An interesting supposition on oil money and its effect on democracy. Andrew Nikkforuk on YouTube here.

Some of you may have noticed that the site has been down for a couple of days. Well that's because I had yet another hard drive crash. This gave me the impetus to finally replace the hard drive. So thanks to backups and some data recovery software, things are back the way they were as of the moment of the crash. I recommend SystemRescueCd, an open source suite of tools that allow you to not only image partitions, but do data recovery as well. I used a program on the disk called ddrescue to image the damaged partition and was able to pull the database files for all the databases needed to run this blog and the other sites here. All good again!

There was much talk during the election about vote splitting. Specifically how vote splitting on the left would allow the Tories to take a majority due to a Liberal/NDP vote split. I will look at how much of an effect this splitting had on the results. What seems to be the case is that vote splitting had very little effect on the actual outcome of the election.

This post is a little late, given that the election was done over a week ago, but as someone with training in political science - everyone's entitled to my opinion and I hate to disappoint. With the election results there are some things that are relatively clear. First, our electoral system is outdated and outmoded, as evidenced by a 1% increase in popular vote generating a 12% increase in seats. However I have written extensively about this in the past and won't write much about it here, other than to say it's unlikely that the Tories will do anything to democratize our electoral system since it would prevent them from gaining a majority. For this post I will confine my comments to my views on how things finished for the parties.

Vote damnit.....

If you don't vote, you get the government you didn't pick...

I have discovered what was wrong with the motor drive on my telescope, the power supply was shot. So a new one is on order and the 'scope is currently running on batteries. This means I can use it again for observing other than my Jupiter observations which don't need tracking. So during the chill of last night I was able to take a couple of snaps. Basically a shot of the moon, but I think a nice one.

... one of your biggest boosters in the press is calling you mean-spirited. Don Martin in the National Post has called Harper's take on Dion's misstep in an interview mean spirited and desperate. The big deal here is that Don Martin and the National Post rarely, if ever say anything against the Tories. My take on this is that the whole Dion misstep won't gain the Tories any traction with the voter, after all if their own media supporters are calling them on it, most non Tory True Believers(T.M. Pat. Pend) will see the same thing too.

... seems to be coming true. Back a month ago, a Harper Conservative majority was a sure thing, now there's a small chance of a Liberal minority government. A perfect storm of gaffes, missteps and economic conditions have caused the good ship Harper to if not sink, at least take on a lot of water and start listing. So as Harper and Co. desperately try to stop the hemorrhaging of their poll numbers an interesting poll comes from Nanos. This poll shows the second choice of various voters. In an election where an ABC strategic vote could be happening, it's interesting to see where that vote would likely go.

So we have someone in Toronto going around cutting the brake lines of Liberal supporters. Looking around the progressive bloggosphere I notice that there is universal shock and condemnation towards these acts of violence, as there should be. Where I don't find such shock and condemnation is over at that bastion of conservative and Conservative thinking, The Free Dominion where as of 9:30 MDT today, the participants in the the discussion of the topic are speculating that it's all a Liberal plot to get sympathy votes. No condemnation, just speculation that it's all just a Liberal plot. This really goes to show what the underbelly of conservatism and Conservatism really is.

For those of you out there who, like me, can't stand the "New Facebook", in kind of the same way as "New Coke", I have successfully used the following method to get the old Facebook back:

Click here and add the Developer App.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2345053339

Then click here:

http://apps.new.facebook.com/?fbnew_opt_out=1

It works for now. How long until the Facebook admins figure it out, who knows.