THE ENVIRONMENT: IT SUCKS

Let's see how much bad environmental news we can fit into a news items! Okay, so social media had a bit of fun mocking Jason Kenney and his team for celebrating the repeal of Alberta's carbon tax at the exact same time that the Alberta wildfires were burning much of Alberta to a crisp and creating the worst air quality in Alberta in decades, but even if that were really particularly fun rather than just gallows humour, it still doesn't change the fact that "annual deadly wildfires" are now looking to be Alberta's new normal.

Speaking of new normals, flooding in Lake Ontario reached new record highs this past week and annual spring flooding in the lake may also be a new normal, which would be fine if our infrastructure was capable of handling it, which it isn't. Most of Ontario's creeks and rivers have also either overflowed or gone right up to maximum anticipated capacity this spring, so that's not good either.

Related to the flooding, all of the spring rain and flooding has caused delay in corn planting in North America, with current estimates appearing to be that standard corn planting in the United States will be a third less than total capacity, which means less corn, which means less of everything that corn and its associated byproducts, like sugar and oil, are used for. I know this is traditionally where somebody snarks about high-fructose corn syrup being shitty (and it is shitty), but the USA exports a lot of corn and corn products to other countries, and when agricultural exporters have production shortages the production that gets shorted is almost always the part that gets sold overseas, which is generally bad for international stability because if you have a potentially volatile nation and suddenly food prices spike, that's a problem. (I've read some very plausible theories that tie the Arab Spring to a collapse of the Russian wheat crop in 2010/2011.)

Oh, and there's a mass puffin die-off happening in British Columbia and Alaska, and I can't tie that neatly to the corn thing with a clever segue, sorry. Puffin researchers in the are have been discovering hundreds of tufted puffin corpses, and the apparent cause is starvation: the ocean has gotten too warm to support larger predators of krill and tiny fish (the puffin's usual diet) in more southerly waters, so those fish and whales have migrated north and a lot of puffins suddenly don't have food. The good news, such as it is, is that the puffins probably aren't going to go extinct soon, but there is the usual "if trends continue, though" sort of bad news attached to that good news.

Well, that was depressing. What next?

BIBI MY BABY

Proportionally elected governments work on a very simple basis: after everybody gets elected, the parties figure out who's going to form the government. Usually this is a matter of deals agreed-upon by a large party with a lot of elected representatives and a few smaller parties (or one larger-but-not-as-large-as-the-first-one) who agree to support the big part in exchange for some favours. For example, in Luxembourg, the centrist Democratic Party is currently in charge, because they made some deals with the Socialist Worker's Party (who got some policies they wanted enacted) and the Green Party (who got some Greens in government ministries they considered important). Sometimes these deals get made ahead of the election (like in Australia, where the Liberal and National parties have a longstanding deal) and sometimes they get made afterward (like in Germany, where the last few decades' worth of elections have mostly been "who will the Christian Democratic Party cut a deal with this time?"). But most of the time, they work out, because there's always someone to bargain with.

This makes what has happened in Israel over the last week all the more fascinating, because Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party - the dominant political party in Israel for at least the last thirty years - has just completely failed to form a government after getting the most votes and being tied for the most seats in the Knesset. This does not happen often in proportional elections anywhere and in Israel, where this is the first time it has ever happened, it is honestly kind of amazing - until you consider how the party divisions play out. Then it is still sort of amazing, except in a grim sort of way.

See, the traditional left-right axis doesn't work nearly as well as lazy political analysts want it to work anywhere, but it works especially poorly in Israel for a number of reasons: unlike in a lot of Christian countries, Israel's parties are divided between secular parties (and to be clear, secular parties in Israel are still often very Jewish in nature, but of a sort which does not center their religion in their politics) and religiously Jewish parties, either of whom can be politically left-wing or right-wing, or kind of a kludge (like the Shas party, for example, which is an ultra-Orthodox religious party and therefore extremely conservative on social issues, but who are extremely left-wing on economic issues). Plus, there are the Arab parties for those Arabic Israelis who recognize the validity of the Israeli government (be they Muslims, Christians or Druze).

Over the past decade, Netanyahu has usually formed governments with a kludge of support from various factions. Usually he finds his primary support in one of two areas: either he has formed his governments with the help of Israel's ultra-orthodox, religiously conservative parties (like Shas and/or the United Torah Judaism coalition) or with the help of Israel's conservative-to-right-wing secular parties (like Kulanu or Yisrael Beiteinu). and in But Likud has grown weaker over the years, and it has needed more and more help, and the problem Netanyahu has right now is that his two major blocs of allies don't like each other at all.

