Megalomedia – the web-based ray of hope for all

So we all remember the Atlanta courthouse shooting right? The Globe has a creepy little story about Ashley Smith, the single mother whose house the suspect hid in. Turns out she stayed calm, read a few good Christian stories to the man and called the cops. Okay, she deserves praise. But the Globe reports that she has already received four book offers and been approached by one movie studio.
Wow.
I was still kind of reeling from that when I read The Post’s Bruce Garvey’s column entitled ” Amid Atlanta’s madness, a blonde ray of hope.” Allow me to share some of his most sparkling gems: “And then, through the gloom and despair of it all, there comes a shining light, a blond ray of hope that there is some residue of goodness left in the world.” ” Bound with masking tape and electrical cord, Smith feared the worst. Yet somehow, she retained enough poise and faith to talk down the murderous fugitive” “Amen to that and thank God for the likes of Ashley Smith, a honky-tonk angel if ever there was one.”
I guess someone’s making a play for Christie Blatchford’s old column space.

It’s okay to rough them up, right?
The Globe was the only paper to report that U.S. military officials admitted at least 26 prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of “criminal homicide.”
That’s murder.
Even if (and this is a stretch) every single one of those cases was inmate on inmate violence, the U.S. still has the responsibility to protect those people from harm.
26 people dead. And how many of those had been charged with a crime?
The Globe has a great point too, only one of the 26 occurred at Abu Ghraib. Remember when Bush said prisoner abuse was the work of a band of rogue soldiers in an isolated incident? Yea, me too.
So why didn’t more Canadian papers get this story? After all, Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have turned countless suspects over to U.S. authorities, so we’re complicit too.
Canadians, Americans and anyone who really believes in freedom should be enraged by this.
Instead, Michael Jackson gets more coverage.

Haiti again?
Pierre Pettigrew is in Haiti today, raise your hands if you knew that. If your hand isn’t up, rest assured, you’re not alone. The CP wire had this, but few papers picked up on it. None of the big boys did.
Pettigrew is there to check up on the UN operation and make sure things are ready for the election coming up later this year. He also wants to address the “urgent” need to disarm gangs. Those would be the gangs responsible for about half of the killings in Haiti in the past year, the other half are part of the U.S-backed interim government, but they don’t need to be disarmed, they’re “soldiers.”
It’s nice of ol’ Petey Pettigrew to pop by, but really, given the level of attention paid to Haiti since a U.S.-backed coup overthrew a democratically-elected leader, I can’t imagine anything getting done.
The government has better things to worry about, and the press would rather talk about other things, like blonde rays of hope and Bush’s “success” in the Middle East.

Terror, thy name is Seamus
In a wonderful news story (the bolding will become clear later), Steven Edwards reports on the changing attitude towards the IRA in the U.S. He notes that although the IRA is by definition a terrorist group (in the same way the American Revolutionaries of the 18th Century or the U.S.-backed insurgents in Haiti are), only recently has political opinion of the group gone awry. Or at least, that’s what he should have said.
Instead, Edwards writes this: “With the IRA under fire over a series of recent crimes (among them the murder of a Roman Catholic family man, the staging of the world’s biggest bank robbery and the laundering of huge sums of money), Mr. Adams is finally getting the cold shoulder many believe he has long deserved.”
Oh, he doesn’t attribute that “many” who believe Adams deserves the cold shoulder.
He goes on:
“That’s a pretty powerful list of snubs in a country where the IRA, for three decades, tapped into misguided Irish-American romanticism about the nature of the group’s struggle and clandestinely raised untold millions to finance its post-1969 attacks on civilians and soldiers in Northern Ireland and the British mainland.”
Misguided Irish-American romanticism, now that’s objective news reporting.

Well if Vanity Fair says it’s true. . .
The Citizen ran an opinion piece by Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens that says the discovery of facilities capable of building a nuclear bomb justifies Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Um, Mr. Hitchens? Bush said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. So did Rumsfeld. They didn’t say they had facilities capable of building nuclear bombs, they said he had them.That’s a key difference.
Just what defines a facility capable of building nuclear bombs? In World War II, tractor factories were turned into munitions factories, are they facilities capable of building nuclear bombs?
I have a brain, I can learn stuff, does that make me capable of building a nuclear bomb? Perhaps we need lobotomies for all, just to be safe.
The fact that Vanity Fair and Slate (where the article first ran) would publish this shit is sad. The fact that the Citizen is so married to its agenda that it reprints it is deplorable.

Barry Cooper: Toughest Man Alive
I normally don’t cast my net of cynicism to regional papers outside the area (Ontario-centrist that I am), but Barry Cooper’s column in the Calgary Herald is too good to pass on. For those who don’t know, Cooper works at the U of Calgary’s miltary studies department. I have wonderful mental images of a tree-house, boys-only club where leadership is picked by whipping out their dicks and seeing whose is biggest, but I digress.
Cooper argues in favour of grizzly bear hunting because “the whole point about hunting a bear instead of a deer or a goose is to measure your own nature by courting a natural danger. … this is why the spring grizzly hunt in Alberta expresses a hardiness — yea, a manliness — that can yet be celebrated.”
That’s right, shooting an unarmed bear from 100 feet is a feat of manliness.
This has given me an idea for a wonderful charity event.
Barry Cooper vs. an Alberta Grizzly: Live from a Steel Cage.
No weapons, no rules… NO MERCY!
Let’s see how manly you really are Mr. Cooper.

Oh and finally, there’s a story about pirates in the Montreal Gazette today! Real life, swashbuckling pirates! I’m not sure how one goes about buckling a swash, but who cares! Pirates! YARRGH!