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"The power of the less powerful begins with honesty."

Trump says he's soon going to a "beautiful place in Switzerland", adding:

"I'm sure I'm very happily awaited for."

"an empty vessel into which all the far-right weirdos can pour their wishcasts into and say "see, this is what he is". There's no there there"

"Can Europe defend itself? My answer is unequivocally yes," Stubb said, offering his views on how Nato might look like without US assistance.

Stubb pointed out to Finland's own military as an example. He asserted that Finland, together with Poland, has the biggest artillery in Europe, including long-range missiles for land, sea and air.

"Can the Finnish military defend itself against a Russian attack ... Yes," the president said. "We have the biggest military force of Arctic capabilities in the alliance. We have conscription. One million have done it. We can mobilise 280,000 soldiers within weeks. We have 62 F-18s."

I listened to Carney's speech in full twice and read the transcript so that I could really get the "between the lines" part of what wasn't said, but what was implied.

I think of his speech in two parts.

Part 1 - the first half - he identifies and diagnoses what he thinks are the problems.
Part 2 - the second half - he identifies what he thinks are the solutions.

On the first half: for some people what he said came as a shock and was refreshing because finally a head of State is admitting what generations of people have seen for a long time - that the law, if applied at all, is applied unevenly and as long as countries receive favours and benefits, they are willing to turn a blind eye to it. He admitted Canada has been part of this. For those of us who pay attention, it was refreshingly frank. The people see what is going on and they are tired of being lied to to their faces.

There is a lot more to be said about this but I want to talk about the second half.

The second half of his speech is more revealing for what he is proposing as solutions.
Essentially he said the solution is to lean heavily into short term economic protections by going full force with resource extraction projects and making deals with countries outside the U.S. while turning a blind eye to human rights abuses.

In short his solution is not offering a vision to try to correct what he considers the problems, but to lean into it with protectionism, environmental degradation, erosion of Indigenous rights, and turning a blind eye to human rights abuses or environmental protections elsewhere.

He said this new reality means he would make deals with other countries and "we may not agree on everything" - translated: they may commit atrocities but for our own benefit, we won't say anything about it.

He said he would invest in new mining, AI, and defense, etc. As I've been posting about - I argue these are precisely the things that are going to make Canadians and Indigenous Peoples less safe and less protected over the long term. How? Because these critical minerals and AI are being used to fuel the military industrial complex. The U.S. who is the biggest threat to everyone's safety in the world is the primary customer. And even if they weren't, the resource extraction being done is for the companies producing and profiting from ever more destructive weaponary and the incarceration and detention of civilians.

Where exactly is this all going to end up - if you flood the world with weapons that are so destructive they could destroy the planet a hundred times over - if you produce more guns, more drones, more sound-cannons, more tanks, more lethal tech, more gear, more jails, more cages? Who exactly do you think is going to use these - and who are they using them on?

These minerals and "investment" feed the military industrial complex which are used by the US particularly not so much for 'defense' as they are for 'offense' - and not so much for either of those as they are for profit. Let's be real. There are billions and billions of dollars at stake. That is what is driving this.

The minerals being extracted in Canada are being used for weapons. The technology being developed is being used for the suppression of dissent. They will further entrench surveillance and further limit freedoms including freedom of movement. Corporations have usurped the will of the people.

I'm not seeing how this protects Canadians or Indigenous people long term - I'm talking seven generations from now long term and beyond.

I have a vision for the future many generations from now - a thousand years from now - that is a planet that is healthy, filled with animals, water is clean, communities live and thrive, the violence of these times hardly remembered, where children are protected from birth and all people and other beings are respected. I have a vision for the future where people constantly reach for higher goals that further entrench respect for all people and the planet.

That is what was missing from Carney's speech.

He does not see the solutions as reaching for these goals.

His solutions are economic. They are capitalist. They serve the corporatocracy. Same overlords. Same injustices. Same violence perpetrated on the people and the lands. Same game, different faces.

