BHS

Sounds to me like someone's kid can't get into a particular local school, er sumpin.

Um, at what point are you going to expose the partisan angle to this story?

Speaking of tinfoil hats, another Yearly Kos moment: Apparently some of the bloggers decided to have a little fun amongst themselves at their own expense, and started a contest to see who could come up with the best tinfoil hat. It was only during the judging when the MSM types decended en masse to take photos and footage, that they realized that five second soundbite of a bunch of lefty bloggers wearing tinfoil hats probably wouldn't look so good on the evening news. Especially after they'd spent much of the week deriding the people who now controlled whether or not said soundbites would be played up as the gently humourous spoof that was intended, or played down as biting satire. I never did hear how exactly that panned out.

You're missing the point entirely. As the article makes quite clear, a homeschooling parent who chooses to instill a set of moral guidelines in their children, which is contrary to what a government official feels is an appropriate moral (political) indoctrination, is breaking the law and liable to end up in jail. The next rung down this ladder into the abyss is of course a parent being punished (and, let's not forget, possibly imprisoned) for contradicting the rubbish his child has brought home from a public school: "Dear Mr. Plegm, It has come to our attention that you've been teaching your children that terrorism is wrong in all cases. This contravenes our current policy of teaching the children that "terrorism" is a loaded word, and to try to see the world from the terrorists' viewpoint. It is only when our children can see that blowing up a pizzaria full of despicable Jews is in fact an honourable act of self defence, that we can make peace with our own blood besotted past. If you continue to contradict our official moral guidlines on this and whichever other matters we've decided are relevant this week, we will be contacting the Child Welfare authorites, and asking for a review of your parental fitness. Because clearly, your refusal to teach appropriate tolerance to your children is nothing short of child abuse. Sincerely, Oberkinderfuhrer Blahblahblah" Because really, when a government official can come into your home, interrogate your children, and have you arrested because they gave the wrong answers, how far are you from having the Gestapo demand your papers on the street?

What an odd conclusion to arrive at. The article quite clearly expresses that home schooling is not illegal in Belgiam. What is illegal is the refusal to teach your children a government sanctioned program of "tolerance" which is expressly not defined. This is an open invitation to political indoctrination on the flimsiest of pretexts. I think education should be manditory the way that eating is manditory - that is, something that is of such obvious benefit to the recipient that only it's exclusion becomes an issue. However, there is a difference between a public education that is useful in a basic, functional sense, and a public education that veers into the realm of parental oversight. Children should receive their moral direction from their families and not from the state.

Will you defend the right of families like the Kahdrs to home school their kids even if that means their kids will be more likely to grow up and become terrorists? Are you suggesting there are enough families like the Kadhrs in Canada for your question to be relevant to a discussion of general education principles? And if so, isn't the problem that they are in Canada to begin with, and not how their children are being educated?

Since all of modern life can be linked to one Monty Python skit or another, here's the link to the Dennis Moore episode from Season 3. The appropriate link, at the top of the page, is for the skit entitled "Prejudice". While we in Canada wile away our time worrying that the government is listening in on each and every one of our dopey phone conversations, the much more nuanced and worldy Belgian authorities have found the means to prove that they are several steps further down the road to Big Brother totalitarianism than their New World sister nation. (I've always thought of Canada and Belgiam carrying a similar global profile re: economy, military, unwarranted overestimation of it's own global influence and importance, etc.). According to this article it is against the law to refuse to allow the Government of Belgium access to your children's mind for the purposes of political indoctrination. Refusal can result in imprisonment. You may be shocked to learn that the source of the political thinking behind this case is UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child. Or not, depending on what level of respect you give to anything that emerges from Turtle Bay. Since we are of course signatories to said convention (under Mulroney, no less), and since we view Euro legalistic proclivities as being preferrable to imitating for the dreaded Americans (who are not signatories to the said convention, natch), the case in point is no doubt a foreshadowing of the future of child education in Canada.

