#Gina #Rinehart, an Australian worth $30 billion and an avid Donald Trump supporter, has changed Alberta’s politics in her relentless pursuit of mined coal.

👉The saga offers more evidence on how the wealthy exercise their raw financial power to engineer democracy for their own economic benefit.

💥Political scientists call the oversized influence of billionaires “the wealthification” of politics.
Witness how billionaires dominated the U.S. presidential election.

🆘 Now the influence of Australia’s wealthiest person seems to have won the open support of the right-wing populist government of Danielle Smith.

Not too long ago, Rinehart’s ambitions in Alberta appeared to be dead in the water.

⭐️In 2021, provincial and federal regulators ruled her company’s proposal for a
♦️massive open-pit mine at #Grassy #Mountain would pollute the Oldman River watershed and was not in the public interest.

❌Not to be deterred, the mining magnate spent millions to reverse the decision, with demonstrable effect.

In the last three years she has repeatedly sued the Alberta and federal governments and challenged regulatory processes.

And even though three separate courts have found her arguments baseless and without merit,
she continues to sue.

Two outstanding lawsuits, for example, contend the Alberta government owes her billions because her mining plans were stymied.

Overwhelming public opposition to coal mining forced the government to impose a coal moratorium in the Rockies to protect critical watersheds.

Outside of provincial and federal courts, Rinehart has hired two lobby firms with ties to the United Conservative Party government to actively promote her open-pit mining project.

When it became clear that citizens living in the municipal district of Ranchland, where Rinehart wants to build the mega-mine, were overwhelmingly opposed to its construction,
Rinehart actively participated in a dubious referendum sanctioned by Smith in the neighbouring community of Crowsnest Pass.

Rinehart’s company even drove voters to the polls.

🆘 Thanks to Rinehart’s promises of jobs and prosperity, one political geography voted yes to a project that will destroy water and landscapes in a neighbouring municipal district.

In the divisive process, the billionaire weaponized an economically depressed community to buy the illusion of social licence.

In the process Rinehart effectively disenfranchised 200,000 water drinkers downstream from the proposed mine,
as well as five million Albertans who own the resource and have consistently opposed mining in Rocky Mountain watersheds.

Last month Smith’s government openly embraced the billionaire’s Grassy Mountain project in an abrupt press briefing before Christmas.

✅ Since then, hundreds of demonstrators have flooded the streets of small towns downstream from the proposed mine site to defend their water security in an arid landscape.

Rinehart’s victory to date adds a push-pin to her global map of political conquests.

In a recent speech, interspersed with video clips from the fellow right-wingers Elon Musk and Pierre Poilievre,
⚠️the Australian magnate said the mining sector must push its advocates into Parliament where they can rip up environmental legislation she claims is jeopardizing the world’s mining industry
thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/01/09…

There's a type of reply-guy that crawls out of the woodwork when I post anything that might inspire others to take action, and they're deceptively insidious.

Regardless of the topic, they sound like this:

Alice: I don't own a gun because they're for killing and I'm not a fan of killing.
Bob: Then only the bad guys will have guns.

Alice: I deleted my Facebook account.
Bob: If the good people leave then the bad guys win.

Alice: I'm openly queer so others know they're not alone.
Bob: You'll make yourself a target.

In every instance, they defend the shitty state of things by discouraging action and change. It's a reply that is designed to support the default, the current power structure. It's a type of reply meant to de-fang movements.

I've posted about this before, but apparently it bears repeating. Fighting for something takes energy. Change takes sustained energy and momentum. These types of interactions sap energy. They're not posting anything openly disagreeable, they're just dropping little doubt caltrops, little concern anchors—making it harder to keep fighting, harder to gain momentum.

If you're about to jump into a thread and concern troll, don't. I'm fucking sick of it. The rest of us don't have the time or energy to drag your dead weight along.

#ReplyGuys #Concern #Trolling #Change

Python people: is there a decent publication quality plotting library that can make basic black and white plots, write them in a common format (PNG, SVG), and does not depend on matplotlib?

matplotlib is brittle, unintuitive, and basically unusable. I do not want or need to display plots, I do not want or need web or Jupyter support or any interactivity.

I need something that runs locally and just turns data into lines and points and text in a graphics format that can eventually be printed. Something like what gnuplot does but that can be driven from Python.

Everything either is aimed at "data visualization" on the web or is just a layer on top of matolotlib. I have two columns of numbers, I want a professional-looking B/W scatter or line plot that can be incorporated into a press-friendly document.

plotnine is failing due to some weird-ass matplotlib backend issue that the plotnine maintainer claims is because something is installed wrong. I've spent my alotted hour trying to get the minimum functionality out of plotnine and have failed so I'm punting.

Someone has to have had good experience with a not-web-oriented locally-hosted plot library that isn't matplotlib. I've seen references to Seaborn, Bokeh, Plotly, Altair, and plotnine. I'd be willing to learn ggplot to leverage the syntax in both R and Python but if there's a decent non-ggplot solution, I'd take it.

There's too goddamn much implicit magic in matplotlib, I have no MATLAB knowledge to leverage, and I'm tired of fighting through the matplotlib learning curve. It's awful and I want something clearer and better.