Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: July 2017 Page 1 of 2

Relations with Russia Sour Further

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On July 31, 2017

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So, we have an anti-Russia sanctions bill moving through Congress, which will increase sanctions on Russia and include fines on non-American companies who do business with Russia in specific ways. It will remove Trump’s ability to remove sanctions. While Trump could veto it, the two versions (House and Senate) both passed with super-super-majorities (the Senate version is 98-2).

The White House has indicated that Trump will likely pass it, and if he doesn’t, will seek a “harsher” bill.

Meanwhile Russia has expelled 755 diplomats and seized two US diplomatic buildings in Russia, a move which brings American diplomatic numbers in Russia to the exact same number as Russian diplomats in America. This is in retaliation for Obama’s seizure of two buildings and removal of Russia diplomats just before he left office.

Russia had put off retaliation in hopes that Trump would reverse Obama’s action.

One of the few good things one hoped for with respect to the Trump administration was an improvement in US-Russia relations.

But Russia hysteria is in full swing in the US; red-scare reborn, based on accusations that Russia put Trump in the White House. A lot of people believe this, there were certainly plenty of contacts between various Russians and the Trump campaign, and heck, Russia probably did prefer Trump, hoping he’d undo sanctions and be less hostile.

(Meanwhile, the US appears to be working to overthrow the Venezuelan government.)

Proof of significant action by Russia is lacking. It may be that some minor help was given, but I have yet to see any proof that hacking was ordered by the Russian government, only repeatedly asserted by a variety of intelligence agencies, all of whom have a long record of lying when convenient.

If interference did occur, it appears to have amounted to “release of true information that was harmful to Clinton.”

If this is worthy of sanctions, then the rest of the world should lock up America and throw away the key given America’s actions; repeatedly not just interfering in elections, but overthrowing governments–including democratically elected ones.

It is worth remembering, again, that Russia has enough nukes to destroy the world, and so does America. Good relations are in the interest of world survival.

It is perhaps also worth looking, with a cold eye, at whether America or Russia, over the last 20 years or so, has done more harm to other countries and their citizens? If you are honest in the exercise, you might begin to wonder who is the greater threat.

Meanwhile, we also have more sanctions against Iran and North Korea coming down the pipe.

North Korea is, by the way, still at war: The Korean war was never ended with a peace treaty, only with a truce. North Korea is under perhaps the most extensive sanctions in world history, but somehow those sanctions haven’t stopped it from getting nukes, and it’s possible they may even wind up with missiles able to strike the US.

There is a rumor that the current leader of North Korea was left a note by his father, which said, “Don’t give up your nukes. Saddam gave up his program, and that’s when the US went for him.” It has also been noted that Qaddafi gave up his nuclear program, played nice with the West, and as a reward, got sodomized with a knife and killed. (Clinton was very happy about this: “We came, we saw, he died.”)

I don’t know if the rumor is true, but I do know that North Korea would be insane to give up their nukes as anything but part of a comprehensive peace deal which removed sanctions, and maybe not even then. This is simply as a matter of survival. You don’t have to like the North Korean regime (I don’t) to not realize that people aren’t going to cut their own throats for your convenience.

As for Iran sanctions… bah, fill it in yourself. This is vile stupidity, and I hate any form of theocratic government.

I blame Democrats and the media for a ton of this. The hysterics have been never-ending. Better relations with Russia are a good thing under most circumstances. Instead, the US is ratcheting up tensions and giving Russia every reason to see the United States as its enemy. (Lets’ be frank, the US is Russia’s enemy, and, save for a brief period when they were allied against Germany, has never been anything else.)

So, the world gets stupider, more propaganda ridden, and more dangerous. The sanctions won’t “work” (and appear to be about forcing Europeans to buy American oil instead of Russian), not in the sense of making Russia do what the US wants or not do anything they can to undo damage done to their country.

If you don’t want someone to treat you as a threat, perhaps don’t act as a threat. (Insert long essay here about how, actually, the US is far more of a threat to Russia than Russia is to the US.)

This is all pathetic, and everyone involved in it should be ashamed, but is, instead, proud.

Pathetic.

