It’s kind of interesting how boring this whole Ashley Madison thing is, eh?

Also, isn’t it more or less a “john ring” as opposed to a “prostitution ring” except legal?

Whatever. Don’t care. People have to get out of their marriages somehow. In time they’ll thank the hackers. Or maybe not. Again. Don’t care.

Oh well so back in 2001 Mulcair thought some of Margaret Thatcher’s policies were good for those pasty-arsed Brits born to be either on strike or on the dole, whichever came first.

Grr.

But in 2015 he unequivocally opposed Bill C-51 – not because it would improve his electoral chances (although it has) – but because Bill C-51 is a fascist piece of shit bill that in a real democracy would never have seen the light of day.

Yay!

Cripes in 2001 I was chained to a stove wondering why we couldn’t all reap the rewards of that great big honkin’ surplus Prime Minister Chretien Martin was always going on about with a restoration of train service to wartime levels.

In 2015 I’ve adjusted my expectations to “lowered”.

So get real, people. Now is not the time to be picky.

I’m enjoying the Duffy trial. Bet you are, too. My favourite part comes after, though, when reporters are asking Stephen Harper questions about it. The look on his face. Oh man, if looks could kill, well, there’d sure be a lot of dead reporters at Conservative Party election stops.

Guess who I saw while I was visiting a very old lady in Sault Ste. Marie? Okay, I’ll tell you – Justin Trudeau. Although just from the side and back while he got into a car on Queen Street, after having opened Liberal campaign headquarters with a speech followed by meet and greet and everyone in Sault Ste. Marie wanting a selfie with him.

Honestly, I thought Bono or The Queen had dropped by to tour the Old Stone House or take a trip through the locks, that’s how much buzz there was. It was crazy. Then I saw one of my mom’s younger friends (I think she might be 70 now) further down Queen Street and she told me all about it, how amazing incredible fabulous he was/is/will be when he’s Prime Minister.

If you have cancer take heart because she’s had cancer ever since I’ve known her, which is almost all of my life. (I was about ten, so you do the math.)

Anyway, she’s a worse Liberal than my mom for being Big “L” about it and she was positively giddy with optimism for his future (and ours, because she’s a True Believer!) and went on and on and interminably on about his awesomeness.

I didn’t say a whole lot back to her because she wasn’t interested. Seriously, she was really jazzed.

I also talked to a couple of people in the crowd before I ran into her and I have to say, he makes a damned good impression in person. They weren’t Liberals, and have no intention of voting Liberal (especially for the local candidate, who is not very popular) but they’d been charmed for sure.

The very old people at my mother’s table at dinner are distraught about who to vote for in the Sault. They don’t want Harper to win (they hate him) and they couldn’t possibly vote NDP (the sky would fall) but they don’t have anything good to say about the Liberal candidate. One friend said she might vote Green. But then that was pooh poohed as throwing away her vote.

They all agree, though, that Elizabeth May is the smartest of the bunch.

Luckily for the Liberal candidate their delight with Justin Trudeau means they’ll hold their nose and vote for him. (And to be fair to him here, it sounded like they had him mixed up with his dad a lot of the time.)

Anyway, do you know what they like about Justin Trudeau?

Oh, I don’t know. I thought you did. But whatever it is they like about him, they like it a lot.

I’m not as soft on him as I used to be because he pissed me off with his support of Bill C-51 but I gotta say, he sure leaves an aura of positivity in his wake.

My two gay friends in the Sault are voting for him for sure because of it, too.

Anyway, lots of time for him to meet and greet, which is his strong suit, so, you know, I’m not a real political strategist but Harper must have a regret or two about this long campaign, eh?

It’s my new adjective inspired by the rich assholes who run the world. I mean, I get why rich shitpoop assholes vote Conservative, I just don’t get why anyone else does.

Is it my imagination or have all of Harper’s Chiefs of Staff seemed sort of, you know, homosexual.

You know who Nigel Wright kind of reminds me of now?

Mary Poppins.

But it’s interesting how the old men of media fame are cackling over JT’s comment about growing our economy from the heart.

I hope Tom Mulcair doesn’t join in because it’s what I’ll be expecting an NDP government to do.

Now is not the time to fuck with caring. Make it so.

I realized this morning that I’d taken the bait again and engaged in argument about climate change. And I was really annoyed with myself because I don’t normally bother arguing with people who pretend not to believe that it’s both real and made worse by certain human activities.

But it just drives me nuts (I know, short drive) to witness the men of politics pile on the girl for speaking up about it.

I refer to an inconvenient woman, Linda McQuaig, stating the obvious, that we should leave the tarsands in the ground.

Now, you’d never know from the ensuing shit-losing that we already know the tarsands are an economic snare and delusion, and certainly that developing them is environmentally both unconscionable and unsustainable. But we do know those things. We even know that’s why Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party government make such a big show of not letting our publicly funded scientists speak about it.

