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After reading Dawg's excellent piece about the man who was appointed by the Harper Cons as Librarian and Archivist of Canada, all I can say is, "Heck of a job, Danny!"

In March 2012, Christy Clark gave the opening remarks to the Ottawa Manning Centre Networking Conference, the yearly "conservative family reunion".

She was introduced by her then chief of staff, former senior Harper advisor, Enbridge lobbyist, and Alberta 'firewall manifesto' signatory Ken Boessenkool, who was her very first campaign manager back in 2010. 
"We have a duty to Canada" to easy the flow of products to Asia, she told her audience at the Manning Centre [a year ago]. "We support pipelines in British Columbia." BC Conservative leader John Cummins was not invited.
Manning has in the past said he doesn’t support the political ambitions of Cummins, who was elected as a Reformer with Manning in the 1993 election, because vote-splitting on the centre-right always makes it easier for the NDP to assume power.One-time Harper government cabinet minister, Jay Hill, also said Friday he’s backing Clark’s leadership. “I’ll do whatever I can to support her and support the B.C. Liberals."
Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and President of the Manning Centre, is also a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.Jay Hill was in charge of the Cons 200 page dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt and stonewall parliamentary committees back in 2007.
Also helping Christy's campaign was Chuck Strahl, former BC Reform and Con MP, now chair of the Manning Centre and chair of CSIS watchdog the Security Intelligence Review Committee since last June, at which time he had to give up working for Christy.

The only pollster to accurately predict Tuesday's election result was Christy's principal secretary and ADM in charge of "Intergovernmental Relations" till a year ago and now on contract to Christy, former Reform and Republican policy advisor Dimitri Pantazopoulos.

Premier’s Office targeted crucial election ridings for the B.C. Liberals — all on government time and your dime
"Premier Christy Clark’s former principal secretary, Dimitri Pantazopolous, and former deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad were among those involved in a comprehensive strategy that used government staff and resources to try to win swing ridings for the BC Liberals ...  serious misconduct by government employees and misuse of government funds.  “Dimitri was the driving force behind the swing teams, from its inception through to the operational phase."Pantazoploulos also runs the Manning Centre Municipal Governance Project and is mentioned by Calgary developer Cal Wenzel in the now infamous cel vid about buying the campaigns of developer-friendly municipal candidates in order to defeat Calgary Mayor Nenshi.


On Ken Boessenkool's twitter account at Kool, Topp, & Guy Public Affairs - the political consultancy firm formed in February - former Christy chief of staff Ken Boessenkool and Christy's election advisor Don Guy are busy congratulating Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research on Christy Clark's federal ConservaLiberal campaign. 














and a quick tweet from Rob Ford's chief of staff Mark Towhey:











You do remember Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research,  don't you ? 

In addition to being Rob Ford's election architect, Kouvalis is a regular speaker at ... wait for it ... the Manning Centre yearly bunfest.

Fun fact :  Founding directors of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy :

• Nigel Wright, Harper's chief of staff, currently in the news for cutting Con senator Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to cover money the Duffster owed to the Senate for inappropriately claimed living expenses for the past four years while Duffy was being investigated for it,  and 
• Gwyn Morgan, Chairman of the Board of SNC Lavalin til May 2 this year, the company being investigated for fraud in four countries on three continents, was Steve's choice for heading up his brand new Accountability commission in 2006.

.

…are readying the frying pan, I suspect. Michael Den Tandt has never been one of my favourite scribes, but his column on the whole mess is frankly masterful. Go read it.... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Forty-Nine to One is not Fifty-Fifty.   Climate change denialists like to spread it on thick and claim there's some fierce debate over the reality of anthropogenic global warming and there are a good many disinformed, misinformed and simply delusional types who think there is no consensus and it's a toss up.

That's simply garbage served up by people who manufacture garbage for people willing to consume garbage.

Yet another peer-reviewed study into the great body of climate change research studies finds 97.1% endorse the consensus view while a miserably underwhelming 1.9% reject the consensus.

