Maybe he's just an idiot

Let's start the day with one from the local politics file.

My home town has municipal elections happening in just over two weeks, and there are (surprise!) quite a few people who want to be the next mayor of Calgary. Apparently the incumbent's 52% approval rating is just low enough for a crop of opportunists to toss their hat in the ring, hoping to get lucky. Most of them are simply boring, with lazy, boilerplate "policy" platforms that begin and end with "I'll lower your taxes while maintaining program spending at current levels."

[As a quick aside, I just want to note that any politician who promises to reduce revenue generation while maintaining or increasing spending is not worth your vote. This is literally the laziest, and most dishonest, thing that a politician can say to you. They know that this is not possible, but they either think you're too stupid to realize that, or they just don't care enough to have bothered thinking up some actual policies to run on. Do not vote for anyone who makes this promise to you, and then refuses to explain their plan for making this work.]

However, there is one candidate who really does manage to stand out from the rest of this year's crop of opportunists, panderers, and chancers, one candidate whose sheer laziness and stupidity truly astounds. That man is Bill Smith.

Bill Smith joined the race by decrying Calgary's property tax rate, which he claimed had increased by 51% over his incumbent opponent's terms of office... a claim so ludicrous that even other challengers for the mayor's office had to disagree. Local property taxes were going to be his signature issue, and his first public pronouncement on the issue proved, conclusively, that he doesn't understand how property taxes work.

[Incidentally, the property tax rate, or mill rate, in Calgary has risen from $3.25 per $1000 of property value to $3.91 per $1000 of property value, and increase of 20.3% -- your tax bill might have increased if the value of your property increased because of, say, inflation, but that's not a tax rate increase. And, yes, Bill Smith was promising to reduce your tax rate while maintaining program spending... somehow. Lazy, lazy, lazy...]

But Bill Smith isn't done. No, no, he's a contender, and if he can't make waves with the property tax issue (because he's too lazy to learn how property tax rates work, and too lazy to put together an actual policy platform), he'll just blanket the city with advertising, hoping that name recognition will somehow produce electoral gains that he hasn't bothered to actually, you know, earn.

Which is how we get this ad, as reported by CBC News:

Yes, those red dots you see on that image are, indeed, spelling mistakes. Because why would a candidate this lazy have bothered to properly proof read his own fucking ad before running it in the local Sun?

From CBC News:

A full-page newspaper ad for Calgary mayoral candidate Bill Smith is making the rounds on social media — for all the wrong reasons.

The ad, placed by Smith's campaign team, ran in Sunday's edition of the Calgary Sun. It was rife with spelling and grammar mistakes, ranging from spelling "council" as "coulcil" and "whether" as "wheather."

[...]

Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, says the old advertising adage "any publicity is good publicity" is not accurate.

"Bad publicity damages the brand you're trying to sell," Middleton said Tuesday, adding the mistakes can impact Smith's credibility, especially among undecided voters.

"So what this would signal to me is, if this guy can't even supervise accurate communication in an ad, how good is he going to be running budgets and looking after legislation as mayor?"

Mayor Naheed Nenshi had responded to news about his ever-so-slightly-sliding approval numbers by saying that he wasn't worried. With ten candidates of this caliber splitting the anti-Nenshi vote, I can understand why he's so confident.

Lock them up?

After an ugly 2016 Presidential campaign which saw Donald Trump routinely leading chants of, "Lock her up! Lock her up!" from his podium, this latest hypocrisy on the part of Team Trump is truly breathtaking.

As reported by Gizmodo:

Less than a day after it was revealed that presidential son-in-law and White House senior advisor Jared Kushner used a personal email account to conduct government business, Ivanka Trump, daughter of and special advisor to President Donald Trump, is facing the same scrutiny.

On Monday, legal watchdog group American Oversight published a batch of emails between Ivanka Trump and the Small Business Administration (SBA) acquired under the Freedom of Information Act. The emails show her corresponding with SBA administrator Linda McMahon using a personal email address.

Copied on the correspondence are: Dina Powell, the US deputy national security advisor for strategy; Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff; and Mary Bradfield, McMahon’s chief of staff.

[...]

“Yet again we see that there’s one rule for the Trump family and another for everyone else,” said Austin Evers, American Oversight executive director. “It’s simply breathtaking that both Ivanka and Jared Kushner would conduct government on a personal email account after running a campaign centered on that very issue. The fact that they would brazenly ignore rules governing email use raises even more questions about their judgement and fitness to hold positions in the White House."

