PEREGRINE PULP

In their ongoing attempt at self-immolation, the once-relevant press is at it again. WHAT HAPPENED On March 7th, aspiring killers (two young men, US citizens living at home with their parents in the leafy suburbs of Pennsylvania) deployed a pair of IEDs (containing materials that would have them designated as weapons of mass destruction) at a public gathering on the street in front of the home of the New York City mayor. The gathering was overwhelmingly attended not by protes

Like many other people, I’ve tried to stay as far away from this story as possible and for all kinds of obvious reasons. Until now, the lack of publicly available information, the hyperabundance of existing investigation and reporting, the wild conspiracies and sensationalism surrounding every aspect, as well as the nature and sensitivity of the related material has made this story deeply uninteresting. And yet, it’s looking evermore clear that this story, or murky constellat

The Vancouver Sun just published " Crime destroying B.C. downtowns, municipal leaders warn ." Many other news outlets offered similar reporting. Just a couple weeks ago it was " ' When a street dies, a city dies': B.C. businesses say disorder, crime jeopardizing their survival ." The trouble here is, well, that none of this is happening. We actually have good data on criminal code violations and crime severity in British Columbia (and around the country). And if you go lookin

Folks just love flipping everything on its head, applying absurdist euphemisms or simply arguing that what we can all see happening is somehow the reverse. My favourite local examples have been "harm reduction" and "safe supply" which have only ever correlated with far more harm and even whole new dimensions of it. On the international front we've seen the most aggressive form of this phenomenon come out of the war in Gaza. In the continued insanity surrounding Israel's confl

Spain warming faster than rest of northern hemisphere: study - Apr 2010 https://phys.org/news/2010-04-spain-faster-rest-northern-hemisp...

Can we talk about CBC’s Vote Compass ? I'd love to know if it's actually possible to assess someone’s political leanings or which party...

What’s the deal  with the measles? ( Offered in the tone and tempo of Jerry Seinfeld, of course. ) Measles outbreaks are taking up a lot of time and space, even here in Canada, in the traditional and new press. Along with that, I keep reading that RFK Jr, the new head of America’s Health and Human Services, is promoting things backward and upside down as preventatives or cures and generally making everything worse, as he's always so determined to do. So what do you suspect I

CONTEXT WHAT IS DOGE? Executive Order - ESTABLISHING AND IMPLEMENTING THE PRESIDENT’S "DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY " "DOGE Teams.  In consultation with USDS, each Agency Head shall establish within their respective Agencies a DOGE Team of at least four employees, which may include Special Government Employees" "Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney.  Agency Heads shall ensure that DOGE

After landing in Washington to start his second term, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency under a temporary contract government organization titled "United States DOGE Service" (a renaming of the United States Digital Service  created during the Obama administration.) Inaugurated through executive order , the stated purpose of this service is to eliminate excessive regulations, reduce wasteful and fraudulent federal spending, and modernize federal technolog

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

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

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

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

No one finds it the least bit interesting when folks suddenly flip reality on its head and offer up the very arguments they just finished spending weeks and months and years loudly and aggressively shooting down? That phenomenon occupies me. This sort of behaviour is so frequent at present it could be a weekly show on CBC Radio. Speaking of which, did you catch the recent Front Burner episode on CBC about the keffiyeh? The feature  came about because the Ontario legislature

The New York Times just published a flashy article on its website accusing Israel of deliberately starving Palestinian children . They tell us, “Obtaining enough to eat had already been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gazans had required food assistance, according to the United Nations, and around 0.8 percent of children under the age of 5 in Gaza had been acutely malnourished, the World Health Organization said." They

This morning NPR landed in my news feed with this astonishing bit of journalism: Why Egypt won't allow vulnerable Palestinians across its...

NO CEASEFIRE November 1st Hamas official Ghazi Hamad stated that Hamas would “repeat the October 7th attacks time and again until Israel...

The killer whale is the largest known species of dolphin. This exposes its common name as a rather silly one. ( Silly, just like so many others, such as the: mantis shrimp [not a shrimp or a mantis], electric eel [not an eel], starfish or cuttlefish [not fish], sea cucumber [not a vegetable, though it sure looks like a disembodied rectum], king cobra [not a cobra], horny toad [not a toad, maybe horny], red panda [not a panda], koala bear [not a bear], maned wolf [not a wolf]