Wild Bill

I couldn't care less if someone is gay or if children are being raised by gay parents. No big deal. However, I am getting both ticked off and bored from being over-exposed to the rantings of those pushing an agenda. I wish many of them would just shut up! They should get over themselves. Most of the acceptance they demand is already there. It would seem that what they really want is to be considered "special". Nobody is special! We are all the same - abused citizens taken advantage of by their government. I am puzzled by what is driving these people so hard. One would swear they want to make their lifestyle compulsory!

Some folks keep dragging out that old scary word - meltdown! Has anyone actually died or been injured from a meltdown? I know that at Three Mile Island the total casualties were ZERO! Seems to me like we are supposed to be frightened of an urban myth.

Really? Such rules never stopped rabble from insulting me or anyone else they fancied! Is it libel if it is true? Is it an insult to state facts? Whatever, don't worry Michael. I've been on this board for some years now and I have only mentioned rabble once or twice. I will be perfectly happy never to mention the name again!

I don't understand. You agree that they are enriching far more than reactors would need, in a quantity that would be appropriate to making a nuclear weapon or at least, selling it to some other power trying to do such. And it is OUR fault for demanding they stop? That instead we should have demanded a more "proper monitoring regime" so that we would have a better tally on how much extra uranium they had enriched? If they indeed are producing that much enriched uranium, does that not make them a valid threat? I don't follow you here at all, my good Dr. Dre!

This is a tired old excuse for authorities not to have to get off their ass and do their duty. Gays should not have to hide. Neither should a woman have to avoid walking at night or dress like a drab to avoid male attention. The law is the law and should be enforced equally for all or it becomes meaningless. Otherwise, the law loses respect and encourages vigilantism. As when an intruder sues someone for resisting his burglary attempt too strongly, or when a shopkeeper tries to defend his property himself after being repeatedly robbed and then ignored by the constabulary. Or at Caledonia, where the police tossed the townsfolk to the wolves and allowed the native protestors free rein, because it was politically expedient. We live in times when the law picks and chooses where it cares to be applied.

I have had only one experience with rabble.com and that was enough! I have never met a more bigoted, intolerant, pig-headed, profane, biased, closed minded and rude bunch of people in my life. And those were just the moderators! I have never been back. They can preach to each other for all I care. They will not miss someone like me, much less care. Certainly, I will never miss them. They have the manners of pigs. May they always get as they give!

I thought the issue was how MUCH enriched uranium Iran is making! Even if Iran does not use it in a bomb, it appears to be far more than what is needed for reactors. Why does Iran need so much? Is there a good reason? If they have such a surplus, are there unfriendly powers or groups that would buy it?

I've heard this argument before. It still doesn't make sense to me! Why on earth would the other nuclear powers blow up Iran? Spread fallout all over the middle east, including allied countries? Kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocents? It would NEVER happen! Certainly we might see a conventional war to force a regime change in Iran. That could likely lead to other complications. No, what you describe seems an utter impossibility. Too many unintended consequences. You are talking about radiation deaths in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and a LOT of other countries! Tell us again how you think the other powers would do such a thing!

Not always, August! A smart businessman sometimes does things a different way. Consider my position. I make my living repairing and building guitar amplifiers. As you might imagine, musicians can be a pretty exotic customer base. Almost all of them have been the best customers a guy like me could ever want but of course, once in a blue moon I get a bad one. It only seems to happen maybe once a year. A guy will knock on my door and start making demands before he even gets inside. He needs me to repair his amplifier but he thinks he knows what's wrong and most important, how much I should charge him! He will demand that I put his repair to the head of the line and ignore those others who have been patiently waiting. When you think about it, why on earth would I want to make a customer like that happy? When you deduct all the aggravation, I'm not going to make any money. Worse yet, meeting his demands would be a disservice to my other customers. This is how I handle such patrons. In my town there is perhaps the country's WORST guitar amp tech! This fellow will take weeks if not months and then likely give your amplifier back to you in worse shape than when you first gave it to him! I wouldn't trust the fellow to put a new plug on a lamp! I have some of his business cards. If I get the sense that a customer is going to be that much trouble I simply say "Gee, I'm so sorry but I really am swamped with emergency work that it might be weeks before I can get to your amp. However, why don't you take this guy's card? I hear he's really good and I'm sure he can fix it quickly for you!" I've gotten rid of him with a minimum amount of fuss. He is no longer my problem. Even better, he's a problem for my competitor, who will give the type of poor service that sort of customer deserves! Two birds with one stone! Meanwhile, I devote my time to my regular customers, who I value highly and who appreciate my service in return. I have customers from the first day I opened my doors and I will NOT inconvenience them for a demanding jerk!. I've been doing this for about 6 or 7 years now and I must confess, it has been a lot of fun! It has not hurt my reputation in the slightest! In fact, if anything it has enhanced it. Any musicians that hear about such an incident don't hold it against me. It is a small enough market that they probably know such a problem customer or someone like them and find it humorous that such a negative sort got what he deserved! They also know that I won't give them less service to satisfy someone who doesn't deserve it. I am in a niche market with very few competitors so perhaps I am lucky I can do this but even years ago when I sold parts to large manufacturers I would sometimes do something similar. There are large accounts that treat suppliers very poorly, expecting them all to leap for a carrot they will never give. Sometimes certain parts would become very scarce and difficult to find. If I had some I always saved them for my regular clientelle. I could get a stupendous markup selling to those larger but mean accounts but they would never give me any other business! Meanwhile, a regular and loyal customer would greatly appreciate my selling scarce parts to him. Often it kept him in business! We would do business together for years, having a mutually positive relationship. So refusing a client is not always discrimination August, at least to me. Sometimes its retributive justice!

