A long time ago people said that if Steve Jobs was filmed walking across San Francisco bay, the systems industry media headlines would all scream "Jobs can't swim!", and that's really what's going on with major media coverage of Danielle Smith and the UCP too: the people involved generally know almost nothing about economics or governance but continually tell each other they're experts and that, combined with the left's assumed moral superiority and the federal government's massive subsidies to approved media organizations, is what powers their current campaign against Smith and anyone else

Disclaimer: there are so many unknowns in the history of Covid19, and so much that is thought to be known is actually of uncertain value, that this article is intended only as an imaginative alternative history.

(An aside: the title was inspired by someone else's debunking of a speculative paper on the grounds that it presented a theory without measurement, with the added LOL note that he intended no insult to string theory.)

Three paragraphs from my 2011 essay Explaining the Health Care Disaster in Canada summarize the issues:

If you find yourself premier this fall you are going to have to pivot to winning the next election - and you only have two options: campaigning while doing as little as possible to disturb the course of government or pushing immediate change through caucus.

Inflation is popularly thought of as what happens when too much money chases too few goods -and that's sort of true, but incomplete. More generally both price and currency inflation refer to change over time in the ratio of the value (V) of that subset of the goods, services, and expectations (e.g. rents) in the world economy normally priced in the currency of interest and the number of units (N) of that currency in use.

Conventional wisdom has it that Mr. Kenney was fired by the UCP membership largely because he mishandled the Covid crisis and/or because he did not follow through on national relationship issues like the vote against continuing equalization payments to Ottawa. I do not believe that; nor do I accept former UCP president Ed Ammar's argument that Mr.

A nice little conspiracy theory in re Putin v. Zelensky et al

Here it is March 2nd, 2022 and there is now enough information to speculate about what's going on in Ukraine, and, more importantly, about what comes next.

Dear Mr. Kenney:

So exactly none of the people who think they're candidates to replace you showed up in Coutts and that, coupled with $95 oil, probably has you thinking your leadership is pretty safe. That's almost certainly right, but also wrong: the candidate for premier most likely to replace you now is Rachel Notley.

It's January 2022 and Alberta is in trouble with premier Jason Kenney facing a rebellion from conservatives because he's unable to stand against his own red tories, the media, and the federal left. As a result Kenney is probably going to face a leadership vote in which everybody loses because neither he nor any of the insider contenders for his job have sufficient credibility with Albertans to overcome media support for their invisible but beloved NDP.

Dear Mr. Kenney:

You're under attack from within your own party - and the other side's happily cheering these people on. So now what?

Reverse course: pull a Trump, tell the delusional to suck eggs, and get on with it.