harris was just going along out of loyalty to her president — unfortunately, we’ll never find out if she would have changed the country’s course if she’d gotten out from under Joe’s feeble thumb. All we can know for sure was that Biden stood by doing nothing while children were murdered in Palestine.

Now ProPublica lists all the cowardice behind the Biden administration’s Israel policy. He kept saying one thing, and doing nothing.

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

“Don’t you dare bomb that Palestinian town!” Israel, without hesitation, bombs the town. “Oh, OK, here’s a billion dollars worth of bombs to replenish your supply.” Over and over again. The article talks a lot about all these “red lines” the US was drawing in the conflict, and how US credibility was constantly diminished because Israel didn’t care and knew they’d get all the money they wanted, no matter how far over the line they crossed.

The article doesn’t end on an optimistic note.

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

Who in the world cares what red line the US draws anymore?

Biden was a weak president, but don’t expect Trump will be any better. He’s going to bluster and lie louder is all.

The civil war sundering the Republican party continues. Steve Bannon minces no words in his hatred of Elon Musk.

“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview published on Wednesday. The article was flagged on Saturday by Bannon’s former employer, Breitbart, which published excerpts in English.

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

I am made extremely uncomfortable by my agreement with Steve Bannon, and I hope he and Musk engage in a game of mutual annihilation. I also appreciate all the irony he is delivering.

In addition to Musk, Bannon blasted David Sacks and Peter Thiel, who also have roots in apartheid South Africa.

“Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon said. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

You know, Bannon’s gripe with Musk is over those H-1B visas, that allows some well-educated brown people to live and work (and be exploited) in the USA, polluting his vision of an all-white America — yet white South Africans are the most racist people? Come on, guy. Racists are diverse, too, and both Bannon and Musk are equally racist, just in different ways. Racism is a spectrum, ranging from red-faced, rummy-nosed blustering MAGAts to pale flabby bros with sketchy facial hair. Kumbaya! Now go murder each other. I don’t want to see anything left but a pair of tails.

In 1921, the Canadians formulated a plan they called Defense Scheme #1 to invade the United States. This was not a serious plan to conquer North America, but was a contingency to be deployed in case they discovered that the US was plotting to annex Canada.

That condition is currently valid.

The idea was that Canadian militia would come charging down our highways to distract and disrupt our preparations, to give Great Britain time to come to their aid. The situation has changed; I don’t think King Charles III is going to be much use in this hypothetical war. Still, it’s a good plan to shake up our unjust invasion.

Lt. Col. “Buster” Brown even scouted out the eastern prong of their invasion plan.

Brown even undertook some very informal (though probably grossly illegal) reconnaissance missions in and around Vermont, near the border – scoping out bridges, locks and railroad lines, and chatting with locals in taverns. Lippert’s telling of these missions and their reports are the most amusing parts of a dark alternate historical scenario. Brown apparently found Vermonters to be “fat and lazy but pleasant and congenial,” and suspected there were “large and influential numbers of American citizens … [who are] not altogether pleased with democracy and have a sneaking regard for Great Britain, British Law, and Constitution, and general civilization.” He suspected alcohol-deprived Americans might welcome their new Canadian overlords, and the barrels of illegal Canadian whiskey they’d bring with them.

That condition is mostly valid. We are fat and lazy and clearly many of our citizens want a king, but not a British one — they want a king who is fat and lazy, like them. Also, Prohibition is over, so the barrels of Canadian whiskey aren’t as enticing as they once were.

The Pacific prong of the invasion is already doomed. There has been a massive build-up of military force in Washington state since 1921 — that’s the home of JBLM.

The Canadian flying columns would have been deployed in trucks, packed with guns, explosives and soldiers. Historically, flying columns have utilized horses, though in this interstitial period between equestrian warfare and modern mechanized tank warfare, trucks seem most likely.

That collection of casual Canadians in trucks full of rifles and whiskey would be met by the 7th Infantry Division, the 8th, 189th, and 191st Brigades, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and a swarm of cocky fighter pilots who are well-practiced in the art of strafing and bombing lines of trucks. Stay home. “Independently directed units of unarmored Ford trucks packed with rowdy prairie province roughnecks packing TNT and machine guns” are not going to hold up well.

The central prong, on the other hand, has potential. We’re still weakly defended here in the Midwest, and swinging through the Dakotas with their ripe ICBM silos dotting the landscape would give Canada the opportunity to become a nuclear power. Then the lovely progressive state of Minnesota might not offer much resistance — I know I’d be out there on the side of the highway happily waving my Canadian flag (note to self: buy a Canadian flag to prepare).

A century of military development on the US side means that Defense Scheme #1 is grossly obsolete, but the idea of Winnipeg thrusting deeply into Minnesota is somehow arousing. Especially if they’re planning to serve drinks first.

Welcome to the fin de siècle, only a few years too late. According to Wikipedia:

Without context, the term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century. This period was widely thought to be a period of social degeneracy, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning. The “spirit” of fin de siècle often refers to the cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and “a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence”.

“Period of hope for a new beginning…” that part doesn’t apply.

Also, the previous end of a century got some great art, but we’re just going to get some flaccid, dead-eyed AI art.