The latest bomb has dropped from the F-35 scandal in Ottawa. After appearing before the public accounts committee earlier today, Auditor General Michael Ferguson told the media that the Harper government “would have had” information about the real cost of the fighter jets in March 2011 when parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page released his report about the increased cost of the F-35s.

Stephen Harper first became Prime Minister in 2006 and has already dramatically transformed the old Canada. But with no election due for four more years, we ain't seen nothing yet.

It's in the nature of true believers and ideologues to believe that any means to their sacred ends are justified. This makes them extremely dangerous people. It's also typical of such people that they're often motivated by unfathomable resentment and anger, a compulsion not just to better but to destroy their adversaries. These are good descriptions of Stephen Harper and those closest to him.

It is deeply regrettable that Iran may one day join the not-so-exclusive club of nations that possess nuclear weapons. It is a potential danger the world doesn't need. If you'll forgive an outburst of preposterous idealism, it would be kind of neat to have a world with no nuclear arms whatever.

But for the life of me I don't see how the world convinces Iran it's not entitled to such weapons when Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, India, China, the United States, France, Britain and Israel all have them.

The United States might be drowning in debt but it's spending enough on its military-security complex to fix the crisis and save us all from economic Armageddon. There are priorities, after all.

The world is a veritable cornucopia of riches for those of us professing the pessimists' faith. Nary a day goes by without a thousand new proofs that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. After all, since the very emergence of our species -- somewhere between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago, if you're a scientist, or 6,000 years if you're a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination -- humans have been in conflict with each other and have chosen (or have evolved) to resolve many such conflicts violently. Think William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the pessimists' bible. Think Stephen Harper's egregious crime legislation.