watching&waiting

I really do not think Nuclear is the way to go in this, and I think we have overlooked what would be a real easy and better approach to having unlimited energy etc. in the form of geothermic power. The fact that we would need to dig deep holes directly into the earths mantle should not be a huge problem and sinc e it really is just a big deep whole, I do not think it would be all that hard to do and maintain. we already have some mines that go down to where the temperatures would be near 150 F. So it should not be all that difficult to dig say a 100ft wide hole that goes say 20,000 ft deep to where the earths own inner heat will then boil water to steam and run generators etc., with absolutely no pollution of the air or water. Since its the earth itself that has this heat, it can be had anywhere that a hole can be dug. Even our governments of today should not be able to break a hole, no matter how hard they try. Even if we had to dig even deeper, we would still be far better to do this then to keep spending for energy such as oil and gas. The whole initial costs of digging the whole and then plunbing it with heat pipes and steam pipes to run large generators would be a one time cost, and I would like to think it would be less then the hundreds of millions that nuclear would cost and also nuclear will have disposal problems that we are not sure of its costs as of yet. I often think about this and I do not see many things stopping this type of project from working as I think it can be done. So I throw it out to the people here on this board to discuss it and see what comes of that.

I have little problems getting the EPA mileage frommy cars and I have owned many. I can attest to V8 Gm getting very good gas mileage on the hwy's. My 1994 Corvette got 34 MPG and the 1995 vette got 36 MPG if driven 70 mph on normal roads in summer. The 1991 Cadillac got 34 MPG hwy and 25 MPG city. It really depends on how you drive these things. The Buik that I now drive with a v6 only gets slightly better gas mileage then my older v8 cars did. I pretty much believe that this has to do with the fuel injection being computer controlled. I never got the mileage posted on the dodge products, other then the old Kcars. Fords I always seemed to be able to get a mile or so higher then EPA but I was usually on 4x4 trucks. If people would just take care of their vehicles by doing proper maintenance and practice some smooth driving and accelerating techniques then they would get much better mileage then they do now.

A carbon tax would only help those who have the means to avoid it, to do so and it would only cause the suffering upon those who least can afford it. If people are so up for fighting greenhouse gases then let it be out and in the open where we all will see the true costs and the jobs lost or gained etc. Making taxes etc is just hiding the real costs. It we are to fight climate then let the real cost in numbers be shown and no hiding anything.

Lamer's whole position for this is that because Haper is having trouble in ledgislating things requiring harsher sentences, that then making requests for more severe sentences as interfering. I personally think he is wrong. Not only is it societies right to demand harsher sentences from the bench, it is just the way it is supposed to work. Lamers view is that he wants to see ledgislation that then compells a judge to harsher sentences, is wrong and is really just a cowards way out of things. Judges should be bound by the will of the people as to where sentences should be and it should also be gauged on the damage to society that would make things more compelling to heavier sentences. The PM as the leader of the people not only should be the one who leads the call, it should also be that of many of the leaders in our society to also say when things seem to be unbalanced. I do not care about who the CPC appoint as judges, as they are just doing the same thing as what has always been done in the past, and it should not be suprising that like minded people will be the ones who get the appointments. Only a fool would pick people who would openly oppose your own views. Judges should not be forced by political will into making decisions but, there is nothing wrong with the political will of the people being considered and even should be so considered in many situations. The trouble with Latimers view of things, is it makes judges, almost god like and that they should never be. Judges are supposed to consider the harm done and balance that with appropriate sentences, and yes they should be made to consider all sides, and even the political climate, and societies own percepptions, before sentencing anyone. That is have it is supposed to be, not some special guilded chamber where judges only consider the cold rule of law and its small scope. They need to be drawing from a much wider scope of lifes experiences.

I do not think that any one group will have much sway. The only group that will even be counted are the small percentage that get off their butts and vote. We have seem ever reducing numbers with every election unless you have very compelling issues around which the voters will rally. The environment is a hot issue to talk about and yes it will even warrant money being spent, but it will never really become a big election issues. The things that affect the voters in their own pockets will be the issues that will be fought about in an election. Dions past as being involved with the government that did the sponsorship scandle, will also be an issue of whether we can trust Liberals again or not. I personally will never trust any liberal who was there at the time of the scandle. So until enough time has past that all of these have left the politic al scene, I will not even consider anything they have to say. As far as NDP and Layton go, I really just can not get past the way Layton comes accross as a snake oil salesman, to ever vote for them. The green as I said will never make it as a party, because the green cause is never going to be a cause that will win elections on, but will always be an added on issue to many parties and their plans. So yes that leaves me with the CPC, who so far have done a good job of running the country and there has not been a scanle a week like the Liberals. They have moved steadily toward achieving the goals and have done so in a minority government position. Yes while I may not agree with all things they plan and have done. I do see that they have acted in the best interests of the people. That means that even when I disagree wiith what they have done, I can see why and where they have made decissions that most want. I am not so self centered that it always has to be me, me, me all the time. If an election is called this spring it will become plain to all the people early on, that the past year of government has been quite good and while things were slowed by the opposition, they still got thru. The only party that has a plan and a future for our country is the CPC. They have laid out what is a slow but steady march towards where I would like things to end up. I am not saying all things but at least the ones that count. So yes, I would not mind a psring election or a fall or what ever. I things that rigt now the only real thing that will come out of an elelction is the CPC will gain seats, and maybe even enough for a majority. Even the Liberals know this, and all the polls mean nothing until a writ is dropped and the people once again start being made aware of the things that matter most to them.

