1 THE DEATH OF “BIG POTASH”? Okay, confession: I just wanted to use the phrase “Big Potash,” because it’s funny to me. And because things that are not funny and are instead sobering include the breakup of Eastern Europe’s largest potash conglomerate, which has so far caused Canada’s potash companies to see a substantial drop in stock prices and Australia’s BHP Billiton to reconsider expanding its Jansen mine. Cool times for the Saskatchewan economy up ahead.
2 NORTH CAROLINA SUCKS North Carolina’s Republican legislators have been busy for the last few weeks infuriating progressives by turning a typical racist bill about preventing “Sharia law” into an omnibus bill that puritanically restricts abortion and developing a draconian voter registration bill that essentially spits on the grave of the Voter Rights Act. Then they passed those bills and danced about it and the governor tried to make good by, no shit, giving a protestor some chocolate chip cookies. What a bunch of horrid assholes.
3 ACTUALLY, SCRATCH THAT, AMERICA SUCKS Cool, it’s really cool that a whistleblower can be prosecuted and sent to jail for potentially over a century. Keep in mind that Bradley Manning’s prosecutors did not successfully prove that he was aiding the enemy, which can pretty much only mean he wasn’t committing treason but rather behaving as a whistleblower, and Manning somehow still might wind up in prison for two generations. Cool.
4 LOOK I DON’T USE THE WORDS “REPRESSIVE STATE APPARATUS” LIGHTLY A witness to the shooting of 18 year-old Sammy Yatim says that, while Yatim looked “crazed” and was behaving in a menacing way, the knife-wielding teen never actually threatened his life, despite later being shot nine times by a police officer. As the Globe & Mail points out, uh, maybe situations like this do not always have to end with a series of fatal gunshot wounds, and so maybe Canada can stop pretending like it doesn’t have a problem with police abuse of deadly force like the rest of the global northwest does.
5 REGINA IS A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE I can’t figure out why there are two articles smooshed together into one article here, let alone why this seems to be in the sports section, but it means I only have to link to one page if I want to talk about Mayor Fougere talking about relieving traffic congestion downtown and the roadblocks facing the construction of a new indoor skatepark to replace the one that is being closed to make room for the new football stadium. And here is what I have to say about both those articles: AAARGGHGHHHGHHGHGHGHHG. (The best part is when a Cathedral resident complains about parking around Cornwall Centre when he could just go for a 35-minute walk at the literal absolute most, and then Vanessa Brown writes “Residents like Carlson are the type of people Mayor Michael Fougere has in mind with his latest proposal,” which seems like the most brutal criticism anyone could make of this shithole city’s dingus residents.)
6 THE WHITE MENACE MUST BE STOPPED In the wake of the Huntington Beach riots following Sunday’s US Open of Surfing (and in the wake of conservative talking heads in the States predicting, incorrectly, that the Zimmerman verdict would end in race riots), here’s Gawker’s Cord Jefferson calling for a frank discussion of the white culture of violence. I know a lot of folks who aren’t fond of Gawker but here’s what their writers look like at their best: funny, biting, brave, politically incisive, and right.
