Wild Bill

Let me see if I understand you correctly. You would insult me because someone ELSE insulted you? Or not even you, but someone else who agreed with you? I don't know the word offhand to describe that type of thinking. If it had to do with race it would be racism but since it's with ideas and civility the proper term escapes me at the moment. Perhaps someone else could help out...

I don't see your point. They use a universal name for God. Your complaint seems to be that they don't repeat their message a thousand times, using each of the thousand names (or whatever) for God. Easy to say when you're not the one paying for the printer ink!

Oh, you're just all wet!

It is sad, Keeps! Am I the only one to have noticed that over the past few decades there has been a drastic change as to which pollution factors get any press? Back in the 70's when the "Save the Planet" movement was just getting underway there was a strong focus on garbage, litter, clean water and pristine habitats for animals. We young folks often organized weekend "cleanup" events, where we would all gather in some park or wooded area that needed attention and clean it up ourselves. Re-forestation plantings were also common. My high school must have planted thousands of seedlings themselves. Cleaning up toxins in the soil of urban brownfields costs governments money. CO2 schemes make money! I haven't seen or heard anything like that for years now! It is gone like the dodo bird. All we hear is CO2 and the need for reductions. Actually, not even much about reductions. It's all about "cap and trade", which really is just a way to pay poor countries for the right to keep blowing CO2 into the air. There don't appear to be ANY reductions with such schemes! How often do we even see a warning in the MSM about eating fish out of Lake Ontario? When's the last time you saw the word "dioxin"? The only difference I can see is that it was difficult to make any money from cleaning up the land. CO2 schemes are different. They will make the Al Gores of this world very rich! They will also be a new tax on the working people of the western nations. Not that it will bother us Canadians! We long ago accepted that our role in this universe is to pay taxes. We're very polite about it! Looks like we're heading for a filthy planet with low CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

After having scrolled back some pages and paid more careful attention - you're absolutely right, Wyly! I totally apologize! I had not been paying close attention in this thread (for reasons given) and I guess I had confused you and Waldo. I retract NOTHING as regards Waldo! In fact, after reviewing many of his posts I could not have asked for a clearer proof of my premise. Anyhow, I now owe you a couple of beer.I hope you will accept them along with my apologies. You did not deserve my accusations in the slightest.

Maybe so, Michael. Still, it is just as illogical to give a tie to those pushing the GW argument. Your points work both ways but it always seems as if they are always used against the 'Deniers'. To accept GW as a given and demand that all evidence from 'Deniers' be labeled as spurious is a religious and not a scientific approach.

You're wasting your time, GH! This is the reason why I've come to distrust those who favour global warming. Too many of them are like Wyly and Waldo! The price of perhaps gleaning some knowledge from them is to accept snide insults and heaps of ad hominem vitriol. This goes to character. It's as if a teacher kept whacking his student on the head while he was lecturing them. After a while the student will just accept anything his teacher says willy-nilly, right or wrong, in order to get the pain to stop. I've become more like the passenger in the seat beside the lead character of the movie Airplane!, Ted Striker, who becomes so bored at listening to Ted spill his life story that he hangs himself to get away! The Armageddon Global Warming folks may or may not prove right but with spokesmen who are so obnoxious they are perpetually forced to round up an audience at the point of a gun! Or else find masochists who LIKE abuse! Whenever some uses their techniques I automatically become suspicious. These are "snowjob" tactics and it is only logical to wonder why they are being used. Obviously, the expounder must feel some need for them. It makes it less likely that they feel their arguments can stand on their own merit. Or perhaps, being nasty makes them feel good! That is a sickness and makes it very likely that they will choose venting vitriol even over eventually proving a point. They are more troll than spokespeople or champions. Sadly, the Al Gore Army seems to have a preponderance of such characters! When I downloaded the Kyoto Accord and read it for myself, I found that you barely started to read the thing and it was obvious that the real goal was wealth re-distribution to Third World countries and competitive economic advantages for China and India. It made it very difficult to accept the little bit of actual science mixed in with the document. The "hidden agenda" was just too conspicuous! So, I'm just saying that if you're looking for answers here with these guys you're wasting your time. It's more like that old Monty Python sketch - "It's 'Getting Hit On the Head' lessons in here!" If you enjoy that sort of thing well, whatever blows your skirt up. Me, I don't really want to win an argument. I'd like to find out what's true! Maybe it's just me but if I had run into Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments under his arm and he explained them to me in between insulting me as to my intelligence and my character I would have just told him to f**k himself and keep walking! What's more, if and when I eventually read his Commandments I would have been biased to be suspicious of them. Life's too short to be some troll's punching bag...

