All throughout this so-called nation
All throughout this so-called nation
Newsletters for you, some of you at work, some of you at home, all of you watching the hit Netflix series The Floor Is Lava I assume, probably, I don’t know what you people like, leave me alone.
Coal, oil, polio, and a Roman centurion walk into a bar.
Coal goes up to the bartender and says “a drink for me, the future of energy”. The bartender pours him a whiskey and sets it down. Coal drinks it in a single draught.
Oil goes up to the bartender and says “a drink for me, the future of the Alberta economy”. The bartender pours him a gin and sets it down. Oil drinks it in one gulp and coughs.
Polio goes up to the bartender and says “ a drink for me, I’m due for a comeback”. The bartender takes a special bottle of liquor and pours him a shot. Polio drinks it down thirstily.
The Roman centurion walks into the bar and pours gasoline on the floor. He throws in a match. Oil and coal fuel the ensuing inferno with thick black smoke. Polio chokes and falls down, his glass filled with polio vaccine with an MMR back. The bartender leads the rest of the patrons out of the bar to safety.
Jason Kenney defunded wildfire response so he borrows a scoop plane from British Columbia and puts the fire out. He looks at the remains of polio and coal and oil and sighs deeply. “So much,” he says, loudly like he’s talking to someone despite being alone, “for the tolerant left.” End joke.
👾That racist speechwriter should probably lose his job but, failing that, being stuck in a room with a person you wrote racist invective against for three hours is an acceptable sort of torture.
👑Nenshi thinks that he can enforce a mandatory mask order in Calgary, which is just adorable.
🦾Your money is now funding climate change denial. God bless democracy.
👩🏫You can’t stop Alberta oil subsidies and bootlicking here at home, but everyone along the Keystone XL path is sure as shit doing their best.
🧏Kenney may be making their doctors quit, making their health care cost way more by privatizing it, allowing their factory jobs to operate unsafely during pandemics, and preventing farm workers from accessing WCB, but he’s still positive that, uh, pumping the oil industry full of cash will make rural Alberta a thriving beacon of progress!
🧑🦼Did you know your neighbours might be Nazi sympathizers? It’s true!
☢️A taste for animal protein and a psychopathic love of profit means COVID is just the beginning of our meat-based hellscape. China just got lucky to pick the short straw first.
👁🗨Dollar stores as a microcosm of neighbourhoods we abandoned.
🕦If you want to clear out a neighbourhood for developers, you can do worse (as a monster) than siccing killer cops on people.
⚜️That’s a pretty nice cruise ship you have there. Would be a shame if I took it, give it a berth, and use it as housing.
♍️The United States appears to be attempting to reduce prison populations through sheer incompetence. I suppose the whole apparatus has to be consistent.
🧿Catholic leadership is dogshit for centuries worth of reasons but continuing inability to use the pulpit to advocate for people of colour is a continuing and damning way they’re the absolute fucking worst.
💾Our postal comrades to the south are in constant danger of dying in a fire because the US government would prefer them to be ash.
🚞Sweden fucked up bad for no reason. Whoops.
🥅Japanese racism and cyberbulling aside, Hana Kimura was an entertainment industry worker who was insufficiently protected by her employers given the environment she was thrust into. Her death is a workplace fatality, no matter how modern.
🍣I know people who, in the fulfillment of the social contract they were presented when they were 16, went on to university programs that required internships between years to advance and charged insane amount of money if they couldn’t find one and had to delay their education a full year. So I suppose basing an economy and entry requirements into that economy on unpaid corporate labour for credits was a bad idea.
🍑Monetary and financial machinations have all the truth and reality of Wheel Of Time wiki talk board theories but they’re all fuses on bombs that will probably explode and send shrapnel into the working class so you should probably subscribe to Tankus and gird your loins.
🍛It’s kind of fucked up to have prisons as revenue centres.
🏓Feels weird to root for a cop but when they murk Liberian war criminals some critical support is in order.
🎲Your favourite comedy was a product of the New Deal.
💒Suffrage in the time of disease. No not this one, the other one.
🧂This is amazing, but, now stay with me on this one, if you don’t have to worry about paying for basic needs your life may actually improve. Weird that a government would do something like that.
🤠RIP Ennio.
📉Insurgents got some muscly Twitch guy on their show, I don’t know him, and I certainly don’t paste pictures of him on my bedroom wall like he’s Leo DiCaprio in the pages of J14.
🎧WE has done a lot of scummy things, and it’s gratifying to see a podcast get to scream “told you so” with such volume.
🔇Ontario teachers showed up on the Working People podcast, which is a match made in heaven.
🎚This week the podcast chaps and chapesses and chapxs talk about taking money from rich people and spin the fiction that is the existence of Nova Scotia. Listen!
🚨Bill 1 sucks. Stay safe if you go to this protest.
🎬Police brutality at the hands of the Calgary Police Service is real and has real consequences. This documentary chronicles the lives upended when police take their usual liberties.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just want to drop us a quick line, reply to this newsletter or reach us at albertaadvantagenewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you! If you want to send some old-timey mail, grab those stamps and send tributes/cake/not anthrax to Alberta Advantage Podcast, PO Box 52167 Edmonton Trail, Calgary, AB, T2E 8K9.
Our editor is Clinton Hallahan.
