Trump's charging a $1 billion fee to accept the invitation (while also ordering other countries to accept it on pain of - you guessed it - yet more tariffs). The finance minister said today paying that fee isn't going to happen.

Trump's demanding members of the occupation board pay him one billion dollars to sit on it, and Ottawa today said that's not going to happen.

Sure, but his ability to wreck things is mostly limited to the UK at this point, not tearing down entire geopolitical systems. An unhinged British prime minister can only inflict a fraction of the damage upon the world that an unhinged American president can.

Watching from the outside it feels like that ship's sailed.

Past that, sure, Thiel's smarter (who isn't?) but he's barely known to most of the public, never mind frequently-literally worshipped by them.

Nobody's racing to pass legislation or enact policies because of a Thiel tweet, unlike Trump.

Replace the insane sundowning self-proclaimed dictator at the centre of a vast personality cult with a disliked empty suit who the Republican party *hasn't* deemed infallible to the point of having election platforms that outright say "Trump's infallible?"

Yeah, I'll happily make that trade. Gimme.

It's not even "what if" at this point.

It's "every 4-8 years they *will* elect another madman, who will immediately destroy anything any non-madman administration puts in place, and when non-madmen are in office the madman party will focus on setting their own country on fire for something to do."

There's probably not much point in arguing with an account whose sole purpose seems to be defending the current administration while being as wilfully obtuse about it as they can.

Or Hoekstra at the very least.

Not just that, but the fact that they're *still* pearlclutching about it eleven days later.

Much of the planet exists outside of the United States. The rest of us have to deal with the genAI plague as well.

And in the meantime I suppose I should probably actually write my councillor about this thing saying I'm in favour of it given he's on the relevant community council.

(I choose to be vague as to whether I'm writing in support of the apartment building or the trebuchet.)

I'd accept one of those in my backyard.

Yeah, it's just frustrating with housing because *every* development that isn't single-family detached suburban homes gets universal, completely identical, frothing opposition.

Everyone's going to say "character! those people! cities are bad even though I live in one!" no matter what, so...

(note the scary "very urban" building would be a hundred meters or so from several preexisting apartment buildings in this particular case, and would be replacing a decaying vacant house that's been sitting idle for about twenty years)

This stuff warrants sanctions, not just tariffs, especially since the US has already declared Europe an adversary in need of toppling with the new NSS published last month.

I suspect they'll rule in his favour, but if they don't I'm assuming he'll you-and-what-army as he imposes them anyway.

The half of the population supporting him all believe that tariffs don't raise prices. They've been convinced (because he said so, which to them settles it) that tariffs are a tax paid directly to Washington by exporting countries and that consumers aren't affected by the process at any point.

He's still occasionally demanding Canada's annexation too.

"Its borders are artificial," says the publication residing in country whose border includes a two thousand kilometer long straight line...