Being Ukrainian puts a completely different spin on it. My comment still holds true for Americans, but I would rather not see Ukrainians ground under the heel of another dictator, especially one enabled by the stupidification of the United States.

In Cobourg, Ontario, a Tim Hortons store got into the news because after the minimum wage was raised they cut their employees benefits.

The interesting part was that the store was owned by the son of one of the Tim Hortons founders and the daughter of the other founder, who had married. There was a bit of a backlash, to put it mildly.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see it. The century of American supremacy is coming to a close. You may not want to admit it, because everyone in the US has been thought about American exceptionalism since they started school. China will rise, as will Europe possibly. I think Russia is failing as well. Its current lashing out is the end of their term as a great power.

The US is a big country, and the fall will be slow, but I don’t think there is a way to stop it now. I suspect that future historians will trace it back to the Nixon era. Come to think of it, every Republican president since then has also been really, really shitty when it came to preserving the health of the democracy.