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The Only Person with Sense in the Trump Administration…

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On July 29, 2017

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Steve Bannon

…is Steve Bannon. (Yes, he’s a nasty nativist as well.)

In the last few days, Bannon has suggested increasing the top marginal rate to 44 percent and regulating Google and Facebook.

Both of these are good ideas. I’m sure that Bannon’s regulations of Facebook and Google might not be what I’d want, but the bottom line is that these are now the primary media organizations of the world: What people read or see is mostly determined by Google or Facebook–their algorithms and employees.

For example, three months ago, Google put out a new algo to reduce fake news. Result?

In the three months since Google implemented the changes to its search engine, fewer people have accessed left-wing and anti-war news sites. Based on information available on Alexa analytics, other sites that have experienced sharp drops in ranking include WikiLeaks, Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News and Truthout. Even prominent democratic rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International appear to have been hit.

Hey! What a surprise. Major corporation does something which makes people who tend to think badly of major corporations read less!

The bottom line is simple: Two companies control most of what people read and that should be under democratic control. And that’s before we even get to how Google and Facebook have systematically taken control of advertising, diverting more and more of the profit to them and away from actual content creators.

This is similar to the problem of railroads before major highways and trucking: farmers could only get crops to market through railroads, so railroads took almost all the profits. We have forgotten, but farmers hated the railroads with a sickly passion, and for good reason.

Google and Facebook determine who gets read, the political and economic repercussions of which are massive. (And Facebook’s CEO quite clearly wants to be President.)

Bannon is right, whether you like his other politics or not.

As far as the Trump admin goes, Ivanka and Jared are the ones who try to mitigate the nasty social stuff (often failing) and Bannon is the only one who wants ordinary Americans to do well.

You can despise all three, with good reason, but understand the reality.

Oh, and “fake news”? It exists, but the hysteria around it is being ridden heavily by people you want nothing to do with. And no fake news so far has ever equaled the New York Times lies which helped sell the Iraq war.

Fake news hysteria among elites is really just them saying: “Our monopoly on lies is being taken away from us! Only approved lies should be allowed!”

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A World Without Poor People (Sort of)

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On July 27, 2017

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Because the last time it was done, it was not forbidden, because good jobs cluster in only a few regions now, and because of vast influxes of foreign money, we have charts like this:

So, almost a 100 percent increase in five and a half years. (People living in Vancouver wish housing prices had only risen this much.)

Meanwhile, the Fed is muttering to itself about how there is almost no inflation, because they don’t measure housing price increases as inflation and consider the most important inflation that which does not include energy and food.

In other words, if the price of having a home, staying warm or cool in your home, driving your car, or feeding yourself is going up, well, that’s just not very important.

A lot of people got very rich in real estate speculation, mortgages, and downstream securities last time, and the vast majority of the rich ones got to keep the money they made. Even those who lost it, were mostly made whole by government. (Ordinary home owners were, uhhh, not made whole.)

Given it worked last time, and given that there was no real penalty for doing it, and that the Fed and other central banks proved they were willing to bail out the rich to the tune of trillions of dollars, why not run the play again? The profits are privatized; the losses at the end will be socialized. Heck, with a bit of luck the Fed will print money pre-emptively to make sure that there is never a crisis for rich people ever again, just ever-increasing asset prices.

(This applies to the stock market as well.)

There is, mind you, a real economy buried under all the money being funneled to rich people somewhere, and at some point that economy may just collapse. After all, all the people who own these fancy condos and houses expect a servant class to take care of them.

But perhaps that labor can all be turned over to robots, as Silicon Valley wants, and the poor can just be expelled from places like SoCal, DC, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto entirely, to slowly drug themselves to death, or perhaps just starve, in the vast interior wastelands of the continent where “real” people don’t want to live.

This is, fairly explicitly, what Silicon Valley techbros want; they want to eliminate the need for surplus people.

I wonder, though, how many of them will find that they too, are surplus, when AI becomes able to code and write ads.

It will, at least, be amusing.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

On Stubborn Facts and Partisan Identification

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On July 23, 2017

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There is vast confusion in the more active left about this, so let’s clear it up by way of Bernie Sanders.

