Wild Bill

Here's the link: http://news.sympatico.ctv.ca/home/to_brothers_music_a_protest_against_iranian_regime/28035485 "CTV.ca News Staff The Toronto brothers behind a politically charged remake of the Pink Floyd classic "Another Brick in the Wall" say music is the perfect medium to speak out against oppression in Iran. Sepp and Sohl, who front the band Blurred Vision, have captured international attention with their cover, a twist on the protest anthem that replaces teacher references with "Hey, Ayatollah, leave those kids alone!" Rock and roll and blue jeans freed Czechoslovakia, brought down the Berlin Wall and now, thanks to the Canadian band 'Blurred Vision' it is taking a crack at Iran! There has always been a political component of many rock and roll songs. Nice to see the tradition hasn't died! In the words of the immortal band 'Strange Fruit' - "The Flame Still Burns!"

Well, I'm ashamed I voted for Fred! Essentially, he's backed Bob Young into a corner. Bob seems to believe that unless he gets a good location he will lose money on the Cats forever. The west harbour obviously isn't it! Fred is so anxious to have a project to provide the money for some downtown renewal that he can't see that no one wants to put a sports team into a white elephant! Surprise, surprise, Bob doesn't want to be locked in to somewhere where he can never make a dollar! I know that I can't imagine anyone enjoying a trip to a west harbour site. The roads suck, the parking sucks and your car won't be safe anyway! The idea of public transit is a laugh! In Hamilton the buses never go where you need them to go. They handle the city core adequately, the mountain poorly and most of the suburbs not at all. Fred and his boys are promising to spruce up the bus service but why would anyone believe them? It will likely all become moot anyway. I can't believe that with no legacy anchor tenant Hamilton will still get the Pan-Am games. What will we do with the stadium afterwards? T-Ball championships? Obviously, no one will want to buy the Cats to keep them in Hamilton if they are still in a money losing location. Bob will have to relocate the team. Meanwhile, it will be very interesting to see the results of the next municipal election. Politicians often forget that the mainstream really doesn't find them that interesting! Given a choice between having a football team or having a particular individual as mayor or your councilor is a no-brainer. They'd take the team! Not every one is a Cat supporter but there are more than enough of them to swing the vote in any particular ward. This is just so typical of Hamilton! They keep losing business and chasing any new business away. Eventually we will be left with a few halfway houses and some government-funded medical research centres to try to form our entire economy! It makes "Atlas Shrugged" look like a blueprint!

But that's the issue, Dre! How easy is it to get a big chunk of seats in Quebec, considering how the Bloc always comes up with so many? How expensive is it to pay for hard fought campaigns? Does putting planks in your platform to please Quebec cost you seats in other parts of the country that might be easier (or cheaper!) to win? It IS possible to have a majority without Quebec! The question is what would it cost to do it. Also, how would Quebecers feel about becoming irrelevant? Would they then be more inclined to support a party that would be in power? Or would they lean even more towards separation? I'd like to get some input from people like August and others who actually live in Quebec to answer that one.

Quite right, Jack! My father worked for Stelco and he often told me how every election the shop stewards would start thumping the NDP drum. After a while the other guys would find this so obnoxious they would threaten to beat the twerps up! Then things would quiet down. The NDP might have been more successful if they had stuck to just issues of importance to the union workers but they always have to take stands on fringe social engineering issues and foreign politics that either bore private sector union workers or are dramatically different from their working man's values. The average auto worker isn't an anti-semite and unless he's gay himself couldn't care less about gay rights, one way or the other. He's not necessarily anti-anything! Just not that interested.

There was a discussion in another thread which featured a column from the Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/puritanism-could-be-a-winner/article1669828/ There was one point near the end which struck me: "What’s happened this past decade is that Quebec has lost its long-time leverage. No one cares much about its priorities now that the separatist blackmail threat, the sword of Damocles, has been removed." The BQ has been around for 20 years and still hasn't succeeded in taking Quebec out of Confederation. However, they gobble up a big block of seats, leaving the other parties scratching for what's left. Is "what's left" worth chasing? The Bloc's portion effectively has diluted Quebec's power in Parliament. They are really only relevant on issues pertinent to their nationalist goals. Overall, their voting on any issue is always quite predictable. Perhaps the new strategy is to not waste a lot of resources catering to Quebec and concentrate on other areas of the country where there are useful numbers of votes to chase.