So we know that Stephen Harper knows this, too, that he’s not such a religious kook that he thinks it’s just the Devil causing us trouble. He knows climate change is real, that it’s caused by burning fossil fuels, and that we can do our part to combat it, but he’s too indebted to oil and gas profiteers to act on what he knows. Also, he doesn’t care about the future of humanity.

Somebody funds the denialists, somebody who knows it’s all true.

Anyway, I was annoyed until I realized that the “Gotchatator” I was wasting my time arguing with, a “context fiddler” in the sense that he’s not arguing in good faith, he’s all about “Gotcha!”, Gotcha’d a point I’ve made myself, that the contradiction between preach and practice continues to be a problem.

Back when I was married my husband did a lot of traveling in his government job. We had three kids and he did a lot of it (it seemed to me, anyway) during the baby/toddler years, the years that are the most difficult.

It didn’t help our marriage any. I complained, he whined. We hated each other.

Later, when I had a government job myself that involved a bit of travel, although hardly any, I was struck by the expense of it all, how unnecessary it was, that anything done in person might better have been done via conference call.

People (I’m copying that stuck up bitch in the Conservative attack ad who thinks she should pick the Prime Minister, not us) it doesn’t do the cause any good to have millionaire former Vice-President Al Gore telling the rest of us how it should be.

Because the other fact of life, besides death, now that we have tax loopholes and offshore accounts in tax-free havens, is that the more money men make the more space they take up.

The activities of just one rich man contribute more significantly to climate change in one minute than the activities of most of us combined over several lifetimes.

I worked for the so-called architect of the Kyoto Accord, although not in that capacity but as Elaine to his Mr. Pitt, and I can’t think of very many octogenarians with his carbon footprint, still. And everybody he knew seemed to be swinging deals in China and making the argument that China gets a pass on carbon because it didn’t get its kick at the can when we did.

Well gee, I thought then and I think now, either climate change is a problem we all need to do our part in mitigating or it’s a problem that will be the end of us but in the meantime men who like to make money as opposed to downsizing their lifestyles will hasten our end traveling the earth and preaching at those of us who never got in on the oil and gas rush in the first place.

People, that’s a bit much to expect without a backlash in the days of vox populi.

And of course the Gotchatator in question pointed to Linda McQuaig as somehow the hypocrite (western socialist feminist, they really do hate us, the men of the right) when all she did was say out loud what all politicians know, that we should keep the tarsands in the ground, but okay, maybe the little boy pointing to the emperor as naked was naked, too, I don’t know.

What I do know is that he’d better be wearing clothes today because that’s where the Gotchatator argument has gone.

And that’s really a good thing because living by example matters.

*So full disclosure: I fly to the Sault to visit my 91 year old mother because, well, even though it wipes out more than a week’s wages (and that’s with a deal) we don’t have proper train service in this country. And we don’t have proper train service in this country because the men of politics didn’t invest our money in it. And the bus, Greyhound, is barely a business, it’s so shitty. But in keeping with this post, it’s also air conditioned to the point where I just can’t risk freezing my ass off for fourteen hours (two hour stopover in Sudbury). And the stop is no longer downtown in the Sault but out on the highway. I know, I know, Ride Share. Maybe next time. But it’s funny, isn’t it, how in these times of supposed choice there really aren’t any good ones. It’s where the Gotchatator argument should fall flat, but it won’t because they’re not making it in good faith anyway. Nothing matters to some people. Maybe that’s the real problem.

Raise your hand if you’re better off after a decade more of tarsands development.

Now fuck yourself if your hand is raised.

Thanks.

I’d like to visit this Canada that has benefited so greatly from tarsands development.

Can I get there by bus?

After watching the debate online, a debate which in retrospect I realize lacked both substance and relevance, so fuck you, Macleans, I watched The National, during which our supposed unemployment statistic was cited.

I don’t know what it will take to disabuse our media of the notion that we have a statistic that tracks unemployment and not just a statistic tracking the current number of employment insurance claimants but I’d be interested in hearing suggestions.

Anyway, I read Robyn Doolittle’s piece in the Globe and Mail on Arthur Hamilton this morning. It turns out he’s not just a random douchebag lawyer representing one of the dirtiest political parties in Canadian history, he’s a follower of God, too. It’s just not clear to me that he doesn’t believe God is represented in the flesh by his paranoid narcissist boss.

Also, this morning I visited a blog (that just annoys me so I hereby declare that I will no longer visit it – again – I declare it again) and I read the comments and, you know, we’re not talking idiots here, although maybe we are, and I realized that we’ll never take any responsibility for climate change.

Sorry eh.

So save your breath, Linda McQuaig (godless socialist and woman). Yes, the tarsands should stay in the ground. Not only does developing them not make environmental sense, developing them doesn’t make economic sense, either. But you don’t matter, I don’t matter, our children don’t matter.

Life doesn’t matter.