Clinton was more popular with POC and women than Sanders was. She was also more popular with old people.

However, Sanders is well-liked by POC and women. Every survey I have seen shows him with approval ratings in the 60s to 70s from POC. His approval ratings from women are usually 50-something, and higher than with men, but within the margin of error.

Sander is not unpopular with women and people of color, and people of color, in fact, are much more likely to approve of him than whites.

Whites and males are the people most likely to NOT approve of Bernie Sanders.

In absolute terms Sanders is liked by POC and women. In relative terms, it depends on who you’re comparing him to.

None of this is in question, and people who run around pretending Sanders is hated by black people and women are either lying or ignorant. In group terms, he is not.

Next: Clinton did better with Democrats and Bernie did better with independents, BUT Sanders is well-liked by Democrats, this Hill poll had his approval rating by Democrats at 80 percent.

Again, relative vs. absolute.

Another fact, because we have the DNC emails, is that the DNC, run by a Clinton loyalist, put his thumb on the scales for Clinton. This is a fact.

I am not a partisan for Sanders in the same way I am for Corbyn. I strongly approve of Corbyn; I think Sanders was good enough to rate an endorsement, but his stands on, say, Israel, are awful. Corbyn has opposed Israeli apartheid right down the line, just as he did South African apartheid.

I think the best President in American history was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But I think that locking up Japanese Americans was abominable.

My judgments of fact, as much as I can manage it, are not determined by my partisanship. My ethical judgments are not determined by my partisanship.

Rather, as best I can, I seek to have my partisanship determined by the facts combined with my ethical judgment.

This should not be a problem. If you have good reasons for supporting Hillary Clinton, you should be able to acknowledge her actual record and actions and still have reasons for supporting her.

If you must lie about a politician’s record in order to support them, or if you must pretend that evil acts they have committed or endorsed were not evil (Sanders’ Israel Support, Clinton’s Libya adventure), then you have gone deeply wrong, and you are a part of what is wrong with your country and the world.

One can support the lesser evil, or the greater good, and admit that. One can support someone who is more good than bad and still acknowledge the bad.

If one cannot, one is making decisions based on delusional fantasy.

You should be able to do this even for people you love or hate. I hate Obama and Bush, Jr. and Reagan, but where they did something right, I acknowledge it. (Reagan’s work on nuclear disarmament falls into this category.)

If your tribal identification is running your determination of right or wrong, please check yourself out of politics until it isn’t.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Shhhh! Russia Can Like Something and It Can Be Good.

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On July 21, 2017

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I know, I know. Russia is evil, the worstest of the worst and is made worse by Trump, because it’s Russia’s fault that Trump is President, not because Clinton ran a terrible campaign and Obama presided over an economy that worked for only about 3 percent of the population.

But maybe, just maybe, even though Russia is the Antichrist and Trump is the Devil (or the Devil’s Jester), it is possible that Trump might do something that Russia likes, and it might be good.

Like Trump telling the CIA to stop smuggling weapons to rebels in Syria? By which we mean, mostly people who are nasty Jihadis?

I know, I know, Assad is bad therefore anything bad that is done to him is good, even if it means causing a civil war which has cost many lives; far more lives and suffering than if there hadn’t been a civil war.

So, since Trump is bad, and Russia eeeevil, and Assad is evil, it therefore follows that giving guns to nasty people so they can ruin an entire country is good.

Or maybe, just maybe, Assad and some Russian policies and Trump can be bad, but it can still be possible that sending weapons to cause and fuel a civil war is a bad idea? Especially one where the main opposition are a bunch of Wahhabi insurgents with a truly ugly ideology; far worse than Assad’s?

It’s just a thought that perhaps, sometimes bad people and bad countries (has Russia done more evil than America in the last 30 years? Readers may wish to think carefully…), might do the right thing. They might even do the right thing for reasons you think are bad, and that right thing, despite being done by bad people for bad reasons (is having good relations with Russia by ending support for a terrible civil war bad?) might be…good?

Well, who knows. Trump is the worstest of the worst, and Putin is his puppet master, and… yeah, sorry, can’t keep up with the current story line.

