Was at my cousin's wedding this weekend, so a bit shorter than usual, please forgive the ongoing construction, et cetera:

SAY DID YOU KNOW THAT THE LARGEST LABOUR ACTION IN HISTORY JUST HAPPENED? BECAUSE IT DID

Specifically in India, where - wait for it - TWO HUNDRED MILLION WORKERS in the banking, insurance, roadwork, railway, postal and medical sectors went on a general nationwide strike for two days. Two hundred million people! Two! Hundred! Million! Fucking! People! The purpose of the strike was an anti-BJP/anti-Narendra Modi protest, because the unions think - not incorrectly - that he hates unions and labour rights. (In case you missed it the last time I wrote about India: Narendra Modi is the current Prime Minister, and the BJP are a conservative Hindu-nationalist party who are very concerned about Muslims and liberals and not very good at a whole lot else.)

Two hundred million people on strike, everybody. It cost the country an estimated five billion rupees in lost value (or just under $100 million Canadian). And this was the warning strike, just a two-day taste of what it feels like when one-fifth of India decides not to play ball. They have a list of demands and if they feel Modi isn't addressing those demands they've made it clear they're ready to go on strike again.

DOUG FORD'S TUITION CUT AND WHY IT FUCKS OVER POOR PEOPLE BECAUSE OF COURSE IT DOES

So the Tories this week announced that they were cutting university tuition rates in Ontario. The immediate reaction to this news, when it first broke, was a combination of "well, that sounds good!" from people who don't know better and "wait for the other shoe to drop" from anybody who actually knows Doug Ford worth a damn. And indeed, the other shoe dropped!

Because, yes, Doug Ford did cut tuition rates, but he did it by mandating what tuition rates would be rather than setting a new goal and funding it appropriately (which would be the sane way to do it). Universities may be partially publicly funded, but they also derive the majority of their operating budgets from tuition. So, basically, what Doug Ford did was cut $440 million out of universities' operating budgets on one year's notice.

But that's not all: Ontario student aid is being reorganized so that a portion of all tuition grants for low-income kids are being converted back to loans. (The previous Liberal government converted the Ontario student loan system to become a grant system under their administration. Speaking as someone who is still paying off his student loans almost a decade after graduating law school: I'm for the grants.) And if you want tuition assistance for a second-entry program (IE, nursing, med school, law, an MBA - basically anything that isn't a straight bachelor's degree, IE anything actually useful for finding work these days) the "loan" portion of a student's assistance increases! Oh, and as an extra kick in the teeth there's always been a six-month grace period after graduation before student loan repayment kicks in, and the Tories are killing that, too, because why not milk the poor kids some more?

"Doug Ford isn't happy simply being stupid: he wants your kids to be stupid too" probably isn't going to be a winning political slogan in the next election, despite it having the virtue of being absolutely true. But what's also true is that they've created a tuition policy that gives the most benefit to rich kids - who won't be taking on student loans but who get the benefit of the tuition cuts - while claiming they're trying to benefit poor kids.

IT'S VERY HOT IN AUSTRALIA

Australia is currently surviving through the worst heatwave it's ever had, with five of its ten hottest days ever recorded having taken place in the last week and temperatures exceeding forty degrees Celsius on multiple days. (The mining town of Cobar in New South Wales, which is in a desert area, reported a high of fifty degrees Celsius.) It is worth remembering that Australia is, when you get down to it, a big desert with some livable bits around the edges, but the parts that are livable are basically that way on a very slim margin and there's not a lot of wiggle room for the country as a whole to support, well, life: a slightly less worse heatwave in November ended up killing off one-third of all of the spectacled flying foxes in the country.

This is all of course the result of climate change, so it's a good thing the Aussies are mining all that coal.

THE CARAVAN, PART DEUX

American media are starting to ramp up coverage of the next big migrant caravan headed north from Latin America for the US border - it's estimated at about seven thousand people fleeing Guatemala and Honduras. Of course, like the first one, it's not an emergency and like the first one, it'll probably dissapate quite a bit as it travels through Mexico and families decide that it's easier to just find some work in Mexico and try to make things work out there.

And like the first one, what's being underreported is that a significant portion of these refugees aren't just fleeing government violence or rebel uprisings (although they are): a significant portion of them are farmers who have just had too many years of drought-related crop failures to be able to stay where they were. I know it sucks that climate change is going to be a relevant factor in most news stories you read going forward, but that's just how things work now.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched or rewatched this week:

The Commitments (1990, Alan Parker, Hoopla) - 3.5/5

Boy (2010, Taiki Waititi, Kanopy) - 4/5

We also watched Derry Girls, the BBC-produced comedy about teenage girls in Northern Ireland in the early 1990s, and it's pretty funny (Siobhan McSweeney as the ever-chagrined head nun is never not hilarious in her comic timing). Only six episodes, too, so it breezes by.

That's it for this week. Stay cool.