PEREGRINE PULP

I was told to go read something said to be a newly published and “damning UN report about Israeli war crimes and ‘extermination’ via its war on Gaza's hospitals.” The document was a Report of Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel . It is the third such report to the UN General Assembly by this group and covers the period from October 7th, 2023 to August of 2024. The report states at the outs

I haven’t had a GP since 1998. I was recently given the opportunity to apply for a rare patient spot at a local health centre. Though I have no medical concerns, I was glad to finally have someone I could see should something come up. And then I received the patient intake application form. It’s hard to describe the lunacy that is this form. As you read the following, please appreciate that this is the intake form for a health centre populated by four doctors and a team of nu

In recent weeks and months there has been a whole rash of articles about rising temperatures killing people. The reporting   started with...

This is what I understood my ancestry to look like: My father’s family name is extremely English and my mother’s maiden name is a sort of anglicization of an Austrian surname, as I understand it. My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is also extremely English while my paternal grandmother’s could only be Scottish. And all of those folks and some of their parents and grandparents, like my parents and myself, were all born in Canada. Everyone else on the family tree I’m aware o

I was wanting to learn about and write something on how leaded gasoline became a thing. But then I came upon the biography  of its inventor.  Thomas Midgley, Jr. was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio and studied engineering at Cornell, earning a Master’s of Engineering in 1908 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1911. Five years later he was working for General Motors, at their Dayton Engineering Laboratories (DELCo) subsidiary in Ohi

A pair of revelations have surfaced relating to the pandemic. I didn't catch these being widely reported when they took place many months ago, they did not land anywhere in my news feeds, and neither were being shared or commented on by anyone I know. Instead, I accidentally stumbled upon one of these long after the fact and then the other while looking for more information about the first. DP (DURING PANDEMIC) In 2021, the US FDA was posting messages on social media and the

Folks seem to think people (other people) believe nonsense due to poor intelligence, low educational attainment, or lack of knowledge....

In 2020 a massive wildfire, known as the CZU Lightening Complex Fire , broke out in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Initially, several small fires were sparked by lightening. Those fires eventually grew and coalesced into one much larger conflagration. Part of that fire surrounded and consumed the ancient old-growth forests of Big Basin Redwoods State Park , along California’s central coast, just south of San Francisco and north of Monterey Bay. Though ignited by an unusual lightn

You’ve heard about the devastations to the world’s reef ecosystems. Most notably, the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s east coast saw...

In their ongoing effort to frame everything Palestinian as benevolent and peace-oriented, CBC sought once again to amplify the voice (and fabulous fabrications) of reporter and associate producer Keena Alwahaidi. Like so many before her, at the beginning of July Alwahaidi gleefully pushed the Gaza famine myth. That, of course, only came after this fiction had been debunked many times and on many fronts by anyone able and willing to muster the sympathy to look into the situat

I was hearing about all this stuff around Trump-related court cases and some being consequential far beyond those cases. Knowing nothing...

With a couple of communication degrees, I think of it as my job to comment on media matters. But at this point the relentless barrage of infelicity — from serious reporters and journalists at all our leading news outlets — has become pretty overwhelming. To be honest, I find it tiresome, too. But it's also hard to look away. Aside from how I feel about all this, folks also like to tell me this “obsession” of mine is both pointless and overly pedantic. All I can offer in respo

I want to love nuclear. I really do. But there’s so little to like and proponents continually refuse to win me over. Here’s just one more...

Some folks really hate Jared Diamond. And those folks love hating Jared Diamond. As any good polymath (with backgrounds in physiology,...

I don’t know how I got here. Somehow I developed this crazy belief that firefighters fought fires. Crazy, right? My bad.  Per capita, Vancouver is one of the country’s busiest fire departments, and getting busier all the time. But almost none of that fire service activity involves firefighters marching into buildings, masks on and hoses over their shoulders, to beat back flames. As a matter of fact, if you eliminated calls for service that weren’t for fires or false alarms (w

You read that right. I’m all for burning books, as I'm pretty sure you are. Just because you can conjure a pithy line you heard in a film or picked up from someone on social media about democracy or free expression doesn’t make the sentiment true. Yes, there was most certainly a time when books were precious items and libraries temples celebrating and preserving the world’s culture and collective wisdom. And, yes, in that context destroying a book or a library, god forbid, co

For years we were hearing about the replication crisis in the world of psychology; how so much accepted work in the field had never been...

Thinking about journalism and public perception, I was reminded today that in 1979 Australian journalist John Pilger entered Cambodia....