Still, I can’t help but think that it might not be a bad idea to stop sending weapons to Syrian rebels, irrespective of whether I have any sympathy for any of them. It might be that helping start the Syrian civil war and keeping it going was bad policy; in both realpolitik and ethical terms, and it might be that Trump is doing the right thing here, whether or not he is doing it for the right reasons.

Maybe.

Perhaps, on those rare occasions when a politician we hate does the right thing, we should honestly admit it. Perhaps if we don’t, there is something wrong, not just with him, but with us?

Or heck, perhaps we prefer to live in a world where people we hate are always wrong, no matter what they do, and change our definitions of right or wrong to suit their actions?

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The End of Cash; The End of Freedom

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On July 19, 2017

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Image by TW Collins

Recently, the Indian government took its high value bills out of circulation, in order to fight corruption. This has been bad for the economy, not just because the gray economy is large in India, but because India is a place where a ton of business is done by cash, not by credit.

In France, because of “terrorism,” cash purchases are now limited to one thousand euros.

In many countries, there is a push to move away from cash, towards electronic payments. Electronic payments are, of course, easier for governments to track.

The obvious point is about taxation; you can tax money you know about. But the less obvious point is about control and surveillance: If everything is done electronically, you can know who is doing what, because spending is doing. Nothing meaningful can be done in the modern world without money following it. People need money to live and money must be used to buy any goods involved.

Anything that can be seen can be controlled. Readers may remember when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard all decided to cut off payments to Wikileaks. I know it’s common on the left now to hate Wikileaks, but only a fool doesn’t understand the power involved in stopping someone from getting money.

In the legal nootropics scene (substances for boosting performance, especially mental), banks have simply refused to allow nootropics firms to do business, even though what they are selling is perfectly legal. This has put people out of business. It is not a minor matter.

In previous years, banks would either not lend to Blacks or they would charge them more than whites; they judged based on criteria which was not then, nor is it now, any of their business. Who or what is discriminated against varies with the fears and mores and politics of the time.

Every time someone talks about getting rid of cash, they are talking about getting rid of your freedom. Every time they actually limit cash, they are limiting your freedom. It does not matter if the people doing it are wonderful Scandinavians or Hindu supremacist Indians, they are people who want to know and control what you do to an unprecedentedly fine-grained scale.

Meanwhile, we have blockchain technology. Blockchains have ledgers: They keep track of every single transaction performed.

Evangelists of blockchains seem to think that because they make encrypted electronic money possible, they are wonderful, but what I see is a totalitarian technology; a way of keeping minute track of every single transaction, ever.

Cash isn’t completely anonymous. There’s a reason why old fashioned crooks with huge cash flows had to money-launder: Governments are actually pretty good at saying, “Where’d you get that from?” and getting an explanation. Still, it offers freedom, and the poorer you are, the more freedom it offers. It also is very hard to track specifically, i.e., who made what purchase.

Blockchains won’t be untaxable. The ones which truly are unbreakable will be made illegal; the ones that remain, well, it’s a ledger with every transaction on it, for goodness sakes.

(Saying this will likely lead to some blockchain evangelist screaming in the comments, because fanatics can’t see the downside of what they are fanatical about, only the exaggerated upsides.)

We are moving towards a panopticon society in which everything you do can be tracked. Everything, including inside the so-called privacy of your house. As biometrics like gait tracking and infrared identification become better, as we put surveillance devices in our houses, and as we continue to carry bugs and tracking devices with us everywhere we go (and paying for the privilege of it) we are creating, as the tired line runs, a dystopian surveillance society that reaches far beyond anything imagined in 1984. (Remember, Big Brother could not record, for example.)

We are creating a society where even much of what you say, will be knowable and indeed, may eventually be tracked and stored permanently.

If you do not understand why this is not just bad, but terrible, I cannot explain it to you. You have some sort of mental impairment of imagination and ethics.

Understand, however, that getting rid of cash is part of this. Understand that blockchains, “coins” do not have to ultimately be a technology of freedom, but can easily be a totalitarian technology. Understand that virtually no one in a position of power is your friend on this: They want to know, they want to control, they want to be able to decide how you spend your money and your time, and they want to have an electronic dossier on you which is complete, and which will be usable to destroy you, because no one has never done or said something which cannot be made to look not just bad, but terrible and illegal, especially if you can pick, say, ten quotes or actions out of a lifetime.

