test blog 5

Not the kind of demo I usually write about: this is demolition. This happened in my area this morning. I would have liked to have seen it!

I'm soon going to start Jared Diamond's Collapse - and if you still haven't read his incredible book Guns, Germs, and Steel , what are you waiting for? - but first I am combing through a pile of book reviews and movie reviews. It's really a virtual pile, as I'm mostly reading them online, with the occasional hard copy for GO train time. This, I see, is why I need to get a newspaper delivered to my doorstep. I get my news online, but reviews and feature-y things about what's happening in Toronto don't seem to filter in. I know there are plenty of websites for those sorts of things, but my preferred method is to leaf through an actual newspaper. We were getting the Globe And Mail for a few months - we got a free map book and a $20 Loblaw's gift card for subscribing - but stopped it before we went to Peru. Now I think we'll try the Toronto Star for a while. It's certainly more in sync with us politically, although the quality of writing in the G...

In case you missed it in comments here , Redsock sent this news item , which notes: The Interior Ministry yesterday identified the two Saudi detainees who died Saturday in Guantanamo Bay as 29-year-old Manie ibn Shaman ibn Turki Al-Habardi Al-Utaibi and 22-year-old Yasser Talal Abdullah Yahya Al-Zahrani, who was detained at the age of 17. Twenty-two years old, imprisoned at age seventeen. I'm so disgusted and infuriated, I can hardly express my feelings. This is truly America's eternal shame.

The weather forecast has been revised; thunder storms and rain pushed back to Sunday. Not that I'm worrying about the weather, mind you.

We once had a lengthy debate on this blog about the media's role in keeping the US ignorant and right-wing. To my and Allan's utter astonishment, a commenter felt that the media has little or nothing to do with it. I can't find the post now, and it's just as well, as I don't want to single out the person who espoused that view. We felt that he simply must be unaware of what the media is like in the US. There seemed no other plausible explanation. I was reminded of that when I read this in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s article, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? : The mounting evidence that Republicans employed broad, methodical and illegal tactics in the 2004 election should raise serious alarms among news organizations. But instead of investigating allegations of wrongdoing, the press has simply accepted the result as valid. "We're in a terrible fix," Rep. Conyers told me. "We've got a media that uses its bullhorn in reverse -- to turn down the vol...

This weekend the weather is beautiful - brilliantly sunny, cool, and breezy. The forecast for next weekend - the wmtc party - is hot and humid, with thunder storms. I'll hope the forecast changes during the week. One nice thing, if it rains and we have to be inside, it will look like a lot more people showed up! Our backyard is much bigger than our little house. It's just a minor fret, though. I'm not worked up over it. I wrote enough yesterday to keep you guys busy through Monday. So I'll leave it with this for now.

My head just exploded. Three men who were being imprisoned indefinitely and illegally at the US's concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay have committed suicide . This is a portion of the US's response: Military officials on Saturday suggested that the three suicides were a form of a coordinated protest. "They are smart, they are creative, they are committed," Admiral Harris said. "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." People in a state of hopelessness, frustration and despair choose death, seemingly their only exit. And they are waging war against us . And you want to know why I moved to Canada.