Wild Bill

TM, are you saying that just because you don't have a specific quote from that defence minister that he was responding to the constant shelling and rocket attacks that those were not factors? That no Israeli civilians were getting bombs dropped on their heads everyday? That Israel intended just to let them keep falling and only got upset over an attempted assassination? More specifically, is it your position that Israel is SUPPOSED to ignore rockets and shells raining down on them? That any Israeli attempt to stop such attacks is actually agression on Israel's part? If you're going to label Israel the aggressor then it would seem that must be what you believe.

At its essential core, religion is about faith. Where it gets into trouble is not when it says there is a God but when it tries to state how God does and did things! When you think about it, if there is a God it's rather arrogant and presumptuous for Man to tell him how He made his Universe work...

Why are you surprised? It doesn't matter who is doing what on a day to day basis. When you boil the situation down to the essentials, you have to face the fact that Arab states have repeatedly tried to invade Israel. Israel has never initiated a war with its neighbours. Whenever Israel returned land it had occupied as a result of a war, groups like Hamas promptly used it as convenient rocket launching sites to fire literally thousands of random rockets into civilian areas of Israel. Only a complete and utter dillhole of a leader would repeat such a mistake as to keep putting his people in danger! It is groups like Hamas that hide their rocket launchers in hospitals and schools. And only a complete moron would expect Israel to just sit there and let it's people be randomly blown to bits, virtually every day. Any country has a right to defend itself, in whatever way works! Until Israel has security from its neighbours there's no point in talking about any solution that is essentially unilateral. As I said before, if the rockets stop falling on Israel then they have no reason to launch helicopter strikes. At that point everyone can argue about who is to blame for what.

There's a very old joke that if you have 3 accountants in a room you will have 4 opinions. At the time Harper started his bragging things did look more positive for us. However, some negative factors take some time to develop. Our banks were in better shape but our manufacturing base was early on in its downward slide. As our dollar firmed up our profit margins were eroded on our exports, since we are usually paid in U$D. Politicians of any stripe are incapable of looking beyond the next few months. They had obvious positives and most of the negatives required foresight and imagination to see. No surprise that Harper tooted the horn to say that Canada was in good shape! Also, politicans tend to think that everything depends on perception and hype. If they can lead a rousing cheer and get everyone feeling good then bad things will be averted and good things will happen. Lots of folks saw the warning signs a year or more ago but they were dismissed as doomsayers. Now those negative factors have had enough time to grow and show up in the analysis. So, now everyone can see them and Harper has to deal with them. Big deal! That's how life works! Stuff happens. Harper is not personally responsible for most if not all of those negatives. He is TOTALLY responsible for how he handles them! We can't blame him if it rains but we can blame him for not getting the roof fixed. This will likely put Harper in a BETTER position for an election! Polls have consistently shown that Harper is considered the more capable PM choice, even by many who don't like him. As I have repeatedly said, it's not enough to knock an incumbent. You also have to show that the alternative is a better choice. Ignatieff just doesn't seem to be able to do that! He is Harper's best electoral asset. Things would have to get REALLY bad, enough to force people into total desperation, before they would abandon Harper in favour of the Liberal choice! That extreme is not likely. The Liberals need a more charismatic leader before they have a chance to knock Harper out. Harper is perceived as rather wooden and stiff. What does it say about Ignatieff that he has been unable to capitalize on that? He appears to be even more wooden and stiff! An academic with his head in the clouds. Not as bad as Dion but still hardly someone inspiring. If the truth be told, our politicians have very limited choices in what to do about the economy. All they can do is try to make a fertile climate and then hope that business will jump in and do the job for them. A healthy economy doesn't come from adding people to the Canada Post payroll.

Makes sense to me! How do expect us to get our men and materiel home? If we've now got it we might as well get used to using it.

Agreed! An uprising of youth against Hamas would be a gamechanger! Dumping Hamas and removing the scourge of random rockets fired into Israel would pull the rug out from under Israel in how it treats those people.

