jihad in Ottawa?

It's 1.30 on Wednesday afternoon in a horrible new world in Canada. Nobody knows anything except there was shooting on Parliament Hill and people are dead and the CBC is going nuts.

Canada has thrown its lot in with the United States in bombing small angry nations in the Middle East, and angry, disaffected young men, even in our once-peaceful nation, have an angry new cause. We will all suffer as a result, and Stephen Harper will triumph. That's all I can think as I hear of this hideous tragedy - that it plays right into the paranoid, evil hands of Stephen Harper.

I had a cab driver yesterday, a grey-haired man from the Caribbean who said another driver, a Muslim, told him that he agreed with ISIS because it is only following the Koran. The driver said, "I said to him, that book tells you to kill and maim in the name of your god and you READ that book? You believe in that book? What kind of human being are you?"

He looked at me in the mirror. "I hate religion now, all of them," he said wearily. "Destroying lives all over the world with false promises to stupid people."

They say that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. So let's take a hard look at the success rate of bombing and invading Islamic nations.

Sad. Seriously depressing.

Luckily, for the first time in days, there's a bit of sun in the sky. I have found a patch shining into my bedroom and pulled a chair over to sit in it. No matter how bad things get, there's delight in a patch of sun.

PS Great op-ed in support of John Tory in the Star today - by Zanana Akande, "past president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and a former NDP MPP and cabinet minister." If Zanana Akande likes him, then I can too. My mind is finally made up.