I would think that it would not be that hard to attack the oil pipelines in Canada. They do run in the most remote areas and the ability to cross under or over the piplines is something many hunters have done many times. It would be real easy for a person with a small C-4 pack to set it so the piplines are blown up at the remotest areas, making the ability to fight the fires and repair it that much harder. But any how that would not take much thinking of how to go about attacking it. It is a whole lot harder to find ways that would secure this from that kind of thing from happening. In some parts of Canada there are already groups that are totally against the piplines in their areas, and so this would also give them the ability to find and nurture a home grown terrorists, into doing the job as well. I seem to remember a person in Alberta that had shot and killed kids that were terrorising his family etc. and if my memory serves me correctly he had a hate on for oil companies and he was also capable of bombing things etc.. I would wonder just how much nurchering it would take to turn him into a full wacko to do the biding of this kind. So while I will not worry greatly about if it can happen, I am well aware that it is not that hard to find and make these things go ahead.

Okay so call me cranky but when I'm right, I'm right. I could have expressed myself less sarcastically but I truly wanted to make the point that Alberta is not the centre of the universe. no alberta is becoming the sess pool of canada do to big oil. I would not run or work there ether. 70% of the oil prduction goes to the us and leaves the shit behind for the albertin,s enjoy the rest of there lives. When you run out of water do not look east were we hwve some . I would not run there my self. Why is it that you think Alberta will have trouble getting water? I think you know very little about Alberta and that is shown in your responce above. If Canada were to be split at the Manitoba border, it would be the east that would suffer the most in the long term. As far as water goes there would be little left for the east after the USA siphoned the great lakes dry. The better scenario would be for Canada to get along and grow as a country and not let the stupid narrow minded get any leverage in how things are done. Also as for Trudeau running for a seat, I can say he should be made to run and win a seat thru his own efforts and then he will not be holden to any one, as that is the one of the biggest problems to date with the Liberal party. If he can show he has the power and the intellect to win not only a seat but the hearts and minds of the voters, then he can walk in his fathers footsteps.

How can so many people be this stupid? It would seem that there must be a pill to make them this half witted as some used to be fairly open thinkers, and now all I see is rampant stuipity galoping in this thread. It would be very usual for Jordan to send a willing passenger to Syria, especially when he has a Canadian passport. So just on that one point all this is total BS. The people who would run with this are to be looked upon as intellectually castrated beings. This whole thread is so openly wrong and misleading from facts that it makes one wonder at those who actually would waste a moments time other then reading it. I will not waste any more time with it, other then to say think, think, think before you spout off in this.

I can say that RRSP's for the most part do serve a purpose of saving for retirement where taxes on money can be put off to those retirement years. Usually in your retirement your income does drop and taxes are lessened. That is where the supposed tax relief is to come from. For many that just does not fit with what they are into. If you have a 40 year work life and you saved 5% of your salary and your employers also put in the same amount, you would have roughly 4 years worth of your average salary set aside to help in your retirement. Some would even have double that as many chose to put 10% aside. Depending on the rate of return on your pension funds, this will give you a monthly figure that will be what you will get during your pension use time. Canada Pension even with subsidies is not enough to live a decent life on and for married couples it is even worse as they will get less as a couple and more as seperate people. You may see soon that divorce of the aged will come into play just to help people get a little more per month. Most people do not start saving for retirement until they are 20 years away from that time, so you either have to up the ante or you will have even less to play with. At todays interest rates it would be hard to know exactly where things will go in future but to live reasonable off a pension you will need to have at least $500,000.00 in it, and even more as time goes on. I plan to retire with my wife in the next 5 years and we have RSP's and other retirement plans, but the best plan I found was the fact that we bought a tree farm 25 years ago and the tress will be ready for harvest in the next decade or so. The money I take from the harvest will be taxed but it also has been offset by the many deductions we got over the years. The value for lumber of the tree farm is over 1.5 million dollars and it can be take whole por in part as we need it. To me this was a very good retirement plan and we will be able to live and travel as we see fit. The fact that this tree farm also helped remove pollution from the air for all these years is also a bonus. Maybe the government will decide to pay us to let the tress stay, or maybe not. Either way we still get our retirement the way we want it. Yes it would be good to let the trees gro another 20 years, but they are now at 55ft and are commercially viable. In 5 years they will be even more so etc. We may only take what we need each year and that way they will be worth even more later. This plan is still available to many country living people and I suggest that any young couples just starting out, that they consider this option. I never trusted the government to look out for me and for most of my life saw the government as the enemy, when it came to saving money. Sure their are many ways to get around all the hurdles that come in life, but when I look at the Tree farm as a retirement tool, I was very glad I chose that route. I bought the tree farm when it was already 20 yeras old and the trees are now 57 years in growth. They are white pine and spruce and the value of lumber will always rise with the times, so it is self indexing. Do not let the government, or even your own employer foll you into, thinking they have your best interests in hand and they are making you ready to retire. You will find that they usually only apply numbers to things to say it meets their targets, and their targets and yours probably are very different. Think ahead and out of the box and you will be able to retire quite well.

