#open canada

[makarshughes]

stars @ canucks \ march 28, 2024.

[dudethatsmyundeaduncle]

Tim Drake is the kind of guy who pushes up his glasses anime style before bragging to you about his boyfriends sweet rack. (and when nobody believes him and he shows them a picture everyone says its AI cuz Kryptonians are Uncanny Valley pretty)

[racewinnerlandonorris]

this seems like they slightly (slightly) took into account the environment with the choice of double headers and been adjusted so there isn’t so many triple headers

[opendirectories]

[three-headed-monster]

as dylan cozens would say, let’s fucking go!

[herteitr-runar]

i can't thank everyone here enough for the amount of support on my stuff so far 💞

i still have hetalia requests open - now for both art styles (chibi and cartoon doodle)!

feel free to send me an anon ask with any characters you'd like me to draw, regardless if i have already drawn them before or not (:

[i don't draw ships or anything of the likes - but definitely will draw more than 1 character on a canvas!]

[nhothicket]

I- I'm sorry, but I need more band AU Ethodubs.

PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU

Never be sorry I dropped everything to draw somethin I was so excited! (I'm a slow artist whoops) So, thank you for asking, I hope this is good! ^v^

ft. My first attempt at drawing Pause and Beef, I hope I did them justice.

without text under the cut ;>

[mudwerks]

Official Opening of UFO Landing Pad, St. Paul, Alberta, 1967

Provincial Archives of Alberta, PA.4272/4

[stirringwinds]

we’ll meet again someday. people who’ve been as close as we’ve been always meet again.

😔 so, i’m having brainrot for the concept of 1990s ned/can distancing due to ned/pan rekindling: fifty years is a long and meaningful human marriage. but nations exist beyond human lifetimes, bearing centuries upon centuries of feelings and histories. and maybe, that’s where the gulf in experiences between a younger and older nation emerges: the sentiment that ‘i still hold gratitude and affection for you—but he and i were together for 300 years before that. i thought it ended—but i’m feeling that pull once more.’ the painting is a print of van gogh’s ‘almond blossoms’, which was influenced by hokusai’s ‘bullfinch and weeping cherry’ and hiroshige’s ‘plum park in kameido.’

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Thankful for class consciousness

On November 27, I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Before the term "ecology" came along, people didn't know they were on the same side. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer – what does the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere?

But as James Boyle has written, the term "ecology" welded together a thousand issues into a single movement. When we talk about "looking at our world through a lens," this is what we mean – apply the right analytical lens and a motley assortment of disparate causes becomes a unified, coherent project:

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=dlj

Unfettered, planet-destroying, worker immiserating corporate power is only possible in the absence of such a lens. Before neoliberalism can destroy our lives, it must first convince us that we are all disconnected. "There is no such thing as society," isn't just an empty slogan: it's a weapon for dismantling the democratically accountable structures that can stand against industrial tyrants.

That's why neoliberalism is so viciously opposed to all kinds of solidarity, why corporate apologists insist that the only elections that matter are the ones where you "vote with your wallet." It's no surprise that the side with the thickest wallets wants to replace ballots with dollars!

Today, at long last, after generations of deadly corporate power-grabs, we are living through an ecology moment where all kind of fights are coalescing into one big fight: the fight to save democracy from oligarchy.

There are many tributaries flowing into this mighty river, but two of the largest are antitrust and labor. Antitrust seeks to ensure that our world is regulated by democratically accountable lawmakers who deliberate in public, rather than shareholder-accountable monopolists who deliberate in smoke-filled rooms. Labor seeks to ensure that contests between profit for the few and prosperity for the many are decided in favor of people, not profit.

