It would seem that George W. Bush, in an attempt to be remembered for something that doesn't have the word "worst" in it, is now pushing for a Middle East peace deal before he leaves office. The irony, of course, is the one person who's done the most to de-stabilize the region is now trying to make peace there, somewhere, somehow. It is most likely that any 11th hour effort on the part of the Bush administration to deal with a problem they've virtually ignored since taking office will fail, given that many, much better thought out attempts have failed. I think it is unlikely that any ham fisted attempt by Bush and Co. to force a settlement onto Israel and the various Palestinian factions will create even a short-term peace let alone anything lasting. This is due to several factors working against any peace process in the region.

As some of you may have gleaned from some previous posts, I'm a bit of an amateur astronomer. Generally I work in the radio part of the spectrum, but recently have moved into shorter wavelength visual work. To that end I purchased a 12.7cm (5 inch) telescope last summer. I've done some prime focus work and some eyepiece projection work, but also wanted to do some piggyback work, as even a relatively small telescope such as mine doesn't see a lot of the sky at once. This can be rectified by piggybacking a camera on the telescope and using the camera lenses, which have a much greater field of view.

Well thanks to being busy and then enjoying some time off, I haven't had much of a chance to post here. So for your holiday viewing pleasure a picture of M42 I took a couple of days ago. This is the nebula that appears as the "sword" in the constellation of Orion. Enjoy!

So it seems that I'll be running against Craig Chandler after all. It seems that Mr. Chandler has decided to run as an independent in the constituency of Calgary-Egmont after being denied the ability to run under the provincial Tory banner. It is interesting that he didn't try to run under another of the far right party banners such as the Alberta Alliance or the Wildrose Party. Now that may be that those two parties already have candidates in place in the riding, though I can find no evidence of that on the web. It may also be that given Chandler's baggage, the two parties aren't too keen to have him flock to their banner. There may also be some disagreement on Chandler's part towards the two parties' respective platforms. Whatever the reason, Chandler has decided to go it alone.

I've been busy again, but there has been a change here at Evilness. In my never ending battle against comment spam, I've added an IP blacklist lookup. The way it works is simple. If you post anonymously, your IP is checked against a list of IP's known for bad behavour. If there's a positive hit, the post is rejected. The list is maintained over at Project Honeypot and if you find your IP on the list, you need to talk to them. For now I've tested from a couple of IP's and there seems to be no problem posting anonymously. Feel free to test it out though. If there's a problem and you have my email address, drop me a line and I can look into the code I've added to my Geeklog installation. Bear in mind that if you have a dynamic IP from your ISP, the IP may be on the list as a spammer may have used that IP then discarded it.

In this interesting article in the National Post we see that Pierre Trudeau was the big spender on the military of all prime ministers going back to 1970. The article is interesting enough for this alone, but the really interesting part is further down the article where it's stated that:

"Some Conservatives have also complained the funding the government has directed for new defence equipment has not translated into additional support for the party at the polls."

Ummm.... isn't the point of increased military spending to support our troops in doing the job we send them to do and not to score political points with the electorate?

With the way Stephen Harper's government supports the troops, there won't be many troops left. With the Harper Tories telling the military to fund the war in Afghanistan completely out of DND's budget, and not to ask for more money for the task, there will necessarily have to be cuts to everything else the military does to make up the shortfall. This is evidence of two things. First that the Tories really only pay lip service to supporting the troops and wouldn't know what real support looks like if it ran up and slapped them in the face. The second is more sinister as it looks like the Tories are trying to hide the true cost of the Afghan mission in the military budget where it won't scare away voters.

In another from the Conservative support for the troops is limited to yellow ribbon stickers on cars and wearing red on Fridays file; the Harper Conservatives are going to eliminate the cost of living allowances that members of the CF get when they're posted to certain Canadian cities. These allowances make up for the fact that military rates of pay don't vary depending on where you live, unlike salaries in other jobs and often military members must live in cities with extremely high costs of living such as Toronto.

It would seem that Ed Stelmach has decided to check out Craig Chandler before signing his nomination papers. It seems that the premier has some reservations about Mr. Chandler. It's no wonder that Ed does, given Chandler's propensity to "shoot from the hip". This has gotten Chandler lots of press, not much of it good, with remarks about how non-conservatives (or Conservatives) should move out of the province, to comparing gay rights activists to Nazis. To say the least, Chandler is a colourful individual.

As of my nomination last night, I'm now the Alberta NDP candidate for the provincial riding of Calgary-Egmont. It looks like I'm the first to be nominated in the riding, though from what I can see the Liberals have former separate school trustee Cathie Williams going through their nomination process. The Alberta Progressive Conservatives have a nomination meeting coming up on the 17th of November and it's a fight between Craig "Vote Tory or Leave" Chandler and Johnathan Denis. It will be interesting to see who wins that fight.