The CPC has decided to make sure they brand Dion with his past perforamances over the last decade or so. The Liberals have been busy trying to brand him as something different, but in the end of the day, it just comes down to what is the clear truth and what is a concieved lie. There is nothing abou the ads that is not true and it is only making Dion accept the deeds as they have played out of his past. It is not as if any of this is made up or blown out of proportion. What the ads will say, will be the true and honest accounting of Dions past and also mixed in with some of his more noteable present. IE the fact that Dions thinks that those who were banned for life from the party, because they were found to be very much be involved with the Sponsorship Scandle, to have paid enough and they should be welcomed again into the party. That did come from Dions own mouth and yes it was himself that made that negative, and one has to wonder at the reasons why he even had any thoughts on this, let alone to put them in public. . Dion's past performance will be brought to light of day, and yes he should be made to explain this to the people as to why and what was the context of each of these. This will show the Canadian people more about his character then any branding the Liberals would have us look at. Face it, most Canadians now know that you can not trust the Liberals by what they say, so it is not that hard to then realize that the people will then have to go on what he has done, as the way to show his true character. I find it funny that the liberals want to call them attack ads, when really they are just ads about Dions past performance, and issues where he took a stand. I guess the Libs take using past deeds as an attack. That is only because they think we should only look to present promises to base the vote. You know the same type of promises that the Libs are known for never keeping once elected! How dare we force the people to see the past record, so they cry foul.

That is the problem when you have been beaten down to the point where you then are fighting a war on the basis of religious belief's. There is never a real end to it except when all opposing views are silenced. There will never be peace among the Paleastinians until they can stop their fighting being about religious belief and make it about political differences. As much as I can say that they need their own homeland and that we should look for ways to assure they have a fair division of land in this, but even that will not be enough if they can not get over the feelings of always being the victim of Israeli aggression. Israel on the other hand must stop its own attempts to always trying to grab more and more land by settlements in areas of contested disputes. It really makes me wonder some times that we see people willing to die for pieces of a desert landscape. It looks to me like if nuclear ambitions keep growing in this region, it will soon all become desert and no living thng will be around to say "I am the winner". This has gone on for as long as I have lived and it has always grown towards the day when it will be one of total destruction of the area. I have seen it go thru all the stages that have been warned about right fromn the early 50's and I must say that in my lifetime I will probably see the end where all of the parties in the Middle East are destroyed by their own unwillingness to agree on anything reasonable. Canada fights to try and stop these events from happening, but we can not do this by ourselves and in the end I think it will come to an end the same way that has been said at the beginning, Total nuclear desimation of the Middle East.

I am shocked and appalled at just how much misinformation can actually be given here. The Canadian way of printing money and the basis allowed for the printing is not as deemed to be the same as the USA. But even the USA doesn't just print as much money as it wants to and it also has to meet the same grounds and critiera as the rest of the world. The one thing that should scare most American is the fact that there are more US dollars being held outside the country, that if ever they were all turned in, the US dollar would drop in value to that near the Peaso in Mexico. Much has been said and made stories in TV shows about foreign countries conterfieting the US dollar and doing so with perfect copies that the mormal to hi-tech methods can not discern them from the real. This could be possible, but very unlikely to be done for long. As much as it is a quaint idea that some entity can just print all the money he wants, when ever he wants, is a good story for TV. It does not play at all in the way things are really done. It is much like what the title of this thread is "Why we fight " and then we are off into the conveluted posts about monetary funds. You have to buy into the weird theories to actually find the links. I can only say that we are now seeing more of the reasons why we can not trust our neighbours to think clearly all the time, as they sometimes go off in the weirdest ways. I guess I will just have to stay quiet and grow my Tuney tress I am growing in the back yard That way I will always have change.

