But first stop Harper.

But I think it’s like this: not talking negative ads, but Adrian Dix didn’t even know how to point out any bad shit the Liberals had done. He didn’t even know enough to come up to a provable lie and say “that’s a lie and I can prove it”. Take the business with the NDP candidate who bad-mouthed francophones…after the Glen Clark NDP crashed, Adrian Dix was the mouthpiece for the, oh heck I dunno, the “Vancouver Association Of French-Immersion-Supporting Parents”, you know? So when he was asked about the francophonic slur, he could’ve said “are you kidding? have you not been watching? Christe Jesu, I practically am fucking French, and I’m more offended by this than you are, well tabernacle thank you for bringing it to my attention…!”

Woulda been so easy.

I’m still baffled by how Michael Ignatieff’s campaign never said a word about how if Harper had been in power five years earlier our banks would’ve crashed, how if he’d been in power five years ago we would’ve gone to Iraq…to this day Harper takes credit for a measure he hysterically opposed while in opposition, and no one but no one calls him on it, and yet there is Hansard.

He can’t stay in, though. Can he? It would be so weird for him to win another election, and that’d be about the end of Canada as a First-World country. He’s incredibly uncharismatic. He looks weaselly. He’s helpless before straightforward questions from Elizabeth May. In recent days it’s been put right out there too, that the backbenchers think of this as the Reform Party…as I’ve said many times, the Parti Albertois. But if the opposition parties don’t care enough to stop them, then I guess they’ll win anyway.

One could win B.C by just saying the environmental review process is a farce. It’s a PR exercise, aimed at us. There was never any chance at all that the pipeline wouldn’t pass, never never never. Everyone knows it. Harper’s government exists to serve Alberta, and not even Alberta, but moneyed interests in Alberta, that a lot of Albertans don’t even like. This is plain and simple the Big Oil Party.

Man, I REALLY don’t want to have to be taken to jail after lying down in front of a bulldozer. That is truly going to suck. The Mounties are not exactly going to have soft hands, either. I’ll probably be tasered. I might even die.

They’re motherfuckers.

I think so, but then again, thats what everyone said about Christy Clark…

I’d like the Liberals a lot better than I do if I thought their abstentions had somehow been principled rather than calculating…and if the calculation didn’t show a basic contempt for the electorate that only Harper’s government and their ilk manages to exceed. Somehow, they think we’re not watching, and they think we don’t notice.

Hmm, procedural things to do…back in a minute…

Also, I’ve never understood the value of abstention. i just this morning finished reading Denis Mack Smith’s Mussolini biography, and he talks about how there was a point where the Socialists in Italy could have slowed, possibly even halted Mussolini’s acquisition of power if they had participated in certain votes. They had enough seats to be a force. But they were all abstaining, so the measures passed unopposed (as everyone else was either too cowed, or too busy sucking up). I don’t see what they hoped to accomplish, and the same would be true with your Liberal Party. Were they hoping if they didn’t participate, those votes wouldn’t take place?

I read a Victorian guidebook to England – can’t for the life of me remember who wrote it – which talked about how the only parts that hadn’t been utterly ruined were those far away from the railway line. Which is a little weird because now railway lines have a retro sheen on them, especially compared with their hellish children, the motorways. But to that writer, who’d grown up before the railways, they were a monster. Albeit one he probably used extensively travelling around writing his guidebook

By which I mean that the technology that comes around in your own time can for some , on balance I think I’m one, be just too much to handle. It’s so novel and exciting but also vile and it’s flushing your childhood world down the toilet. I find the internet, which provides me with a living, to be horrible and fascinating and if we should lose it tomorrow I’d probably be relieved.

As for musical instruments being benign, I don’t know. Grade 7 Cellist going through her scales = fantastic. Teenage novice with a Peavey Vypyr trying out his amp’s full range of Stygian distortion effects on his two Manowar riffs = not so much.