That is the finding of a University of Queensland-led study that surveyed the abstracts of almost 12,000 scientific papers from 1991-2011 and claims to be the largest peer-reviewed study of its kind.
 The report's lead author, John Cook, a fellow at the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute and founder of the website skepticalscience.com, said the scientific consensus was overwhelming, growing and had been around since the early 1990s.
  He said that while the number of papers rejecting the consensus was "vanishingly small", his research suggested the public was under the impression the debate was split 50-50.

"When people think scientists agree, they are more likely to support a carbon tax or general climate action," he said.

"But if they think scientists are still arguing about it, they don't want to do anything about it." Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are about 400 parts per million and rising – the highest in more than 3 million years.

Mr Cook said scientists now found less need to state their position on climate change in abstracts summarising their papers, "just as geographers find no reason to remind readers that the earth is round".

Science is a discipline that is not quick to embrace consensus which is one reason even phenomenon such as gravity are still treated as theories.  Therefore, when you hit 97% agreement, you truly are ringing all the bells.

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last few months, the National Post’s Matt Gurney has a useful summary of Mike Duffy’s corrupt antics in the Senate, up to and including the decision by the Prime Minister’s Office to bail out Duffy with $90,000 in cash from Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, which Duffy then used to pay back his $90,000 in ill-gotten gains bilked from the taxpayer via fraudulent expense claims. At the time, the PMO praised Duffy for “voluntarily” paying back the money. It now turns out there was nothing less than a conspiracy to rescue Duffy from having to make good on the expense accounts, and then to cover up the truth.

It’s illegal for Duffy to accept these sorts of payments in connection with his job as a Senator, so Gurney’s colleague, Andrew Coyne, is probably a little off base when he suggests that the matter wouldn’t have been nearly so awful if Duffy had disclosed the payment when it was made. In any event, I do thoroughly endorse the calls from both Coyne and Gurney (and many, many others) for Duffy to resign.

But there’s a broader observation to be made here, and I’m going to draw on another recent and scandalous episode in order to make it: where the hell has Stephen Harper’s admittedly self-interested sense of ethics gone?

Some of you will be scoffing that he never had one. This isn’t entirely true. Back when Harper was Leader of the Opposition, he believed sincerely in accountable and transparent government — or, more to the point, he believed that talking points about Liberal corruption, of which there was plenty to go around, played well with voters. And after getting elected, too, he passed some serious reforms to the ethics, lobbying, electoral finance, and other laws, even if those reforms have since been criticized for being full of loopholes so big you could drive a truck through them. And ministers could get dismissed for gross indiscretion from time to time, although those times have gotten noticeably fewer and some of the offenders (I’m looking at you, Max Bernier) have been pardoned and welcomed back into the fold.

Contrast that Harper with the Harper of this year. The Harper of this year isn’t exactly open about the corruption of his government, but he makes only slight attempts to hide it, and when caught out, he’s thoroughly unapologetic. When Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue was caught with his hand in a rather large cookie jar, the PMO defended him. When it turned out that they couldn’t simply brazen away massive violations of the electoral finance laws, Penashue stepped down, but only to run in the resulting by-election with a public promise from other Cabinet ministers that he would be reinstated into Cabinet following his re-election, plus some rather appalling guff of his own about he had deliberately (ab)used his Cabinet position by sabotaging government projects elsewhere in the country in order to gather pork for his own riding.

And now Mike Duffy. Duffy, as has been known for some months now, collected $90,000 in expenses for living in his house in Ottawa — a house he already owned and lived in when he was made a Senator, and hasn’t left since — on the dubious pretext that his vacation cabin on PEI was actually his “primary residence.” This declaration was made despite the fact that Duffy pays income taxes to Ontario, has an Ontario health care, and is registered to vote in Ontario; he subsequently claimed that he had made an error when filling out the form. A couple of months ago, while an audit of Duffy’s books was underway, he suddenly announced that he was going to repay the $90,000 in a spirit of generosity. At the time, we put it up to the Conservatives trying to put away the story before it got out of control.

