Thus Spake Albertathustra
Thus Spake Albertathustra
Stepping boldly into 1972
New bonus content for our Patreon subscribers.
We have a newsletter! It seems like the done thing these days, and now your friendly neighbourhood podcasters have one too.
This is part of our ongoing commitment to/slavering dependence on our Patreon supporters, and we thought you could use a little more of what you all want — us. We’ll be in your inbox every fortnight or so.
Keep your eyes open for news, opinions, analysis and opportunities to Do Politics In Real Life. We poached a friend off the digital hull of left-Calgary to help us with some newsletter specifics, our Director of Communal Luxury whipped up some beautiful new logos and buttons and colour palettes, and the entire roving gaggle of hosts will be pitching in to pack these things with as much content as we can possibly find in the content mines.
It’s the Alberta Advantage, swapping senses from your ears to your eyeballs. Hello.
Your Local Hell
🦈One way to fight knowledge, which is anathema to a certain reactionary Wailord cosplayer in high office, is to simply deprive students of the scholarships they earned and call it a technical glitch. Oops! Your future is derailed! Easy mistake to make honestly!
☠️If you have troubling and expensive health issues, don’t go to Lethbridge. Politicians there aren’t troubled by your death, and actually aim to hasten it.
🔥Yes, the city is blanketed in wildfire smoke during the summer. Yes, there was a massive flood less than ten years ago. However, austerity at city hall means that funding for Calgary’s climate adaptation plans have cut. This makes me feel so bad I don’t even have anything funny to say about it.
👮Oh yeah, sure, when Milton Friedman tweaks it we just go ahead and do it, but when I try to get some slaves to staff my plantation you all call it slavery and get buck-wild about it. Double standard much.
🏩If anyone tells you that homelessness in Calgary is an intractable problem, just remind them that so many new hotels have been built in the last decade that industry groups are begging developers to stop building them. I want to expropriate those units so hard I can taste drywall dust.
💰The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees is headed into wage arbitration after successfully defeating Kenney’s plans to delay arbitration was defeated in court. I hope they all get massive pay raises.
🤮If you’ve ever wanted a rundown of Jason Kenney’s worst beliefs — he hates abortion! He loves Israel! He was really into the Iraq War! — then this article is definitely for you.
🌿Calgary Police Service, hot off their resource-stretching one arrest for cannabis DUI (that they begged for money to accomplish), are begging for money in the face of service level cuts required for *checks notes* a new arena for a billionaire and tax cuts for that guy who owns the neon hookah bar in Inglewood. May they all fall into a pit, their wealth apportioned to some Syrian orphans.
Hell, National and Abroad
🏝️Four governments in two countries stranded a huge group of people on an island and then was like “lol deal with it bye”. Can you guess which country they were in?
😠Quebec politicians are scared little cowards who see 9/11 under every vase and wide tree. Their tiny baby courage tanks, always empty, cause them to trample the rights of whoever has brown skin.
📰Postmedia, the newspaper conglomerate/bondholder enriching pyramid scheme that owns the Herald and Sun papers you line hamster cages with, is demanding that editors and writers be more right-wing. Don’t worry though, you’ll likely be covering some percentage of their payroll with your tax dollars in the near future.
💉Facing falling vaccination rates, Quebec hires people to do something truly groundbreaking: talking to people and giving them facts to inform their actions. (Spoiler: it’s working pretty well). Expect these to be the first jobs cut by their braindead provincial swine-lords.
Comrades International
💊Health care in the United States is so unaffordable an elderly couple killed themselves because health insurance poverty was going to make them just as dead.
🕵️The FBI is essentially reviving COINTELPRO and aims to infiltrate racial justice organizations. This comes after the defunding of high profile anti-white supremacy programs shortly after Trump was inaugurated.
💤Libs want the Mueller Report to matter so bad they’ll even make a cartoon of it just so someone, anyone will do something. (They won’t).
🎣Everyone at the Alberta Advantage has terminal Mark Fisher brain, and you should too.
🤷♀️It seems a bit trite to continually tell you all that things are bad, but what else can we tell you? Things are certainly bad. The question now is where we go from here.
🍋When life gives you lemons, lemonade. When life gives you a planet covered in drought-ravaged forests that are in a constant state of either on-fire or soon-to-be-on-fire, use all that smoke and ash to study how fucked we are in the event of a nuclear winter.
🌊Yeah there is a paper war over water in Arizona right now, whatever. Wake me up in 20 years when the water wars involve guns.
💯101 notes on the L.A. Tenants Union.
Upcoming Local Praxis (Useful and Otherwise)
✏️Charter schools are a fucking nightmare and they are going to wash over this province like a tidal wave of fecal slurry. SOS AB is showing a documentary about what dogshit they are in early September and you should go see it.
Goodbye for now. No snitching. Oink oink.
A Quick Note: if you want us to include an article, petition, link to an event, or just a really funny joke, drop us a quick line at AlbertaAdvantageNewsletter [at] gmail [dot] com. We make no promises, but many hands make light work, and we’d love to hear from you!
This volume contains writing by Kate Jacobson. The newsletter is edited by Clinton Hallahan.