Yuri's Night 50th

That picture (left) is ostensibly a fuzzy black and white TV image of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 (mission patch above) during his one orbit space flight around the planet on this day 50 years ago, and I remember it too. Pretty exciting day, but it must have been terrifying for Gagarin, he was the first person to orbit the earth and thus the first to spend an extended period in space - one orbit. Much of the time in orbit Gagarin was not in contact with controllers in Moscow and his capsule automatically fired retros about one hour into the flight. Gagarin parachuted from his capsule 7 km above the earth when the capsule door blew off and he landed in South Western Russia. While dragging his chute along the ground in a field, Gagarin met a farmer and his daughter and asked for a phone to call Moscow.

Ironically Gagarin died during a routine training flight in March 1968.

The video below is an interesting tribute. 

Election Day minus 21 - Futility?

Day 17 - The close of nominations - a warm and windy day, "April is the cruelest month," that is Eliot, a poet not a weatherman. Tomorrow will be cool, I always thought April was cruel because it teased. I also had my snow tires swapped today (so did everyone else from the size of the crowd at the shop). It could still snow, that would be cruel.

All my papers are in, so now the real hard sell begins. The problem for Libertarians is we have nothing to sell but freedom, and people think they already have that, and are unaware that they lose it in dribs and drabs every time some blowhard politician declares a new program to help this group or that. The good news is, I can still insult the Prime Minister, even in a public debate, and few will think anything of it, thats freedom. Try doing that to the POTUS in the States, call Obama a name in public, even FOX NEWS will defend him.

This morning's National Post had an OpEd piece from a friend (the Party V.P.). In 750 words John Shaw, tried to encapsulate the essence of the Libertarian Platform for Post readers, a daunting task. The second paragraph in my link above gets to the heart of libertarianism, and I'm sure most readers will think they are in control of their lives, so they will dismiss it but conveniently forget that as much as 50% of their income is taxed away and spent by some level of government or other, 50%. The federal government takes a good chunk of that. Is it wisely spent? Well, each time there is a spending scandal (who can keep up) that is a clue the money is not wisely spent, as if we really had a choice in how it is to be spent. Of course thats what we are about. Libertarians are all about choice.

On the topic of choice, a new movie opens this week, I hope at a theatre near you. You should choose to see it. It is possibly a foreshadowing of things to come, or just a commentary on things as they are; whatever it is I can relate now, as I could when I first read the book. Have a peak:

Election Day minus 23 and 22: Rule 8

Day 15 and 16: Rules are rules - Late Saturday afternoon I received a phone call from my Returning Officer. She is effectively in charge of the conduct of the election - all the polls - in my riding.

She informed me that everything is in order except for one item. If you scroll down to the April 8 posting, I mentioned that I must bring the original copy of a fax that my RO received on April 8.

It turns out that Rule #8 (see above) gives me until April 13 at 2 pm. to present all the papers and confirm my nomination, and that is true for everyone. So her threat to dismiss my candidacy (which she mentioned), while worrying for a moment, means nothing. She called me Sunday to apologize after speaking to her bosses at Elections Canada.

Meanwhile I have been busy researching for a two minute TV promo that the local cable channel Rogers (63) will give me on Thursday.

The coming week is already booked up, getting and posting signs, writing speeches, swapping my snow tires, campaigning in the riding and to top off the week, a Caucus Meeting of candidates who wish to run in the Provincial Election in October. 

When "climate science" ceased being a science

One thing I don't like about running as a candidate during an election is how it cuts me off from the daily "real" world news. As I try to focus on issues that affect my local riding, and the country in general, everything else goes out of focus. Opportunities to comment on issues like nuclear power, the environment, the banking industry and everything else that interests me, are lost. Fortunately I seem to suffer from some degree of ADHD and this allows me moments to quickly switch my attention to something else.
An article in the Financial Post yesterday literally begged me to share. The article by David Evans, an Australian scientist with impressive climate science credentials, agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but its effects on global temperature are miniscule. Dr. Evans points to other bits of evidence that many climate scientists choose to ignore for reasons he makes clear in this excerpt:

"At this point, official "climate science" stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters."

It is a very good article, and it puts the issue in perspective again, pointing to one of the motivating factors behind the political support of global warming, the idea of world government. Here is where many climate alarmists or warmists (like the Gore's and the Suzuki's) fail to see danger. Their background and "education" has driven them to the idea that coercive collective action is required to stop impending doom. That idea has spawned in Canada a political party, the Greens, whose original purpose was to defend the environment and the planet. The Greens have morphed into yet another statist organization that assumes the other political parties have the goal of befouling our home. Now I'm getting political again, because as Dr. Evans shows clearly, global warming has nothing much to do with science, its all politics.