The only way to protect yourself against the surveillance state will be to become a complete and utter drone who has never done or said anything interesting. It’s too late for the olds, but those who grow up in it will understand, and will become nothings because of it.

We are moving very steadily towards a totalitarian state which will make the Stasi look like bumbling amateurs, and we are doing so with little murmur, and often voluntarily.

The only thing likely to derail this, oddly, is catastrophic environmental change and collapse.

Yay?

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Death of Saudi Arabia

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On July 16, 2017

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain recently cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar and launched an embargo, stating that they wanted the media outlet Al Jazeera shut down, and support for the Muslim Brotherhood ended.

Or, more colloquially, and good for a belly laugh, for these entities to “stop supporting terrorists,” which coming from any of those countries–and especially Saudi Arabia–is so flamingly hypocritical it puts the sun in shadow.

Oh my God.

Unfortunately for Saudi Arabia and its allies, Qatar has yet to give in, and it has been backed up by Turkey (who sent troops), and Iran (who is sending food).

Then we have the war against Yemen. Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen, with a huge coalition, and US support, and, well, what have they accomplished? I suspect the main accomplishment will be crippling Yemen’s next generation by starving them when they were young.

And, some time back, Saudi Arabia decided to lower oil prices to push out Western producers and…Oh, look! Oil prices are too low to support Saudi Arabia.

The joke in Saudi Arabia, I understand is, “My grandfather rode a camel, I drive a car, my grandson will ride a camel.”

Saudi Arabia is doomed. The current king is an incompetent, thrashing around trying to solve problems and making them worse.  He, as with his forbears, sees foes everywhere; unlike his predecessors, he isn’t willing to simply sit and let sores fester. He wants to do something about them, and so far, what he’s done has made them worse.

This is fairly standard: All dynasties go bad eventually because the kings-to-be grow up in wealth and power and think their privilege is the natural state of things. They believe they are brilliant and deserve it all, when it was handed them on a platter. Perhaps they are good at palace intrigue and think that extends beyond the palace.

It doesn’t.

But this is worse than that; Saudi Arabia is just an undeveloped country sitting on oil. It’s that simple. Their particular ideology did not allow them to control their population, and the source of their power, oil, was always going to be replaced as the world’s most important energy source at some point. That “some point” is now close.

Electric cars are coming. It is that simple. And when they do, oil will never recover.

As with all such windfalls, the only correct way to deal with resource windfalls is to siphon them off from the regular economy and develop the new economy. That is almost never done, and the story is always the same. Sometimes it takes decades, sometimes centuries, but the resource is always either replaced or depleted and the country or area, never having developed an actual economy, goes into terminal decline.

I live near one such place: the Canadian Maritime provinces. Once, this was the main supplier of ships’ masts in the British Empire. As the entire empire ran on sailing ships, this made it important. When steam took over, there were no ship masts left, and the Maritimes have never recovered.

Alberta, Canada’s oil patch, will likely experience the same story, with the added problem of having destroyed much of its soil, so that it cannot even go back to its full, agricultural roots.

Saudi Arabia is DONE. Like other rich and powerful countries, and Saudi Arabia has been a great power (though not a super power), its death throes will be terrible. Yemen is collateral damage; part of the early collapse. Likewise, Qatar. From the long point of view, this all just has to play out; for those on the ground, it will be ugly.

There are good Saudis, even as there are good Americans, and they have my sympathy, but I have little hope to offer them. Saudi Arabia is a classic example of over-development, on top of resource sickness: The land cannot support the population, and relatively soon, in historical terms, it will not be able to afford the necessary imports.

Civil war and implosion, famine and catastrophe are all next to certain. If you live in Saudi, it is probably time to get out. What is to come is unlikely to be avoided; it would take vast amounts of luck. Luck Saudi Arabia, in making so many enemies, has made unlikely to occur.

