A parade of foreign leaders is desperately angling to receive a coveted invite to President-elect Trump’s inauguration later this month.
By custom, foreign leaders don’t attend inaugurations of U.S. presidents, but Trump has thrown that precedent out the window, setting off the scramble after inviting Chinese president Xi Jinping to the Jan. 20 ceremony. Xi has already turned the offer down, with a top emissary expected to attend instead.
I doubt we’ll see an LPC member there.
A whole week has passed since Justin Trudeau somberly announced his intention to resign.
The world is still turning normally, except for the Justin-cult elites who feed off the Trudeau Government – they are starting to get twitchy just wondering who will pay for their next well-stocked plane flight.
People love — or detest — Los Angeles because it is the opposite of New York.
More space, bungalows with gardens, plenty of nature: in a place like Topanga to the west you can live in semi-wilderness and still be not just within reach of but actually in the city (by LA’s weirdly distended definition of the term). Then there’s all the wonderful hardcore nature of mountains, deserts and ocean within a few hours’ drive. Add in the endless sunshine and you have the ingredients for a laid-back, outdoor life.
The #EatonFire continues to burn near Altadena and Pasadena. MORE: https://t.co/Wfml6jHGfy pic.twitter.com/Vz1hb5QKDL
— FOX 11 Los Angeles (@FOXLA) January 11, 2025
#Firefighters are battling multiple wildfires across
Southern California.
Eleven days into 2025, there have been 101 wildfires. Here is a summary of the major fires burning in Southern California, including the#PalisadesFire and #EatonFire #LAFires pic.twitter.com/zPp6fHkH6o— CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) January 11, 2025
Almost half of Canadian job seekers (46%) believe there will be fewer job opportunities in their field in 2025 compared to a year ago, according to a new Express Employment Professionals-Harris Poll survey. This is a significant increase from 2024’s survey when only 31% of job seekers expected fewer job opportunities than the previous year.
While one-third of job seekers (36%) believe opportunities in their field in 2025 will remain consistent with 2024, less than 1 in 5 (18%) believe there will be more job opportunities this year in their field.
Here is how things go with Canadian prime ministers: We welcome them in a warm haze of high hopes. We watch them struggle. We realize they don’t have all the answers. We then expel them in an explosion of outrage and disgust.
It happened that way with the unloved Stephen Harper in 2015. Now, a decade later, it is happening with his successor, the equally unloved – for opposite reasons – Justin Trudeau.
Maybe, just maybe, we should ponder whether the real problem isn’t with our leaders but with ourselves.
Nah. It was Trudeau. All of it.
Yet British officials knew what was happening on a rampant scale. It was impossible not to know.
In our pages, over a decade ago, I scoffed at a colleague who had suggested that ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, which used to be the Iraqi franchise of its now rival al-Qaeda — might be concerned that Western nations were on to its rape jihad. Even if we indulged the fantasy that jihadists were possessed of the civilized sensibility that would trigger such a concern, I countered that “the shocking Rotherham rape jihad scandal” that had erupted in England would assure them that “the West is far more likely to look the other way than to mobilize against this signature sexual abuse.”
Decades of fire suppression policies have left forests dangerously dense and overgrown.
The devastating fires raging near Los Angeles have again drawn national attention to America’s wildfire crisis. Such destructive blazes have become increasingly common, and their human toll is staggering: lives lost, families displaced, and entire neighborhoods reduced to ashes. Like other recent severe wildfires, the blaze in Los Angeles raises questions about what can be done to prevent such devastation in the future.
This incredible video was sent to me by friend. This is what the #PalisadesFire looked like Tuesday night from a plane landing at LAX . Courtesy: Rip Tide Hero pic.twitter.com/E9Q8rBTYTs
— Cristy Fajardo (@fajardonews) January 11, 2025
While stacking its leadership with jihadists and threatening minorities, the new regime in Syria is also seeking to radically revise its educational curriculum for children aged 6 to 18. While some of the reforms to de-Ba’athify are welcome, others are causing concern about the future of Syria post-Assad.
The swamp is deep and it clearly includes the supposedly independent Federal Reserve which sets interest rates. The bank was lowering interest rates in 2024, but now they are talking about slowing down cuts because of a theoretical increase in inflation that they think will be caused by Trump’s tariffs …
The Federal Reserve is a mystery to me, this sheds a bit of light on it …
How Can the Federal Reserve Pay Dividends to Its Shareholders When It Has No Profits?
Although the Federal Reserve is — and thinks of itself as — part of the government, 100 percent of the $37 billion in paid-in stock of its twelve component Federal Reserve Banks is owned by private shareholders. This was part of the political compromise of the original 1913 Federal Reserve Act.
The shareholders are the commercial banks that are the members of the respective Federal Reserve Banks. Remarkably, these private shareholders are getting dividends from the Reserve Banks even when the combined Fed has no profits, no saved up past profits (retained earnings), and hugely negative actual capital. Any private bank which tried to pay dividends under these circumstances would be sternly prohibited by the Fed from doing so.
Lex Fridman is one of the many inexplicable products of the YouTube age. Despite his enormous profile, he remains almost entirely without presence – diminutive, unassuming and perpetually wearing an expression somewhere between serious and confused. He provides something close to a perfect blank space on which his famous guests can project their views.
In the opening of E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, there’s a lovely metaphor of the work of an historian. History, he writes, is like a bottomless well stretching into eternity, visible only by human recollection falling through the generations like lighted piece paper dropped into the void, getting smaller and smaller as it falls and disappears.
I’m reminded of that image as I consider the sense of deja vu currently hanging over British life; it feels as though we have been here before, and on more than one occasion. To live in Britain today is to be gripped by a sense of overwhelming, unshiftable malaise, which in recent months has morphed into something darker and more violent: a mood of bubbling resentment and anger that feels ready to explode. In many respects, this atmosphere is entirely new: a reflection of the globalised, social-media age in which we now live. And yet, it also feels so jarringly, achingly familiar — a dim folk memory from our recent past. Poor, rainy Britain, once again unsure what to do with itself, buffeted by the ideological storms rolling in from the United States, humiliated by those to whom we cling closest.
MANHATTAN, NY — In another disgusting display of judicial activism, progressive judge Juan Merchan released a man convicted of 34 felonies right back onto the streets of New York.
Instead of handing out jail time, Merchan simply released the felon back into civil society, with no conditions whatsoever.
h/t Lenny S
Both face shrinking and aging populations. Both either cannot or will not control their borders, despite popular protests. Both suffer from woke political correctness and are pushing back
Consider these European and American binaries.
On December 20, 2024, a terrorist, Taleb Al-Abdul Mohsen, rammed his SUV into a Christmas crowd at Magdeburg, Germany. He killed six pedestrians and injured 299 others.
Eleven days later, on New Year’s Eve at New Orleans, Louisiana, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar smashed his pickup into a festive crowd. He murdered 15 and hurt over 35.
A poll commissioned by CBC News has revealed that over 80% of newcomers to Canada believe that the country’s immigration system is bringing in too many people without proper planning.
In November, Pollara Strategic Insights conducted a survey involving 1,507 individuals to learn about their experiences of immigrating to Canada.