This coalition is so powerful that the ruling class has never stopped attacking it. Indeed, the history of US antitrust law can be viewed as a succession of ever-more-insistent laws enacted solely to make it clear to deliberately obtuse judges that competition law is aimed at corporations, not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Rising corporate power and declining worker power is bad for all of us. The failure of successive US administrations to block airline mergers led to sky-high prices and a proliferation of "junk fees" that can double the price of a ticket. The monopoly carriers stand to make $118b this year from these fees:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90981005/airlines-fees-118-billion-dark-patterns

The consolidation of the agricultural sector led to cartels that conspired to rig the prices of our food. These Les Mis LARPers rigged the price of bread!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1.6883783

Remember eggflation? Nearly all the eggs in US grocery stores come from a single company, Cal-Maine, which owns dozens of brands, including "Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs":

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

With all our eggs in one basket, it was easy for a single company to rig the egg market, blaming everything from bird flu to Russian invasion of Ukraine for doubling egg prices while their profits shot up by 65%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

Antitrust isn't just about monopoly – it's also about oligopoly. The American meat cartel pretends that it's not rigging markets by outsourcing its price-fixing to a "clearinghouse" called Agri Stats:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Agri-Stats gets data from all the Big Meat companies, "anonymizes" it, and publishes it back to its subscribers, who use the service to coordinate across-the-board price-hikes that have cost the public billions in price gouging (meanwhile, Big Meat was able to secure $50b in public subsidies).

For forty years, governments have ceded power to "autocrats of trade" who usurped control "over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

But that era is coming to an end. In the past year, American regulators have blocked airline mergers and promulgated rules banning junk fees. They've dragged price-fixing clearinghouses into court:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-turkey-eggs-and-air-travel-just

They're getting results, too: for the second year in a row, turkey prices are down. Cranberries, too (18%). Same for whipping cream (25%). Pie crusts are down. So are russet potatoes. Airfares are down 13.2%.

The egg cartel just lost a long-running court case over the last egg price-fixing campaign, which gouged Americans from 1990-2008:

https://www.pymnts.com/cpi_posts/kellogg-kraft-secure-victory-in-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-egg-producers

The same fact-pattern that was revealed in that court case is repeated in this year's eggflation scandal:

https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action-Letter-to-FTC-Chair-Lina-Khan.pdf

That's terrific ammo for the FTC, and will doubtless benefit the Democrats running against would-be Indiana senator John Rust, whose family owns convicted egg cartel member Rose Acre Farms and whose wife just stepped down as chair of the board.

One underappreciated aspect of the global war on corporate power is that the same corporations commit the same crimes in countries all over the world, which means that whenever any government establishes evidence of those crimes, they are of use to all the other governments. Competition enforcers from the UK, EU, USA, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere are coordinating to target the Big Tech cartel. Maybe Google and Facebook and Apple are bigger enough to resist any one of those governments – but all of them?

https://cmadataconference.co.uk/

One notable absence from the anti-monopoly coalition is Canada. While other countries merely stopped enforcing their competition laws in the neoliberal era, Canada never had a good competition law to enforce. Canada's official tolerance for monopolies has allowed a handful of companies to seize control over the economy of Canada and the lives of Canadians:

https://www.canadaland.com/shows/commons-monopoly/

These monopolies are largely controlled by powerful families, Canada's de facto aristocracy, whose wealth and power make them above the law and subordinate the country's democratic institutions to billionaires' whims:

https://www.canadaland.com/tag/dynasties/

At long last, Canada has called time on oligarchy. Last week's Fall Economic Statement included an announcement of a muscular new competition law, including new merger guidelines, a new "abuse of dominance" standard, and Right to Repair rules:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7132855021548769282/

The law also includes interoperability mandates for Canada's highly concentrated – and deeply corrupt – banking sector. These measures are strikingly similar to new measures just introduced in the US by the CFPB:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

The arrival of Canada's first fit-for-purpose competition rule coincides with all kinds of solidaristic movements in Canada that are fighting corporate power from the bottom up. Even Ontario, led by one of the most corrupt premiers in provincial history, can't break its teachers' union:

https://globalnews.ca/news/10105600/ontario-elementary-teachers-reach-contract-deal/

It's not just workers who benefit from solidarity: Tenants' unions have formed across the province in response to corporate takeovers of scarce rental stock. These finance-sector landlords have armies of lawyers who've figured out how to bypass rent-control rules and evict tenants who balk. Rather than rolling over, tenants' unions are organizing waves of rent-strikes:

https://macleans.ca/longforms/rent-strikes-canada/

As with Big Tech, the illegal tactics of the rental sector aren't confined to a single nation. In America, Wall Street landlords have dramatically increased the price of housing and kicked off an eviction epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

And as with Big Meat, landlords use arm's-length clearing houses to rig rental markets, coordinating across-the-board rent hikes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

In other words: to fix the housing market, tenants all over the world need to learn the tactics of labor unions. Housing regulators have to learn from agricultural regulators. Americans tenants have to learn from Canadians. These aren't 1,000 different fights – they're one big fight, and the coalition for dismantling corporate power is vast and powerful.

