Mother Hubbard soft soap me
This newsletter is late because the modelling was inaccurate and we moved from “semi-monthly” to “endemic” too fast.
I know it’s trite and adorable from me but I think I have a better understanding of military coups now.
I imagine when you’re an officer in the military, someone sufficiently high up that you interface with civilian government on a regular basis. You probably have a lot of impotent frustration. Here you are, all smart and pressed and armed and there is a ton you can’t do. By design, of course, but those hobbles have to chafe sometimes. One imagines the non-existent, benevolent coup, one without CIA money lubing the gears or opportunist strong-men looking for a cushier chair, and I think I can understand the appeal as we gallop our way through a needless fourth wave of a pandemic just as I can understand the impotence of our forlorn fake General. He’s someone raised to appreciate rules-and-procedure meritocracies, with firm career ladders based on performance, however far from reality that shining military might be. He must look at growing piles of bodies stacked by morons and say, “hey, I can do better, and they don’t have the guns to stop me. I’m am the gun”.
It takes about seven seconds of reading any history of any society to disabuse someone of the idea that a military government might outperform the clown college in your local legislature. But I think everyone reading this might agree that the past two years have cemented exasperation as an extremely animating emotion that might make someone amenable to the stupidest ideas available. (Someone reading is screaming at me through the Internet that this is the soil of fascism but I can’t hear them under this pile of blankets and the dope of my depression naps. Na na na na boo boo).
As I write this 18 people died yesterday in Alberta and we have 32% of the active COVID cases in the country with 12% of the population. Our leaders maybe were on vacation and maybe are at coffee shops covered in dookie and not holding podium briefings. Nobody has resigned, nobody has been sacked. In some corner of your mind you have to long for a structure with rigidity and consequences. You imagine someone walking into the Sky Palace and clapping Jason in irons before reaching for the Text All Phones In The Province button. It’s okay now, our phones blorp. Men with guns are here to replace these wilted blue suits, these people without imagination or courage, these Shandros with tiny, distressing faces.
If exasperation can make that sound like a sweet bell, no matter how remote, I think I can reach to hear how it sounds to the truly desperate, the hungry and sick, and to the people with guns and uniforms who are convinced they couldn’t do any worse. How fucked up must I be, how bored of the morons who run this place, that I would opt for probable, pragmatic brutality instead of boiling to death in this vat of moron.
🧸Masks still have our neighbours heck-piss mad! I feel like it will be hard to convince them to do communism!
🗑That said maybe communism will go down easier if you note that the local pinkos have the best grasp of vaccine passport issues.
✒️People using supervised injection sites will be required to present ID, which is about the stupidest sentence I’ve ever had to type.
🌐Are they scabs if they’re just brought in to cover the vacancies/need created by government mismanagement?
🔔A developer so beloved by the community someone tried to kill him in his mansion driveway bought the best bar and theatre in the city, gutted it, and left it fallow. He’ll now get some of your money to finish it. Justice doesn’t exist, sorry.
⚰️If you need a house to live in you can just go fuck yourself honestly.
🛸A fun climate change problem is that hurricanes tend to assault coastlines and coastlines tend to be filled with noxious industrial activity and intractable historic impacts. Just waiting for radioactive particulate to blow around some more so we can call it a NUKENADO.
🎻Housing crisis means illegal basement suites flooding and drowning whole families desperate for affordable shelter.
⛳️Someone could probably move some votes looking out for gig workers. Just saying.
🎯I would take most prisons over Texas prisons. Mexico? Morocco? Sign me up, just keep me away from anyone saying “y’all”.
📉Alberta Advantage pod crew talks about how everything is well and fucked and then talks to someone who, gosh darn it, makes you think for a second we can fix it.
🎧The Progress Report posits that water…is good?
🔇Turn Left outlines the best tool O’Toole has in his tool(e)box.
🎚️HE RISES FROM A BRIEF DEATH
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Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
