The months of lies and half-truths are starting to catch up with the Harper Conservatives. It would appear that the media reaction to environment minister Baird's description of gloom and doom over the Kyoto Protocol is at best skeptical. The Canadian Press is reporting that few people are buying what Baird is selling. So why has the great Tory Spin Machine been unable to get people to believe that Kyoto will ruin the economy?

The Tories have announced their replacement for the Energuide for Homes that they call Ecoenergy Refit. The Harper Government claims that Canadians will get more money from the new program than the old, despite the program only being funded to half what the old program was. Since I did my energy refits under the old program, which was canceled from under me, cutting short the time I had to do the refits by six months, lets see if I could have gotten more money under the new system or the old system.

Some people are fond of order. Everything and everyone has it's place, and nothing should be allowed to upset that order. Laws are strict and not subject to interpretation for this crowd. Government is there to maintain the order and to prevent change. For people who think this way, democracy is not a form of government to be applauded. True democracy is incompatible with highly ordered government. In order for a democracy to work, every member of that society has to have a say, and since it's unlikely that every member of a society thinks exactly the same way as every other member, there's going to be some disagreement. This disagreement and dissent is healthy in a democracy. It is required for a democracy to grow and flourish. It does however tend to promote some chaos in the system as not everyone is marching to the beat of the same drum, much to the chagrin of the law and order crowd.

A perusal of the Privy Council website comes up with this little gem. It would appear that the Canadian Taxpayer shelled out $640 for getting passports for Stephen Harper, His wife Laureen and his two kids Benjamin and Dawn. A few questions come to mind. First, why am I, as a taxpayer paying for the PM's family's passports? I can see paying for Harper's, since his official duties require him to leave the country on occasion, but his family? Second, the cost of $640 for the lot works out to $160 per person. A quick look at the Passport Office's website shows the maximum cost of a passport is $92, for an adult. Add another $20 for a photo and you have $112 per person. So not only are we paying for passports for a government member's family, we're paying more than we as people off the street would.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified!) about what people remember about you.

After a week of cloudy, crappy weather, last night was finally clear. So I zipped on down to the RASC Calgary Centre's Wilson Coulee Observatory and took some pictures before the clouds started rolling in. I managed to catch M1, M42, M44 and M65 (pics below the cut). I've also uploaded full size pictures to the download section of this blog under astro-photos along with my other Messier astrophotos. Eleven down, 99 to go. Enjoy!

Stephen Harper wants an election. He wants it bad. He and his party are so into election mode they've probably hired the caterers for the victory party. All the signs are there. The Tories are spending money like it's going out of style. A huge negative ad campaign against the Liberals, a new fully equipped and staffed 17000 square foot "war room" in Ottawa, and budget largess that would make any previous government blush in shame. There's no denying it, the Tories are in campaign mode right now. Unfortunately for Harper and the Conservatives, they're the only ones in the country who really want an election.

In my surfing of the blogosphere and the news services I've noticed some things. One of which is the ferocity that the opposition parties attack one another. The Liberals attack the Block, NDP and Greens; the NDP attack the Liberals, Greens and Block; and so on. Same in the blogosphere, the Liberal bloggers attack the NDP bloggers and so on. I understand the reasoning, each party and their supporters are trying to steal votes from the other. There's one major problem with all this though. In the oppositions', and their supporters', vigor in trying to trash the other they're unwittingly, or wittingly, providing support to the Conservatives.

Well it's the end of week one with the new Macbook. So far I've successfully installed Windows and partially installed Linux. So it is now tri-boot, with the cavaet that Linux doesn't yet boot fully, which I'm still working on. Other than that the new computer works great. There's only one problem, and it's a bug in Mac OS X that's truly annoying. It seems that there's issues with the WPA drivers for the wireless card. Now from what I've seen on Apple's it's a widespread problem that has people up in arms. For example, for my network, the bug prevented me and Mrs. Evil from connecting to Google. Everything else worked fine, unless they linked to Google of course. So if you need WPA, you may want to wait till Apple gets this bug fixed. I've gotten around the problem by using the less secure WEP protocol which does work. Other than that, I've no complaints about the computer.