They want cheese, they want bread
This newsletter is brought to you by birds. Thanks, birds. Thbirds.
The reactionary playbook is designed to wear you down. You only have so much outrage juice to spend and at a certain point your body and brain will cry uncle and watch as the parade of indignities large and small walks past your house unchallenged. A few years of the UCP and your average horror barely registers as an outrage. We were all primed and coiled for the worst and the worst was delivered, some weeks in a torrent, some weeks a pitch drip. We get to watch as our friends are impoverished and immiserated and we wait until the wheel of austerity lands on something we need. It feels bad! We’re all out of OJ!
It’s useful to use our shit giving ability against us, and the people who don’t give any shits know this. They like to wind you up and watch you lose your mind over something small, like the disabled being able to pay rent or the destruction of the only planet proven to sustain human life. They’ll always float some bullshit let you believe the biggest thing and then respond to your screams with the thing they actually want.
As was the story with AISH this week. Kenney and his moaning jug band of toads floated enough innuendo to make us think they were about to take a machete to the program. Facts were scarce but we all assumed the worst because everything has been pretty bad and it would be on brand for the worst people to do bad things. And they will! They for sure will, but they’re not arbitrary.
Almost as soon as AISH outrage hit media pages and social networks the fetid little hell prince of issues management, Matt Wolf, was out in the Tweet trenches trying to convince you all that the disabled are actually scammers and they’re swimming Scrooge McDuck-style in pools of ill-gotten lucre. Ignore the 70 caliber holes in his soul he donned his white coat and said those with mental illnesses are, oh my god, in a program for the severely disabled. Can you imagine? A mental illness preventing productivity? This is clearly a scam. The fucking nerve of some Albertans to choose this for their brains. How far we done fell.
Anyone who knows an AISH recipient knows the provincial government follows their lives with the intimacy of an IUD, and know that their stipend is about as far from easy living as can be. Maybe this is a symptom of conservatives and the rich running policy. They are so far from renting homes they can’t imagine housing consuming most of an urban AISH cheque. That’s the generous interpretation. Maybe they just don’t know how hard it is. They don’t earn that interpretation, but imagining this court of knowing gargoyles giggling in the legislature as they save a few dollars in exchange for exquisite pain is too depressing.
We live in the conservative scream cycle. They say machete and when they’re actually just hiding a very sharp scalpel and we already used our energy on the feint. Heck, some will see the small cut as a win, or imagine they’ve been heard, God bless them. But for 2000 or 20,000 people, depending on whatever small program just got hacked to death on the altar of government debt, maybe that means not making the mortgage. We know this, we know we’re too tired to care, and we know we’ll all do the same thing next week.
Oh, your brain makes you vomit in the presence of others? Rough, you should have been born into money with a problem like that! Sorry, Moody’s needs to see some improvement on our balance sheet or they’ll be very cross. Put a mask on and find a job please. Make sure your next disability is more visible.
-Clinton Hallahan
🦔Premier Meat Sphere doesn’t even have the gumption to follow-through on his shitty witch hunts. Can we trust the future of this province to a guy who can’t even persecute his political enemies properly?
🍵Northern community takes consensual COVID baths for no reason other than loving death.
🥏If I said the province and city want to build an overpass a few meters from some houses in Calgary, what quadrant of the city would you bet that’s happening to? Go ahead and guess.
🛶D2L has been a stone around the neck of the CBE/CSSD since at least 2005, and turning to them to do the online learning in Alberta during COVID is another monumental fuck up. If you can’t improve on Google Drive and FaceTime don’t even bother.
🧲Organization training teenage boys to kill brown people overseas shocked, SHOCKED that racists proliferate in their ranks.
🗞Co-op structures are being used to install vampires with aims to enrich their vampire friends. Calgary Co-op was there, now MEC. Love my retail chains to buy massive debt loads for bondholders. It’s what I look for when shopping honestly.
🧷Local triangulators to promise large public program, for sure we will do it this time, I swear guys. Believe me, this will totally happen.
💤It’s beside the point but I am a little surprised that there hasn’t been any outrage from South and Central American countries about their expat nationals having their reproductive organs removed at ICE detainment facilities. Lots of bad in this story - history will add these camps into listicles next to Mengele if there is any justice - but hearing no rage for citizens from the Mexican government especially seems like a failure.
🔔Climate change has created so many tropical storms and hurricanes that the National Hurricane Center is out of names for them. They’ll move on to the Greek alphabet now, ensuring that Gerard Butler will star in a hurricane thriller called Alpha and Omega before 2030.
👶🏽Journalism depends on the largess of billionaires who buy good coverage by broke serfs who hope senpai notices them with their wallet.
🤰🏽United States commits act of economic sabotage by selling the UAE a boondoggle.
🦞Can’t wait to race to 100k followers just so I can try some free drugs to cure my manageable diseases that would force me into bankruptcy. SponCon saves the day again! #livingwell
🐌Imagine working for the UN and justifying to yourself, every day, having a whole job concerned with fixing what the Security Council fucks up. Just constantly one arm of signatories bathing the earth in fire and you applying the dumbest little bandages when they allow you, sometimes, maybe. I’d burn the fucker down.
☃️National Guard Twitch streamer has a heated Nazi moment as he wishes the Final Solution min/max strategy was a bit more refined.
🧃Heat ray sought to disperse protests, DARPA confirms approaching Myron Reducto to finish research on a viable device.
🧛🏼If shareholders want to vote for climate change friendly policies at corporations we will simply just change what they can legally vote on.
♻️Recycling is a big dumb lie.
☂️The Dolan family goes on a driving tour of Belfast.
🐧Trans woman with the campaign slogan “Fuck The Police” wins GOP sheriff nomination.
🦈We salute “Pascal Charland” and the dope barbecue he is undoubtedly having right this second.
🎀Our big beautiful boy sits down to talk about Chile and Allende.
📉The try-hards on the podcast do actual work and talked about shit-talking your grandparents, boomers wanting to hug and kiss oil, and interviews with (gasp) two actual leftists trying to get elected to office in Canada.
🎧Unpacking the News ENDS and invites a bunch of friends to sit shiva and shoot the shit. But what is this… what is going to take its place….?
🔇Vancouver documentarian starts a series about the history of the United States sticking its finger into the eye of Iran. Disclosure: I once kissed the filmmaker on the lips on a dare.
🕹Your boss might not care if you get COVID, but Courage does. They made a guide on how to organize your workplace against exposure.
🔫The Lethbridge safe consumption site may have been closed by idiots but people still need lifesaving materials and services. You can donate to that effort here.
🥌MEC members are circulating a petition to prevent the co-op from being sold to hedge fund dicks and hollowed out like…something outdoors and hollow. Sign it here.
🍟Some leftist big-names are getting together to form Progressive International. They’re having a summit and you might be able to catch Cornel West schooling fools. Check it out here.
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.
