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I know you’re all busy fracking that poll, but this is relevant. It’s all about the oil, and Charles Pierce always puts it so well. As we await the decision on whether or not TransCanada will get to complete the northern leg of our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death-funnel aimed at transporting the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel from the poisoned moonscape of Alberta down the spine of North America to Texas, where what already hasn’t spilled out and killed ducks and bunny rabbits — and the agricultural economy of half the country — will be put on ships and sent out to the rest of the world, we should check to see how the pipeline system is working elsewhere. It’s not working so well. A Northern Alberta pipeline sprung a little leak. A leak that spewed 9.5 million liters of waste water into Canadian wetlands. A spokesman for the company running the pipeline, Texas-based Apache Corp. (do you Canadians know you’ve got fucking Texas oilmen running loose in your backyard, with boldly named racist companies?), said it was just “salty water” with “trace amounts” of oil. Right. Do you believe him? The substance is the inky black colour of oil, and the treetops are brown. Across a broad expanse of northern Alberta muskeg, the landscape is dead. It has been poisoned by a huge spill of 9.5 million litres of toxic waste from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta, the third major leak in a region whose residents are now questioning whether enough is being done to maintain aging energy infrastructure. “Trace amounts”. OK. “Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha First Nation, whose members run traplines in an area that has seen oil and gas development since the 1950s. Oh. Well that sounds…innocuous. This is where capitalism fails, among many other places. Look to the...
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They’ve mastered our technology.

Kickstarter has a lovely new project to fund: a self-published book on how to seduce women. Well, if you call this seduction. All the greatest seducers in history could not keep their hands off of women. They aggressively escalated physically with every woman they were flirting with. They began touching them immediately, kept great body language and eye contact, and were shameless in their physicality. Even when a girl rejects your advances, she KNOWS that you desire her. That’s hot. It arouses her physically and psychologically. And that’s one of the milder recommendations from the author of this book. I am relieved that I was never exposed to these kinds of ‘dating tips’ back when I was a-courtin’—I might be even more of a jerk now, and I’d probably be living alone. If you’re appalled that such a book should be so grossly rewarded, register a complaint with Kickstarter.

Because there are a heck of a lot of people who need to eat of it.

You know what’s really manly? Wearing diapers. If you need to wear some special protection as you get older, there’s no shame in it, and like the ad says, “millions of guys deal with the same thing.” But so do millions of women. Rather than pandering to masculine sensitivities and encouraging people to mentally segregate themselves, why can’t we say these problems are a human thing? All these products with the marketing ploy of “for men” or “for women” (unless, of course, they’re actually dealing with unique aspects of the biology of the sexes) are just shoring up walls between us.