Tuesday, June 27, 2017

A random sample of good-news bad-news stories from the CBC today

Here's a good news/bad news story out of Edmonton.

The bad news is that Edmonton still employs the widely discredited carding strategy to harass Natives and black folks living in poverty in the capital city of Canada's most prosperous province. At least it was the most prosperous till very recently.

Thankfully, the Edmonton chapter of Black Lives Matter is shining some light on this travesty.

Stop those "street checks" on Indians and black folks, you racist Edmonton cops!

The good news is that when they stop, we'll be better able to ignore the systemic racism that leaves Natives and black folks living in the streets in the first place.

Here's another one. Looks like the Trump Care initiative to repeal Obamacare is going nowhere fast. Trump Care is bad news. Obamacare was bad news. The good news is that studies have shown for decades that a vast majority of Americans want a single-payer health care system just like most civilized nations in the world enjoy today.

If, per Leonard Cohen, democracy ever comes to the USA, they'll have single-payer in no time.

And here's a good one; Ontario taxpayers just made a commitment to clean up the mercury poisoning in the English-Wabigoon river system that's been in the news since I was a teenager. The story talks about $85 millions, but that will only scratch the surface. We'll spend ten times that and there'll still be mercury poisoning in that river system.

But at least we're finally making an effort. The bad news is that the heirs of the greed-bags who poisoned those waters in the first place live unscathed in their posh mansions and get accolades for their various philanthropic endeavours.

As a taxpayer, I gotta say that sucks.

Finally, here's a good news/bad news story out of the Holy Land. Seems a few mainstream Canadian Jews have their kippas in a twist over the fact that the arch-racist Netanyahu regime has reneged on a promise to allow men and women to pray together at the Wailing Wall.

They didn't notice the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

They didn't notice the egregious colonizing of stolen land.

They didn't notice Netanyahu turning Israel into a pariah state.

They didn't notice the creeping apartheid.

But by God, they're paying attention now that the prayer-wall has been re-segregated!

And that's good! Maybe now they'll be more amenable to noticing all that other stuff.

No comments:

Post a Comment