Smoke Break #950: The “Anthropocene” Is A New Geological Epoch Dominated By People

Welcome to the Anthropocene is “a 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit.” Tracing roads, shipping lanes, railways and flightpaths, it charts “the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.” Gnarl.

TAKE ANOTHER BREAK

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Lives Of Charm And The Steam Clock That Doesn’t Run On Steam

by Sean Orr | Think Tanked: Solidarity forever? How about a job? Oh, I get it. He’s trying to paint those against things like the Jumbo glacier project, Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion, and LNG extraction as moneyed elites who are out of touch with poor people: “Many of these politicians, environmental activists, labour leaders, social agency executives, lawyers, doctors and those born with silver spoons in their mouths have to recognize that their charmed lives are also dependent on developing the natural resources our province has”. Because the creation of jobs, no matter how destructive, is far more important than the democratic process that allows for greater accountability of said projects. Hell, the pyramids were a pretty great way to create jobs. Let’s make one of those and use it as a tomb for Fazil Mihlar.

It’s a good thing we don’t have a national housing strategy: Get government out of the housing market. Get the government out of governing. Seriously, just let the corporations do everything. What could possibly go wrong?

Vancouver has no right to regulate the oil industry. It’s true. We signed it away with TILMA. We have no legal right to do anything.

BC Launches Hyper-local Poverty Strategies. Weird. So the mayors want to run the Province and the Province wants to run our towns. Specifically these towns: Surrey, New Westminster, Port Hardy, Cranbrook, Prince George, Kamloops, and Stewart.

The fine art of capitulation: Open letter to parents, administrators, and school trustees. “You got everything you wanted. You win”.

My new friend: Von Boringcity Zu No Fun City.

“There are winner and losers, everything is clean and fair. There is room for busy. Curious, where is the esprit? The cultivated human is the dead human; no men speech on the street, no drinking also, but you can smoke weed. A many of tolerance, but no pressure- no heat. Without friction it’s a little bit colder”.

And now: A tour of Our Dumb Vancouver.

Today’s symbols of ineptitude, outdated ideas, poor planning, blissful ignorance, wishful thinking and bald-faced greed are about to disappear. Get out there, and take it in while you still can.

Stephen Quinn gives an imaginary walking tour of civic blunders: The Viaducts, Wall Centre, the Douglas Ho Chapel, and Main Street Skytrain station. I’ll add the new float plane terminal that Harbour Air refuses to move into, leaving a cluster of aluminum portables in the middle of the Sea Wall. Then there’s the famous double Starbucks. Or how about 200 Granville, a monolith and testament to Vancouver’s media concentration, and the only building completed in a project to wipe out Gastown. How about Storyeum? 40 bucks to take an elevator into the ground to watch people act out Vancouver’s history. It was bought by a furniture salesman who sealed an entire ship in the ground. It now sits empty. And nearby is a steam clock that no longer runs on steam.

A New Vancouverism. Because the old one is broken.

SCOUT LIST: The 11 Things That You Absolutely Should Do Between Now And Next Week

by Michelle Sproule | The main objective of this website is to scout out and promote the things that make Vancouver such a sweet place to be. We do this with an emphasis on the city’s independent spirit to foster a sense of connectedness within and between our communities, and to introduce our readers to the people who grow and cook our food, play the raddest tunes in our better venues, create our most interesting art, and design everything from what we wear to the spaces we inhabit. The Scout List is our carefully considered, first rate agenda of super awesome things that we’re either doing, wishing that we could do, or conspiring to do this week. From our calendar to yours… Read more

TEA & TWO SLICES: On The NDP Loving Nazis And How Not To Live Next To The PNE

by Sean Orr | If you thought the Canucks handed the Kings a series, ladies and gentleman, meet your next governing party, the NDP:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was shouted down during a debate in question period Thursday on the Afghanistan mission for suggesting the NDP – not yet in existence – didn’t even support Canada’s military involvement in the Second World War.

Thank you sir, may I have another?

Meanwhile, U.S. Tea Party architects (the Koch brothers) poured half a million dollars into Canadian right-wing think tank, the Fraser Institute. You know it as the place where the Vancouver Sun gets its editorial directors.

Smear Piece: Pantages’ foes need to check their heads. According to the Courier, developer Marc Williams has been “consistently vilified” by Ivan Drury et al over this project. So the paper takes it upon itself to act as pushback? I mean, I’m not necessarily defending Drury’s often inflammatory rhetoric, but on the other hand I’d be pretty disappointed if there was total silence on this project. Perhaps every development should be met with such fierce democracy (see Rize and Woodwards).