Bush's poll numbers must be going up, if journalists are making a big deal about this. Seeing the name "wonkette" in the video's URL reminds me of a picture of Andrew Sullivan, Ana Marie Cox and Glenn Reynolds posing and looking chummy at this year's Yearly Kos in Las Vegas, that some wag had labelled "Rum, Sodomy and The Lash". I saved a copy for posterity, of course.

Are you aware of where your "4 to 10 percent" figure comes from, or are you just regurgitating what you read in the conspiracy pages? There is 1, that's one, report that comes up with that figure, by a single think tank in Washington called The Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Guardian in England picked up the story of the report last year, and it spread like a virus across the anti-war pages from there. The conclusions of this report are not generally agreed upon, accept among people who want to believe the opposite of what the American government and mililtary have to say about any particular issue. This has the same odor as all of the crap you write about "consensus" with other issues. You guys cherry pick reports that agree with your biases and then claim that everyone buys into those conclusions because so many people have repeated them. Obfuscate. Exaggerate. Repeat.

This is an amusing little list. My personal favourites: 5. We are attacked by Japan and then attack France? Roosevelt is worse than the Kaiser! 3. This war doesn’t attack the root causes of Nazism 1. I don't see Roosevelt or Churchill storming the beaches -- they're Chicken Hawks

You're an ass. I have never denied that global warming is happening in my conversations with you. I have denied the importance of the anthropogenic aspects of global warming. Big difference. So much for your grasp of reality, and your reading comprehension skills. No wonder you take crap eco-alarmism as gospel truth. On the one hand you deny any denial of global warming, and on the other you call it "crap eco-alarmism". Who's the "ass" again? I apologized to the forum administrator for using inappropriate language, after I was contacted on the matter. Clearly someone complained. I guess it wasn't you, though, since you've chosen to use the same language in return here. Right? (And please, don't try to deny that you're reference to "simple-minded folk" which prompted my outburst (and your subsequent rehash) wasn't a reference to me specifically to me.) You still have to work on your reading comprehension skills, as you have once again mischaracterized my meaning. I wasn't referring to global warming as "crap eco-alarmism". I was refering to that piece of crap website you linked to as "crap eco-alarmism".

1) Consensus has never proved anything. In fact, broad concensus among scientists has on numerous occasions worked against developing an acurrate scientific determination of how a system actually works. That scientists share an opinion doesn't make that opinion scientific or true. 2) There is no broad concensus that man-made problems are the primary cause of global warming. The consensus you speak of is pertains to the notions that warming is occuring and that this is a problem. And even those opinions have their detractors.

If you notice, fixer1 has been banned. My apologies to all. I read the line that said "Full Member" instead of the line further down that said "Banned".

Okay, who reading this thread is surprised to find that fixer1 is still a member of the forum? I was reading this thread the other day when I read a post that really startled me. Let me refresh: Since when is threatening to hunt down and do physical violence to another member not a bannable offence? I mean, for crying out loud, he could be charged for this.

Within their own jurisdictions only. A Nova Scotian can't vote to change policy on Provincial matters in Manitoba. No. The way I read it, the difference is under Subey's proposal all Canadians, regardless of the province, would vote on these matters of public policy as represented by a single legislative body, not individual Provincial legislatures. Okay, but that's neither here nor there. My example was to point out that though our current method of financing gives the illusion that we have a unified public health care system, in reality we do not, and that to truly unify the system would require the radical constitutional amendments that you claimed are unnecessary.

You're an ass. I have never denied that global warming is happening in my conversations with you. I have denied the importance of the anthropogenic aspects of global warming. Big difference. So much for your grasp of reality, and your reading comprehension skills. No wonder you take crap eco-alarmism as gospel truth.

Gerry, why are you posting this? I thought you'd already proven, beyond all shadow of doubt, that anthropogenic warming was the chief cause of global warming and that the only solution was to turn the clock back to 1989. What more have you to gain by beating us with your unstoppable hammer of truthiness? By the way, the site you linked to sucked. You know a site sucks when enormous claims are made that presumably have a plethora of credible citations, and yet no citations are given. Unless we're to believe that the clown who threw that mess together performed the ice core sampling himself. In fact, the only link he provided was to Source Watch, which is apparently neutral in it's analysis of the organizations it monitors, because they didn't make much of a case against Cooler Heads. I guess we're just supposed to take a bunch of evil neo-conish references and infer the evil connections and twisted conspiracies for your guy (and by extension for you as well). Kinda lazy, no?

