[RETRO-SOUNDING ONTARIO PLACE JINGLE, IRONICALLY]

Doug Ford’s government appointed James Ginou - a Toronto businessman who owns a company that prints trayliners (you know, the paper sheets that go on fast food trays that advertise the food, or maybe there’s a maze for the kiddies, those things) and who is also a hefty Tory fundraiser and friend of the Ford family - to be the chair of the board of Ontario Place. Ginou was previously on the Ontario Place board in 2003, and the appointment immediately raised eyebrows when he stated to press that the current state of Ontario Place is “disgraceful” and that “nothing can be saved.”

(In the real world, the Cinesphere and its attendant buildings were renovated last year, the Molson Amphitheatre does good business every year and is in operating condition, and the park portions are still perfectly fine if perhaps in need of some gardening. But these are Doug Ford’s Tories. The real world need not apply.)

What this is all really about, of course, is satisfying another of Doug’s obsessions with how he thinks Toronto should be run, which is: wouldn’t it be great if Ontario Place was a casino? Or a shopping mall? Or a giant Ferris wheel? Or some combination of all of the above, plus maybe some rich people condos? And - because it’s Doug Ford - what if we sold the land to a private developer who would build all of those things as part of the purchase agreement?

I personally expect there to be more of these over the next couple of years, because the Tories are a pro-privatization party in the first place and selling public assets is a time-honored political tradition in order to help balance the budget in the short term, and given the projected size of Doug’s deficits he’s going to want every last dollar he can get.

THAT’S NOT KOSHER, BELGIUM (OR HALAL)

Belgium passed a law last year - which came into effect as of the new year - which bans kosher and halal animal slaughter and requires that animals be stunned before they are slaughtered. Kosher animal slaughter requires that the animal must be in “perfect health” before it is slaughtered - this is why kosher slaughter focuses on a single cut to arteries in the neck, to kill the animal quickly and (advocates argue) humanely, as the animal loses consciousness extremely quickly as a result of rapid blood loss. (Stunning the animal before slaughter is considered to be wounding it, and thus not kosher.)

Whether this type of slaughter, in fact, a humane method of slaughter is - and this is putting it mildly - a subject of intense debate, which sometimes gets rabidly anti-Semetic. Arguably kosher slaughter, when performed on an individual basis, can be reasonably humane (inasmuch as killing an animal for meat can be deemed humane), but over the past decade there have been a wave of scandals with respect to kosher slaughterhouses not killing animals as quickly and cleanly as Jewish law might demand.

Of course, this has little to do with Belgium’s law, which isn’t really about animal welfare. How do we know this? Well, for a start, the law bans kosher and halal slaughter, but much of what I wrote about kosher slaughter above doesn’t apply to halal slaughter - a lot of halal slaughter animals are in fact stunned before they’re killed. (Halal rules don’t allow Muslims to eat meat which was dead before it was slaughtered, but stunning methods which do not kill the animals but only stun them temporarily have been deemed permissible by multiple halal certifiers.) In fact, a few countries have done studies (most notably the UK) and determined that the overwhelming majority (80+ percent) of halal slaughter animals are stunned before being slaughtered. And any degree of honesty about animal slaughter whatsoever forces one to admit that most non-halal/non-kosher slaughterhouses are awful places and that most animals aren’t slaughtered terribly humanely in the first place.

So what’s the real reason for the law? Simple, really: it’s about telling Jews (30,000 in Belgium) and Muslims (over half a million) they aren’t welcome in Belgium. The law was proposed by a Flemish nationalist politician named Ben Weyts, who previously attracted public attention when he attended the 90th birthday party of a Belgian Nazi collaborator who later became a far-right-wing politician. Because it sounds relatively innocuous (“who doesn’t want animals to not suffer when we slaughter them for meat?”) he was able to dress up what is actually fairly pernicious anti-minority law which doesn’t really address the serious issues behind animal slaughter as a whole, because the dude did not really care about the nice animals in the first place.

SHUTDOWN PART 2: EVERYTHING CLOSED BOOGALOO

Last week we talked about the American government shutdown, and this week… the American government is still shut down! Which is honestly kind of impressive, because government shutdowns usually resolve themselves within a few days when one side caves. However, in this case, the Democrats don’t want to cave because the border wall that Donald Trump demands is, in addition to being stupid and wasteful, wildly opposed by their base and generally unpopular with the American public. And the Republicans don’t want to cave because they don’t really care if the government is shut down or not, because they’re sociopaths.

(No, seriously: the GOP Senate rejected the House’s revised budget offer earlier this week. This budget offer was fundamentally identical to a proposal the Senate backed unanimously the week prior, which offers no wall but additional funding for general border security. Why are Senate Republicans suddenly opposed to the thing they supported only a week earlier? Because Democrats. That is literally the entire reason.)

