It’s been awhile! We’ve been busy with not much time to look until after Xmas. We have narrowed the search to the west of Cali or Manizales. The west has areas at higher elevation and so noticeably cooler. Today will be 32C in the south of Cali and probably a few degrees cooler in the west. As previously mentioned, Manizales is much cooler: high twenties in the day, mid-to-high teens at night. Maybe too cool now that we’ve acclimatised!

Cali looks to me to be transforming into a world-class city. Hosting COP16 was a showcase, but there is so much more in the works. The current mayor, Alexander Eder, comes from a wealthy family but nonetheless seems to have a strong sense of duty and a vision for Cali. But he’s not imposing his vision, he’s including many groups and trying to be fair to everyone. It’s remarkable to see in this age.

Cali’s roads are awful – potholes galore, ranging from a few centimetres deep to enough to break an axle if hit at speed. Eder has the funds and plan to repair 700km of roads in Cali, and that also puts a lot of people to work at relatively simple jobs – he does some badly needed roadwork and reduces unemployment. His administration had already reduced unemployment and crime to levels not seen in some time, if ever.

Part of Eder’s vision is to rejuvenate downtown Cali, which hasn’t had much love for 50 years. But if Cali is to be a world-class city, downtown has to be special and safe. Right now it’s packed with all kinds of vendors, many without permits or paying taxes. It’s challenging to get through in a car. It’s not that safe, mainly because of the cars. So they’re going to make several streets pedestrian-only. As usual, businesses are protesting even after shown evidence that revenue goes up once the street is pedestrianised. I no longer believe businessmen have much in the way of vision.

Anyway, it will happen because when surveyed, 70-80% of people felt very unsafe because of cars speeding by, so there’s lots of popular support. Car-free areas open up many more possibilities, too – think all the cafes and restaurants in European cities.

It’s good to see progressive, sensible leadership at work. Eder is using the government to make Cali better. Many politicians in Canada and the US seem to spend all their time demonising government, so it’s refreshing to see.

In addition, I subscribe to the local paper, El País. It’s owned by a rich guy and has been since its founding in 1950. Except for the usual rabid talking heads on the Opinion pages, the paper is remarkably sensible. (Rich people buy media specifically to employ propagandists on the opinion pages. See: Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, or Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times: both have openly suppressed content critical of Trump or themselves, or supportive of Democrats.)

Finally for the update, we bought a car. It’s a Mazda CX-9, which is a large SUV (seats 7). Why, you may well ask, would people who want to support regenerative agriculture, who would prefer not to need or have a car, one of whom presented An Inconvenient Truth many times and who is well aware of climate change, buy a gas guzzler? Basically:

• We would prefer an electric car but have nowhere to plug it in.
• Electric car prices are expected to drop significantly due to advances in battery tech in the next few years.
• We need something reliable and versatile until we know where we’ll be and what kind of car we need – if we do.
• The Mazda was a good price because it’s a gas guzzler. Smaller vehicles were the same price but had 150,000km+. The Mazda has less than 100,000km. It’s a 2011 but it looks near new (if you don’t look too closely).
• We don’t drive that much, so the gas consumption / wastage is not too bad. If we commuted, no way.
• Mazdas are reliable, solid cars. We can drive it for a few years until we know what we need, and then sell it.
• It has already been used to transport up to eight of us at a time!

Bye Bye USA and maybe Canada

The rest of this post has to deal with what has happened in the US election, as this will affect our retirement and much more. If you can’t stand hearing about that any more, I don’t blame you and feel free to skip it. I’ll write a less depressing post about all the Christmas stuff going on here later – there’s lots!

I’ll leave you with this Crazy Christmas video from Colombia – the rest of this one and more are here if you have Instagram. (I no longer do.)

