Sunday, May 6, 2018

Can a newspaper be judged by what's not in it?

Took the hounds for a turn down the Bruce Trail the other side of Bass Lake this morning. Turns out the new pup is quite the water-girl. She'll fetch sticks out of the lake that the old girls turn their noses up at. They like to see a decent splash before they commit. The new girl will chase anything.

Lots of good stuff in my Globe and Mail this weekend. I see where the Trudeau gang are screwing over our PTSD-addled CAF vets by cutting back their medicinal marijuana allotment by two thirds. I thought maybe they'd make good on their promise to treat our vets with a little more respect after the lost decade of the Harper years, but it's not looking good.

Freeland's trip to Bangladesh gets lots of coverage. My sense is we're being prepped to open the refugee floodgates for the Rohingya, and why not? After all, according to Saunders' thesis in Maximum Canada, we'll be also-rans on the global stage and in the world economy till we hit that critical mass of a hundred million in population. A million Rohingya will give us a goodly boost in that direction. Let's just hope the Housing Matters crowd succeeds in it's quest to have lots more lux condos put up; we're gonna need a lot more luxury high-rise developments in our big cities to create enough trickle-down affordable housing for a million newcomers.

Made it down to the funeral on Friday. Is it actually a funeral if the guy's been cremated? Instead of a big old hardwood casket, there was just a little box with his ashes up on the altar. Saves on both wood and pallbearers, I suppose.

The deceased always prided himself on his immigrant heritage. He was from East Prussia. How fitting then that the officiating reverend spoke in a noticeably accented English, although I think it was perhaps more East Punjab than East Prussia. No matter; Werner would have been the first to point out that we're all equal in the eyes of God.

Elsewhere in the paper we've got a bit of fluff about the royal wedding and some obligatory drivel about the latest twists and turns in the saga of 45. Giuliani and Stormy Daniels figure in the reportage today. Ya, I know, but apparently it sells papers. That's the thing about Trump. A creation of the media from the mid-seventies on, anyone who follows media, entertainment, and politics will realize that the trajectory of Donny J has been a self-fulfilling prophecy for a society that has for far too long been amusing itself to death.

While Trump hasn't quite made America great again, he's sure given SNL a new lease on life, hasn't he? And I just learned today that Alec Baldwin used to be a busboy at Studio 54 back when young Trump was honing his pussy-grabbing skills at the notorious disco. Hmm...

Aside from a lengthy article about Syrian refugees in Lebanon, (a mere pit-stop on their way to Canada, I'm sure) there was utterly no news about the Middle East. Is that an oversight? A crooked cop in Hamilton gets eight feet worth of column inches and the most explosive tinderbox on the geopolitical map gets next to nothing? How can that be?

The Globe brain trust rightfully found room for a 3/4 page spread on the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. That's something we never want to forget.

But not a word about what happened in Gaza yesterday or last week or last month.

That's something we don't want to know.



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