I hope you are well.

Got this in an email the other day:

On November 5th you do not want to say “I wish I’d done more.”

I really do not want to say that, so I put my money where my mouth is.

Hello mr. random internet dude from unl.edu who recently ranked all my posts are not awesome. I think YOU are awesome, if you if you think I am not.

The last two days I have left work in a miserable mood, but on my commute home I started up Journey and instantly did a complete 180 and transported into a better state of mind.

So yeah, I’m a Journey fan. Not in some retro-cool nostalgic aspect, since I never really followed them at all when I was younger. I just actually like them.

Here in ‘merka it’s easy to forget that there is another election going on, up in Canada.

As with the last election, I support the Liberal Party of Canada. Why? Not because Stephan Harper is worse than hitler, surprisingly. In fact he has proven himself to be a relatively moderate right winger. There is of course still the danger that he would show his true stripes if given a majority, but that is not the main reason I don’t support his party.

The main reason I support the LPC in this case is because of the Green Shift. This policy substantially cuts income taxes and replaces them with a tax on carbon pollution. This is an extremely sound economic plan that I have been promoting for years, and I am thrilled that a major federal party is holding it as one of their main election planks.

By providing clear financial incentives to discourage bad behaviour, the “Green Shift” will provide environmental benefits without the requirement to nag people, and avoid the smugness problem that many right-wing people resent when confronted by environmental issues. Offsetting the tax against income tax means this isn’t just a tax grab. To phrase another way, it aligns individual incentives with behaviour that leads to good societal outcomes. To phrase another another way: Nice!

The LPC will almost certainly not win tomorrow. However I hope the ideas of the Green Shift live on. Hopefully the similar ideas instituted by British Columbia’s centre-right Liberal Party will show clear success and inspire the federal Conservative party to work with the LPC on this in the future.

In my earlier post about the games drought I had completely forgotten about the NDS game Contra 4. This fabulous little retro game looks and plays like the legendary Contra through Contra III, with single-shot kills, powerups from the sky, badass boss stages, and the hail of slow moving bullets.

Which means that like the others it’s frigging hard. I am playing on the easy setting where it mocks you for not being “hard core” but still I can barely make it to the end of the 2nd level with my 5 continues.

If you’ve not seen it yet, True Blood is the best show of the new season. It’s a drama about vampires in a small Louisiana town, but in this case they approach it somewhat seriously — what would happen if vampires actually did exist and “came out of the coffin” as they did on this show? How would society react and adapt to this new world?

Did I mention that Anna Paquin’s character can read minds? Or that her main love interest is a vampire who fought in the civil war (fun to watch the town rednecks try to figure out where they stand on that one). Or that the hot new drug in town is V (vampire blood)? Plus it’s stuffed full of wonderful colourful characters, much like Alan Ball’s previous show Six Feet Under but less sad. Sex and danger, interesting characters, great plot — what more can you want?