Random thoughts from a random week in the middle of a random time… Just before dawn on the morning of May 9, 1992, a methane gas explosion rocketed through the underground tunnels of the Westray mine in Plymouth, NS, killing all 26 miners working underground. That’s just four more than were killed last month in...
Mask, mask, who’s got the mask? And other global games from the coronavirus killing fields.
Welcome to the COVID-19 wild, wild west. Welcome to transnational economic globalism meets Trumpian political nationalism. Welcome to our post-COVID Job 1 — rethinking the way we’ve thought about the world for the last 50 years. Welcome to tomorrow. Welcome to today.
The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. On Friday, five unions representing workers on the coughing, spewing, life-threatened front lines of our province’s particular finger in the dike of the global coronavirus outbreak, called on the Nova Scotia government to agree to the same protections Alberta is now providing its frontline healthcare […]
Killing Patient Zero: how a 1970s-era Halifax man was blamed for the AIDS crisis
The event pre-dated cell phones, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Who knows how the word got out? But all of a sudden, the cavernous San Francisco Chronicle newsroom was flooded with television, radio, and print reporters. The date was February 17, 1994. The breaking story? Randy Shilts, the nation’s first “AIDS celebrity” journalist had died, at […]
The president versus the press. Or should that be the president thanks the press?
The day after the US mid-terms, Donald Trump staged a rambling 90-minute press conference to spin the dross of Republican electoral loss into the gold of never-ending Trumpian triumph, and thus re-establish his personal ownership of the news cycle. The press made it easy for him.
I’ve never been a fan of press-conference journalism. It may be a marginal improvement on canned-quotes press-release journalism when it comes to public accountability, but most press conferences I’ve attended are little more than carefully staged theatre pieces designed to control and direct the flow of information and emotion in ways favourable to the presenter....
Outraged about Russian meddling in the 2016 US election? What about…?
... the US role in 1948 Italy, 1953 Iran, 1954 Guatemala, 1964 Brazil, 1969 Thailand, 1973 Chile, 1980s Nicaragua, 1983 Grenada, 1989 Panama, 1996 Russia, 2002 Venezuela, 2009 Afghanistan, every year Cuba and on and on? Perhaps it's time for a little equal opportunity outrage.
Americans are right to be outraged at the outrageous Russian interference in their 2016 presidential elections. They are correct to be appalled not only that their Putin-puttana-ed president continues to pretend that what happened didn’t happen, but also that their commander-in-chief and his principle-free, me-too Republican Congressional congregation refuse to act to prevent more...
Donald Trump and the border: He stands on guard for he
In the past month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped 21 vessels in the Gulf of Maine “looking for illegal immigrants.” Illegal immigrants? From Canada? Or should that be to Canada?
“Border disputes do not go away; they fester. And when other factors push them back to the surface — the discovery of valuable resources, an assertion of national pride, a mishap at sea — the stakes can suddenly rise to a point where easy solutions become impossible.” — John Kelly Retired US diplomat who served...
It can happen here
Morning File, Friday, June 8, 2018
1. It can happen here President Donald Trump. Premier Doug Ford. Two years ago this would have been unthinkable. Now it’s reality. And these aren’t just some weird blips in history. There’s always been an undercurrent of nativism in North American history, and no manner of wishful thinking is going to make it go away. […]
Progress isn’t easy. Sometimes it just isn’t.
You know the way progress traditionally happens in politics: slowly, incrementally. And then you wake up one morning to the latest news from the Ontario provincial election campaign trail... or the White House. Progress, as Barack Obama once said, may not always be a straight line or a smooth path. But is there still a line? A path?
“We need to go forward, but progress isn’t always a straight line or a smooth path.” Barack Obama victory speech, November 7, 2012 How to explain our current political whipsaw? You go to sleep one night knowing 6,000 delegates to this weekend’s federal Liberal party convention will debate progressive resolutions to de-criminalize possession of small...
Three takeaways from America’s fool’s game election
You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?” You try so hard but you don’t understand Just what you will say when you get home Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is Do you, Mr. Jones?...