A Funkaoshi Production

The set opens with Triumph. That’s how you do it.

The police services board in Thunder Bay was disbanded and an administrator appointed in its place on Friday after a report found relations between the force and the city’s Indigenous community were in a crisis that constitute an “emergency.”

It’s unreal just how fucked up Thunder Bay seems to be. I have been listening to the Thunder Bay podcast from Canadaland, which is excellent. Each episode i’m all, “Well this is fucked up. Where do you even go from here?” And then the next episode is even more fucked up.

He was one of the greats. This is a good collection of links and stories about Ricky Jay.

An interesting concept you see playing out now. Crazy.

This recent election was such a shit show. Our provincial government is terrible, and my only hope is that they fuck up so badly they can’t elected again for decades. Ford is a petty tyrant.

We shouldn’t be doing anything that props up the Saudi government.

Well this is a downer.

The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes. Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate’s time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.

There is! And her opponent has found it.

The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.

John Tory is the worst. Please vote for Jen Keesmaat, who isn’t perfect, but at least has some vision and passion to her.

Yes!

I’m not sure how to sum this up neatly, but it’s a good read.

Everyone talks about the country falling apart in November 2016, but maybe it fell apart in November 1996, when America went to see The English Patient. What if we had all turned to each other and said, “This garbage is our idea of rave-worthy cinema? Anyone else see a big problem here?”, and then there had been a massive riot?

This pull quote doesn’t sum up the article, but it’s pretty great.

In the negotiations over Uber’s regulation two years ago, the city tried to placate cab companies worried about competition by levelling safety standards down, rather than up. That is, instead of imposing the same rules on Uber that the taxi firms faced, it eliminated most of the rules for everyone.

Radheyan Simonpillai interviews M.I.A. for Now.

Interesting piece from Steven Zhou about what’s going on in Markham.

This guy is somehow a bigger dirt bag than his dirt bag brother.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs Recalls Memories of Her Famous Father. This might be a really good book. This excerpt is great.

A set of dice that have the following properties: 1) There will never be ties. 2) Each possible ordering of the players (determined by highest result, next highest result, etc) has a mathematically equal chance of occurring. 3) The above conditions hold for every subset of the whole set.

Quite the headline.

Disgusting behaviour. Unsurprising, sadly.

“In recent years, American culture has increasingly been following a playbook made in Japan.”