MAPA

Make Polio Great Again

We used to have progressive income taxes that did this.

Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk pulled them because “trickle down, a rising tide lifts all boats, thousand points of light, blah blah blah”

Steve Irwin would want anomalocaris

As we’re seeing in the US now, and the in the UK with the ratfucking of Jeremy Corbyn, the owners of the mainstream media are not interested in covering actual left-wing values. Singh isn’t great–I preferred Angus–but anything progressive he says will either get laundered by the media, or ignored completely

What just happened with the LA Times and the Washington Post vis a vis endorsing Harris should be a warning sign to progressives everywhere: the media, or at least it’s owners, are already in the tank for the political right. It doesn’t matter how much you try to be serious or sensible: the mass media will ignore or belittle you, while they throw softballs to the Conservatives.

It’s especially an issue in Canada, where media ownership consolidation is worse than it is in the US.

This isn’t to let the NDP off the hook: they need someone like Bernie Sanders, someone willing to bang the class-war drum, but what they’re getting are consensus-builders who aren’t much better than Trudeau et al.

It would have to be an outsider candidate, and the LPC party structure does not do well with outsiders.

If you’ve ever experienced dealing with the LPC, you can see why: they’re primary composed of compulsive board-of-directors members. Every Liberal representative and most of the party and riding executives are all from the same incestuous BoD members. They encounter each other all the time in their professional circles: they’re on the committee for this, the board for that, the council for something else, the executive director for fill in the blank. They know each other because they’re each other’s lawyers, estate agents, consultants and so forth.

They’re so socially inbred that it’s incredibly difficult for an outsider to break in.

And before you say “All politicians are like this”, they aren’t:

• the NDP is getting this way, but they’re not there yet; with the weakening of organized labour, more of them are from the Director class, but a lot are still union folk and a few are student radicals. They’re nowhere near as institutionalized as the Liberals
• the Cons are composed of a mix of small-business douchebags and grifter-ideologues (sometimes in the same body!). It’s actually pretty easy to break into the CPC: just have money and be a loud, obnoxious dick; support is something you can buy.
• the Greens are pretty much split between true-believers that don’t like the NDP’s professionalism, and grifters that are working a green angle for their next scam. Again, easy to break into if you’re loud enough. (side note, it’s scary how many failed Green candidates pivot to the Conservatives).

Compared to the above, the Liberals place a much, much higher value on consensus and favour-trading, and have a visceral reaction against outsiders.

By Liberal standards, Trudeau is an outsider candidate. What the LPC wanted was a Dionne or Ignatieff.

I really would like a patty that doesn’t pretend to be meat. Something like old-school veggie patties from the pre-Yves, pre-Beyond era. More of a veggie fritter, I suppose.

I know people want the meat-burger experience, and that’s fine. I’d like an option that doesn’t resemble meat.

A guilty pleasure of mine is the Ikea veggie dog with cabbage and fried onions and mustard. Kinda like that.

Mobsters, not clowns.

OPC MPPs are exactly the kind of small-business douchebags that get really upset about any attempts to correct them.

Just so you know, this appears to be cover for some other goodies in the same bill:

• Ford’s turbo’ing past the environmental assessment for Highway 413
• He’s also bypassing the need to use (striking) civil engineers for the 413

The 413 will make his developer cronies a lot of money; everything else is identity politics garbage to get the bill through.

This is Greenbelt 2.0.

As someone who lives beside an urban park with a lot of people tenting in it, I do hear what you’re saying, and we do need to do both: house people who can accept it, and incarceration–humane, safe and rare–for people who can’t.

It doesn’t look like it’ll matter: the Canadian economy is too dependent on real estate developers getting rich, and that’s who has the ear of our leaders.

I’d love to see property prices collapse and corporate landlords take it on the chin. Maybe it would result in more owner-owned businesses and fewer corporate and franchisees? Maybe it would mean more and more affordable housing instead of shoebox condos on top of a Starbucks+Winners+Bank+Loblaw

Just so everyone knows, the real reason for this appears to be buried in the bill: Doug wants to sidestep striking civil engineers, as well as bypass having to do an environmental assessemnt, on Highway 413.

The bike lanes nonsense is a red herring to distract from Doug once again trying to get something done for his donor base: land developers.

This…this can’t be serious, can it?

Or is this a “Trudeau is a racist because he calls out racism and that makes me feel bad” kind of thing? Because I see that a lot.

Or the actual being convicted for civil rights violations for refusing to rent to black people? Or, well, there’s a list

Can we…please just build housing directly? Just, like, build it? Not bribe billionaires, not offer P3 partnerships, just employ people, move dirt and hammer things together?

I’m glad to see this, and as someone who’s lived next to a park in a downtown where people are tenting (which, let’s be honest, has become a nexus of drug dealing, fencing and low-grade violence), this can’t come soon enough.

If this doesn’t bump the poll numbers, expect them to start talking about sex ed and drag-queen story hour next.

Alabama Burning

The North goes orange, and even they’re wobbling a little.

The rural and suburban ridings are reliably, depressingly, blue.

If you don’t have a family doctor today you are going to wait months if not years to get one if you are in a busy area.

If you live in a non-busy area, expect to wait years, if not decades. I live in a smaller city in southern Ontario, and our wait list is getting longer every year. I’ve not had a doctor since 2018.

He wins in urban areas

He wins in suburban areas, as do all conservatives: above a certain density across the country if not the entire world, urban spaces reject conservatism. That map you linked to pretty much tells that story.

Where do you think all the “urban elites want to make you gay, take away your pickup truck and make you drink plant-based beer” comments come from?

And Danielle Smith. And Francois Legault.

And while we’re at it, hopefully this rot won’t take root in BC, either.