Anyway, even if Republicans start to see the writing on the wall (and as TSA agents and air traffic controllers- who are currently working without pay because their jobs are categorized as “essential” - start to “call in sick” in greater and greater numbers, more Republicans will), it seems unlikely that Donald Trump (who can veto any compromise legislation designed to end the shutdown) is going to do so soon unless someone can figure out a way for him to pretend that not getting the wall is somehow a win for him. This isn’t impossible (he is very stupid), but given how focused he is on building a wall it’s going to be harder than usual to distract him long enough to get anything done, so odds are probably good this shutdown is going to last a while longer.

(Unless the Democrats end up caving anyway. You can never rule this out.)

SOMETIMES IT’S NOT SO GOOD TO BE THE KING

So Malaysia has a “rotational monarchy.” Nine of Malaysia’s thirteen states are hereditary monarchies, so the kings of those nine states vote every five years amongst themselves to determine who should be Malaysia’s next king - or, more formally, “Yang di-Pertuan Agong” (rough translation is “he who is made Lord”). The King of Malaysia works a lot like the Queen does in the UK - substantively the king has no real power, but technically speaking they appoint the Prime Minister, they can potentially dissolve Parliament (but only if they’re asked), that sort of thing. Basically, when the British left Malaysia, the Malaysians decided that the British style of monarchy was a sensible idea and decided to adapt it for their own use. This is the sort of thing I find fascinating.

Anyway, until literally maybe twelve hours ago (as of this writing) Sultan Muhammad V of the state of Kelantan was the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. (Not every Yang di-Pertuan Agong has the title of Sultan, incidentally; one was a Raja and the two from the state of Negeri Sembilan had the title of Tuanku.)

Then Muhammad V resigned. Which is amazing! He didn’t abdicate his throne as Sultan of Kelantan, but he definitely abdicated the seat of Yang di-Pertuan Agong. And this is the thing: nobody really knows why he did this! There’s a lot of gossip, of course - a lot of it has to do with the fact that he maybeeeeee married a former Miss Moscow in November, although that hasn’t been confirmed one way or the other. But nobody knows for sure right now.

All of this just goes to show you: if you think Canada is weird for having a Queen who is the ruler of another different country and who has been here maybe a couple dozen times in her very long life, don’t worry, there is always another country who decided to go an even weirder route when it comes to king-type stuff.

“SO LONG AND NO THANKS” SAY ALL THE FISH

A study headed by a researcher at Dalhousie University, in conjunction with researchers around the world, now projects that saltwater fish - as in, all of them, from clownfish to great white sharks - will be extinct by 2048. There’s a lot of reasons for this: climate change, pollution, habitat loss (primarily due to climate change and pollution), and of course most importantly the fact that human beings are dredging up literally every last fish from the goddamn ocean and eating them faster than the fish could possibly reproduce.

Personal anecdote, accompanied by data: last week my wife and I went to dinner with a law school friend and her husband, and I ordered the branzino, which I did not realize at the time was a whole roasted fish or I probably would not have ordered it. Branzino is a sea bass which used to grow in the wild to sizes of about a metre long. This particular branzino which was my dinner was about ten inches long, because branzino - like every other fish out there - has been overfished. There aren’t any big branzino any more, and the smaller ones get caught before they ever get a chance to become big branzino. (The total biomass of branzino - IE, the total estimated weight of all the branzino in the world - dropped thirty-two percent from 2010 to 2012, and has almost certainly dropped even more steeply since. Marine biologists were urging European countries to regulate branzino fishing and drop it by eighty percent four years ago in order to allow the fish population to start regrowing. That… did not happen.)

It’s not just branzino, of course. It’s everything in the ocean: twenty-nine percent of edible species have been overfished so greatly that they are basically all but gone already. Fish that used to be sniffed at - like monkfish, drum, scup and amberjack - are now being served at restaurants because the species we used to eat have been fished to near-death.

Those old enough to remember when Newfoundland’s cod fishing industry collapsed because the cod were basically just gone might also remember that, at the time, a lot of politicians expressed the hope that maybe the cod population would regrow itself to the old levels if given maybe a decade’s relief, but that didn’t happen - so Newfoundland fisherman became crabbers and lobstermen and whatever you call the guys who harvest scallops, but these days the crabbers and lobstermen and scallopeers (?) are all reporting that they have to go further and further out in order to find their catches - just like in the days before the cod collapsed.

I would say something about the need for total re-imagining of how we interact with the ocean, but realistically, nothing is going to happen unless we all agree together to do something, and if we can’t do that about climate change we probably aren’t going to do it about fish. And “extinct by 2048” means that fish will be gone for us, as an edible resource, at least five to ten years sooner. I’m nearly 43, so that means I’ll be part of the last generation to get to spend the majority of their lives able to eat fish.

(I know this was a depressing item, but they can’t all be about Malaysia’s wacky monarchy.)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched in the past week:

Eighth Grade (2018, Bo Burnham, Google Play rental) - 5/5

Leave No Trace (2018, Debra Granik, Google Play rental) - 5/5

More at my Letterboxd, as per usual. I’ve also compiled a ranked list of every 2018 release I saw in 2018, if you are like me and enjoy ranked lists.

We’re also halfway through the second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and enjoying it well enough, although I do think it feels a little tonally different from the first? Just a bit… wackier.

That’s it for this week; see you in seven.