True, but what if your doctor tells you that you have cancer and when you ask for a second opinion he promptly calls you ignorant and says anyone who disagrees with him gives oral sex to bears in the woods, when they're not looking? At that point, it is only logical to suspect your doctor's diagnosis.

Surely you must have heard the old joke about such stats! (I know, don't call you Shirley!) The statement in the ad is "4 out of 5 doctors prefer Aspirin." You might have to go through a thousand doctors to find those 4. At that point, you only need to add one of those 996 to truthfully make the statement and protect yourself from being charged with false advertising. Anyhow, I would disagree with you. It is NOT logical to believe on the basis of a larger number. This is the "Delphic" Method, which essentially believes that 5 million flies can't be wrong! Something is true or not true regardless of how many people believe it. What's more, often the numbers you are given of how many people believe a premise are cooked in themselves, by those with an agenda of one kind or another. What IS logical is to try to educate yourself to better understand the factors involved. It also never hurts to try to get some background on those who are making the claims for either side of the argument. Personally, I've always found that if one side appears to have some character flaws they usually are either wrong or outright lying. Someone who promotes or defends a premise with ad hominem attacks and puerile sarcasm usually does so because he lacks true evidence or reasoning. If you just go by the numbers then Galileo was wrong to go against the numbers of those in the Roman Catholic Church. E pur si muove!

Yeah, I guess you're right! Hamilton is a boom town! Jobs springing up all over! Of course, that doesn't hold a candle to St. Catherines and the Niagara Region. All those GM plants going full tilt, 3 shifts around the clock with thousands of guys working on each shift... Sorry BM! What could I have been thinking! If I got out more I surely would have seen all the truth to your premise! The private sector has never had it so good!

You see, you yourself just showed the flaw! It's not the idea of workplace safety that's the problem. It's the way things like WHMIS are implemented. I was there when it first started. I watched as one guy in the warehouse stopped production dead in its tracks over a difference of opinion that involved the GRAMMAR of the definition of the possible hazard with a specific cleaner! It took over a day to get it resolved. There were arguments about the salt used for de-icing the walk to the doors. Salt is sodium and chloride. WHIMIS in the first installment considered salt as dangerous as either chemical. The flaw is that the implementation of these rules is always in the most expensive and downright loopiest manner! Rules are written by English majors instead of engineers and chemists or whoever actually knows the subject matter. The flaw you showed is taking any criticism of HOW we do such things or IF such things are even worth the trouble as an attack on safety in the workplace! It's all very well for you to say you couldn't care less if it cost companies an unnecessarily high amount of money, or that YOU don't consider it any hardship! Countries like China and India pay lip service if at all to anything like WHMIS or safety regulations. This makes them much more profitable than companies here that you might have worked for. That's part of how they have stolen our jobs! That's another example of how socialist attitudes are screwing us. Unions here seem blind to anything beyond the walls of the companies here they work at. The fact that the real competition that steals or eliminates our jobs comes from outside the country is just to complicated a notion for them to accept, I guess. Oh well, rest assured that while our employers close down it will all be done according to the rulebook and in an environmentally conscious manner!