Which was right, in a sense, but also wrong, in a sense. We now know, courtesy of some convenient press leaks, that Duffy worked out a deal with the Prime Minister’s Office. Under the terms of this deal, he “stayed silent” during the investigation — silent about what, we still don’t know — and, in exchange, he received a $90,000 “gift” from Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright, which he used to repay his fraudulent expense claims. So Duffy didn’t actually lose a cent by way of punishment. The Conservatives are adamant that Wright used his own money, not taxpayers’ or the party’s, for this incredibly seedy transaction.

Now, first of all, this seems like a useful time to point out that it’s simply untrue to say that “all politicians are the same.” Chretien’s Liberals, corrupt as they certainly were, were never charged with national electoral money laundering. When ministers were implicated in bilking the public, they were shipped off to Europe as ambassadors — which is bad enough, in its own way, but not nearly as bad as endorsing them as by-election candidates (a la Penashue) or promoting them to the Treasury Board (a la Tony Clement, whose proven exploits already dwarf the Sponsorship Scandal in its size). It’s hard to imagine Chretien not only declining to oust from his party a Senator found guilty of defrauding the taxpayer, but bailing him out of trouble with $90,000. Mulroney might have done it, but only if the cash had been stuffed into a brown envelope and exchanged in a New York hotel room.

As I wrote already, some readers will no doubt be already scrolling down to the comment section to interject that Harper was corrupt all along. I don’t contest this. There was, for instance, Harper’s attempt to bribe terminally-ill independent MP Chuck Cadman with a $1 million life insurance policy in exchange for a vote against the Liberal budget. The difference is, Harper used to angrily deny such allegations, and engage in ludicrously heavyhanded censorship tactics to suppress them — in the Cadman case, he sued the Liberals for libel and demanded $3.5 million in compensation, although the suit was later quietly dropped, presumably because the allegations were true.

The detectable (but gradual) difference is that after making some cursory efforts at denial, the Harper Conservatives no longer make serious attempts to defend their claims to integrity or accountability. During the Penashue by-election, it was openly claimed — unsuccessfully — by the Conservative Party that it would reward Labrador for supporting Penashue by putting him back in Cabinet and directing a steady stream of government investments into the riding. It was also indicated that if they declined to support Penashue, they would be punished: federal funding for the riding would dry up overnight. Given that Penashue had openly admitted to massive violations of the electoral laws in 2011, it’s amazing that he would have been allowed to run under the Conservative banner again in the first place.

The Duffy scandal didn’t have to be a scandal. The Liberals turfed their own cheating Senator, Mac Harb, long ago, even though he was guilty of much less than Duffy. Yet to date, Harper and the Prime Minister’s Office have not repudiated Duffy. Instead, they bought him out, and now, they have the temerity to claim — in obvious disregard of the ethics code — that the huge payment made to Duffy, much more than most of us make in a year, is actually a sign of how generous and friendly the Harper government is. It’s stunning, callous, and pathetic.

But it’s calculated. We have to assume it’s calculated. Despite their frequent missteps, the Harper government lives by tactics, not grand strategic vision. That is why they micromanage. That is why it’s hard to imagine Harper wouldn’t know about the payment to Duffy and even have approved it (without any semblance of a paper trail, of course). And that is why it’s worth asking what was going through their heads at the time that they judged the political risks of secretly funneling money to a corrupt senator were less than the political risks of simply firing Duffy at the outset and washing their hands of the whole thing, the way they did when another Harper appointee to the Senate, Patrick Brazeau, was recently charged with sexual assault.

On its face, this sort of calculation seems absurd. Harper himself would have had a field day with the issue if the Liberals had done anything remotely like it during their dying days. The conclusion must surely be that they believe the political fallout from being thoroughly implicated in corruption is actually negligible.

