Lots of good reads in the Globe today

When you fork over $6.30 to the Korean Extortionist for a Saturday Globe, and you're done reading anything worth reading in under an hour, you tend to feel ripped off. But not today. Even Doug and Mark had feature articles that I managed to get through without any noticeable rise in blood pressure.

But maybe that's just more evidence of my cognitive decline...

Having said that, Mark's multi-page "Folio" feature on the betrayal of the Kurds is a good example of how the billionaire-owned media chooses what you or I get to read. When is the last time you saw a multi-page feature on the betrayal of the Palestinians in the Globe? Or Canada's complicity in the betrayal of Haitian democracy? Probably never.

My favourite piece was Marty Klinkenberg's profile of the three mountaineers who died on Howse Peak back in April. I'm a big fan of fairly extreme mountain hiking, but I've never been a ropes-and-pitons guy. I have an acquaintance who is. From talking to him, I get the sense that the climbing club is pretty exclusive. You're not in the club until you've dangled from ropes attached to the premier climbing mountains around the world.

Elsewhere, Report on Business has a feature on how "Bay Street whipped up a cannabis frenzy," which completely avoids any mention of how the Globe and Mail assisted Bay Street in whipping up that frenzy.


Without using the actual words, the thought-leaders at the Globe now acknowledge what I've been saying all along; Canada's legal weed roll-out was a classic pump-and dump scam.

Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble...

How to lose millions selling marijuana

That would seem to be a tough slog, but the Government of Ontario has apparently managed it!

Which comes as something of a surprise, because Premier Doug is reputed to have been quite the wily weed shark in his younger days. Then again, just because he was a renowned pot peddler, doesn't mean he ever made much money at it.

I know how it goes. You're selling a quarter ounce here and a half ounce there. You do the math and figure if you could just crank up the volume, you could quit your day job! You scratch together a few thousand dollars to buy a couple pounds.

To move this in a timely manner, you're gonna need a network. So you enlist a bunch of your pothead buddies. None of them have any money, so you front them the stuff and wait for the cash to roll in.

You wait and you wait, and you wait some more. After about a month, you realize there's precious little money rolling in, but you're getting a virtual tsunami of hard-luck stories. What to do?

Well, what are your options? These are, or were, your pals. Kidnap their kids? Kill their dog? After briefly considering your options, you decide to eat your losses, strike the offenders off your Christmas card mailing list, and stick with your day job.

But that was then. This is now. It's legal, and the government has a monopoly!


And they still manage to fuck it up!