There will never likely be a massive takeover, BM. That's my point! Instead, we have a baby step here and a baby step there, with months or years in between. You have to look at things over decades to see the trend. One thing I've lived long enough to see is the proliferation of laws, bylaws and rules of all kinds. This is very much a socialist thing. Socialists often tend to be nitpickers, getting all fired up about the process to where you'd swear they really don't care about the problem or the goal. Socialists LOVE schemes like ISO or WHMIS procedures in the workplace! The more rules the better! The anal-retentive detail of clauses and sub-clauses involved in a large unionized corporation's collective agreement is mind-boggling! This preoccupation with rules and the process is what tends to make such organizations (or countries!) less productive. Any time spent not directly involved with adding value just detracts from the net worth. Look at a country like Britain, where rules have become so picky that the model engineering hobby has either died out or gone underground. So many safety rules (with many fees for the trouble, of course!) have been imposed that it is impossible for a hobbyist to have a metal lathe workshop at home. Often these rules are imposed rather sneakily. They don't always ban a particular product or tool. Instead, they regulate who can buy it! So the certified technician can get it but the home repairman can't. This has been starting to happen here in Canada. I had a part fail in my furnace. I found out the hard way that I can't buy it myself. So I had the technician in and he fixed it for me. The rationale is hard to argue with. Nobody wants folks blowing up their homes from faulty natural gas furnace repairs. However, it's not that simple! First off, the part was a control module that simply plugged into a cable. Even an idiot couldn't screw up the replacement! What's more, afterwards when I was not distracted by being cold I did a google on the Net and found a number of American sites that would have shipped me the part parcel post. Their price, including shipping and handling to get it across the border, was $50 USD. I had to pay my technician over $600 CDN! Why does it always cost more to be a Canadian? Why, when we're toting up things to be proud and patriotic about, are we always reduced to emotional things like the sight of the Rockies or the beautiful pictures in that Pierre Burton big coffee table book we got for Christmas? It's never about how much it costs to have a home, drive a car or feed our kids!

Ah BM, when WalMart is all that's left rest assured it will be nationalized! For the good of the people, of course!

One would expect the "Church of Climatology" to declare him a heretic! Nothing new there! That has nothing to do with truth. It just means that there is disagreement. The difference is, one side sees disagreement as a path to truth. The other just summarily dismisses it as heresy. The "Pope" of Climatology is not some Richard Feynman. He's more like some Maurice Strong.

Go ahead. Twist what I said into something easier to knock down. I'm used to it. I thought I was quite clear. The danger is not in the old USSR invading Canada. Rather, it's in Canada slowly becoming more like the USSR! Not militarily, of course. We're much too cheap for that! It's just that every day, a slow step at a time, we seem to be adding layers of red tape and bureaucracy. We specifically left the right to property out of our Charter. We have a health care system that makes any alternative illegal, a trait we share with only a few other countries in the world, like Cuba and Angola. It's a way of thinking, not an iron fist that we should fear. Slowly we sheep ossify our own necks, until it becomes physically impossible for us to look up! Eventually we shall achieve a nanny state that has successfully chased away all business, which means all private sector jobs. We'll all work at inefficient public sector jobs, with our children in government daycare centres from the age of 2 years! As a country we'll flog our raw resources to other, more progressive countries, competing with the likes of Bangaladesh. Hyperbole, I admit. Still, there's a grain of truth here.

I've had quite a few friends who escaped from "socialist hellholes" over the years, Saipan. One thing that always impressed me was how vigilant they were about Canada slowly ambling down the same path that ruined their home country! Don't let the rudeness of our refugees on this board from "rubble.com" get you down, Saipan. There are others like me that don't always agree with you but would not be so crass and lowbrow as to attack you personally in so rude a manner. I'm surprised that we haven't seen a "Charles Anthony" caution in this thread. He must be busy with holidays. I can't speak for anyone else but if this board goes the way of "rubble.com" then I'll be outta here!

What am I supposed to do with your link? I read the article and it seemed to be one of the most emotional, sarcastic and ad hominem essays I have read in some time. It sounds much like it was written by John Stewart or Steve Colbert, not Kary Mullis or Richard Feynman! This braying, sarcastic, adolescent tone is precisely what makes me loath to give such words any credibility! These tactics are not meant to sway one's head. They are meant to BS the ignorant! You give me a text and when I open it I find a dog turd! It's hard to read something that distracts you with a bad smell in your nose! Why didn't you just shriek "He's an evil denier! He gives oral sex to dead bears in the woods, while they're not looking!" It would have saved some time.

