Sorry for the one-day delay, but it is Canadian Thanksgiving (or as Canadians call it, "proper Thanksgiving, not like Americans have" and yes we say that every time) and yesterday I was eating food and then sleeping. It's a long weekend here, so just pretend!

BROWNED OUT AT THE HOTEL CALIFORNIA

Pacific Gas and Electric, the biggest power company in California, completely shut down power to in between 550,000 and 800,000 people this week (depending on whose estimates you believe, and the lower estimates are the company's so... probably go with the higher number here). Now, shutting down electricity to modern society for an extended period of time is.. bad, let's just go with that, because most of us lead electricity-dependent lives. I mean, even if you don't need an iron lung to survive, you will eventually need to eat food, and you probably want that food to have been refrigerated before you ate it, and cooked (if you don't have a barbecue or grill). Your business probably needs electricity to operate - one estimated loss of economic activity as a result of the power outage is $1.8 billion per day. And for those people who do need iron lungs or other powered life support technology to stay alive, well... (At least one such person has already died as a result of the power shortage.)

So why is this happening? Well, lefties on the Internet want to blame it all on capitalism, and that is sort of inaccurate, because it's actually a combination of climate change and capitalism. (Sorry to be predictable, but sometimes lefties are just right about things and this is most definitely one of those times.)

In short: PG&E is shutting down power to specific areas because it's concerned about wildfires. You may remember from last year that California wildfires have gotten progressively more apocalyptic in recent years. Partially this is because the wildfire season ends when winter rain starts, and climate change in California means, among other things, that the winter rainy season has started later and later in the year, which means the dry season when wildfires can potentially start has gotten longer and longer; the math isn't particularly hard here.

What has made wildfires worse is that real estate development in California has gradually extended out into areas that, well, have wildfires. This is pure sprawl in action: developers are building homes further and further into what was previously wilderness because the cities where people work are too expensive for most people to be able to buy or rent a home, and then the immediate suburbs got the same way, and then the exurbs, and now we're into the fourth wave out which, it turns out, need a catchy name involving both suburban sprawl and wildfires. (I have not yet invented one. Go nuts.)

When those new fireburbs get built, they need power lines, and all it takes in wildfire season is one downed power line throwing around sparks and fwoosh. PG&E was found liable for damages stemming from the biggest wildfire last year, the "Camp Fire" which killed 86 people. It's paid out billions of dollars in settlements for the Camp Fire, and it's not finished paying out yet. The company actually entered into a managed bankruptcy earlier this year to try to resolve its debts stemming from lawsuits, and it really can't afford to pay out more money if it starts another wildfire this year.

At this point you, a rational human being, might say "...so just be careful and don't start any fires." Which is possible! You just have to trim trees around power lines (so they can't down them) and clear out nearby dead brush (so there's no dry tinder to start fires). None of this actually prohibits PG&E from continuing to provide people with power. It's just that they've been neglecting maintenance for years, because maintenance costs money and costs equal lower profits. And since now doing all of the maintenance at once would mean spending a lot of money and being unprofitable in the short term, they've decided - correctly - that the profitable thing for the company to do is simply not provide power while there's risk of wildfire. Sure, they lose money for the next three months, but they'll lose less money than it would cost them to do proper maintenance, and you know at some point someone in that boardroom uttered the phrase "a duty to our shareholders." And there's no law actually requiring them to provide power, soooo...

THINGS GET WORSE FOR THE KURDS

Last week I wrote about how, in the wake of his obvious corruption coming unspooled, Donald Trump gave Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish territory in Syria, and the Turks have followed through immediately by attacking Kurds. There are plenty of atrocity videos online already if you want to see them (which you probably don't) or videos of Kurds begging American soldiers for help the Americans have been ordered not to provide (which you probably don't want to watch either).

Of course it's more complex than just Kurds getting slaughtered, because the Kurds - well, the Syrian Democratic Forces militia, who are basically just Kurds - have responded by cutting a deal with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to allow the Syrian army to enter the territory they control to defend against Turkish incursion. This is obviously a pretty desperate move, considering the SDF exists mostly because it wanted to carve out a chunk of Syria to become Kurdish-controlled territory and they were at war with the Syrian government because of this (and, you know, all the atrocities the government committed, which is why the Kurds wanted their own space in the first place). But they're between a rock and a hard place right now.

