by Sean Orr | With the death of Thatcher yesterday, Free Market fundamentalists everywhere have been weeping into their copies of Atlas Shrugged: Margaret Thatcher the revolutionary architect of modern Britain. If only the Free Market was actually a free market!
COPE springs eternal: COPE will challenge Vision for Vancouver mayor’s job in 2014. Unfortunately, most of their campaigning will come in the form of ill-advised pickets at fancy restaurants and bilious blog posts.
And speaking of bilious blog posts: Downtown Eastside Tech Hub: City commits to “capital incubation” at the expense of housing and jobs. I understand that this symbol of the paradoxical relationship between the open drug market and policing (the flagship of the social experiment known as the DTES; the highly visible first pillar) is important, but do you really think someone would want to live in the old Police Station? Also, shouldn’t the government be opening up infrastructure all over the place? Does this blogger at The Mainlander see the Vancouver Film School (with their buildings swarming Victory Square) as first-level agents of gentrification? I mean, is she against all capital, or just some?
Report: Nation’s Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization. Sorry, I just had to.
The real working class of Vancouver: Divisions and Disparities in Lotus Land: The Social Geography of Income Polarization in Metro Vancouver. Social Housing In The Suburbs (SHITS) now!
Report provides tools for adapting to sea level rise. So wait…the BC Liberals now believe in climate change? Damn hippies!
Local bloke exposes hole in Liquid Natural Gas: Methane Beneath our Feet. It is better to read this entire article out loud in the Daniel Plainview voice.
Sometimes when I’m bored I read the letters in The Province: Letters: Roberto Luongo, Ten Commandments, climate change. “Hatred and anger are rampant and increasing.” Actually, aside from pockets of leftover archaic religious extremism, society is advancing by leaps and bounds. I’m sorry, but when I think of the Ten Commandments I think of Charleston Heston clutching a rifle in the wake of the Columbine massacre. It’s just so hard not to.
Why I voted to keep the HST (as horribly mismanaged as it was): Why PST in B.C. marks return of a ‘profoundly stupid tax’. Did people even read the question on the ballot? It wasn’t “do you like that the Liberals totally lied about it?”. Nor was it “hey, do you like taxes?” It was “do you want to take this wad of your own tax dollars that the Feds are giving us to streamline our tax system at a reduced rate of 10% because we fucked the whole thing so badly?” Seriously, I can’t wait until the NDP re-introduces it in…oh, let’s say around 2016.
Shout out: You Say Party’s Stephen O’Shea becomes Green Party candidate. #attaboy