Thanks Americans

Thanks to Trump, the Canadian dollar is sliding fast and we’ve lost thousands of dollars in the last few days. Here’s CAD to COP: the last month:

My pension and Adriana’s pay are now worth substantially less because Trump is threatening tariffs. In reality, if Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs, prices in the US would shoot up. But what’s going on is that Trump is basically a mob boss running a protection racket. Pay up and exemptions will be granted, as long as Trump’s narcissism is not triggered. Co-President Elon Musk has called Trudeau an “insufferable tool.” (Some projection going on there, methinks.)

I wrote the above paragraph a few weeks ago and have delayed publishing this post so I can purge any bitterness from it. Since then, Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada, and that guy doesn’t joke. (Laughing at people with disabilities is not a sense of humour.) Some silly people think he’ll never make Canada the 51st state because we’d almost all vote for the Democratic Party. Obviously that won’t happen. If the US does take Canada, it will be as a territory like Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are US citizens but cannot vote if they live in Puerto Rico – see how that works? We moved the proceeds from the sale of our house into a US Dollar fund.

Trump is a narcissistic psychopath, also known as a Malignant Narcissist. All the people he’s surrounding himself with are also sociopaths of one sort of another. That means they have Dark Triad traits:

• They are pathological liars
• They are capable of caring only about themselves
• There is no honour among thieves, so expect lots of backstabbing
• They are sadistic; they enjoy manipulating and hurting other people
• They do not care at all about climate change, pollution, racism, biodiversity collapse, democracy…
• They have no mercy

Given this, why did Americans vote for him? Lots of people are calling them stupid, and certainly many Americans are dimwits. This is the result of home schooling and demonising education and experts. But the real reason is that most Americans are morally corrupt.

Even stupid or uneducated people would know not to vote for an evil person…except that many Americans are also morally corrupt. They have no wisdom. They are fools. Capitalism’s highest virtue is greed, which also happens to be one of the Seven Deadly Sins for excellent reasons. Americans voted for greed. I have heard more than one American say they voted for Trump even though they know he’s evil, because they believe they had more money in their pocket when he was President. They have been corrupted by greed and are fundamentally selfish individuals.

And now they – and we – are going to find out what it means to elect a Malignant Narcissist. The fools thought, Sure, he’s a Hitler (one man said as much) but they think he’s their Hitler and will take care of them. Trump and his billionaire buddies don’t give a damn about Americans or the USA. They’re sociopaths and their only loyalty is to themselves. They are literally incapable of being loyal to other people or a country. Some of these people are already finding out as the Trump team plans to go after Social Security and Medicare to fund another massive billionaire tax gift.

America = Oligarchy

The US is now an oligarchy. “The chart here shows how much political influence different groups have in America today. Not only do the wealthy have the most influence; ordinary voters have basically none.”

The American oligarchs are going to do what oligarchs all around the world do: loot the country while setting themselves up as the new aristocracy.

Death and disease are coming

In addition to gutting or eliminating all kinds of protective government agencies, it looks like the Yanks may be so insane as to eliminate vaccines. (It’s worth noting that the people eliminating vaccines are themselves vaccinated.) This springs from a belief that was pushed during Covid – that if your immune system is in the ‘right’ condition, you don’t need vaccines. This is so obviously wrong that it’s not surprising Americans are being called morons.

There is a pernicious and very wrong belief that your immune system will protect you from new diseases. When you ask these people what kind of condition your immune system needs to be in, they generally respond that we need to eat more naturally: organic, unprocessed foods, for example. We need fresh air and sunshine, exercise, community, etc.

What these cretins can’t seem to grasp is that there used to be tens of millions of such people living in the Americas who lived exactly like that – and almost all of them died from smallpox and measles. (Maybe they don’t ‘get it’ because most Trumpers are racists and see everyone else as inferior.) 90-95% of all the indigenous people in the Americas died when Europeans brought these diseases. Their immune systems were in far better shape than the Europeans who had just survived a long sea voyage, but it didn’t help them. Now a Trump government is talking about eliminating vaccines, including for polio. Enjoy death, disease, and travel restrictions, Americanos – you’re headed back to Victorian times, when many, many children died of preventable diseases.