Once again, that may seem absurd on its face, but I’m not so sure. 40% of Canadians won’t vote anyways, so it doesn’t really matter what they think, although probably it’s something on the order of “don’t know, don’t care.” Of those who do vote, it’s now quite apparent, after six years of Harper rule, that at least 60% will never vote for the Conservatives anyways. The PMO can afford to write off these voters, because experience has amply demonstrated that you can win a majority government without them. Lots of these people are no doubt very angry about the Duffy scandal, but they weren’t going to vote for the Conservatives anyways, and Harper knows this.

Of the remaining group, the majority — let’s say at least 30% — will vote for the Conservatives anyways, because they consider themselves right-wing to the core, even though there’s no indication that the Harper Conservatives have more than a passive interest in any plausibly “conservative” political agenda. This is actually a surprisingly small percentage of our population that consider themselves too staunchly conservative to vote for any party that doesn’t label itself as conservative — adjusting for the mass of non-voters, less than one in five is a staunch conservative loyalist.

Despite current polling levels, I am quite confident that this represents basically a lower bound and I will stand by my judgement. Even in 1993, when the Progressive Conservatives imploded in spectacular fashion, they still captured 16% of the popular vote, and the Reform Party took another 19%. Plus, voter turnout was higher. Adjusting for that, about 25% of Canadians voted for an openly right-wing party in 1993, which is actually higher than the percentage that voted for the Conservatives in 2011. Of course thinking readers will want to also adjust for the fact that the PCs were not as right-wing in 1993 as they are now, and that by 1993 the Liberals were already a right-wing party in their basic policy outlook if not in their rhetoric.

So that leaves a total of about one in twenty Canadians who will vote for somebody and might vote Conservative but could plausibly be talked out of it. Of this already very small group, only a minority will (a) watch the news regularly, (b) read subtly enough to realize that this sort of graft would probably not be committed by other political parties, (c) put a high enough priority on government accountability that a scandal like Mike Duffy’s, or Tony Clement’s, or Peter Penashue’s, would cause them to change their vote, and (d) will receive such a strong impression from scandals like these that it will still influence their voting intentions two years down the road.

Now, it could be that the cumulative weight of successive scandals will end up costing the Conservatives dearly, the way it did for the Liberals, and the way it did for the PCs. I am not convinced of this, however. Mulroney’s extravagances were so extreme that it sparked the rise of a new right-wing party, whereas today, the vast majority of Conservatives show no interest in leaving Harper, at least on the mere grounds of routine lawbreaking, fiscal incompetence, or heavy-handed secrecy and censorship. The Liberals were buried by a full-court press by the conservative media, whereas today the media can generally be counted on to act as cheerleaders for right-of-centre parties, regardless of their indiscretions. The Globe & Mail is may be already working on the first drafts of their 2015 endorsement of Stephen Harper. At the time, people of all political parties and at all newspapers agreed that the government was subject to the rule of law. Sadly, that no longer appears to be the case.

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.... people showing such contempt for my intelligence really inflames me:

A senior PMO official told Fife that Duffy couldn’t afford to repay the $90,000 and did not want to borrow money from a bank, fearing that his wife would be stuck with the large debt if he died suddenly from a heart attack. Duffy has battled cardiac problems over the years.

Jennifer Ditchburn and Steve Rennie present an alternative view of The Puffster's finances here.

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My Duffy post earlier today seems to have drawn the attention of some Ottawa outfit called the Government Telecommunications and Informatics Service.  Anyone know anything about them?

We are relaxing recuperating in our room in the Hotel Molinas in Granada, in the south of Spain. File this day under all's well that ends well.

Our last night in Barcelona, we had a tapas dinner at El Bixto, where we had gone two nights earlier. We got caught in the pouring rain on the way home, the first bad weather we've seen on the whole trip.

In the morning we took the metro to pick up our rental car, then braved a minor nightmare making it back to the hotel, what with poorly signed roundabouts, one-way streets, no parking, and Allan re-learning how to drive a stick shift. (It now seems amusing to call this a nightmare, given the major driving nightmare that would bookend the day.) We packed up the car and I navigated us out of Barcelona and onto the highway. I don't drive a stick shift, so on any of our European trips, all the driving falls to Allan.