Urban planners oppose lowering Vancouver’s demands to developers. In other news, developers oppose lowering demands to urban planners (I know that’s dumb, but I just can’t seem to find anything wrong with anything Jeff Lee writes).

Not news to anyone: Vancouver ‘vulnerable’ to housing bust, RBC warns.

In Cold Blood: Province columnist Jon Ferry visits Marc Emery in jail in Mississippi. “But then the Bible says — and Mississippi knows a thing or two about the Bible — that a prophet is not without honour, except in his own country and among his own kin.” Truman Capote, eat your heart out.

Tweet of the day c/o T. Fed: “IF U ARE A BIG FAT FUCKING CRYBABY MOVE TO VANCOUVER WE LOVE U” regarding the PNE banning electronic music after some idiot who moved next to an amusement park complained. No Justice? No Peace.

Printemps Erable: Manifesto for a Maple Spring.

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Rent-A-Cops, Erotic Films, And No New Juice For Old Politicians

by Sean Orr | Burnaby-Douglas MP proposes national housing strategy. Remember, folks, before Woodwards left, before the introduction of crack cocaine, the Feds stopped the Canada Assistance Plan.

Rat Goofs: Citizen’s arrest bill gives more power to rent-a-cops, police warn. I love that the pejorative “rent-a-cop” is now acceptable for use in a headline. Can’t wait for an article about fuckin’ narcs. Six-up!

Because they aren’t exactly liberals: Change of name proposed for B.C. Liberals. How about the Wild Orca Party? It reflects our natural beauty and casually references the erotic film Wild Orchid, starring Mickey Rourke.

Granola-cons: Evangelicals lean to right, but some are ‘crunchy conservatives’. Apparently, the crunchy conservatives “include those traditional Christians who oppose abortion and euthanasia and believe Jesus is the son of God, but also reject consumer culture, big-box stores and suburban sprawl, and eat organic food.” Ah, but why do you need a name for a slightly less hypocritical form of Christianity?

It created Vancouver, then it’s removal helped to create the DTES: Vancouver’s streetcar retired 57 years ago today (yesterday).

Hmm. It turns out our sawmills aren’t equipped to process dead trees: Wood dust suspected in B.C. sawmill blasts.

Sum Dynasty: Terracotta army to hit Vancouver’s streets. From the cheap appropriation of nature to the cheap appropriation of other cultures…

War on culture: Dr. Seuss’s ‘Yertle the Turtle’ deemed too political for B.C. classroom.

“I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights” – comes from Yertle the Turtle, the tale of a turtle who climbs on the backs of other turtles to get a better view.

So I guess Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th Century is right out then?

News for Youse: “Just ask any multi-dimensional entity that feasts on human suffering, or, alternately, just ask Bev Oda, whose epicurean palate and taste for the good life has landed the International Development Minister in hot water more than once.” See Bev Oda shouldn’t have an option when it comes to orange juice for background.

Bonus: Could Vancouver’s next hot restaurant neighbourhood be in the suburbs?

TEA & TWO SLICES: On The Existentialism Of Ecology And Corporate Media Editorials

by Sean Orr | Hmm, slow news day? How about we run another Time to Clean up the DTES editorial! It’s a tradition that goes back to when booze (not crack/meth/oxy/dilly/methadone) was the great social ill. As early as 1955, local editorials have been sensationalizing Skid Row/DTES, as this article entitled “The Dope Craze that’s Terrorizing Vancouver” makes clear. And even before booze, it was “too Chinese” (see the introduction of Canada’s first drug law and the 1907 anti-asiatic race riots).

Frontier Politics: Raising kids amid the hookers, junkies and drunks of Vancouver’s worst neighbourhood.

We purchased a unit pre-construction, gambling that the neighbourhood would improve significantly by the time our building was completed. It didn’t.

The funny thing with gambling is…

The Downtown Eastside may be home to my city’s least fortunate, but it is also, in many cases, home to my city’s least sanitary, least responsible, and least polite

And yet they saw that you had children and his their drugs? That sounds pretty damn polite to me. Anyways, the whole piece is just baiting for a reaction, but just comes off as more of the First World Problems same. In any event, I’d sooner read an editorial about a family of drug addicts that moves into Shaugnessy.

Or I’d rather read an article about the new Vancouver Healing Lodge. It’s probably not going to happen, though, as our 3 major dailies sold their front pages to Hyundai.

The Rubber Stamp: Sequel 138 Approved at Old Pantages Theatre Site in the DTES. “The City came to the decision after a 6 hour meeting with over 60 disgruntled Downtown Eastside residents. Naturally they didn’t want any new neighbours. They never do”. Those 60 people or all of the DTES? Because I’m pretty sure buddy above with the kids is stoked.