And a lot of people, close or far from Saudi, will suffer as it destructs.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Why There Is More Reason to Hope Today than in Decades

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On July 12, 2017

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Somewhere between the late 80s and the early 90s, with Clinton’s election, hope died.

The post-war era had serious issues, but the post-war era–as the civil rights movement and 70s feminism showed–was handling those issues. It was moving in the right direction. Until it didn’t, until it couldn’t handle the cascade of problems from the rise of oil prices.

In Britain, Thatcher got into power; America got Reagan. They were opposed by people who preferred to try and fix the older world, and those people lost. So there came the third way, which said: “If you can’t beat them, join them!” Clinton, Blair, and all the various folks like them wanted to do Thacherism and Reaganism but with less cruelty.

That couldn’t, and wouldn’t, work. Clinton set the stage for large chunks of the financial crisis: He gutted welfare, set up truly cruel standards for incarceration which gutted poor black communities especially, and hurt everyone else who was poor, even if less.

Blair, his British counterpart, was onside with Iraq, and blah, blah, blah.

None of them did anything about climate change worth speaking of. Their solution to pollution in the developed world was to ship the most polluting industries to developing countries, mostly notably China, and pollution there is as bad as it ever was in the first world.

Meanwhile, as we all know, they pursued a raft of policies whose effect was to funnel money to the rich, gutting the middle class over time (though the middle class benefited at first) and impoverishing many. This created oligarchical power structures throughout the west, abetted by technocrats insulated from control by elected politicians.

The point here is that the trends were mostly bad. Those few good trends, such as improvements in parts of the developing world were not a result of neoliberalism (China used mercantile policies to industrialize), and in fact, as Ha Joon shows in Bad Samaritans, growth in the developing world was slower in the neoliberal era than in the post-war era.

We have been driving ourselves towards, not disaster, but catastrophe, and not one catastrophe, but many.

So, people thought I was pessimistic. I wasn’t. I never was. I was realistic. Because it’s government and corporate policy, it’s the policy of all of our elites, to do things which would have forseeable bad consequences. That’s been policy and they’ve been very determined to stick with it.

So, there has been no room for what some people mistake as optimism. Hope. The only hope was that at some point this would change. As long as we kept electing people like Clinton or Obama, there could be no hope because those in power haven’t wanted to change the way the world is run. They don’t intend to do anything which would avoid catastrophe.

That is just how it’s been.

So now everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and I’m the calm one.

Because there is now reason for hope. Large masses of people are now willing to vote for politicians who want to do the right thing. It is too late to avoid much of the consequences of what we have done. It is simply too late. We have methane release in the arctic, we have a great species die-off, and it’s too late.

But it is not too late to mitigate. As the first rule of holes states, “When you find yourself in a hole, first, stop digging.”

We haven’t even done that yet, really. There’s a small amount as solar becomes cheaper than coal, something which should have happened 20 years ago through government intervention, but it’s too late.

However, with Sanders and Corbyn’s near successes, with the fact that so many would consider voting for them, with Melenchon in France coming so close, there is now reason to hope that we finally have an electorate willing to consider actual change to do the necessary things.

This was not true in the past. People like Sanders and Corbyn were not taken seriously as national candidates. The idea was laughable.

So this is hope; a bright, shining, slender thing.

We have it now. And yet people are running around like the sky is falling. The only reason they are doing so is that most of them didn’t understand that the decisions which caused all the problems we’re having today were taken and reaffirmed for decades. If you knew where they were going (and it wasn’t hard to), you just had to look and not flinch. If you were able to do this, nothing that is happening today, nothing, is surprising–in general terms.

The only thing that is interesting is that a large number of people, and especially young people, are turning away from doing the wrong thing, and showing openness to change. This creates a crossroads: They may choose something worse, or something better. I think they’ll take something better when offered; we saw that with Corbyn, and polls now show he’d win an election held today.

Of course, they’ll also take something worse if it means change from the status quo. We’ve seen that.

But they are willing to Change, and that means there is Hope.

So, the sky is creaking, but that’s already been predetermined and running around screaming about in affected surprise is pathetic.

Meanwhile, we may be able to begin reducing the worst of what is to come, rather than continually trying to make it worse.

And that, my friends, is reason for hope.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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