Native Americans looked this this, pre-contact with Europeans. Slim, muscular, shiny and healthy hair, lived into their seventies, etc. Being in great shape and living in harmony with nature did not prevent measles and smallpox from killing almost all of them.

Idiocracy Incoming

The long and the short:

• Idiocracy is where the stupid are the majority and rule.
• The US is an oligarchy and will be looted.
• Canada may also be looted by the American oligarchs drooling over privatising our healthcare, or Poilievre’s Conservatives. That guy also displays many Dark Triad traits and he doesn’t care about Canada.
• Many people will be deported. One man had been in the US for 20 years but not documented. He has a wife and four children, a house, etc. His wife voted for Trump and he supported that. Now he’s gone from the US. Lost his family, his house, everything. The Trump administration response: If the rest of the family wants to leave too, good riddance. (The rest of the family is legal.) Some people voted for Trump thinking other people would be deported, not them.
• People who are gay or trans are in deep trouble. Almost certainly gay marriage will be outlawed again and no doubt Trumper thugs will terrorise anyone ‘different.’
• There will be lots of this: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
• Women’s ‘rights’ are being erased. Already in several states there are no abortion options even for victims of incest and rape. That means if your wife gets raped and pregnant, you and she will be raising the rapist’s baby. 64,000 Pregnancies Caused by Rape Have Occurred in States with a Total Abortion Ban.

How Low Could Things Go?

Trump asked repeatedly about using nuclear weapons in his first term. Most people refuse to understand what a sociopath is. Trump would nuke a US city if he felt like it, maybe to send a message that protest will be punished, maybe for kicks. (Reminder: sociopaths have no conscience and are cruel – they enjoy hurting others.)

We are back to the days when the US will overthrow any government that is not sufficiently ‘friendly’ to US corporations, i.e. US oligarchs. Again, here’s Musk talking about overthrowing the Bolivian government so he can get Bolivia’s lithium:

Elon Musk: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.“

Would they do the same to Canada? Of course, though Finlandization is more likely: “the process by which one powerful country makes a smaller neighboring country refrain from opposing the former’s foreign policy rules, while allowing it to keep its nominal independence and its own political system.” This has already started.

Conclusions – Random Thoughts

I ain’t travelling to the USA any time soon, maybe ever again. I will book travel to avoid the US if at all possible.

The US will decline as the looting commences. Smart and decent people are already leaving. Tariffs will increase prices for average people. There will be lots of bankruptcies, which means great deals for rich people to snap up properties and businesses.

American allies will stop sharing intelligence with the US. Europe is realising that the Americans are not trustworthy partners in NATO, trade, climate change deals, or anything else. The US gave security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons in 1994. Nobody will trust such ‘guarantees’ ever again. Europe is rearming as a result. More countries will seek nuclear weapons as it’s the only known way to keep the big powers of Russia, China, and the USA from invading.

The US standard of living will decline. It is already significantly lower than Canada or Europe, but it will get much worse. The purpose of any conservative political party is to funnel money from the public to rich people.

Some climate change tipping points have already been passed, The Americans will make sure many more are, which means mass migrations, trillions of dollars lost, entire areas abandoned. Miami, for example, is toast. And where will the millions who live in Miami go once they’ve lost their homes and have no money?

Tough times are ahead. When I used to give the An Inconvenient Truth presentation in 2004, I said that on our current course I expected major social collapse by 2030. That looks ever more likely now, sadly. I really wanted to be wrong on that one.

Most Trumpers will never admit that they were wrong. How do I know? That’s what Germans did post-Nazism. They could not look in the mirror and admit they had done something so horrific. Americans will do the same.

It is very possible that the US will not recover from this. Trump and many of his cronies are Russian tools and Putin is actively attempting to destroy the US as a world power. Trump will sell US secrets to whoever wants them – he has already done so, getting many agents murdered. Trump himself is quite stupid, but the people waiting for him to die – JD Vance and crew – are smarter and utterly ruthless.

Bye bye Miss American Pie. I hope you don’t take the rest of us with you.