Barcelona to Grenada is about 860 kilometres (535 miles). It's the longest drive of the trip, the only one of this kind of distance. Once we were on the highway, it was very easy going. There were vistas of the Mediterranean, rolling farmland, some foothills and mountain tunnels. Easy, pleasant driving. But, I think, a lot for one person. So as the day wears on, Allan is getting tired. We are both ready to get into town.

We had a bit of a surprise when the toll road turned out to be 30 euros! We stopped at a rest stop for lunch, serving all manner of freshly prepared food, and picked up some cookies and chips... which turned out to be dinner.

The last few hours of the drive wound through dramatic country. First we drove through thousands of acres of vineyards, an area of Spain that produces standard table wine, and lots of it. Eventually this gave way to orchards on both sides of the highway, more orchards than I have ever seen, including in California. We were driving through a valley, and the orchards went up steep hills, into the foothills of mountains. It seemed like every bit of land that was not completely mountainous rock was planted, including on dramatic steep hillsides. The orchards didn't stop until the mountain went straight up. We were both amazed at such steeply hilly country being completely planted. I don't know what was growing, although we also passed a processing plant of some type and the air was rich with the smell of olives.

By the time we reached Granada it was growing dark. There's a huge amount of suburban sprawl, which surprised us. We had no idea the area was so populous. We turned off the highway, following directions to the hotel... which quickly did not correspond to reality. Before we knew it, we were driving on tiny, narrow streets, pedestrians overflowing from the sidewalks, intersections not marked, and absolutely no idea where we were or what direction to go.

This is absolutely not a town to drive in - and in fact the streets in the oldest part of town are closed to traffic (except taxis and buses) until 10:00 pm - but many tourists have no choice. We were hopelessly lost. I couldn't even call the hotel, because we lacked any point of reference to tell them where we were. At one point we found ourselves on a ring road heading up into the hills, out of town, in the pitch dark.

Poor Allan was exhausted. He had already driven 9 hours, and now he's bumping down impossibly narrow streets, motorcycles cutting us off, taxis honking behind us, people walking in front of the car with no warning. It was a nightmare. I was debating whether we should just stop at any hotel and try to get a room, but it was after 10:00 pm and that can be an even more frustrating experience. We had booked our Granada room online while in Barcelona. It was a great deal, they were holding the room for us, but I was starting to wonder if we'd ever find them, and if we did, would the room still be available.

Allan spotted a large hotel with a brightly lit sign, and we pulled into their check-in/unloading area. I took a chance, called our hotel and said we were lost. A very nice young man gave me verbal directions, which I wrote down, but they were like gibberish. We needed a map.

Then I went inside, and another very nice young man saved the day. He knew the hotel we were looking for, and said it was all but impossible to find. I felt a bit vindicated when he said that folks with GPS get especially lost! He took out a map, and gave me detailed directions, both written and verbal, then went over the whole thing again. While there, I also asked if his hotel had a vacancy... it did not.

It worked. The directions were perfect and we found the hotel. The young man at the desk (who I had spoken to earlier) could not have been nicer. He showed us to our room in an adjacent building, met us at the parking garage around the corner, and booked our tickets for the Alhambra for the next day. We were so tired we could have cried.

The hotel itself is hip and stylish, the room bright and roomy - and crazy cheap. Our room in Paris was 200 euros per night, much more than we usually spend, but I wanted to stay in a nice neighbourhood, and many of the better discount hotels were fully booked. Our room in Barcelona was 80 euros a night, a terrific deal in a nice neighbourhood. And this room in Granada is 55 euros a night! And it's really nice. It will be interesting to see what transpires from now on.

On the way here, I was fascinated to see highway signs in both Spanish and Arabic. Is there still an Arabic community in southern Spain, or do Muslims make pilgrimages to see these ancient holy sites? Either way, it's wonderful. We're seeing the Alhambra late in the day, just relaxing and hanging out until then. We'll also book our next couple of nights, and maybe book ahead in Madrid.