TM, are you aware that there has been much controversy over the accuracy of ice core samples? Here's just one link: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/ice_core_man-canada_2007.pdf It's a PDF file and I can't seem to cut and paste text from it but the essential point is that those folks using the CO2 record for their GW argument make the assumption that the tiny bubbles of air trapped in the ice stay the same over the centuries, so that the percentage of the various gases is accurate as to the time when the bubble was first trapped. Apparently, tests have shown this is not true! CO2 very slowly diffuses out over the years, so that the levels measured today are far lower than what they actually were in those long ago times. Obviously, if true this blows the entire argument out of the water! I'm no chemist but I suspect it's quite true. The air bubbles are trapped in frozen water, not granite or glass! I don't believe that ice is a 100% impermeable material to gasses, especially when we are measuring parts per million against thousands of years.

My comment about wheat pricing was merely off the cuff. I quite agree with you that it wouldn't have a hope of working. This only confirms that Canada has allowed itself to slip into a position of little or no leverage in certain areas. Again, that fits the definition of a third world country. You have a resource based economy. Third world countries can only compete on price with their resources against other countries. The countries that manufacture/add value always make the real wealth. We do have a geographic advantage with our oilsands. Canadian oil needs only a relatively short pipeline, instead of huge, slow oil tankers crossing the oceans. We also offer political stability and similar moral and cultural values, unlike many middle east states. Sadly, resources do diddley to help my own Ontario recover its economy. And the feds will be very slow to stop raking off money for transfer payments. True, in theory we can all buy oil stocks to offset our losses. How big a portfolio does one need to generate as much income as the job you lost, by the way?

Yeah, that's the smarmy way it works in Canada! We have a system where any other alternative to the government paying is illegal and then we use the fact that "society pays" as a justification to force people to change their lifestyles. Frankly, I find the situation rather morally disgusting! Not the concept of government medicare but just the idea of making it a monopoly and then using it as a lever for social engineering.

No! We had the duties and tariffs. THEN we had federal and provincial taxes! And we've always had clearing fees, because we've always kept much of the paperwork. If you had worked somewhere that imported products at the time you would know for yourself. I did, so I have direct experience.

Hey, I've got nothing to do with any Pat Robertson supporter! As for having a doper for an airline pilot, how about an alcoholic? You may have had one already! More than once! Unless he is drunk when he shows up for work, how do you tell? For that matter, does every pilot blow into a breathalizer before he enters the cockpit? Sure, they have rules about how much time must pass from his last drink and his work shift but how do we know for sure if he lies? So we should have someone pee in a bottle? That test only tells if you've smoked dope in the past few months, not that morning. Why not test a lock of his hair? That will tell you if he smoked some pot within 6 months. Would that make you feel safer? The only thing that's important is if the pilot is sober when he's on the job! Whether he has a drink or a toke on his own time is not important at all. If we follow your logic, then we need a test which will tell if a pilot has high THC levels in his blood AT THE TIME HE ENTERS THE COCKPIT! We give him a breathalizer at the same time, too! Frankly, I'm MORE afraid of the pilot who drinks than one who has a toke once in a while! I will admit, however, to be a little leery of a pothead flying so slowly that he might stall the plane...