And yet for all the pseudo-pragmatic, tough-guy populism in the corporate media, Jeff Lee pens a discussion about real solutions, eschewing rhetoric: Vancouver must make it cheaper for developers to build housing. It’s the same solution we’ve been citing for decades. We can make something like an endowment fund, or even something akin to carbon credits — a commons.

Inculcation vs. Education: Disgusting: David Suzuki and NFB indoctrinating school kids. Of course, when it’s the church indocrinating children it’s ok: Catholic students asked to support laws that criminalize abortion. Maybe we could combine schools and teach them about the abortion of Kyoto.

Existential Council: Park Board motion aims to protect Vancouver beaches from oil spill threat. Isn’t this sort of like drafting a bill to say we are against earthquakes? I mean, I’m totally against both earthquakes and pipelines, but doesn’t this sort of seem oddly specific? Clearly we have no say in the matter. Why not impose a levy on tanker traffic that would go into an emergency clean-up fund or something? I don’t know, I’m just thinking aloud here…

This person says it way better: Open Letter Urging Premier Clark to Act for BC.

SCOUT LIST: The 12 Things That You Should Absolutely Do Between Now And Next Week

by Michelle Sproule | The main objective of this website is to scout out and promote the things that make Vancouver such a sweet place to be. We do this with an emphasis on the city’s independent spirit to foster a sense of connectedness within and between our communities, and to introduce our readers to the people who grow and cook our food, play the raddest tunes in our better venues, create our most interesting art, and design everything from what we wear to the spaces we inhabit. The Scout List is our carefully considered, first rate agenda of super awesome things that we’re either doing, wishing that we could do, or conspiring to do this week. From our calendar to yours… Read more

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Pseudo-Hardline Pragmatism And Our Beaches Covered In Oil

by Sean Orr | Human Storage: Non-profit to house women in shipping containers in Downtown Eastside. Oh relax. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Actually, it’s way better than it sounds.

As bad it sounds: Withhold teachers’ pay until report cards are written. What kind of childish, petty, pseudo-hardline pragmatist nonsense is this?

Worth reading: Worth Saving: Changing the Economics of Rental Housing. Wherein policy bro totes agrees with my idea of a rental land reserve.

Meanwhile, let’s build a 28-hectare destination shopping centre in the suburbs! Richmond to be transformed by wave of developments, says mayor. It’s close to transit and gambling. Everybody wins.

Zombie condo: A look at the revived luxury condo project on West Georgia. It’s alive! Twisting and writhing from the ashes of the so-called debt crisis! Laughing at it. Spitting on it.

The Sun sucks at math:

It’s not entirely fair, then, to posit the image of oil-soaked beaches around Stanley Park as a consequence of the pipeline expansion, when we already tolerate that risk with existing shipments.

No, but certainly doubling or tripling the amount of tankers would double or triple the risk, right? I mean, the risk of sun cancer is already there, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to spend three times as much time at the beach, especially if said beach is covered in oil.

I guess this is something: Marc Emery’s U.S. prosecutor urges pot legalization. Weird. Every time I see the name Marc Emery I immediately begin to lose interest.

Job within a job: RCMP to train 100 B.C. officers to investigate sex harassment within force. So what if out of those 100 officers there’s a sexual harassment complaint and they have to hire a different team of investigators? Would it become an inwards turning Fibonacci-like vortex that eventually collapses in on itself, or is that just wishful thinking?

News1130: A show of Canucks support that lasts forever. Wow. News.

The Tyee: Fake Bieber in Canada accused of forcing NJ girl, 12, to perform sex acts. First come the Fake Biebers, then the legions of cloned Kardashians; reeking of raw cookie dough perfume, clenching LV bags yapping into smart phones while ordering their lattes, dripping fake tanner on your tablecloth as they order another Grey Goose and soda. Oh wait! That already happened. It’s called Yaletown.

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Hockey Metaphors In Politics And Taking Over Council Meetings

by Sean Orr | How much does freedom cost? The cost of the new jets is the price of freedom. Oh sweet! Thanks, but what is the cost of lying about the cost? And is there interest on that?

Downtown Eastside residents sound the displacement alarm. Man, is that what that fucking noise is? Does it have to be so high-pitched?

Protesters disrupt council meeting over Downtown Eastside gentrification concerns. it seems they realized that writing “gentrifuckation” in front of fancy restaurants in Gastown was a little misplaced. No, but seriously, anything short of taking over council meetings is “whining on the internet”. Good for them.