Actually Bonam, the numbers say that premise MUST be true! Ontario admits to having some 484,000 more OHIP health cards in circulation than the number of citizens actually eligible. Many of these are Americans living near Niagara and Windsor. My wife has many friends in the medical profession in Niagara and it is common knowledge there of doctors having many patients that have a Canadian address but a New York State phone number. Years ago Bob Rae's NDP Ontario government promised to address this problem by making everyone exchange their cards. Might have worked better if they didn't give new cards to anybody, including those who were committing the fraud! To be fair, we shouldn't pick on Bob for having a dumb solution. None of the other parties since his government have even bothered to try! I guess they feel its not worth the trouble. Might save some money but not necessarily many votes. As always, governments don't really care about our money, just whether or not we will vote for them.

Save your breath! Life is too short! Another one for my ignore list.

They do, of course! It's just that takes a bit more effort. Much easier to just take a canned package of CanCon material with good "numbers" and just play it over and over again. The station buys one CanCon playlist and that's all they ever spend to keep legal with their Canadian percentage. All the rest of their money and attention goes into the other 70% or whatever. There's an excellent site called http://209.217.127.248/clientsites/letsfixcancon/ that has been addressing this issue for some years. The man who is the prime mover spent his career with "numbers" outfits like BBM and other ratings people. He has a good handle on how CanCon long ago stopped helping new Canadian talent and has just become a royalty bucket for Canadian old guys. He has some excellent suggestions, like a point system that gives extra points for playing a new artist with only a regional label, or even no label at all! Or megapoints for doing remotes like in the old days, where the station sets up a feed from a club and broadcasts a live performance of a local Canadian artist. You might want to check it out.

It's worse than many think, Jack! As you probably are well aware, classic rock stations do NOT play the music of our generation! During the late 60's and early 70's we kids all were glued to the new world of FM radio. All we listened to was album rock bands. AM radio and Top 40 was for "teeny boppers". If we listened to Crowbar it was never "OH! What a Feelin'!", their Top 40 hit. It was all the boogie-woogie harmonica rockin' blues of their albums! Modern radio has not picked their own music in 30 years. Instead, they buy playlists from agencies that have "numbers" on songs for every audience age demographic and day or night time slot. I imagine most of them don't even listen to their own broadcast music at all! With 'classic rock' they have a problem in that FM stations in those early days didn't keep numbers. The DJs were all too stoned! So they went to the next best thing for their purposes, which was the AM numbers kept during that time period. All the Top 40 Hits, that only the "Rod and Todd Flanders" kids listened to. I've gotten so sick of Q10Zepplin and the other classic rock stations that I never listen to them at all anymore. It's either AM talk radio or my own collection of CDs, like Mendelson Mainline and a LOT of "juke joint" blues! At home I have a bigass collection of vinyl. Nothing like the Canadian guitar gods like Pat Travers, Dominic Troiano and lots of others, played at high volume! God bless technology for freeing me from the "suits"!

You're wrong, Oleg! Take a tip from the comedian, Andrew Dice Clay: "The package said "Ribbed, to maximize her pleasure!". So I turned it inside out...

Take a downer, good Doctor! Get out more! Join with Opus the Penquin and kick the heads off a few ripe dandelions! I keep looking in the dictionary under 'fanatic' and there's a picture of you slowly forming...

I'll bet you 3 beer that Waldo never actually read it! Never seems to slow him down with a rebuttal, though.

Oh, I don't know. That sounds rather simplistic to me. The Mutually Assured Destruction situation of the Cold War prevented a big conflict. Obviously, diplomacy and negotiation is the preferred path but what do you do with a heavily armed aggressor who believes he can take by force whatever he wants? If you have no ability to defend yourself what options do you have besides voluntary servitude? How well did diplomacy work for Neville Chamberlain? Do you have any precise and specific diplomatic approaches that are guaranteed to work in such situations?