August: I have to quibble. The problem with your argument is that Subey is proposing a system wherein all Canadians have an equal say in all of these spheres of public policy and you are not. Therefore, your argument that we already have the system in place that Subey is proposing is not valid. For example, the Federal Government currently has legislation in place for collecting taxes and redistributing tax dollars for both Health and Education spending. Their control over healthcare financing in particular gives them a stranglehold over what you've correctly identified as a Provincial matter. This fiscal control allows them to set a national agenda for the manner in which publicly funded healthcare is delivered. Many Canadians agree with this arrangement - they believe every Canadian should have the same level of care, regardless of which Province they reside in. However, if a Province had the wherewithal to forego Federal funding it could pull out of the Canada Health Act and set it's own agenda. If Canadians wanted to ensure equitable treatment across the country was a permanent feature of our pubic policy, we would require some fairly radical amendments to our Constitution.

I believe we were at risk when we went into Afghanistan. I believe we were at risk before that.

How is a proposal for a new federal system of government a moral or religious issue? At least, how is it more moral/religious than Canadian Politics>Federal Politics? Plus, I don't think either you or Riverwind have gotten the point of the initial post at all. Subey is proposing a radical change to the structure of the Canadian Federal government. The system we have now is not at all like what he/she is proposing. Reread the post.

I don't know if this has been discussed anywhere on the forum yet. It seems the ammonium nitrate was delivered to the suspects by undercover police officers. Does anyone else hope, please sweet Jesus please, that the police had the good sense to deliver something that was not ammonium nitrate but merely a harmless substance packaged to look like ammonium nitrate? I mean, wouldn't it be a screaming nightmare of an irony if somehow the police had lost track of the chemicals at the last minute, and they ended up being used to take out Metro Police Headquarters? Or that CSIS building?

Er...this was good old fashined police work in action. Beefing up the military would do sweet F.A. killjoy: These suspects were homegrown. The London bombers were homegrown. Ditto Madrid. Foreign terror networks aren't the problem. Anyway, I think this undermines one of the fundamental precepts of the "war on terror": that we must fight "them" over "there" so we don't have to do it here. Well, as these arrests and other recent successful attacks have shown, "they" are here already. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq appear to be serving as rallying points, current examples of the western war against Islam that is central to the radical ideology which uses terrorism as its weapon of choice. IOW the "war on terror" is ultimately counterproductive. Hey BD, Any irony for you in the idea that these guys had their communications monitored? Just asking.

I'm a hard-core Conservative, with nothing but contempt for anything that even appears Liberalish, and even I have to admit that she's undeniably right about that. Nobody in the world hates Canadians as a people "for who we are and how we live". We have become a target in the last few years for one reason only: We are too chummy with the U.S. This was my biggest fear when the "war on terror" began; that we would not distance our intentions from those of the U.S. in a distinct enough manner. Stepping up our presence in Afghanistan gives the signal to the terrorists that we are on board U.S. imperialism, and puts us at risk at home. Now, I'm not saying that we should not be doing our part. We certainly can't be sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that it'll go away. But we should not kid ourselves. More Canadian involvement in the middle east makes us a bigger target. The more we do over there, the more danger our citizens are in over here. It's an iron clad guarantee. Am I to read this to mean that you prefer an isolationist policy for Canada?

I bet, if they'd carefully selected only three or four screens nationwide to show the movie on, they could have averaged over 20k per screen easy. That would make it, like, the biggest blockbuster hit of all time! (On a per screen basis.) Yay, Al!!! The incovenient truth is that outside of a very limited number of markets this movie will flop, because only blue state concrete jungle dwellers (you know, Greenpeace supporters) buy in to Gore's econutter ramblings.

Yeah, too bad that one set of circumstances is based in reality and the other is retardedly partisan payback speculation.