People must be hunting for things to discuss, as there is not even a hint that the US will pull out of Afghanistan, and it is only in the eyes of those who whould have us cut and run away anyhow that this is even posted as a topic. I personally believe that the USA would pull troops from Iraq to Afghanistan then the other way around. It will be akin to a small defeat to gain a fair victory. The Iraq situation can be left for some time as a fight among the people as in their civil war, and the troops from Iraq could be sent to Afghanistn for a proper routing of the Taliban and even into Pakistan, and in short order be back to mop things up in Iraq after they are through fighting among themselves and then a ready to talk as a single nation or evn divided into two nations. I think it is more then workable. Those who think that the troops now in Afghanistan wouldmake a difference in Iraq are kidding themselves and the extra troops Bush is sending is more of the kind that will just contain the civil war and ensure no outside interference will happen. I actually believe that the USA would welcome the Iraqi people if they split into two seperate nations and the divided countries would or could work things out between them. It is not as it the middle east has not seen the break up of countries before. This may even be the best way to find peace in that area of the world. The Nato lead mission in Afghanistan is doing a good job of rebuilding but yes they need more help to clear and secure the southern areas from Taliban insurgents. Canada has taken a large role in this and while we have had casualties, when you look at the number and consider we are in an active war zone, for the last year or so, we really do not have to be ashamed and should be proud that we have done a job in such a good manner. Yes there will be those who say any casualties are just too much, but then again these are the people that think they can talk and reason with the Taliban insurgents. Hell I am all for sending Laytone and all his NDP friends to Afghanistan and put them on the front where the insurgentents are, and let them talk these guys into giving in to our views. But they say we have to protect the weak minded even from themselves. I preferr to wait and let the news come to me, instead of like this thread, try to make news by the "What if" happens type story.

It is only the oppositions that are making Canada position after 2009 an issue. They know that they can not find a good issue to use as a wedge in the present and near future issues. So of course they try to make an issue about things that will happen in 2009. They are sad and I am quite pleased to see them always waging war here on this site about everything to do about nothing. I was starting to lose interest in this site due to all the attacking and very little actual sunstance of things discussed. Few threads were on topic and the Liberal supports were very loaud and proud of the way they twisted everything. I was wondering if maybe this was an attempt to prove some weird political science paper or something. I still wonder at some of this, as for a time the postings here seemed to be controlled almost and everything was really one sided. I still do think that many here are party hacks and those who have been around for a while know who and what side they are on. I did see a definite push by the Liberals here on this site, to post anything negative, no matter how stupid about the CPC and Harper. I have now decided that I will not let that succeed, in driving me away. My own view of how the government has run this last year or so is pretty good and yes there are some things I would have done differently, but for the most part it has been a good year. The Liberals do not want to acknowledge that simply because it shows just how bad things were on their watch. I still believe that Liberal party are still a very corrupt group and they should be pushed down until they finally have a renewal that wipes all the old guard from the party. Dressing up a new leader will not cut it will most voters. They have not learn that lesson yet, and they should never be allowed to rise to any position of power until this message is driven into them by the voters. It may take time and as I said before I do not think that there will be a spring election as Dion is no where near ready to wage an election and still does not even have a hold on his own party yet. I guess all the ballywho about the Liberals having a new leader, when it is obviuos that it was the choice of the same old guard who are scandle mongers of the same past government, was just to see if they could bump a few points with Dion as the new leader. The fast drop in his status, will now show that the Liberals are doomed for at least the next election and maybe even the next few. I guess that is what makes me still hag around and watch and wait to see what will happen next.

It disturbs me to see that people still have not learned the lessons behind the Arar case. That being so we will probably repeat it again and again until we do learn them. Canadians should never send any citizen to a foreign country, especiallt while in detention, where we know their are very good chances that they will be tortured. This should have by now sunk down to all levels of the RCMP and CSIS etc. The fact that the RCMP Commissioner took the blame and resigned, dhould not negate the fact that this was done, with the full knowledge of the RCMP and its members. The sad thing is, not one stepoped forward and said this was wrong. That shows then that the whole of the RCMP checks and balances that were in place, just do not work. We need new oversite, and that oversite should not be from the ranks of the police agancies at all. I realise that there are some things that need to be kept secret for the sake of the country, but there is nothing about the whole mechanism that Arar brought about, that needs secrecy except, to cover up what was a huge mistake by the RCMP to begin with. The people of Canada should demand more and they should also demand that they be now included into the oversite committees, that way we will be less likely to repeat the things. The cost is small if we learn from it, but it will only grow infinitely higher the longer it takes to learn those lessons. This would be one time where the government of the day can make some very sensible appointments, and save the taxpayers lots of money. I will wait and see if that happens.