Wild Bill

Oh, excuse me! I thought I was logging on to MLW, but obviously I've done something wrong. Judging from the tone of the posts in the last couple of pages, clearly I've stumbled on to "rubble.com" by mistake...

Yeah, 'they' SAY lots of things! Does that make it true? Would you expect an appeal panel to say "Well, our laws AREN'T very clear!" The Law NEVER says that! If you're ever unfortunate enough to get charged under some vague and imprecise law try using that as a defense and see how far you get! Sometimes the Law is an ass but the Law NEVER admits it was an ass!

It's nice to see someone tell it like it actually is, MG! I have to keep shaking my head at those who continually quote the OFFICIAL definition of something as if that's the way it is in reality. Our Senate is a perfect example. Officially it is defined as a Chamber of sober second thought but in reality it usually strikes out on all three! Money talks and BS walks! Actions speak louder than words! In politics perhaps more than in any other area it is important to look at things the way they actually are and not just quack out the words in the press kit! Trudeau had so little respect for the Senate he actually appointed his chauffeur! Until and unless we get a true Triple E Senate we will just have an extension of the PMO, where party bagmen can receive their rewards and sleep away the day, rubber-stamping the occasional missive from their party masters.

And you can't read English! And not just my post here. You must not have read anything else I've ever posted if you think I'm a conservative or a blind supporter of the CPC. Either that or you have no idea of what such definitions actually mean! I took issue with the first opening posts. The implications were quite clear that the idea of having a Tory majority in the Senate was a BAD thing and that they would certainly use it to get their own ideas passed and those of their opponents thwarted! The exact same situation has occurred for most of the life of our Senate, only with the Liberals in control! Where was the outrage then? It only seemed obvious that to some the only problem must be that now it is Tories instead of Liberals. As I've said time and time again, I'm more of a classic Liberal. Of course, to a socialist like yourself I must be a Tory because I'm not the same as you! Just more evidence that we're doomed, I guess. Wiser older folks are dying off and the new generation appears to have nothing in their heads but placards. "We have met the enemy, and he is us!" ---Walt Kelly as Pogo

It does look like they buggered something up but hey, the laws with campaign funds and also taxation are rarely clear and obvious. We should note that the reason it was the Tories who got into this fix was because they were the only party that got a lot of public donations! It was easy for the Liberals and the NDP to stay out of trouble. They didn't have much money to handle improperly, or even properly for that matter! These are accounting things that really don't interest any but those political junkies who hated the Tories in the first place. The Tories interpreted the law one way but it looks like they were wrong so they'll have to pay some back. Big deal! I thought I could declare the cost and upkeep of my toaster as a communications and economic forecasting device. Revenue Canada told me I was wrong so I paid some of my refund back. These are arguments over accounting tricks, not attempts of a political party to sell us all into slavery with the American Illuminati...

You're right, August! Canada IS boring! Look at our scandals! Italy and Britain have sex scandals with their politicians all the time. We have decades between Gerta Munsinger and Bernier's girlfriend. The world must think all of Canada is Amish!

"NEWS FLASH! LIBERALS RULE SENATE FOR DECADES! SITUATION NORMAL! COUNTRY IS WONDERFUL! DEMOCRACY IS PRESERVED!" "NEWS FLASH! TORIES NOW RULE SENATE! COUNTRY IN TERRIBLE DANGER! DEMOCRACY UNDER DIRE THREAT! ARMAGEDDON!" Talk about your mindless, simplistic, blindly partisan, non-logical biased CRAP! Why don't Mr. Ashley, Topaz and the others who ascribe to this view simply champion a one-party state? Let's appoint the Liberals as our perpetual rulers! Apparently, they like a multi-party state only if all parties are actually the same, i.e. Liberals. They should just wear different coloured ties so we can tell them apart. That way, no matter which party wins an election the country will always be Liberal. I mean, everyone knows that the majority of citizens always agree with them, right? So therefore if we went to a one-party state we would just be ensuring that democracy always triumphed! Their view would always prevail and we could all sit around congratulating each other on our respect for differing thought and true democracy! "NEWS FLASH! ALL CONTRARY THOUGHT IS NOW BANNED IN ORDER TO PRESERVE OUR FREEDOMS!"

