As heavy as my bonеs were
Karens get a bad rap. Our Karen, the good Karen, the ur-Karen, the mould from which all good Karens are wrought, made us a sweet merch store. So now you can get Karen designed Alberta Advantage shirts for Christmas. That’s a good-ass Karen. We also have a really good Aaron, a super good Aaron, and he has us up and running on Twitch and YouTube. If you don’t know, now you know.
This will be the fourth time I’ve written a newsletter on the cusp of the world getting its shit kicked in by a new COVID variant. Maybe I’ll get to eat my words this time! Maybe VARIANT OMICRON will roll through with insane virality but won’t put enough DNA points into the Symptoms tree. Maybe everybody and their dog (and, I don’t know, deer) will get it but it only presents as the sniffles and an ache in the ankle. Maybe the mutation really fucks up and it stays in the body forever but prolongs life and makes your lungs into super-lungs. VARIANT OMICRON could be the next stage in human evolution and the first-stage fever and cough is just the larval blush, the growing pains turning us into Omega-level mutants.
But I suppose it’s just as likely that it doesn’t. The common refrain in the Alberta Advantage Discord server these few years is “what a predictable result” or, as my left buttcheek tattoo says, quid praevidere eventum. If VARIANT OMICRON cuts through the planet like a hollow point it will be absolutely predictable. We got the vaccine, protected the intellectual property, under distributed to the “third world” (and reaped the mistrust in Western medicine sown by decades of shady bullshit on the part of our governments and pharma apparatus), and now we have lots of new variants all the time, probably forever because the steps required to staunch this shit are too unprofitable to consider. This is the predictable result. Whoops.
Okay but a few years into this we surely have a robust infrastructure to deal with the material impact to workers and families when a disruptive pandemic occurs, right? It’s not means-tested to hell, funneled through landlords and employers, or inadequate in the main, right? Right?
Nah, fuck that. CERB 2 will come out just in time for VARIANT OMICRON and you get to hire a Kumon instructor to figure out how much you have to send back when someone pays you ten bucks to shovel their sidewalk. Nobody in power gives a shit, really. The trouble with writing this column for a fourth time is all the predictable results. People will die, governments will provide half measures, and I’ll be writing this a fifth time in April. See you then.
🙉Cargill workers went on strike and got the fucking goods. Congratulations to them.
🌝New COVID means fewer restrictions in Alberta baby FUCK YEAH LET’S GOOO
🐋She says she resigned, her boss said she’s getting a new job, and bad cops will never be punished. Same as always.
🐠The ambulance and EMS system in the province is grinding employees into dust and nobody cares.
🐉Barbados shows the world how easy it is to leave the yoke of a weird pedophile German family with some land in England. Fuck ‘em.
🥃The French are blockading the United Kingdom, as is tradition.
🤾♂️Burn your NDP membership and never trust a Mountie.
🎍Twitter is getting a new CEO. Garbage site or not it’s still the preeminent firehose of primary information on the internet. Getting a new CEO looking to make his name as an innovative leader can only mean bad things.
🎻Dave Chapelle went back to high school to bully some kids.
🌔Huge corporations were cool with being drug dealers.
🧇Passage is here to teach you about the welfare state, you ignorant butthead.
🍖Hitler was the original TERF sort of.
🥝Degrowth is a good idea.
🧀Blow up think tanks with a real tank.
🍩Piketty has decided to stop being a huge baby.
🎾Reject billionaires acquire video cards.
📉We did a podcast about the Communist Party of Canada (shocking I know) that is MEGA SIZED and MEGA GREAT.
Darts & Letters brings a bunch of people together to ask the important question: Sup with Max Faucet?
🎧Get yourself the confidence of even one, single Laurentian political operator. Holy fucking shit. For more content like this, please go give Progress Alberta your money.
🔇Tech gadfly and Fox News boogieman Paris Marx says maybe paying companies to listen to and record us is a bad idea.
🎚️Be it resolved: Nora talking about debates is good, actually.
🛰Comrades in Vancouver should check out this action for Crab Park.
🌠In Edmonton? Want to work for the Alberta Federation of Labour? Love pain? Click here!
🚂Help stop this dumb mine.
🤹Another protest to convince Sean Chu to get his predator ass out of his chair is planned for December 4 at noon at Calgary City Hall.
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. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