Change of ideas: Chinese investors shutter Vancouver neighbourhood while apologists cry ‘racism’. Oh noes, what’s wrong with me? First I wasn’t entirely against Rize, now I’m agreeing with Marc Hasiuk. We need to be able to identify large portions of the population in order to better plan for housing without it being racist. We need to be able to use these abandoned McMansions as an index fossil for the extinction of speculative real estate or we’ll be living in our own debris.

Or at the very least, taxpayers end up spending millions to mow lawns of foreclosed homes.

Speaking of housing our cities: Bricks and Mortar vs. Rent Subsidy. Future directions for affordable housing (since so many of you are so interested in promoting it over that big ugly condo).

Staying on the topic of Rize, they seem to making some commotion down in Vancouver’s better half: Developer opts for marketing over sustainability. Wait, Surrey has a green energy grid?

Oh shit, by the way I forgot to tell you about Rize. Everything is now moot.

Our friends at the Dependent aren’t as willing to indulge in the hockey metaphor as T&TS: “And the hockey-politics analogies continue. The latest offender: Bill Tieleman over at The Tyee, pondering Which Team Changes Managers First, Canucks or Libs“.

No Bus for You: Funding gap forces TransLink to suspend expansion plan. Big deal, the same fools that don’t want to pay for new roads via vehicle levy don’t get buses in their shitty towns.

TEA & TWO SLICES: On The Three Bears, Romanticizing A Riot, And Transit As Hockey

by Sean Orr | Flogging a dead horse to death: Vancouver’s ‘big, bad, ugly night’. I think our serial obsession with last year’s riot is partly on account of a) how slowly it unfolded b) how sort of half-assed it was c) how the cops did everything right but still got blamed, and d) how young everyone was (and if there was no particular impetus, the cameras watching the rioters every move get the blame, too in a sort of self-propelled fait accompli). We all want to put the blame on everyone but ourselves, because we don’t like to think that our city still makes the young feel bored and alienated.

I was there, had a visit, took some shots, un-flipped a few smart cars, got threatened by the mob and then the cops, then walked quietly home to images of two rioters kissing in the middle of the street (a romantic ending to an imaginary narrative). “Cool riot, bro!” was the prevailing meme. A riot for its own sake. A riot because they hadn’t had a turn yet; self-entitlement run amok.

When you include Vancouver’s historically puritanical attitude towards alcohol, you can see why we’re so often compared to Tennyson’s Lotos Eaters. We’ve abandoned our children to the outskirts. Our city is full of one-bedroom condos. A lifestyle marketed to us by Bob “Everything is going to be alright [sic]” Rennie, which vanishes as soon as the shiny, happy couples in the ads eventually procreate (on granite countertops) .

Anyway, so the next day I wrote on the hoardings, “What are the politics of boredom?” I’d wanted to quote the Situationist International: “A warning to those who build ruins: after the town planners will come the last troglodytes of the slums and the ghettos. They will know how to build. The privileged ones from the dormitory towns will only know how to destroy.”

Kinder surprise: Mayors oppose pipeline expansion. Aww, that’s cute. It’s like they totally forgot about TILMA.

Guilty by association: B.C. Liberal apologizes following bizarre blast at NDP leader. “It really makes me wonder about the leader of the opposition stealing from the public, fraud. I wonder how he proposed to his wife. Is he like his good friend Svend Robinson?” I don’t know, Harry Bloy. Are you a drunk driver like your friend Gordon Campbell?

Surrey is better than Vancouver, pt. 37: The Goldilocks Campus. You know, like oatmeal. Not too hot and not too cold. But instead of oatmeal, it’s architecture.

You mean they’re golfing? TransLink has the air of a hockey team that didn’t make the playoffs these days. I’ll indulge in the crude analogy further…By choosing flash over substance (Skytrain vs. Light Rail), throwing money at big projects (Golden Ears Bridge, Port Mann, Sea to Sky) and neglecting meat and potato players (buses, pedestrians, cycling) they’ve created a team of prima donnas, and now they’re all unrestricted free agents. And even though attendance is up, they’re going to have to raise ticket prices to pay for it all. And if that fails, blame the media.

Derailed: Hotel ousts Rocky Mountaineer replacement workers. Thanks to some grade-A, insider espionage that I’m not allowed to talk about. #industry

This looks like it could be a good post if it wasn’t some weird blurry jpeg: BC’s top political influencers. It’s time to get WordPress or something, bro.

Because we can’t/won’t: London, England shines spotlight on Vancouver’s Stan Douglas. Thanks again London, England.

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