We won't get out of the problems that exist in the world by digging in deeper to what got us here in the first place.
I thought I would add this perspective so that people consider what wasn't said in his speech - and what perhaps really needed to be said instead.

Carney's speech in Davos was a really interesting moment. It was a really smart speech. I think there's a way in which the loftiness kind of hit people. We haven't had a kind of grand spirit or loftiness in our politics in quite a long time, so I think that was a smart move.

The real relevance is that he named the moment which is that the rules are gone, they're shredded. The United States is stomping around the world in exercises of naked power and it's reconfiguring what countries like Canada need to do and I think all of that really did hit the mark.

The question is whether what he does is actually going to be informed by that. Because he's also, at the same time as he's saying these things, considering participating in Trump's Board of Peace initiative with Putin, with Netanyahu already at the table. Pay $1 billion for what? It's like a traveling Berlin Conference where they're gonna divide up the resources of the world where there are conflicts. What would Trump do with a body like that? Why is Carney even floating that?

Or the Golden Dome (which sounds dirty because it's weird and a dumb idea). Never gonna happen, you know?

I think there's a bit of daylight between Carney the statesman analyst that we saw at Davos and the way he's kind of elbows downed a lot of the negotiations with Trump.

Throwing out the digital services tax for nothing at all - AI is reshaping our world, Carney's all in. Evan Solomon, kind of minister of AI sales and marketing, you know they're all in on this. They're firing 40,000 civil servants, and what? People on social assistance are gonna deal with a chatbot? I mean, I think this is a disaster and we can't strengthen Canada and strengthen Canada's independence and our economy in austerity.

So there's all these contradictions in this moment and Canadians who voted against Trump, for protection from Trump, must be pretty confused.

Asked Tuesday if Ottawa would be interested in a permanent seat, Carney said he's focused on providing cash directly to Palestinians in Gaza.

"We would write cheques and deliver in kind to improve the welfare of the people of Palestine, but we want to see it delivered direct," he said at the World Economic Forum.

A federal official earlier told CBC News that Canada has not been asked to pay at this time and would not do so.

"Canada wants money to have maximum impact," Carney told reporters on Sunday. "We still do not have unimpeded humanitarian aid flows at scale to the people of Gaza."

NYMA buried Trump's academic records

Mar 5, 2019 · Trump spent five years at NYMA, starting in fall 1959, after his father - having concluded that his son, then in seventh grade, needed a more discipline-focused setting - removed him from his Queens private school and sent him upstate to NYMA. [New York Military Academy]

U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday warned Canada that if it concludes a trade deal with China, he will impose a 100 per cent tariff on all goods coming over the border.

If Prime Minister Mark Carney "thinks he is going to make Canada a 'Drop Off Port' for China to send goods and products into the U.S., he is sorely mistaken," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

"If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100% Tariff against all Canadian goods and products coming into the USA," he said.

Lloyd Axworthy, who had served as minister of foreign affairs from 1996 to 200 under Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien, has rebuked Carney for his repeated subservience to Trump on a broad range of issues. According to Axworthy, Carney "went silent when Trump attacked a Canadian judge at the International Criminal Court, refused to comment on his breach of international law in Venezuela, declined to outright condemn his threats against Greenland, paid scant attention to the tragedy in Sudan, and backed away from climate commitments—to name just a few examples."

As an alternative to Trump's neo-imperialism, Carney at Davos recommended a new alliance of middle powers that could promote trade and security. This program is fine as far as it goes, but the nations Carney seems interested in engaging most are either the wealthy countries of Europe or the emerging great power of China. Nowhere did he address the need to revitalize the United Nations or build stronger ties to the Global South.
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In any case, Carney's combination of centrist policies with strengthening alliances with European powers amounts to a politics of retrenchment rather than an attempt to forge novel policies. The great Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote (in a loose translation): "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters." To his credit, Carney knows the old world is dying. But the new world he is trying to create is just a refurbished version of that old world. It will not help us in defeating the monsters.