Once again Max we appear to agree more than disagree! After a career since the 70's with new, old, large, small and high tech business I can honestly say that 90% of the management I worked with was straight out of a Dilbert cartoon! I read somewhere that Canada, Britain and the US are the only companies with formal management education. Every other country grows their management through hands-on experience moving up in the ranks from the floor up. Not surprisingly, those same 3 countries have a reputation for having the most inept management! One of the major differences between the two approaches is that of hands-on experience. No matter how well something is taught from a book it's just not the same as with direct experience. Also, many people are much better thriving in a classroom than they are in the real world. So they may win positions in management ahead of those less scholastically gifted but with more innate talent for the job. Only socialists believe that all jobs are equal and any worker can do any job, after enough training. Anyone who truly believes that should make me their cook! Some of us just don't have the capacity to learn certain skill sets. Western management tends to be simplistic, short-sighted and of a herd mentality. They follow each other blindly and never plan more than a business quarter or two ahead. That's why the Japanese in the 80's and the Chinese today have so successfully stolen their business. Those country's managers planned ahead by DECADES! Governments have been just as "simple". How often have we seen them shovel corporate welfare dollars at companies only to watch those same companies use the money to pay to relocated production out of the country? Either they are too stupid to put strings on the money to make sure it is used for the public good or if the company breaks its agreement they don't bother to take them to court. Tony Clement of Harper's government is the first to ever sue a company (US Steel who had bought the old Stelco) for promising to maintain certain levels of production and jobs and then breaking their word. Their excuse was the global recession but they had enough steel demand to keep some American plants open at the expense of their Canadian one! They ship American steel up to their Stelco location to supply their Canadian customers, while the Stelco ovens lie shut down. I don't know if Clement will actually win but I respect him for trying. As I said, it's never been done before. If nothing else, it will change the tone of negotiations with the next company asking for handouts to buy out a Canadian location. When you talk about companies here relocating to low labour countries and getting bit by quality and scheduling problems you have to wonder about their management's collective brain power. These problems are usually rather obvious! These decisions are more what you'd expect from an inexperienced teenager in high school than someone who works in the board room. Something happened to our industry during the 80's that affected their brains! Maybe they all were replaced by pod people from outer space. I'm reminded of how Lee Iacocca of Chrysler commented on business in the 80's, the decade of all the junk bonds, takeovers, quick flips and buying up troubled companies just to close them for the tax deduction. He had no respect for this type of thinking at all. He was raised in an environment where business created products or delivered services for their revenue, making or providing something worthwhile for society's needs. He called the new style of business just playing with dollars but producing nothing concrete, often bleeding from the wealth created by previous business but adding no value themselves. All too often I fear the man was right!

Isn't Libya now in charge of such things? What are they doing for the festivities?

Ok! Some folks were a little confused between International Law and the UN. Now that you straightened that out, what are we left with? THE UN IS A JOKE! I think you picked apart their model and not their point.

Max, many of us are not nearly as 'right' or 'left' as some members have branded us. Sometimes it's just because they use their own politics as a definition of what is the 'middle'. Other times, it's just that they believe that anyone who disagrees with THEM must be on the other extreme of the spectrum, making it easy to hurl ad hominem insults. It can be hard today to even label politicians and their parties as left or right, considering how they vary from the dictionary definitions as such. I lack respect for Fantino because of how he handled the Caledonia situation. He seemed to apply the law differently according to the race of who was breaking it! He choose who he would offer police protection again according to their race and ignored the plight of individual citizens of Caledonia who were having their rights infringed by the actions of native protesters. Others dislike him for his historic treatment of subordinates while he was chief in Toronto. It's been said that whenever it hit the fan Fantino always had someone under him he could make to be the fall guy for his own mistakes. So it's not really that Fantino is right wing. It's just that he has such poor character that it's easy for many different people to find things about him that are upsetting! However, if you live farther away from where Fantino has wreaked his havoc over the years or you simply haven't followed his career then it's easy to see him simplistically, as some sort of right wing champion of law and order. That's why Harper adopted him! He thought Fantino would be electable, and he was! Still, Harper might be unaware that Fantino's win came at a price. Most of us that are more politically astute and not locked into one party or the other vote based on "who smells the least", as I love to say. A politician's or a party's 'aroma' is based on many different factors that contribute to the strength of their stink! According to the personal values and beliefs of each of us, each factor becomes more or less important to the total miasma. Adopting Fantino really was a rank move to my nostrils and I'm a guy who has supported Harper since the Reform Days. It might not affect my vote this next election but by the next one the Liberals would have had more time to get their act together, perhaps with a more impressive leader. At that point it would be rather easy to get a guy like me to switch his allegiance. I'm sure there are many others like me amongst the electorate as well. Anybody who tends to have real values and a memory should never be taken for granted by any politician. Harper seems to have taken many of us for granted by backing Fantino. I don't know if Harper was ignorant of Fantino's negatives or just didn't care, thinking he'd win more than he'd lose. Those aren't the real questions. The real question is how many negatives are building up in Harper's aroma compared to that of his political opponents and can he afford in the long run to add a Fantino to the mix!

