Did You Ever Get That Feeling?

 



Comments

  1. Northern PoVDecember 31, 2021 at 7:22 AM

    Today's Nat Post has one of those 'Poor little Alberta' epistles.
    It ends with a self-own, boom/bust delusional and oblivious bit:
    “No one in Alberta cared much about slagging Ottawa, because we were having a big party.”

    https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/alienation-is-fuelling-a-new-bigger-alberta-agenda-we-wasted-the-last-20-years


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibDecember 31, 2021 at 9:26 AM

      I came across that headline the other day but decided it probably wasn't worth my time. It wasn't. It's the now standard Alberta drivel. Their grief and woes are all the work of "the other" - i.e. Ottawa.

      Ottawa can't fix what Albertans broke. They chose not to adopt Peter Lougheed's prescription for petro-prosperity in favour of the "pigs at the trough" policy under Klein and all of his successors. If they're looking for their 20 lost years, there it is.

      From the energy giants' perspective it's a bit like that Gordon Lightfoot song, "That's what you get for loving me." It's that line, "Everything you had is gone, as you can see. That's what you get for loving me."

      What are they left with? About 8,000 abandoned oil wells and those magnificent bitumen tailing ponds visible to the naked eye from space. There's your 20 lost years. A classic 'boom and bust' economy that has sucked the life out of the province.

      Now they're snapping and snarling like a pit bull. Only it's a dog with no teeth, none.

      What are they going to do, leave? And go where? They keep their fantasy alive by assuming British Columbia would throw in with them. Why? Perhaps they imagine that the US would be a better suitor because it needs a supersized Love Canal. Who cares? Not I.





      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na...
Read more