You're leading to something that always seems to get ignored. Does Mother Earth have correction factors? When I was very young I read a story that featured an engineering term named "homeostat". It was the idea of a regulator that adjusted things one way or the other to try to maintain a status quo. Later when I began to study electronics I learned about negative and positive feedback loops, where a tiny portion of an output signal is fed back to an earlier point in the circuit in order to keep the circuit stable, reducing the gain if things became too energetic and opening it up if things weakened. Surely a system as complicated as a planet's climate would have homeostats! There must be corrective factors, so that if things overheat it will melt more snow to bring more cooling rain, or whatever. Others more well-versed in the science than I could probably name and describe them much better but it's enough if they exist. For if they exist then we should not be too quick to make extrapolations of present trends with the assumption that nothing will ever buck them! As I said, Mother Earth is a powerful lady! Surely her systems would have some inbuilt resistance to tampering...

Jack, with governments we find that intelligence is a constant, a mathematical fixed quantity. You then divide by the number of people involved!

What a yawner of an issue! Adapter boxes are readily available for about $100. 6 months after the switchover date they will likely be less than $50. We already saw the precedent years ago when Cable TV began to offer more channels than the regular TV tuner could choose. Converter boxes appeared and people bought them. No big deal. In addition, some folks will choose to finally get cable or satellite, and/or a modern tv. Among those who still use an antenna are those who do so deliberately just to get HD signals without paying Cable surcharges. These folks will already have a digital tuner. So that 900k figure will shrink dramatically in reality. Those that are left will buy an adapter box. Those that are left after that will bitch! No doubt some politicians will come up with programs to get some of them free adapter boxes.

This is exactly what I mean by "picking apart a model and not the point." I just mentioned peer review as one of the ways that evidence or argument can be dismissed and suddenly the validity of peer review becomes the entire argument! The original point becomes forgotten. Conveniently, perhaps.

So? What does that have to do with the INTEGRITY of the process? If there is an agenda to not accept something that challenges GW for fear of losing funding then a review would look no different from the way you described.

You're misunderstanding what is meant by 'conspiracy'. No one is talking about a group of gnomes in Switzerland controlling the entire world. Perhaps you're trying to define such a conspiracy so that it would be easy to dismiss the premise like some 9/11 or moon-landing crap. That's hardly fair but typical of many GW supporters. It's much simpler! An idea like GW becomes politically popular. Politicians feel that if they don't appear to be supporting the idea they might lose votes. Very quickly this affects funding for research organizations. These organizations rely VERY heavily on government funding! Politicians as a rule are NOT scientific people! They also don't really give a damn if something is true or not. Many of them are also dumb enough to believe their own BS, like Al Gore. I don't think he is deliberately dishonest. He's just wrong! What politicians DO care about is being re-elected! They want the guys in the white coats to be part of that process. Otherwise they have no compunctions about cutting off the funding. That's all you need. No Illuminati mastermind, although Maurice Strong might be a likely candidate! Just a situation that tends towards a certain outcome. Now before you tell me that most scientists have too much integrity to cow to such pressures, what would you do if your ability to feed your kids and keep a roof over their heads was put at risk? Hell, murders have been committed just over a professor getting tenure! Many scientists HAVE bucked the trend! It would be interesting to know how many of them are free of monetary worries. If you are having trouble buying into even the possibility of things happening as I've described, I invite you to google up "The Club of Rome". They were a group of "experts" who held a world wide panel to explore trends in energy, agriculture and material resources against population growth a few decades ago. Basically, they predicted that if we kept on the way we were we would all freeze, starve and die before the year 2000! Politicians the world over, including our own Mr. Trudeau, bought in to their arguments and allowed them to influence government policy. They were dead wrong, of course but they caused the waste of HUGE sums of tax monies! That could have paid for a lot of hospitals or programs for cancer and AIDS. There was no 'Illuminati' behind the Club of Rome either yet their influence at the time was enormous and global! With that sort of example as a precedent the idea of scientists supporting GW to keep their paychecks is not hard to believe at all.

You're nitpicking my model and not my point! I used anecdotal and peer review as only two examples. There are lots of other ways contrary evidence is discounted. The method really doesn't matter. And you seem to have entirely too much faith in the honesty and integrity of the peer review process as regards Global Warming, for reasons others have given much better than I. Besides, the Universe doesn't give a damn about peer reviews! Flat Earth beliefs were no doubt peer reviewed, once upon a time! The Universe has her own Laws about how She works and she doesn't give a damn if a few scientists or even ALL scientists believe differently! All peer review really does is give an expression of confidence in the peers involved. If the process is tainted by politics or economic blackmail then the scientific confidence is gone. It only has to be gone over one issue to be complete. Many defenders of things like "climategate" seem to feel if they can marginalize it to one or two incidents they can claim that in total the system is impartial. That's like saying that if you find 2 crooked judges on the Supreme Court you should still trust all Supreme Court judgements! Whatever! As I said, it doesn't matter. Peer review was merely one example I gave, not my essential point. That's another trick of the GW religion! Pick apart details of an example and ignore essential points. You can't declare YOURSELF the winner in the middle of a debate and then afterwards refuse to revisit the arguments because "we've been there and done that!" That's not only absurd but incredibly arrogant!

