So. . .

The two-bit oil junkie that the enlightened voters of wannabe Texas-North installed as Gas Guzzler-in-Chief, Mr. Jason Kenney, has made common cause with Vladimir Putin of Russia, expressing admiration for the way he deals with environmental activists - that is arresting them and sending them to Siberia. "Instructive" he called it. Amnesty International thought this in poor taste, and wrote him a letter. Kenny, utterly unrepentant, wrote a nice-long open letter to the National Post attacking Amnesty International. 

That's right folks, you read all that correctly. To whit:

1) An elected representative of this country mused about jailing his political opponents.

2) An international organization dedicated to freeing jailed political opponents found it necessary to lecture an elected representative of this country. 

3) \Said representative told said organization to go fuck themselves.

Yuppers. Jason Kenny wants to go from two-bit gas guzzler to tin-pot-dictator - our very own Bolsonaro North. But that's all cool as long as he keeps the drills pumping, right?

The Kenney regime's always been fraught with absurdities. Neither he nor his supporters see any irony in condemning foreign money in the environmental movement, even as he turns the Provincial government into a PR branch for foreign oil companies. There's not a thought given to climate change, even as its apocalyptic implications become more obvious by the day. Now he's claiming the moral high-ground against frickin' Amnesty International for godssakes. Jason Kenney is invoking foreign dictators, but a US group commissioning a study by the Pembina Institute is a bad thing?

And don't go boo-hoo-hooing me about Alberta jobs. The busboys on the Titanic didn't want to lose their jobs either. In any other out-dated industry (and yes, getting useful energy out of that tarry bitumen crap is an expensive, inefficient, and primitive process) the unfortunate left-behinds of progress are told to buckle up and adapt. Adapt! Adapt! Adapt! But not here - this one has to go on forever, damn the consequences. And even as governments won't live a finger to slow down automation, or prevent multi-nationals from packing up and leaving (effectively making off with billions in bailouts), they will go full Stalin on any ecological measure with even a whiff of economic inconvenience.

Funny also, how a citizenry prepared to give up every liberty and principal to fight terrorism, or who lionize the generation who gave up everything to fight a war, won't continence a ten-cent rise at the gas pumps to resist climate-extinction. In Alberta, you can't even talk about it.

That's swell folks.