#IOKIYAR, apparently. On the plus side, with Robert Muller circling the Trumps like a slightly-starved shark, it probably is only a matter of time until one or more of them actually does get locked up. Still, I guess this emerging piece of news goes some distance to explaining why "Daddy" Donald randomly picked a fight with the entire NFL on the weekend (that fight isn't going well, BTW).

John McCain finally becomes the maverick that he's claimed to be for years.

I'll admit it: I've spent years thinking that U.S. Senator John McCain's "maverick" reputation was mostly smoke.

Yes, he stood up in the Senate and argued passionately against legalizing torture... but he then voted for the bill that legalized "enhanced interrogation," even after describing those interrogation measures as torture. Yes, he co-sponsored the DREAM Act... but then he ran for the U.S. Presidency (with Sarah Palin at his side) on a campaign promise of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senator McCain has basked in his "maverick" rep, while voting in lockstep with his party 95% of the time. He endorsed, and claimed to have voted for, Donald Trump for President. None of this is maverick behaviour.

So it was a shock to almost everybody when he walked onto the Senate floor in July and cast one of three GOP "no" votes that killed their horrible, horrible Obamacare repeal bill. And now, just to prove that he really did mean it, he's done it again, declaring opposition to yet another rushed Obamacare repeal effort and probably killing it before the bill can even be brought to the floor for debate.

From CBC News:

The Obamacare repeal zombie rose yet again this week for its last, best chance to gut the current health law — until the Republican senator who put it down in July returned on Friday to deliver another conclusive blow.

This time, it seems, it's over. Maybe. Probably. Almost definitely.
Arizona Sen. John McCain released a statement Friday afternoon confirming he will vote No on the Graham-Cassidy health bill, a resurrected effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.

[...]

[...]

"I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried," McCain said in a statement. "Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it."

McCain waffled on whether to support this iteration due to the lack of debate, hearings and revisions that comprise the deliberative process known as "regular order" in Congress. On Friday, he finally said he "cannot in good conscience" support the proposal without a full analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

The nonpartisan CBO did not have time, given the haste to jam the bill through for a vote before the end of a crucial Sept. 30 deadline, to calculate costs and insurance losses.

John McCain was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986. He's been a loyal republican, voting with his party 95% of the time, for thirty-two years. But now, thirty-two years later, in the twilight of that long career, while fighting for his life against an aggressive brain tumour... now, John McCain has finally decided to actually behave like the maverick that he's reputed to be.

It's got to start somewhere...

... so let's start with a short recap, shall we?

I really wasn't intending to be a political blogger. For one thing, political blogs are a lightning rod for trolls of all kinds, and I hate feeling like I'm feeding the trolls. For another thing, while I might have opinions on the doings of the day, I don't often feel like I actually have anything constructive to add to the discussion.

Sometimes, though, I just can't help myself. Sometimes, I just need to vent. Which is how I found myself posting political commentary on a tech blog. It was like a fart in a crowded elevator. Or like a low-rent Gizmodo.

And I get it; I really do get where they're coming from, over at Gizmodo and Kotaku. Sometimes, the state of the world is something you simply can't ignore. Sometimes, the topic you're avoiding becomes conspicuous by its absence.

And so, I posted about the nature and importance of free speech, and how Google's firing of The Anti-Diversity Engineer was not a violation of his freedoms. I found myself blogging about the poetic, plosive, pungent power of "fuck," and why it perfectly described what was happening in Charlotteville at the time. I wrote about how there is no alt-left movement, told you why you should totally boycott Dell Computers, found another reason to hate Julian Assange, wondered how many generations it would take for the USA to live down having elected Trump to the presidency, and capped it off by pointing to an excellent WaPo article about Houston's third "500-year" storm in three years... along with some thoughts of my own, naturally.

I am a semi-professional dilettante. An expert in nothing, I nonetheless tend to read about everything. Here is where I intend to share those interesting tidbits that don't fit on my tech blog, or my blog about game design.

I don't expect this to be a regular thing. I don't expect to be posting here every day, or even every week. But I now know that I will need to vent, every so often, and it feels good to have a place for those primal screams. Even if nobody ever reads them. If you've found your way here, I hope that you find some of the same catharsis in reading these posts that I feel in writing them. Or, failing that, I hope that I at least managed to point you to an interesting tidbit of information that you hadn't encountered previously.

Welcome! Please be polite (I am, after all, Canadian, so politeness is the baseline assumption here), and may you take away something of value from having passed this way.