Not quite, Michael. I worked with some Muslim teenagers once and learned a lot from them on the REAL situation! I agree that children born into our society will most always WANT to learn our values! The problem with many Muslim communities is that the Imams and many of the parents are well aware of that tendency and do their level best to fight it! Many Muslim church leaders actively rail from the pulpit against diluting not just the values of Islam but more often the cultural values of the country from which that community came. It is rare to see immigrant Muslims from many different countries worship at the nearest mosque. Almost always there is a specific mosque for that specific immigrant community. So the teenagers I talked to were between a rock and a hard place. They wanted the freedom of being mainstream Canadian kids but were under immense pressure to instead practice and preserve the cultural values of whatever country their family came from. Of the dozen or so kids I worked with, ALL of them were expected to go through with marriages arranged by their parents, even though the kids all believed that this was NOT something from the Koran but merely a cultural practice of the "old country". The kids were all secretly dating each other but were all sadly aware that nothing could ever come of it, since they eventually would be forced to marry under the arrangement. I think the difference perhaps with Islam is that Canada has never seen a large immigration from cultures so dramatically different from our own parent culture. Britain, France and Europe were basically all Christian, either Roman Catholic or of various offshoots. Most cultural values were quite similar. The idea of arranged marriages hasn't been held for centuries! We value individual freedom far more highly than do communities in countries like Somalia. The idea of the local parish priest running our lives died during the Middle Ages. So your premise about assimilation is only true in general. With the specific cultures of many middle eastern countries that happen to be Islamic, those that govern the culture are well aware of assimilation and actively fight it! This is a new thing for western societies and is becoming the source of much friction and backlash. Countries like France would only become officially Islamic after much blood was spilled! I'm afraid this problem will only get worse before it is resolved. Even here in Canada, older immigrants are resisting the assimilation of their children to the point of drowning nearly the entire female side of a family by pushing a car into a canal! True, these are isolated instances but their very extreme nature implies that there are likely far more instances that while not going that far are likely examples of strong and violent to a lesser degree. It is a unique situation, Michael. It must be dealt with in a unique manner.

Speak for yourself, Michael. I'm interested in PIK's opinions!

We differ, Waldo. Myself, if we had to use non-stealth fighters, I would much rather you be a pilot than I.

As has been said Mr. Canada, those that fly our fighters want the F-35. What's more, no other plane has the stealth capability. In modern war if a plane doesn't have good stealth you might as well paint bullseyes all over it. It would be a flying death trap. Don't worry about it. I am confident that Canada will end up either with no new fighters or fighters that are woefully inadequate for any needed job. Politicians will congratulate themselves for saving money and our brave pilots will just keep their fingers crossed that they never have to fly them into modern combat. It would be less painful just to commit suicide.

You are implying that it is somehow our fault, that we have insulted them. If we look at your argument from the other end, how on earth could we have avoided insulting them? What would we have to do to make them LIKE us? Could we live with the price?

Of course I am aware of sedimentation! It's just that there is a bit more being asked here. Biomass left out on the open tends to decompose. It loses much of its moisture and its volume becomes a pittance of what it initially had. Dry plant life is easily blown away by the wind, or washed away by the rains. This would also be occurring over those same millions of years. Peat bogs would seem to be a first step in the process of biomass turning into petroleum. Yet we find such bogs in relatively few and specific areas, covering nowhere near the extent of land where we find oil fields. It just seems that the explanation of grass and trees becoming so much petroleum, even over millions of years, seems just a bit too pat. I would be more inclined to believe that if an Ice Age came on far more quickly than we have supposed, such as in as little as 50 years, the weight of the ice sheets might compress equatorial rainforests into petroleum over 50-1000 years. Those same ice sheets might also bury the material. I mean, my lawn mower mulches my grass as it cuts. After a hot summer you would be hard put to find any traces of that cut grass. Again, I am not uncomfortable with the principle but I am still finding the standard explanation of the process takes a lot of things for granted.

Are you saying the stuff will just sit there for billions of years, slowly turning into petroleum? No drying up and blown away? No being eaten by bacteria? Then after those billions of years, it will suddenly dive down tens if not hundreds of thousands of feet into the earth and rock, waiting there undisturbed until somebody drills into it? I'm willing to accept that biomass might turn into petroleum if left in a sealed bottle for billions of years. You are asking me to believe something totally different. How deep is the average peat bog? How long does it take to form? How much longer before peat could or even would become petroleum? Was all of the middle east covered in thousands of feet of peat? Or Texas, Oklahoma and other surrounding states? Were the Alberta oil sands once a gigantic peat bog thousands of feet high, that lay undisturbed by the elements while they slowly turned into petroleum tars? Again, it's not the principle but the logistics that bothers me.

