To Read or not to Read...

How did it come to this, indeed? Canada's brewing debt storm. Globe

Household debt has surged three time faster than income in recent years and now stands at a record high of more than $1-trillion....

“We may be back into a recession [next year] because, remember, part of what has helped us get out of this recession was spending and consumer spending at that, and if people don't have money to spend we could be rapidly back in to where we started,” he added.

And while consumer spending and confidence have increased recently, both may be short lived, said CIBC's Mr. Tal.

“There is a gap between confidence and ability,” he said. “It's a gap between what's in your head and what's in your pocket. And this gap is, of course, a matter of concern because consumer confidence is high due to the fact that interest rates have been extremely low and people are able to finance those mortgages and those loans.”

In a recent report, Mr. Tal concluded that “Canadian consumer fundamentals are weaker than they have been in almost 15 years.”

That's something that concerns officials at the Bank of Canada. If consumers run into trouble with their mortgage payments, that in turn can lead to “wider problems with other consumer loans, such as credit card debt,” David Wolf, a Bank of Canada economist, said in a speech in January. “Consumers may also have to curtail other spending to cope with their debt burdens, creating adverse spillovers to the real economy.”

What we need is a Suspension of Debtbelief. Sudden Debt

A World Without Planes. BBC.

In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea.

Despite all the chaos and inconvenience of our disrupted flight schedules, we should feel grateful to the unruly Icelandic volcano - for allowing us briefly to imagine what a flight-less future would envy and pity us for.

I do not support the troops. I support peace.
Graveyard of Empires: Nine Months on the Ground in Obama’s Afghanistan. Virginia Quarterly Review

Everything seemed to be going exactly to plan. For the first week after Operation Moshtarak was launched under cover of darkness on February 13, NATO and Afghan troops lived up to the offensive’s lofty name—a Dari word meaning “together,” selected to reinforce the operation’s joint effort. The Afghan National Army made up some 60 percent of the thousands of troops advancing on the dusty redoubt of Marja, an agricultural town latticed with canals and ditches irrigating the poppy fields that made it a crossroads for heroin traffickers and pro-Taliban forces in the Helmand Province. Locals, as asked, voluntarily stayed in their homes to avoid IEDs emplaced by insurgents and shared intelligence with international commanders. Even Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) got in the act, arresting two “shadow governors” of Afghanistan’s northern provinces and raiding a house in Karachi where Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s military commander, was captured.

Coming nearly nine months after General Stanley McChrystal was appointed by President Barack Obama to be commander of forces in Afghanistan, the coordinated action in the southern provinces and across the border in Pakistan appeared to be an astounding exoneration of the general’s new counterinsurgency plan. And not a moment too soon. After eight long years of military stalemate and political neglect, US troops were scoring measurable victories, and the fresh focus on winning the confidence of ordinary Afghans appeared to be paying major dividends. For the first time since the shedding of burqas and shaving of beards in the exultant early days of the invasion, the Afghan people seemed to be rallying around NATO forces.

Then, on February 21, troops sweeping for insurgents on the run from Marja intercepted Taliban radio chatter near the main road in Oruzgan Province. Little Bird helicopters, flown by elite US Special Forces, were called in. Pilots discovered a tight-knit convoy of two Land Cruisers and a pickup, all overloaded and riding low, lurching up the Khotal Chowzar mountain pass toward Daykondi Province. They concluded that the vehicles were heavy-laden with arms and insurgents. They opened fire, destroying the convoy. But when ground troops moved in to collect Taliban casualties, they instead found twenty-seven dead civilians—including at least four women and a child—and fourteen more wounded. These were ordinary Afghans, it turned out, fleeing the renewed violence....

As we watch our troops struggle against years of pent up animosity toward US-led forces—and a generations-long commitment to opposing all invaders—it’s easy to see how Afghanistan has earned its reputation as a “graveyard of empires.”

My kids will be 49 and 47 in 2050. My grandkids will be just entering the "workforce". Who the hell knows what I'll be doing! But, after watching this video, The World in 2050, I may, as Paul Kedrosky says, just take a pass.