Actually, if you go back to the 50's Canada had a LOT of domestic manufacturing! Not just steel or raw materials but radios, televisions and whatnot. Our domestic industry looked very much like a smaller version of the American one. Loudspeakers were made here. Tractors, cars and such as well. At the time, the vacuum tube was the basis of electronic technology, found wherever we find transistors and ICs today. The important difference was that unlike solid state products vacuum tubes wore out and needed to be replaced, like light bulbs. This ensured a continual large replacement market. Like most countries in those days, Canada had a lot of duties and tariffs that kept the price of imports high, encouraging local production. Many American companies found it cheaper and more profitable to open up branch manufacturing plants inside Canada to escape those duties. Others paid local companies to produce clones of their products, under licence agreements. Radio Speakers of Canada in Kitchener/Waterloo was one such example, producing big name speakers like Jensen for Canadian customers like Electrohome, Clairtone and other Canadian manufacturers of home mono and stereo hifi receivers and record players. During the 60's the Japanese began sending stuff to Canada and the US so cheap that only a ridiculous amount of duties and tariffs would have let domestic manufacturers compete. In the 70's, the car companies made a big mistake! They supported letting the Japanese bring in small cars. The American car companies didn't believe that anybody wanted anything but a big car. Of course, that was when OPEC was formed and drove the price of gas through the roof! Everybody was scrapping their muscle cars and bulgemobiles in favour of Japanese compacts and Volkswagen Beetles. The Americans didn't have any small cars that were worth a damn to offer! They lost a lot of market share and over the years things have just gotten worse and worse for them. Then came Mulroney and his Free Trade Agreement. No more duties and tariffs! We can argue about whether or not it was a good deal. Some say yes and some no but it's really not a clear thing to see, even in hindsight. We know that much of the domestic and branch plant manufacturing was shut down. American companies exported into Canada. The factories here became just warehouses. Warehouse jobs pay much poorer than manufacturing ones. However, how do we know if without Free Trade with the USA things would have been even worse? Globalization was already starting to happen. The real competitors were in the far East and not America at all. This is all just history, of course. I only post this because you seemed to believe that we were always just a raw materials exporter and that simply isn't true. Still, we seem to be BECOMING just a raw materials exporter! Manufacturing in Ontario and central Canada has taken a huge hit and will never likely be as big as it once was. It's still an important and large piece of the economy but not the biggest piece, like before. Countries that do most of the manufacturing tend to be wealthier than those who rely just on raw materials. Some believe that a raw material economy is part of the definition of a third world country. These countries have nothing else to offer and are forced to offer their raw materials at super low prices, just for the foreign exchange. The main exceptions would be the OPEC countries, who have become rich by controlling the price of oil. Perhaps we should tie the price of the wheat we sell to Saudi Arabia to any increase in their selling price of oil!

You're right, BC. However, there's another side to the argument. There are many people who can always rationalize a justification for telling their neighbour what to do and how to live his life. Once again, I'm getting very sick of people telling me I can't do something because someone ELSE has a problem! If someone is going to tell me how to live my life I would like to have the favour returned once in a while. I'd start with censoring their music collection! No disco, no hip hop and no country except for Keith Urban!

This is the law here in Hamilton. I can't think of anything more cruel and anti-business, at least at the moment! There are a LOT of small businesses hanging on by their fingernails in this city! Many of them are staffed by just the owner and perhaps a member or two of their family. There are a lot of variety stores where you see the same guy behind the counter no matter what time of day or night you go in. I've gone into some stores and found the guy napping behind the counter. I feel for them! So some monkeyshines decides to spray paint graffiti on his outside walls! He calls the cops. They don't do anything, of course. They don't prevent the spray painting and they don't catch the perp afterwards either. What DOES happen is that in a few days a bylaw officer informs the owner that he has to clean up the spray painting HIMSELF or the city will make HIM pay for it! And he better be quick about it, too! Talk about making someone a victim, twice! You'd almost think the city thinks its all HIS fault! What a cruel and heartless attitude to the "little guy" who's just trying to make a living to feed his kids, while paying his taxes. Meanwhile, business keeps leaving Hamilton and new business avoids coming here. Go figure!

Never happened before? You must be quite young. Either that or you don't get out much. Have you ever heard of the Reform Party? The one that came out of nowhere, drove the old PC party down to 2 seats and within less than a decade became the official Opposition? The one whose major platform plank was to have MPs that carried their riding's constituents' voices to Ottawa, instead of Ottawa's voice to the constituency? The one whose party constitution FORCED its MPs to try to take the pulse of the people who had voted them into their seat and vote THEIR WAY on the issues? NOT the party way or their own way but the way the majority of their riding wanted? New idea...geez! Those who know no history are doomed to repeat it...