The most powerful weapons our bosses have is convincing us that we are weak and they are strong – so strong that we shouldn't even try to fight them. But solidarity is absurdly powerful, which is why they go to such great lengths to discredit it. In Sweden, the solidarity strikes against Tesla – who refuses to recognize its maintenance workers' union – have spread to nine unions.

Tesla can't get its cars offloaded at the ports. It can't get its showrooms cleaned. No one will deliver its mail. No one will fix its chargers. The strike is spreading to Germany, and workers at its giant Berlin factory is set to walk out:

https://www.metafilter.com/201514/Swedish-Tesla-workers-go-on-strike

There's something delicious about how palpably frustrated Elon Musk is by all this, as he realizes that neither his billions nor his bully pulpit are a match for workers in solidarity:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-23/elon-musk-calls-swedish-tesla-strikes-insane-as-impact-spreads

It's a reminder of just how fragile and weak billionaires are, when we stop believing in them and deferring to them. Rebecca Solnit's latest Guardian column adds up the ways that allowing billionaires to run the show puts us all in danger:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis

They are the unelected "autocrats of trade" who control "the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life." They are the force that this new ecology movement is coalescing to fight: across borders, across sectors, across identities. No matter whether you are a worker, a tenant, a voter, a shopper or a citizen, your enemy is the billionaire class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/24/coalescence/#solidarnosc

[makarshughes]

canadiens @ canucks \ march 21, 2024.

[ariaterramoon]

Eli is Canadian?!?

It's never outright canonically stated, BUT Slugterra IS a Canadian show, AND Eli's va, Sam Vincent, is Canadian.

The script has Canadian lingo in there, easiest example of this is Eli calling his slugs "bud". Oh! In ROTE, one of Will's security questions mentions a cabin they used to go to, Canadians are notorious for going to their cabins for vacation!

(Do you know how many of my classmates went to cabins? I was so jealous lol I want to go to a cabin)

Sooo it's 99% likely he is Canadian. Aaaand I'm Canadian and I'm biased soooo, Eli's Canadian for me lol (there's rarely any Canadian mc imo lemme have this 😭)

I like to think he's from the GTA area, from Hispanic heritage.

It's why I included hockey and lacrosse in my poll yesterday, Eli is Canadian, and no one can tell me otherwise 😤😤😤

EDIT — clarified my first sentence as I am literally using the canon as evidence lmao but you get what I meant.

Og: There is no canonical evidence.

Edited: It's never outright canonically stated

[androgynousdreamerenemy]

Help this ongoing fundraising campaign by making a donation and spreading the word.

Hello, my name is Charles, and I’m reaching out to you with a humble heart. I am battling severe Type 1 Diabetes, and my condition has deteriorated to the point where I can no longer support myself without assistance. Maintaining my diabetes management requires constant supplies, regular checkups, and medication, all of which are now beyond my financial means.

I used to work as a Jua Kali artisan, a job I was passionate about. Unfortunately, due to the relentless demands of managing my health, my business collapsed. Frequent hospital visits and the high costs of treatment forced me to spend all my savings and business capital. Now, I am unable to perform the physically demanding work I once did and have struggled to find a less strenuous, stable job.

Despite applying for numerous white-collar jobs, I have not been successful. However, I remain hopeful that one day, I will secure a position that allows me to cover my medical expenses and daily needs. Until that day comes, I am turning to the kindness of others to help me through these challenging times.

☆ https://gogetfunding.com/support-charles/

1. Donate: Any amount you can give will make a significant difference. Even small contributions add up quickly.

2. Share: Please share my story with your friends, family, and social networks. The more people who know, the better chance I have of reaching my goal.

3. Encourage: Your words of encouragement and prayers mean a lot to me. Knowing that there are people who care can lift my spirits and keep me going.

[opendirectories]

[oatbugs]

procrastination is starting to have its consequences finally

[state-of-calamity]

Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park - Saskatchewan

15-Sep-2020 | R. Clark-Martin

#0033 Postcard