The Cracked Crystal Ball II

The UCP now owns the entirety of the Green Line debacle.  Every last bit of its demise lands at their doorstep.   Let me explain a bit here.  The current efforts to get this project underway...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-ucp-owns-green-line-project.html

So … the UCP wants the Green Line to be above ground as it passes through downtown.  The reasoning for this is ostensibly the “complexity” of dealing with water issues.  I call bullshit o...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/09/on-above-ground-transit-corridors.html

The UCP government is now becoming vengeful - openly so.  In the 2023 Alberta Election, rural Alberta voted UCP, and urban Alberta didn't (at least not the kind of sweep that the UCP seems to th...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-ucp-is-being-petty-and-vengeful.html

This morning, in a move reminiscent of UK media, Canada's National Post published the following story as front page news:  Ontario school hid girl's transition, called CAS on parents questioning...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/09/what-is-untold-story-here.html

Things are beginning to line up in terms of the UCP's plan and we can see now how they are going to attack health care and Albertans.  There's quite a sequence of things here, but the picture th...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/08/how-ucp-is-lining-up-to-steal-your.html

As we move from the summer doldrums to the fall political season in Alberta (and Canada in general), there are some things we need to talk about.  Specifically, we need to talk about the concept...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/08/an-attack-on-one-is-attack-on-all.html

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter(1) and renamed it "X", I've been toying with abandoning the platform.  I don't like Musk to begin with, but at the same time the platform is often a firehose ...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/08/why-i-left-twitter.html

There's been a whole lot of fuss made over a couple of athletes in the Olympics who don't appear female enough to satisfy some people that they are in fact women.  I'm not going to link to the v...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/08/about-sex-testing-and-olympics.html

Yesterday, I ran across this essay on X(itter), and it annoyed me because the author makes all kinds of errors of both fact and reason.  Since things on X have a nasty habit of disappearing at ...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/07/letting-your-biases-get-in-front-of-you.html

So, Andrew Coyne muses that Justin Trudeau should just step aside in the wake of a recent by-election defeat .  His reasoning?  Well - it's a bit of a jumble of deflection, redirection and obfu...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/07/yes-andrew-democracy-is-under-attack-in.html

The subtitle for this should be "How Cass Weaponized Science". Now that the Cass Review has published their final report, it is possible to look beyond the apparent issues in how the report wa...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/06/reviewing-cass-review-report.html

In the last few years, coded language has become a significant factor in how political parties present themselves.  This is especially prevalent among  parties who are adopting policy positions...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/06/on-coded-language-and-political-policy.html

The Cass Review draws some astonishing conclusions about the WPATH Standards of Care (SOC) . More or less, the basic upshot of the Cass Review's analysis is that the SOC is "based on shaky evi...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-cass-review-and-wpath-soc.html

The recently released Cass Review Final Report  (Cass Review) has criticized the absence of “high quality evidence” supporting the use of puberty blockers to treat transgender youth (as well...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/04/lets-talk-about-data-quality-for-moment.html

So, wayyyy back in 2021, I wrote a piece pointing out that a lot of the arguments about whether transgender athletes (and particularly trans women as athletes) have "intrinsic advantages" in spo...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/04/trans-athletes.html

Apparently there is a belief held among certain members of the trans community that we should go back in time … back to the days of the DSM III in particular - at least for what is now referre...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/04/lets-go-back-to-dsm-iii.html

 On March 19, 2024 the United Conservative Party of Alberta held an event that they called "Let Kids Be Kids " (spoiler alert:  it was an anti-trans/anti-2SLGBTQ/anti-SOGI/"parents rights" rall...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/03/you-got-played-girl.html

Ever since Pierre Poilievre opened his mouth and declared that Trans Women need to be banned from washrooms and locker rooms , there's been a steady increase in the amount of violent rhetoric aim...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/03/collective-punishment.html

Alberta in particular continues to ride the “War on Drugs” policy train from the 1980s.  In fact, in many ways the current UCP government has doubled down on it with an approach that basical...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/02/on-drug-policy.html

In reading the essay “Current Concerns About Gender Affirming Care In Adolescents ”, it occurred to me that there is a fundamental misrepresentation about what Gender Affirming Care means, an...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/02/affirming-care-is-not-conveyor-belt.html

So, apparently people who have made careers out of attacking trans people (and trans women in particular) are "unfailingly polite", and it's trans people who are being unreasonable (apparently). ...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/02/i-get-comments.html

Back in the comments here,  one of this blogs semi-regular, anonymous TERF-y commenters claims that transgender women are "often violent" based on a single news story .  The backstory here is...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/02/about-that-angry-violent-trans-woman.html

Among the heartless and cruel things that Danielle Smith announced in her "policy package" about parental rights (anti-transgender policy, really), was an absolute ban on transgender women compet...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/02/about-albertas-proposed-ban-on-trans.html

The United States is giving us a real-time view into the collapse of an empire.  The 2024 election cycle will determine whether the final failures happen quickly (and soon), or if there will be ...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-collapse-of-american-empire.html

So, in the last few days, much virtual ink has been spilled by the press and conservative politicians about Canada's "car theft problem" .  I'm not going to spend a ton of time analyzing it, but...

https://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2024/02/about-that-car-theft-problem.html