Remember back here when Harper said he only cared about advice on military matters from people who had served in the military? This was, of course, before he appointed Peter MacKay Minister of National Defence; a man who's sole military experience is that he's currently the Minister of National Defence. Well it seems that apart from accepting military advise from someone who hasn't spent a day in uniform, against his previous statement, Harper has his minions, specifically Jason Kenny, downright attacking former generals who give them advice.

Just a photo of Saturn I snapped on Friday night. I'm amazed at how well it turned out given that I hadn't done the polar alignment drift yet.

It would seem that the Harper Conservatives are continuing along the long, slow slide to their apparent dream of a neo-con totalitarian dictatorship. The most recent action would appear to be an attempt by the Harper government to muzzle the independent officers of Parliament such as the Auditor General. Actions such as this begin to make me wonder about the Harper and the Tories' commitment to democracy in general, and our democratic system in particular. Millimetre by millimetre, the Tories seem hell bent to destroy Canada as we know it, our democracy with it.

So last Saturday I swapped my old Motorola Cybersurf modem for the new DOCIS modem from my ISP. So there was a brief period on Saturday where the sites here at Castle Evil were down. No big deal. Except that for some bizzare reason the new modem kept dropping carrier. My ISP sent out a tech last night to check signal levels and such. The levels were fine and he swapped out the modem. So far so good, except for some reason the modem picked up a dynamic IP from my ISP as opposed to using my static IP. So after about an hour on the phone with tech support it was recommended to power down the modem for four hours. Since it was late at this point I powered down the modem and went to bed.

My ISP is making me upgrade my modem (fortunately at no cost). However I need to take the old one down to their office to make the switch. I will be doing this Saturday, 26 April 2008. During the day this site, and all the others hosted here, will be down until I have the new modem installed and the new IP propagates through the DNS system.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

If you want to control the message and spin bad news in a better light, it's probably not a good idea to invite "select" reporters to a private meeting and then scurry around like cockroaches when the rest of the media find out about it. Doing that makes it look like you really do have something to hide. Of course Harper, chess master and control freak, won't probably take this advice, simply because it's unlikely that he or any of his minions read my humble little blog, but really, you'd think it was obvious. The optics of having your party office searched by Mounties is bad enough, adding insult to your own injuries by acting underhanded isn't going to help.

Apparently the beavers up in Wood Buffalo National park have been busy. The dam is big enough that it was spotted from Google Earth images. All I can say is... well... damn!

... the best politicians money can buy.

The poll question is "Do you think that Canadian Neo-Conservatives, through the Harper government, are out to destroy the fabric of Canadian society so that it can be rebuilt in a neo-con image?" If you don't see the poll in the right sidebar, click here.

A friend of mine on Facebook had a link up to a New York Times article on John Hopkins University's medical database Popline ignoring the word abortion in searches of the database. Why might you ask? Well the US federal government under G.W. Bush told them to. Now supposedly the dean of the school has ordered the word restored to the search engine, it was being ignored in the same way as "a" or "the", but it creates some disturbing questions. Specifically, are the Bush clone Harper Conservatives doing the same thing here?