The DSM-5 is out, and it’s a 1000-page whopper. Shrinks have discovered a plethora of new mental illnesses—such as grieving the death of a loved one—and no doubt they have a pill and other “therapies” ready and waiting for anyone... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Who knows? With a little modification, Robertson's advice to the wife who has been cheated on might offer a new spin direction for the Harper regime, especially in its current troubles.

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With the launch yesterday of the X-47B from the deck of the USS George HW Bush, the case for the F-35 just got a lot weaker.



The X-47B is a prototype of a U.S. Navy UCAV or unmanned combat air vehicle.  It's a stealth light bomber which is pretty much the same sort of aircraft as the F-35 only without the guy inside.

The X-47B is intended to penetrate hostile airspace, undetected, drop a couple of bombs on a heavily defended, high-value target and then try to get back out again.   The F-35 is intended to penetrate hostile airspace, undetected, drop a couple of bombs on a heavily defended, high-value target and then try to get back out again.   The big difference is that if the F-35 doesn't succeed, you're probably going to lose the airplane and the pilot.

But don't you need a pilot to bomb an enemy target deep inside the bad guy's territory?  Nope.  The Americans have been using air launched and submarine launched cruise missiles for many years that fly ground-hugging profiles and hit their targets with great precision.  All you have to do with the drone is programme it to find its way back out.  It's a lot like a reusable, two-way cruise missile.

Now the defence-guys at Wired.com are suggesting that the XB-47 might just be the best option of laying a God-fearing whipping on those godless Chinese that we all know we're going to be bombing sooner or later.

And wouldn't you know it?  Guess who also seems to be fielding something along the lines of the XB-17?  Why the Chinese, of course.





The picture caused Aviation Week's Bill Sweetman to quip, “What’s Chinese for, ‘Here we go again?’”

The folks at UpWorthy have published a photo-perspective showing the faces of soldiers taken before, during and after war.  Here's one example.   Follow the link above to see the rest.

Check this out.  It's a twitter-based map of racism in the United States.


 
A team of geographers from Humboldt State University has developed a map of the United States which plots the intensity of discriminatory speech in social media, including racism, homophobia and ableism.

The team -- headed up by Dr Monica Stephens -- used a database of geotagged tweets called DOLLY to scan the Twitter output in North America between June 2012 and April 2013. They were scanning for a list of words along with the sentiment attached to those words -- this was done manually, with undergraduate students Amelia Egle, Matthew Eiben and Miles Ross reading the tweets to deduce whether a word was being used in a positive, negative or neutral way.

I'm not sure about this.  Obviously the results are higher in regions with higher population density and appear lower or even non-existent in sparsely populated states.  It's an interesting example, however, of how social media can be used to profile regions and populations.  Big Bro is Watchin' You All.

America has increasingly been turning itself into an outlaw state.  It practices indefinite detention without charge or trial.  It resorts to torture.  It violates foreign sovereignty to kill as it sees fit.  It even kills its own citizens on executive whim.

It is within this context that we have to make sense out of the Obama administration's intentions about enacting a shield law to protect journalists from the intrusions of a torturing, murderous state that holds itself above its own constitution.


They're going to protect the privacy of journalists, really?  When they're just about to open the most massive electronic surveillance centre ever in Utah, a "black box" that will siphon up data by the yottabyte which, Wiki tells us is 10 to the 24th power or roughly this:

1 YB = 1000000000000000000000000bytes

It will probably be sooner rather than later before we find out whether Christy Clark will become British Columbia's Judas Goat to the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipeline/supertanker fiascos.

Steve Harper, Alison Redford and Enbridge just need to buy or coerce Clark's capitulation, make her sell-out  the province and people of British Columbia, and then ram those goddamned pipelines down our throats.   They've got plenty of markers to call in after her Hail Mary election win.