That's one way to look at the situation but not the only way, Michael. How about this view? Some people disagree with the Global Warming Argument, or at least a major facet of it like the premise that it is man-made and therefore within man's ability to control. (I realize that these are two entirely separate premises but dammit! Those who believe in Global Warming seem invariably to think one means both so I'll take them at their word, for the purposes of argument.) They bring up some contradictory evidence that either attacks their opponents' position or furthers their own. Their opponents refuse to accept it and never do actually refute it, except in their own minds. The evidence or reasoning is dismissed as 'anecdotal', not 'peer-reviewed' or just plain old ad hominem attacks. Time goes by. More evidence that appears to support the anti-Global Warming evidence appears. What's the response from the GW 'church'? "What? Are we arguing those old chestnuts again? We decisively disproved that stuff long ago! Didn't you get the memo? We're not wasting our time going over that again!" See the trick? They judged themselves to be the winners of the argument and then seize the right to declare it "old and proven", thus no longer subject to debate! "And the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle. What does the turtle rest on? You can't catch me with that one! It's turtles all the way down!"

Well, he must have done something that Kelly thought was wrong. She fired him!

Don't play that game! True, he has not specifically said that red is right and white is wrong. Instead, he consistently and INVARIABLY always states that any native anywhere on any issue is in the right and that non-natives are wrong! Go back through his posts! I'm talking every single time! Every single issue! Lord, he sounds like a Moonie! No one is that perfect! Everyone makes mistakes once in a while. CR will not even admit to a native or natives having an over-reaction. He is as predictable as sunrise! Of course he would never actually state that is how he sees the world. He knows that would sound ridiculous. Yet in practice he talks as if that is indeed his guiding principle. Actions speak much louder than words.

You are the very LAST person I would ever engage in such a debate! If I want ad hominem abuse, I'll pay for it. "It's Getting Hit On the Head Lessons, in here!"

Your argument is coloured by your own biases, Michael. Again, tie seems to go with the GW faith. It may not be that his dad distrusts science at all! I have a great deal of respect for science. As I've said before, my first book was a science text given to me by my grade 1 teacher who was impressed by my advanced knowledge and interest for my age. More likely, he distrusts many spokespeople of science! And it is not a "shadowy conspiracy". That is a value judgement, not a scientific one. It implies that anyone who disbelieves must be some kind of a nut. Total ad hominem. There are a LOT of people who respect science and don't agree with the GW premise, or at least the idea that it is man-made. Some of them are very highly educated and respected people within the scientific field. There HAS been a lot of evidence manipulation by spokespeople for GW! So there's good reason to be suspicious and any unwillingness to listen is understandable. To be fair, it is ALWAYS scientific to listen but after a while the repetition can wear your ears out! It's a pity none of us will live long enough to see who's right in this argument.

A total ad hominem reply. You must be nursing a headache from all the mental effort put into that one! Boring! All sizzle and no steak. You sound like someone I voted for!

Jack, we've been reading these posts for a couple of years now. Have you EVER seen a post from CR or one of his psuedonyms that admitted that a native anywhere over any issue was in the wrong? Even one post that said perhaps they made a mistake? Even ONE??? I haven't. From my perspective, CR believes that any native position or action is gospel straight from God. Red is always in the right and White is always in the wrong. Is it no wonder that I consider such a position racist? Bigots and zealots come in every colour and rarely can recognize themselves. Perhaps it's because they lack logic. I swear that CR would champion Charles Manson or David Chapman if they were natives.

Hey, I don't blame him! Where is it written that "unionists" have a right to occupy his office and get a hearing? Screw 'em, I say! Who made them all supremely important? They already get treated better than private sector workers. They routinely have gotten supplements to their EI while on layoff for years. I make a few bucks mowing a neighbour's lawn and it's deducted from my EI cheque! Hell, in big companies the guys with the MOST seniority get the layoffs! With their supplement it brings them to 90% of their takehome pay. It's essentially a holiday. This elitist attitude on the point of unionists has always ticked me off. So much for all citizens being equal. Let them make an appointment with the minister like anyone else! If they act arrogantly and rudely then they deserve to be snubbed! The only fault with Flaherty is that he's not coming straight out and TELLING them he's dodging them!

