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"It's the closest your face will ever come to being shaved BY A SPACESHIP!"

Let's see... Tuesday? It's grey. I'll stay in bed.

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I thought this cartoon was quite amusing.  Done by that rapscallion animator Happy Harry.


This will be my last blog post for a while; I've got to spend time getting ready for Hal-Con.  My next blog post will be (late) Monday, where I'll hopefully a pictures and the like to share.

This is the Best Campaign Attack Ad

Well, it is.

I Guess Sesame Street Isn't Completely Worthless These Days...

At least, I laughed pretty hard at this.



(In case anyone reading this has been living under a rock and has no idea what Grover's doing, look here.)

Sintel short film

Sintel is a really very impressive undertaking, and you should really watch it right now.

It's a 14-minute film made by independent artists using free 3D rendering software, and released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license (meaning it's free to download, copy, distribute, remix, learn from, etc.)  While it's not quite Hollywood quality (the animation gets a bit choppy during some bits of action, such as during the first fight scene), it's very, very close.  And it was done by an international team of artists working collaboratively with donations from folks on the interwebs.

It's also the second animated film of this ambition that I know of which was released under a creative commons license (the other being Sita Sings the Blues which is also awesome and highly recommended.)

It will be interesting to learn how the DVDs do commercially - Sita Sings the Blues, last I checked, was doing quite well despite the setback of being boondoggled to the tune of $50K over songs that were meant to be in the public domain in the first place.

The comments here will be spoilers, so read them only after you've watched the film.

Collateral Murder revisited

You might remember the whole Wikileaks release of the Apache killings of several reporters and unarmed Iraqi civilians back in April.

Well, Evan McCord was one of the soldiers on the ground who was on the scene, and a while ago he gave a speech about the events of that day.  You can watch it here.  It's...  uncomfortable to watch and listen to, almost as much as watching the original footage...  But he has important things to say, so I recommend giving it a watch when you have the time.

At the very least, his courage in speaking out should be commended.

New Brunswick Election

Today, I'm scheduled to share some amusing thing I found on the interwebs.  So, um...  Here's my favourite Tim Minchin song.

With that out of the way, I'd like to talk about the New Brunswick election.

New Brunswick's provincial elections are less than a week away, so for today's political post I've decided to get things extremely local and talk about the parties, their platforms, and my thoughts on the whole thing.

Theoretically, we've got four political parties. But this is kind of not true, really, when you get down to it, because the Greens are really a pretty sorry excuse for a party. In fact, it's even stretching the truth to claim that we have three parties, given that the NDP won a sum total of zero seats and a mere 5% of the popular vote in the last provincial election. In fact, in the entire history of the New Brunswick NDP, never has more than a single NDP member been elected to Legislative Assembly at a time. So, really, we've got the Liberals, the Conservatives, and... I dunno, maybe one-tenth of an actual leftist party. Plus the People's Alliance, which is completely untested and nobody really knows what to make of them

New Brunswick is not a healthy province, and in truth hasn't been for some time. We don't even have a boom-bust cycle, like some resource-rich provinces (e.g., Alberta). We're lucky to get almostboom-bust cycles, and often it feels more like bust-bust-almostboom-doublebust. We've had several opportunities to slowly crawl out of our economic pit, but have squandered each and every one with a dedication and reliability that's almost courageous in its masochism.

New Brunswick's unemployment rate stands at 9.6%. This, too, is pretty much a lie; honest unemployment statistics haven't actually been tabulated since at least the 80's, possibly much longer than that, but then the dishonest definition of "employment" and "unemployment" used throughout North America is well-trodden ground and beyond the scope of my post. Regardless, even the underestimated figure of 9.6% puts us among the worst rates in Canada - though we're doing ever-so-slightly better than Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Newfoundland (in order of best to worst). However, we're also losing more jobs than those other provinces - Newfoundland and PEI are actually improving their employment rates. So it's doubtful that we'll maintain our lead in the Maritimes for long. And it's still pretty shameful compared to the rest of Canada, no matter how you measure it.

Seven out of the ten poorest postal codes in Canada, with a median income of under $14,000, are in New Brunswick.  Per capita, our deficit is second only to Ontario’s. For every dollar the province takes in from income tax, 48 cents are paid out to the interest on our debt.  42 cents of every dollar the Province gets comes from Ottawa in the form of transfer payments.
So, it should come as no surprise that the economy is at the forefront of everyone's minds; voters, politicians, journalists.  I'm not going to make the claim that this is a super-important election - none of the parties would be able to fix all our economic woes no matter what happened, but they all certainly stand in a position to make things significantly better or worse...  So I do rank this election as "more important than most" for New Brunswickers.  Sadly, the plans the parties have on offer to tackle the problems the province faces have little to distinguish themselves from one another, but I'm going to examine them each anyway.

Because of this, starting tomorrow and going through until Friday, I'm going to be going over each of the provincial parties and their platforms (as well as any historical information I find relevant), and posting summaries here, in order to educate myself before election day.  Hopefully it will be informative to any of my meagre-but-not-quite-as-meagre-as-one-would-expect readership, so that the effort will enable even more people to cast informed votes on the 27th.

The Take

In 2004, the National Film Board of Canada released a 90-minute documentary about workers reclaiming factories in Argentina. It's a very uplifting film that shows a socialist movement at its purest, and it's available in its entirety on Google Video. Worth a watch, not the least of which is for its cautionary aspects; it's not such a stretch of the imagination that the West - or at least the bulk of the non-rich population of the West - could find itself in a similar situation as Argentinians found themselves in, if we continue to let corporate interests rule in the public sphere.

A Marxist Perspective of the Credit Crisis

A nifty little video here, very useful for visual learners.

The actual talk it's taken from is three times longer, found here. I highly recommend both for those who are curious.

Actually, it's called "Korobeiniki"

I really love this.  Listened to it six times already.



"Peace and love?  Wait, does that mean Vash the Stampede was a communist?"