Michael, all I can say is that I lived it! I'm the kid whose first book in Grade 1 was a science textbook. All my life I have worked in scientific and technical fields. I bought probably every single issue of OMNI science magazine ever published, along with many other titles. In short, although no accredited scientist myself, I think I can at least claim to have followed new talk and discoveries since about 1960, when I was reading the newspaper everyday for myself. So I KNOW that the premise that Man and his 'polluting ways' were bringing another Ice Age down upon us was prevalent during the 70's! I don't care who tries to debunk that it happened. I lived it and remember it vividly. In fact, if I get ambitious enough to crawl through my basement I will likely find some of those science magazines and be able to cite you specific issues and dates. Just don't hold your breath! I've got more than enough on my plate to want to spare the time. I really don't care if others believe me. What's important to me is that in order to believe THEM they are asking me to totally discount what I directly experienced for some years of my life! I would no more do such a thing than I would become a member of Sun Yat Moon's Unification Church!

Not quite, Jack! The problem in this thread seems to be that Mr. Lukin has not done the best job of explaining why someone would be interested in reading a book by Gairdner. Meanwhile, some others have made no attempt to become familiar with the book and are just using it as a cheap straw man to attack it as some sort of right wing totem. I read Gairdner's first book, the Trouble With Canada. It came out in the early 90's and caused a firestorm of flames from the left wing media. This was kinda pre-Internet, remember. This new book is really just a re-visitation of his first book, after some years have passed. Anyhow, Bill Gairdner's book was no simple right wing rant. Nor was it just a slam of Trudeau. Trudeau was used more as a figurehead for a cultural trend that began at that time. What these books do is establish definitions for the classic political philosophies and then definitions for the modern political Canadian parties. He gives some historical background to Canadian history, particularly with the different regions. Then he lays out changes in demographics and cultural values over the years, along with the disconnect between what mainstream Canadians wanted or believed was happening and what was actually being done. He examines the justice system, immigration, majority and minority views on abortion, how politicians say one thing in English but have it deliberately mis-translated when they speak it in French. What particularly inflames his left wing critics is that he loves to use sources like StatsCan for his evidence, instead of right wing, more extreme journals. StatsCan of course is considered non-partisan. At times even a Libertarian like me finds him a bit harsh. He doesn't constantly blather about it but he doesn't attempt to hide that he is a strong Christian. Still, he also fervently believes in the separation of Church and State so I can forgive him. I think if I had to name the most important factor of his writing I would be torn between two points. One is how clearly he can define political classic philosophy and contrast it with its modern practicing parties. The other would be how well he shows how modern Canadian parties don't really give we citizens what we actually want and are very good at keeping us fooled about it. If you're the kind of person who likes this sort of stuff then a Gairdner book is for you, even if you don't agree with his own politics. If you're more of a partisan thinker who believes that only his way is right and everything else is 'evil' then save your money!

Don't be so sure you've got the exclusive on Lennon, good Dr. Greenthumb! He may not have totally approved of YOU! "You say you'll change the constitution Well, you know We all want to change your head You tell me it's the institution Well, you know You better free you mind instead But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right all right, all right, all right all right, all right, all right " John was too smart to be just a "one-issue" to the point of mono-mania thinker, like many marijuana activists we know...

Hard to say. I just want to see McGuinty evicted! I truly believe he is racist in his philosophy of government and a crass opportunist. He seems to have zero understanding or regard for the rights of the individual. That's the worst of sins for a politician, in my book.

More power to the man, I say! He doesn't do a bad job, for an amateur. What's more, I share his taste in material. Nice of him to include Canadiana like Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings. If it had have been a Liberal party no doubt we would have been tortured by either Celine Dion or Walter Ostenek the Polka King playing the most wretched middle of the road or ethnic crap! Ignatieff always seemed to me to be the kid we laughed at in High School 'cuz he thought being a Neil Sedaka fan made him 'cool'... I have some political differences with Harper but as a human being I can relate to him a lot better than Ignatieff or God forbid, Jack Layton. I can picture Jack taking a year or two to nail the main riff from "Smoke on the Water"...

Well Max, I'm not saying you're wrong but the polls are way out of whack with your view! Of course, polls have been wrong before.