Clark will have to be ready to deal with unrest of a wide range from First Nations and other groups and individuals determined that our territory and coast be defended against Alberta and Ottawa.  She will have to be prepared to use force and the full power of her law to thwart the clear will of a solid and growing majority of the people of her province.   She will have to be willing to move on lifelong law-abiding grey hairs who stand against her and turn them into criminals.  Christy Clark will have to accept becoming the most reviled woman in the history of British Columbia, knowing that she will never be forgiven.

Those who stand up to Christy Clark, Enbridge, Harper, Redford and all their minions and enforcers and the secret police force Harper created for just this purpose will know that they stand on the wrong side of order and the law because that is the right thing, the thing that must be done.

They will draw the attention of the world and of the major markets down upon the federal and Alberta and British Columbia governments, their high-handed and rotten dealings with a totalitarian Communist government they so recently purported to condemn, and their willingness to sacrifice one of the world's last remaining great treasures, the British Columbia coast, for the benefit of foreign oil companies who can't even  pay proper compensation to the people of Alberta.

What's wrong with filling their damned jails if that is the cost of doing what's right, defending what's ours?   Nothing at all.  In fact, a criminal record for this would be a badge of high honour to be worn proudly.

And, look on the bright side.   Maybe this is where the Carbon Bubble bursts.   Could there be a better or more likely place for that bubble to burst?  It's already the highest-carbon, highest cost, least profitable petroleum on the planet.   A little granny insurrection could be all that's needed to tip the bitumen market straight into a ditch.

Because they may be able to buy Christy Clark but they can't buy us.

Or y'know, not. I'm not one of those people who's afraid of hitting 30. Today is my 29th birthday and as I look back on my 20s I realize that it was probably the best, and hopefully worst, decade so far. Forget my teens, the teens suck. 20 to 29 is where it's at, and I figure now that I've got myself sorted out (mostly), my 30s should be pure gold. Hopefully my 40s will be even better, and so on and so forth until I hit 100 and am basically a god. You never know, my grandma P lived until she was 92. I could do it.

It's been a big year; two moves, a baby and a close call with death, learning and loving to be a mom again, falling for a new part of the island, strengthening and deepening my relationship with Ryan, and as always Figuring Things Out. Truly life is the journey, not the destination.

What am I doing for my birthday today? Tidying up and getting some things ready for our trip back to the Sault next week (so no posts unless something amazing happens), another nap hopefully, and that's about it. With all our friends back up in Nanaimo and all the family in Ontario there wont be dinner or a party or anything, and that's ok. I kinda feel like garbage today anyway. Kat, who finally has her first tooth, has been up a lot at night again and is scooting all over the place, so I'm feeling pretty beat. Wall to wall excitement, I know. 

It's not carjacking.  Nobody with a gun jumping into the driver's seat and speeding off with your ride.

It's car-hacking.   A cyber criminal hacking into a car's computer systems to wreak havoc.

Senate Commerce Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, said while he's excited about safety improvements through technology, he's concerned about new risks including cyber security.

"As our cars become more connected – to the internet, to wireless networks, with each other, and with our infrastructure – are they at risk of catastrophic cyber attacks?" Senator Rockefeller asked in his opening statement prepared for the hearing.
Cars are increasingly controlled electronically rather than mechanically, from acceleration and starting to rolling down the windows. Infotainment systems connect drivers to satellite and wireless networks.

Today's typical luxury car has more than 100 million lines of computer code, while software and electronics account for 40 per cent of the car's cost and half of warranty claims, said John D. Lee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's industrial and systems engineering department.

Not exactly sure why someone would do this although imagine if terrorists could send vehicles careening out of control on busy highways?  In our automobile-dependent society what would happen if confidence in our essential conveyance was shattered?

If your going to protest, have the guts to show your face.Pretty brave behind the mask. @deniscoderre good on you for ignoring it.— David Wilks (@DavidJohnWilks) May 16, 2013 I have no idea what this is even about, except that... Mandos http://politblogo.typepad.com/

The high-living Daniel Caron, a man with no qualifications whatsoever in library science or archival studies, is stepping down as the head of Library and Archives Canada. But not really for the right reasons. His blithering incompetence wasn’t an issue... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/