What other grounds? How about finding something that will WORK? I too would like to see a moral society. Since moral is a relative term, I would prefer that I alone be allowed to define what is moral but since that's not likely to happen I'm willing to work something out with the rest of society. I started out as a young hippy but the older I get the less patience I have with offering dreams instead of reality. Every kid wants a pony for Christmas but he's not likely to get one! As I got older the more I became a "techie". I learned about cause and effect. I learned that some things work and some don't, that some solutions are easier to achieve than others. Some make good dreams but are flatly impossible! It can feel all good and righteous to rail against others for not seeing YOUR Light but that's just ego-boo. The Universe just doesn't care! Now I'm at the point where I desperately would like someone to offer real, achievable solutions. If a leader offers me that kind of inspiration I'll be first in line to offer my energy and resources. However, if it's just someone venting against the way the world works and offering "blue sky" methods of achieving noble goals with zip all in specific details on how to achieve them then excuse me, I'll just keep sitting comfortably on my ass and read a book.

I make no claim to be an expert in such matters. The detail in your post makes it obvious you know far more than I do about the current legal situation. Still, I get the sense from your arguments of "woulda, shoulda, coulda...". That is, you're citing a moral argument and "the way things SHOULD be!" This doesn't answer the given question, "Who would lend money if that was the situation?" Appealing to the moral sense of corporations is a futile task. Still, perhaps if the very structure of pensions were changed a solution would be found. Here in Ontario it is said that during Bob Rae's tenure as premier he changed the laws about company pension contributions, allowing them to use them as collateral or other purposes and to let their portion of the contributions "slide". The belief at the time was "Such companies as Stelco are too big to ever go bankrupt!" Now we often see such companies going bankrupt and we find that their portion of the pension monies is underfunded. As you stated very well, in such cases workers and their pensions come last in the list of creditors. Seems to me that the answer should be that unions negotiate and the private sector also adopt the custom of funding pension plans that are locked to the employee, untouchable by creditors in a bankruptcy situation. Perhaps mutual contributions from employee and company towards an RRSP. If the RRSP was in the employee's name, locked until age 65 or whatever, it would be easy to also make sure title of the policy remains with the employee, making it portable if he ever is downsized so that he can take it with him to his next job. Or it might be even simpler to establish a pension fund that companies MUST maintain contributions that are not legally part of a company's assets, so not part of any bankruptcy settlement with financial creditors. I don't see how this would bother a company's credit rating, except for not being able to use pension funds as collateral. As you pointed out, there are other factors involved in a credit rating. Surely they would be enough to ensure proper growth and operation of a business. After all, if a business has to put up its pension fund to get credit this is more likely a sign that it is in trouble and shouldn't be given credit at all! You might well know better than I of some legal snag or peculiarity that would block such a scheme but it is obvious that the traditional model we've used since the 40's and 50's no longer provides for workers. I've had a number of jobs in my life, due to downsizing and opportunity and some of the flaws in the way pensions worked were obvious to me. The difference was that the number of employees caught in Nortel situations was never that high before so no one paid much attention, except those workers screwed over at the time. Sadly, there are many more Canadian workers losing pensions in bankruptcies today. Whatever! It just seems to me that the easiest solution for pension funding problems in the future is to use schemes that remove a company's ability to use the pension money in the first place.

Now this was interesting, Dre. There are charts from StatsCan in Bill Gairdner's book The Trouble With Canada that show healthcare to take up more than all the other items combined! This was the early 90's and Gairdner was making the point that the rate of growth of health care spending was unsustainable. I figured that today with Google and the Internet there would be lots of sites showing easy pie charts or whatever to breakdown the federal budget but after editing my query a number of times and spending half an hour on it all I could find was references to percentage of GDP. This of course won't show anything very clearly. I did find this site: http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/177/1/51 "One view maintains that our publicly funded health care system is unsustainable because health care expenditures are accounting for an ever-increasing share of government spending. In Ontario, for example, health care spending accounted for just over 30% of the provincial government's expenditures in 1981/82, but 45% in 2004/05. Assuming that current trends will continue, the Ontario government has projected that the share will increase to 55% by 2025.8" This only covers Ontario but I'm sure other provinces would be similar. The article immediately retreats to dealing only in GDP numbers and percentages by capita, which at least to me are not as clear and thus not as scary. The site is run by the Canadian Medical Association and the purpose of the article is to make the claim that things ARE sustainable! Perhaps that is the reason. Maybe someone else can do a better google. Still, before google can find a site someone must compile the info in the desired fashion. Perhaps few are paying attention and publishing results in that manner. Whatever. At least we have a cite that shows Ontario paying nearly half of its budget for just the one line item of health care, with a history of increases. Surely that's an indicator of a cause for concern!