I've just heard another radio trailer for something calling itself Being Black in Canada. It promises me the "Black Experience in Canada Today". Racist Tommy Rot. The programme can no more encapsulate the life and experiences of all black people in Canada than I can encapsulate the white, or whitish. Or old The White Heather Club on television captured what it was like to be Scottish. Radio should be celebrating what we have in common, not creating ghettos.  PS - I suggested Remembered Memory might be the next example of pointless repetition alongside the likes of Lived Experience. It turned out to be Residential Home. The so-called journalists that perpetrate this nonsense are supposed to be professional communicators.

There used to by a BBC radio show called Just a Minute in which panelists were challenged to speak for a minute on a subject. Other panelists could take the topic on if they caught the panelist talking repeating themselves and could win the round by addressing the topic when the one minute buzzer sounded. The BBC could take a leaf out of that game show. Surely reference to pre-prepared military positions in Ukraine is blatant repetition. Any reference to pre-prepared is yet another example of redundant repetition – along with lived experience, etc. But pre-prepared is truly pathetic. The “pre” is already there in the first three letters of prepared. Another example is "continue on". How long before the idiots start talking about "remembered memory"? 

Last Friday was Canada Day. Only apparently there are people who believe the public holiday should not be called Canada Day because that celebrates Settler Colonialism. I think people should be more honest. Taking land is as old as mankind. Here in Canada many Indians like to be called First Nations. I doubt most  were the first inhabitants of the land they now occupy. One of the supposed First Nations here in Alberta are the Nakota Sioux. The Sioux are originally a woodland tribe from way further east than prairie Alberta, Minnesota I believe. Maybe someone should look into who the Sioux robbed of their land. Is this not an example of Settler Colonialism? Or is it just white people who are responsible for that? 

I heard a radio programme recently about people living in exile. What struck me was that all the participants were members of the upper middle classes in their former homelands. The ability to speak some kind of English may have weighted the participation rate but perhaps more effort should have been made to widen the social spectrum. The fact that most of the radio production team were probably middle class too was also a factor in the misrepresentation. That kind of class bias, intended or otherwise, can lead to distortion. The lionisation of the odious Aung San Suu Ky is one example. She was one of the Oxbridge chattering classes who dominate the all but the very senior ranks of the BBC. One of Us. Only fool would believe that her supposed commitment to democracy went beyond redressing that fact that as a girlie she could not be part of the military junta established in Burma by her father. She was putting the boot to the Rohingya Muslims long before her regime started murdering them. But she still has sainted status on the BBC.  I wonder how the BBC would cover the war in Ukraine if Putin had gone to Oxford and spoke English with a plummy accent. 

I had hoped to head this Why Does Mickey Mouse Hate Canada. But it turns out that though Disney bought much of the Fox media chain, it did not buy Fox News. And it is Fox News which is advocating the overthrow of Canada’s “Creepy Trudeau Government”. I take it that Fox News fully endorses its right wing, almost neofascist presenters and what they say on air. There is such a thing as Freedom of Speech. But shouting “Fire” in the crowded cinema is criminal. Sedition is a crime. Overthrowing a democratically elected government surely counts as sedition. Though Fox News is not big on democracy and appears to support voter disqualification measures which favour the Republican Party.  Perhaps the answer is to discourage Fox presenters from exercising their supposed right to freedom of speech when it comes to neighbouring countries. They are of course free to spout insidious rubbish that encourages polarisation and violence in their own country. Let's just stick to inciting riots at the Capitol Building and leave the Canadian House of Commons alone.