I guess you just jumped in without reading the previous posts. We already covered this. Your suggestion won't work! Except for those already on Dalton's program, which is no longer accepting new applicants, selling power to the grid is illegal and likely to stay that way in Ontario. You therefore would have to buy a battery bank of deep cycle batteries, which is NOT cheap! Right now systems to get the average home completely off grid are running about $30,000, Look at your monthly electricity bill and do some simple math. How long will it take you to pay off the investment and begin to enjoy free power? I will be 60 next week, If I installed such a system I would likely be dead before I enjoyed any benefit, Certainly,I wouldn't last beyond the break even point very long. Like most simplistic ideas, it sounds easy when you are not familiar with the details. Perhaps someday it will be possible, but not today and not any time soon.

Well, perhaps its easy for you but I still have some problems. Did all that biomass like in protected pools, so that nothing ate it or dissolved it way? Was it out in the open, under the sun and the wind? How did it get so far underground? How did it collect into specific areas and not be spread evenly over millions of square miles? Even crude oil released in spills doesn't just sit there for millions of years. Creatures big and small, from bacteria to bears, can and do eat oils. Unless protected under hundreds and thousands of feet of rock and earth, wouldn't the biomass likely dry up, be eaten or dispersed in a much smaller volume into the general environment? It's not the concept in itself of biomass eventually becoming petroleum that I have a problem accepting. It's the logistics of it becoming oil fields of millions of barrels that seems unlikely.

My good friend, it wasn't all about YOU!

Is that all it's about? That sure makes things easier! I have no problem with "moving same sex relationships out of the dark". I just have a problem with how the school system always goes about such things. They always seem to think that you bring about acceptance by making groups "special". Every group gets their turn being "more equal than others". I would rather just treat everyone the same and such issues as no big deal. If there is some clear discrimination going on then by all means something should be done but otherwise, "can't we all just get along?". Someone once said "The love that dare not speak its name is now the love that won't shut up!" It often seems applicable today.

Mr. Canada, tell the truth. Your idea of a wild dance party is Walter Ostenek and his polka band! You sound like you grew up in Mayberry and never left! No shame in that. I always rather liked Mayberry myself! It's just that when you give advice to the mainstream it doesn't resonate well when you seem to be anything but mainstream yourself.

And there is no possible way that our present grid would have any hope of operating in such a manner! We are talking decades of upgrades, at least. People who keep proposing such ideas should keep that in mind. We have to do what we can when we can. Otherwise we are merely dreaming.

This is where once again we disagree, Michael. I'm starting to see how and why it happens. You make a statement or suggest an approach and immediately I start to see the inevitable consequences. When I point them out you immediately deny them, without explaining why! You do not see any connection where to me the connection seemed obvious. In this instance, you see criticism and negative observations of primitive cultures as an attack on their religion. You see it as giving those who genuinely are prejudiced against that religion ammunition for attacks. I see things more simply. Primitive actions are primitive actions. Whatever religion is involved is a totally separate and irrelevant issue. Michael, it is an obvious fact that some cultures are dangerous when they lead to conflicts with ours here in Canada. I would put the Hare Krishnas under police observation if they showed a propensity for violent acts! This is not prejudice. It is merely prudence. The safety of EVERYONE in Canada is paramount! Worrying about true prejudice is a separate matter. If it would make you feel better, find a few REAL bigots and hang them! Meanwhile, your approach to me seems in reality to be obstructionist! I see your way as making the dangers greater, not less.

So we should all just stick our heads in the sand? Ignore whatever happens? There IS a policy choice! We should be extremely careful in screening immigrants from primitive and violent cultures, no matter WHAT religion! I swear Michael, sometimes you seem to find it an acceptable price to have innocents die rather than give offense.

Ah, but are we talking about simply a mass of living cells or an actual personality? A fertilized ovum is living only in the same sense as a geranium is living. When it is born it definitely has a personality, as every parent well knows, unless there has been serious damage in fetal growth. At some point during gestation a personality begins to develop. I don't claim to know the exact point at which that occurs but by 6 months it seems certain, whereas at 6 weeks it would seem not. Simply being a living mass of cells is no more a human being than is a severed finger, IMHO. Man is the animal that thinks. Sooner or later we will have to address the issue of other animals that think but this thread is only about the unborn. However, we better get used to the idea of defining "human" in terms of being able to think or we will never be able to cope with a whole host of problems. It's not just when is a fetus a human being. It is also about whales and dolphins, elephants and perhaps many species of birds and of course, ET! Sooner or later we are going to meet him, after all. Again, if we are all hung up on the primitive notion that a clump of cells is enough to define a sentient life we will never be competent to judge. What about Artificial Intelligence? What sort of programs will we see in 40-50 years? If abortion is wrong what about pulling the plug on an AI program? Think I'm crazy? In the immortal words of Lord John Whorfin: "Laugh-a while you can, Monkey-boy!"