Also, a bunch of ISIS captives - you remember ISIS, right? The insane Salafist terrorist group that wanted to create its own fundamentalist state and go to war with the entire world, that was basically all but defeated around the beginning of this year? Well, the Kurds are - or, rather, were - guarding about ten thousand or so of them in prison camps, and it turns out when you suddenly get attacked by the Turkish army you don't have time to guard all of your prisoners so a couple thousand of them have already escaped. Letting one of the most psychotic terrorist groups in the world off of the mat where they were basically pinned seems to me like a bad idea, but on the other hand, I'm not Donald Trump who probably owed Turkey a favour because they let me build a hotel there.

All of this only took a week. Presumably things will get worse in the near future.

SPEAKIING OF LIGHT TREASON

The "did Donald Trump try to trade foreign aid for political favours from Ukraine ha ha of course he did" saga continued this week. The short short version, because I want to keep this to a single paragraph: multiple high-ups in the Trump administration have now testified to House committees that they provided advice (sometimes in writing) to the President that what was happening with Ukraine was a "clear counterintelligence risk" and that they were opposed to the plan being advanced by Trump and Rudy Giuliani. To get an idea of how stupid people thought all of this was, one of the people who testified about these issues this past week was former NSA head John Bolton, who is essentially a walking moustache obsessed with bombing the Middle East flat. The Ukraine plan was too dumb and too illegal for him.

CATALONIAN SECESSION II, OR "NOW THERE'S VIOLENCE"

I wrote in February about Catalonian secessionists getting more politically active, and things have recently broken out in riots. Riots are exciting! And awful, yes. But exciting! Let's discuss them.

The protests and riots are in response to a series of prison sentences that were handed out Monday morning to twelve Catalan political leaders for organizing the Catalan independence referendum in 2017. See, Spain's supreme court had ruled that the referendum itself was unconstitutional - ostensibly because the pro-referendum parties who had gotten it passed into law had not been procedurally correct, but realistically it was really because Spain's central government doesn't want there to be any official referendum on Catalonian independence. Most of Catalan went ahead and had the referendum anyway, and secession passed with 90 percent of the vote. Except, of course, only about 43 percent of the electorate turned out for the vote. Independence activists and politicians blame the low turnout on the Spanish government interfering with the vote (which they definitely did) and Spain's government says it was because it ordered all loyal citizens to not participate in an illegal referendum (which the government did do). The result of this, of course, is a situation where both sides say they're right and there's no real proof either way.

Catalan's government declared independence after the referendum and Spain instituted direct rule of Catalan in response, and there were protests and general strikes about that. The Spanish government then instituted fresh elections for Catalan's regional parliament in December of 2017, which pro-independence parties narrowly won. The current President of Catalan (elected in roughly the same way as a prime minister), Quim Torra, was in fact the fourth nominated MP because the first three were all blocked by Spanish courts who had jailed or invalidated them for being secessionists.

Anyway, a bunch of politicians who helped organize the referendum were afterwards arrested for sedition, which as criminal charges go is, you have to admit, pretty baller. (Also misuse of public funds, which is less baller.) They were found guilty and received their sentences on Monday, and they all got between 9 and 13 years in prison, which is wildly disproportionate for the supposed crime of "let's find out if Catalonians actually want to secede or not." Hence the protests and riots.

To be honest, it's genuinely uncertain if a majority of Catalans actually want to secede, and if they do it's probably not a big majority - maybe 55-45 at most, because we know from actual electoral results that Catalonians tend to vote for secessionist parties slightly more than not these days, but not to a dramatic extent. Probably a lot of this drama could have been avoided if the Spanish government had simply decided to do a Quebec or Scotland-style referendum for Catalonians; one way or the other you'd have an answer. What's more, given the likely numbers and the history of independence referendums and citizens sticking with the devil they know, it probably would have been a result the Spanish government liked. But instead they decided to bring down the hammer right from the get-go, which has turned the entire thing into a giant, increasingly bitter and partisan mess, and that's probably because unlike Quebec or Scotland, Catalan is the richest part of the country and the rest of Spain can't risk losing that money.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched since last week:

Toy Story 4 (2019, Josh Cooley, theatre) - 4.5/5

We just finished the first season of The Righteous Gemstones. I don't generally go for the "everybody is an awful person" school of television-making (it's one of the reasons I could never really get into The Sopranos or, for that matter, Seinfeld), but Gemstones carefully threads the needle of making its characters do reprehensible things for understandable and even sympathetic reasons: it's a show about people who mostly want to be good, but oh lord are they remarkably not skilled at being good.

See you in sev - actually, make that six.