One of the major faultlines is the draft. Israel has compulsive military service for all Israelis - except for ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are exempt from military service because, well, the Torah says "thou shalt not kill" in big letters, and it's impossible to effectively observe Shabbat in the military for obvious reasons ("what if the enemy invades on a Saturday," et cetera). It goes beyond the draft, of course - secular parties complain that unemployment among the ultra-Orthodox is rampant and evidence of systemic abuse, and ultra-Orthodox parties maintain that study of the Torah is vital to maintaining Jewish society and they fulfill a vital role - but the draft has become a flashpoint of the conflict between the right-wing socially conservative ultra-Orthodox Jews and the right-wing socially conservative secular Jews.

Basically, Bibi couldn't get together a coalition that would give him a majority, because the success of the Blue and White centrist coalition - which formed specifically to beat him, so they weren't a possible governmental partner - meant that, even with Likud's increased number of seats in the Knesset (35, up from 30), he couldn't find enough seats on either side of this divide: the ultra-Orthodox parties only got him to 51, and the secular conservative parties to 49. Furthermore, because Blue and White didn't satisfy their goal of beating Bibi (and that is literally the only reason the coalition exists) every party they took seats away from - mostly centre-left, left-wing and Arab parties - all figure that another election is a good chance for them to win more seats back from Blue and White and increase their bargaining power.

Bibi - one of the most successful politicians anywhere in the world for the past few decades, regardless of whether or not you think the man is awful (which I do, for the record) hasn't been this badly politically defeated possibly ever. Even in past elections when he lost, it was simply a matter of voters choosing a different party. This, though, is a failure of Bibi to do what he's always done - make a deal to benefit his party, and really, himself. Does this mean his career is over? We can but hope - and also hope that Avigdor Lieberman or Rafi Peretz doesn't take Bibi's place.

A THRILLING STORY ABOUT A NO CONFIDENCE VOTE

If you don't know who Sebastian Kurz is, he is an Austrian politician who looks sort of like Christian Bale ten years ago playing an evil politician in a movie. (Google image-search his name and try to tell me I'm wrong. You will not.) But he's also the Chancellor of Austria! Or, at least, he was until this week.

See, Austria is another country that votes in its governments via proportional representation, and Kurz formed Austria's last government by allying his party, the Austrian People's Party, with the far-right wing Freedom Party, which like practically every party in existence with "freedom" in its name is anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic, anti-gay and anti-lots of other things that generally define freedom for a lot of people. This was a massive shift in Austrian politics, given that since World War II ended just about every government in Austrian history has been a coalition between the APP and the Social Democratic party, resulting in a lot of centrsit politics.

Kurz immediately did a whole bunch of right-wing things, like bring back the ability of businesses to "allow" a 12-hour workday for their employees and outlaw hijabs and replacing child tax benefits with a tax credit that's better for rich people and making German-language education mandatory and be generally hostile to immigrants and immigration and, well, it's a depressing list but you probably can recite the bullet points by memory just by thinking of a nationalist government you know/you live under and copy-pasting their policies, because right-wing nationalists all work off the same playbook.

Anyway, a scandal erupted last week when the leader of the Freedom Party, a jolly asshole named Heinz-Christian Strache, got caught on video trying to trade promises to award government contract work to a woman he believed to be the wealthy niece of a Russian oligarch in exchange for that oligarch's support, which was clearly intended to be social media ratfucking of the sort of that has become endemic in elections throughout the first world. Strache also explained that he wanted to monopolize Austria's media in the same way that Viktor Orban has done in Hungary. Needless to say, this made Strache incredibly unpopular in Austria, and his party has dropped an entire seven points in the polls! (Somehow you would think that collaborating with a foreign country and openly admiring a dictator would earn you more demerit points with the electorate, but you forgot: people are frequently terrible.)

Kurz fired Strache immediately, and then the rest of the Freedom Party ministers in Kurz' cabinet resigned in protest. The Social Democrats figured this was an opportunity, and demanded a no-confidence vote, which they got, and everybody else voted Kurz out and now they will have a new election! Except that Kurz will probably win, because the support the Freedom Party has lost all went directly to him, so really, this all feels kind of pointless, and all of the Western media applauding Austria for kicking out a corrupt politician is A) not getting the story quite right and B) actually not getting it close to right at all.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Always Be My Maybe (2019, Nahnatchka Khan, Netflix) - 3.5/5

We've started watching Good Omens on Amazon Prime, and my general reaction two episodes in is that it is mostly pretty good with fun performances, but that Neil Gaiman isn't really that good at screenwriting and someone else should have adapted the novel into screenplay form, because the words that work on a page don't necessarily work when spoken aloud.

See you in seven.