News roundup, 17 Feb 2024

 - The Trump regime has a proposal for Ukraine. Essentially the proposal is, "you give us a 50% interest in all of your rare earth deposits, and we'll politely ask Putin not to take any more of your territory than he already has". Not surprisingly, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is less than impressed with the idea.

- JD Vance has met with AfD leader Alice Wiedel, and is condemning the "firewall", that unwritten rule that German mainstream parties will not form coalitions with extremist parties such as Wiedel's.

- WestJet is reporting a 25% drop in inquiries about tickets to US destinations since Trump's aggressive moves against Canada, and a duty-free store on the BC-Washington border has lost 80% of their business since the tariffs were imposed. And not only are individual Canadians thinking twice about US spending, municipalities are as well - for instance, the City of Surrey has cancelled a $740,000 contract for American-made bleachers.

- Elon Musk's close ties to the regime are seriously impacting Tesla sales in many places, as people increasingly don't want to be associated with Musk. There has also been a rash of vandalism at Tesla stores; unusually for cases of vandalism, the FBI is getting involved.

- Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, has studied insurgencies for many years. She thinks (no doubt rightly) that an attempt by the US to militarily invade Canada would be catastrophic for both countries:

 Even if one per cent of all resisting Canadians engaged in armed insurrection, that would constitute a 400,000-person insurgency, nearly 10 times the size of Taliban at the start of the Afghan war. If a fraction of that number engaged in violent attacks, it would set fire to the entire continent.

While the prospect of a military invasion still seems far off, it's worth noting that many didn't think Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was very likely either. Gwynne Dyer thought, in February 2022, that the idea that Russia would actually invade Ukraine was preposterous, because it would be harmful to Russia's interests. And if you consider the fact that the people pulling Trump's strings may not actually care about the well-being of the US anyway...