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One type of TV show that I enjoy are detective murder mysteries. I don't watch them all - that would be nearly impossible, Netflix carries so many - but I'm always looking for detective shows that I find absorbing. " Inspector Lewis " is probably my favourite. I loved " Prime Suspect ", Helen Mirren's tour de force. I'm in the middle of " Wallander ", recommended by a few wmtc readers, although I'm watching the BBC version with Kenneth Branagh, not the original Swedish show . " Case Histories ", featuring Jason Isaacs as private investigator Jackson Brodie, is another one I enjoy. And I've sampled many more - Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders, Cadfael, and so on. On my to-watch list are The Killing and The Fall. As much as I enjoy this genre, I often end up annoyed when we learn "whodunit". Because, too often, you know who done it? A woman. In TV detective shows, there are an enormous number of women murderers. W...

Today, fast-food workers all over the United States are standing up for their rights, demanding a living wage, demanding to be free from harassment and intimidation. From New York to Seattle, from Maine to Texas, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, low-wage workers are on strike. Please show your support by signing their open letter to McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s. These corporate giants netted $7.35 billions in profit last year alone, yet they pay their workers poverty wages.  Help them demand more!

Let me be clear. The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. - Secretary of State John Kerry The slaughter of innocent civilians is a moral obscenity? I'm betting the people of Iraq and Afghanistan* agree. Or is only the slaughter of civilians by chemical weapons obscene? Is slaughter by bombs - by house raids and checkpoints, by torture and endless imprisonment - merely ordinary and banal? Does white phosphorous , the US's chemical weapon of choice , constitute moral obscenity? How about imprisoning for 35 years  someone who brought to light the killing of innocent civilians, then granting absolute immunity  to the people who ordered those killing? That obscene enough for you? Yet again we are told that to punish a dictator for killing his own people, we must kill more of those people. And we will be told this again and again, onward through the years, until we shut down this...

If you are a fast-food worker, go here for more information on the national strike to say: Low Pay Is Not OK . For the rest of us, on August 29, visit a picket line , send an email , sign a petition . In New York City, join rallying low-wage workers at Union Square at 2:30 . All our communities will be stronger we all earn a living wage!

Abby Zimet reports on Common Dreams: Days before Bradley - now Chelsea - Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for helping expose U.S. war crimes in Iraq, the Obama Department of Justice filed a petition in federal court arguing that the perpetrators of those crimes - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al - enjoy “absolute immunity” against criminal charges or civil liability. The filing came in a suit brought by Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan, who alleges that the planning and waging of the Iraq war under false pretenses constituted a "crime of aggression" under a law used in the Nuremberg trials. Meanwhile, after the revolution...

My adventures with VPNs, wireless VPNs, and other fun IP-address changes just keep getting better all the time. My new favourite addition is called HideMyAss  - a stupid name, but a terrific service. When I last updated you on our awesome wireless VPN + Roku experience , we were using two separate routers - one for wireless VPN, and one for everything else. This was necessary because MLB.TV - through which we watch baseball on our TV, via Roku - didn't get along with the wireless VPN router. The feed would continually stop for buffering, making it impossible to follow a game. To watch baseball, we would use our regular router, with our normal Canadian IP address. To watch US Netflix, we'd use the router with the non-Canadian IP address. Flipping routers, as we call it, was no big deal. But recently, anytime I was using the wireless VPN router, my internet connection would slow to a crawl. Plus the selection of IP addresses offered by Acevpn was getting less and less reliable. ...

A few months ago, I wrote about my idol, Joni Mitchell , and posted a number of links to in-depth, lengthy interviews with her. I wasn't able to listen to them at the time. Today I am relaxing on the patio, drinking iced coffee, listening to Joni talk about her life, her art, and life, and art. Podcast of Jian Gomeshi (CBC) one hour in Joni's home. At around 17:30 she talks about what it was like to be a pregnant, destitute teenager in 1965, and the erroneous claim that she surrendered her child for adoption in order to further her career. She also demolishes several cultural myths, such as "the greatest generation," and looks at the conversion of the hippie generation into a generation of consumers. She ends by saying, "I have a tremendous will to live, and also a tremendous joie de vivre ." Video of Jon Pareles (New York Times) in conversation with Joni Mitchell and Brian Blade, one hour thirty-five minutes, at the Luminato Festival in Toronto; the inter...