World burning; lots of chattering from the usual suspects.

Just back from Paris. There, as everywhere else, people fed up with politicians and talking heads who refuse to acknowledge that the world doesn’t work the way they want it to. Love him or hate him, Ricky Gervais was on to something with his Golden Globes speech.

In Paris: massive strikes and huge protests like this one over the weekend.

And when I say massive, I mean: imagine a world capital with no public transport whatsoever. Imagine what would happen in London or New York if all the commuters who usually took busses and trains and subways to work had no option (other than staying home) but to drive, instead? Things are improving a bit, with some trains running — and some public transport back online. But there are calls for the strikes to be resumed in full.

Some articles on the strikes and the protests here, here and here.

From a firsthand perspective: unbelievable traffic; forty minutes to go what should take five. If this is an improvement, the city must have been effectively paralyzed before.

One Uber driver I rode with told me he was sleeping in his car because it took too long for him to drive home after a shift — and could easily use up most of a tank of petrol. He hadn’t seen his family in over a week because his wife was home trying to telecommute and take care of their children (whose teachers couldn’t get to their nursery).

I asked him what he thought of the strike, totally expecting him to be resentful — angry, even. But he wasn’t. Not at all.

He stood behind the strikers. Fully. Ditto the Yellow Jackets. Said that politicians weren’t caring for the poor, the workers, the average man — people like him. The people protesting, he said, speak for me, too.

In other news, from reporting to OpEds by Susan Rice in The New York Times, to a lot of voices telling us all that the President’s decision to kill Suleimani in Iran was a catastrophe. Interesting, then, that General Petraeus had a very different take, going so far as to suggest that our actions in Iraq had reestablished the principle of deterrence after our failure to act in the face of other provocations had eroded it significantly. Published almost simultaneously, in the same publication (Foreign Policy) an article suggesting American foreign policy is out of control.

Not surprising, but nonetheless interesting that Niall Ferguson writing for the Boston Globe thought about things in a slightly more nuanced way as well, suggesting that civil war was likely, but not World War III.

In short: no consensus to speak of. We’re curious about what all of you are thinking; let us know in the Facebook group or here in the comments and we’ll kick off a conversation.

To close: gold reached a high not seen since the beginning of the last decade; oil prices are surging in anticipation of war and misc economic turmoil, FTSE chief executives are estimated to earn the yearly salary of 'average' workers in 3 days, and scientists at the University of Sydney estimate that 480 million animals have been killed as a result of wildfires in Australia since September.

Seems we have a few issues on our hands — and rather pressing ones at that. Still, everywhere, the petty desire to point fingers and virtue signal rather than thinking about solutions. And lots of people who know very little about what they’re saying and less about the lives of the people they’re talking to taking up all the air in the room.

Plus ca change. As it were.