So you may have noticed that it's been a while since I've posted something of any substance here. There are many reasons for it. My mother's passing took an emotional toll that took some time to deal with so for many weeks I just haven't been in the mood to do much blogging. I also started a masters program so that has also taken up much of my energy. Well September is upon us and hopefully the sliding back into the routine of work will punch up my blogging energy, or at the very least push me past the bit of writer's block that seems to have set upon me like some kind of malaise. Heck with an election on the horizon, there should be plenty to blog about, now just to find the motivation!

... is how I see Harper's latest election maneuvering. Stephen Harper has wanted an election so bad for years now, but the opposition has defied his wishes so far, how dare they! So Harper is willing to break the spirit, if not the letter of his own law on fixed election dates. Not that the Tories are sticklers for obeying the law, as one Tory staffer put it, laws are for criminals.

They Stephen Harper hypocrisy just keeps on coming. It would appear that our beloved PM can't even follow his own laws. Someone tell me again how the current Tories are so much better than the Grits they replaced?

Some time over the night my mom passed away in her sleep, her battle with cancer finally over. It's difficult right now to find the words I need to say what I want to say. My mind is full of memories of her over the years, all of them good. Since few outside our family probably know anything about my mom I thought I should write something about her.

The stories lost due to the hard drive crash have been restored. Unfortunately any comments to those stories have been lost forever.

Now to get a new hard drive since this one seems to be on it's last legs....

I've just had a hard drive crash, wiping out the database that serves this blog. Thankfully I have a back up, though it was done on the 15th of May. I've restored that much. I have the other posts as I word process them first and will be restoring them slowly over the next couple of days. I apologize for any problems that this may cause.

It has been a while since I've received something of this nature in my inbox. In fact not since I received this piece of bovine scatology has something this bad shown up. As a public service, here's my dissection and comments. For the record, the email has an alleged quote from controversial radio host Bruce Allen of CKNW.

I've been away from the blogging keyboard for a while. It's been busy here at Castle Evil between the end of the training year with my unit and the end of the school year at my civilian job. Now that the lazy days of summer are here, I can again wax semi eloquently about the issues of the day. Today I'm going to look at Stephane Dion's carbon tax proposal. Now I'm not going to look at it from a stand point of will it work or won't it or what it will do to the economy or our greenhouse gas emissions. I'm going to look at it from the standpoint of how it will affect Dion politically.

No sooner than Harper loses his nigh-incompetent Foreign Affairs minister, then Harper himself starts messing up the portfolio. It would seem that the Harper government is so desperate to put a positive spin on the Afghanistan mission that they'll they'll tell the media about agreements that don't exist only to retract the statements when in flight, reducing the ability of reporters to change their stories before publication. Now I'm sure the Tory apologists out there will simply state a mistake was made, but one has to wonder about the timing of the mistake, not to mention that most PMO staffers don't go to the bathroom without prior approval from Harper himself. It all seems that the "mistake" was planned so that the headlines back home would read "Harper gets troop deal" as opposed to nothing at all.

...the Fraser Institute to toe the neo-con party line. In this case, the party line is that global warming, if it exists, isn't caused by human activity. Why do I bring this up, well because the Fraser Institute has mailed to my school, and undoubtedly every school in at least Alberta, a copy of Great Global Warming Swindle. For those of you unaware of this great "masterpiece" of British television, it claims to show that global warming is just a big conspiracy. By cherry picking data, charts and misquoting scientists, the program attempts to counter act the massive weight of peer reviewed science showing human activity as a problem in global warming. Now I'm not going to critique the program as others have done a good job of that here, here, here, here, and here.