Something very interesting was said at the end of the article, eyeball. Here it is: "What’s happened this past decade is that Quebec has lost its long-time leverage. No one cares much about its priorities now that the separatist blackmail threat, the sword of Damocles, has been removed." Perhaps I should start this as a thread on its own. There's much truth to this idea. When so many seats are gobbled up by the BQ it effectively dilutes Quebec's power in Parliament. I mean, who cares? The BQ is a one note pony and you always know what they will stand for. There is limited reason for the other parties to try to woo Quebec voters in such a situation. Might as well concentrate on other areas of the country where there are votes to be had!

Talk about hypocrisy! You call anyone who disagrees with any native position at all a racist! You've flat out called people stupid and ignorant! Now you try to claim that you don't think 'either/or'! Why did I ever bother talking to you again? You defy all common sense and call logic and reason a mere delusion! You don't seem to realize that it is your debating style and tactics that actually hurts support for native rights. You really should hit the library and check out Dale Carnegie's old book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". If you were a salesperson you would not likely be successful People are reluctant to buy something from you after you've insulted them!

Because that's what police do! Absolutely, whoever made that call should bear some of the blame! There is plenty of blame to be shared. I know some folks tend to think 'digitally', that is that something is all or nothing. It is either all Harris' fault or all protesters' fault. The world is rarely so black and white. Police are not normally hired because they are the most intelligent or shrewd choices. The prime factors are things like assertiveness and ability to follow orders. To a policeman, the first choice of how to handle the protesters would have been to charge them with force. If necessary, they would have gotten bigger clubs! Inquiries after the fact are like 'monday morning quarterbacks' or 'back seat drivers'. Also, one should never forget that the one about Ipperwash was a POLITICAL inquiry! Politicians were well aware that there would be repercussions for generations from the native protesters. The situation had been botched. The fact that there were logical reasons that it was botched, such as the fact that OKA had forever more meant assuming protesters were armed doesn't change the fact. If it was felt that making a cop the 'goat' would have political benefits they would have done it without a second's thought! I mean, the average cop still believes they can win the war on drugs if they are given big enough legal hammers! The lesson of Prohibition seems wasted on them.

I think it's important to make some distinctions here. When the allies kill innocents it's virtually always as a result of collateral damage or mistaken intel. When the Taliban or some Islamic fundamentalist group kills innocents it is virtually always because they DELIBERATELY TARGETED THEM! There is NO moral equivalency here!

Quite right! I live in a residential neighbourhood of older homes. When we moved in during the mid 80's we were the youngest people here! All my neighbours were older folks whose kids had grown up. Gradually those folks died off or moved to retirement homes and now we have a lot of younger families with kids. I began to wonder about all the funny 'tags' from paint spray cans on the signs, the post office box where the mail carrier had his daily load dropped and whatnot. My cop brother-in-law explained to me that these were gang signs! I asked my daughters and of course, they were away ahead of their old man! They showed me the odd pair of sneakers, laced together and hanging from a telephone or hydro wire crossing the street. These apparently are also a gang signal. Once in a blue moon we get a rash of burglaries from one little 'monkeyshines' but as far as all the other drug and gang activity one would never notice!

My daughters have both told me that there was pretty well any drug you wanted freely available - at their elementary school! Everybody knew who the 'stoners' were that could sell you something and what the cost. The teaching staff seemed blissfully unaware, to the immense amusement of the kids! Once or twice a year a policeman would come in and give the standard 'anti-drug' speech. Apparently the police had learned nothing since I was in school over 40 years earlier. They described the effects of marijuana straight from the 'Reefer Madness' movie and then insisted it was a gateway drug that would hook virtually everyone of them onto heroin very quickly. Sadly, the kids all knew this was BS but it weakened the very valid cautions about harder drugs. Thankfully, my daughters and most of their friends were already very streetwise enough to understand the real dangers, despite the silliness of 'Deputy Dan'. I was rather dismayed when one young fellow got expelled for dealing some pretty dangerous stuff. I found out that being expelled didn't mean what I thought it meant. He just went to the next school over, where he just resumed dealing to a new market! I'm not sure if it's possible to be expelled in the fashion us old farts remember anymore.

"How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?"

Yeah, but it helps if you're the country with all the toys! That could cut the job from decades to days. How many Cray computers is Saudi Arabia likely to have at their disposal to crack the RIM encryption?

Minor correction. My high school period was 66-71 and "speed freaks" were quite common, so your time line is late by at least 5 years. Likely 1960 would have been the start of that trend. It was interesting that the majority of my crowd had very little respect for speed freaks and considered them to be idiots who were going to harm themselves. Drugs were of two classes - 'head' stone and 'body' stone. Head drugs were marijuana and mild LSD. Body stone drugs were alcohol, speed, and such. There was much prejudice against other kids who were just into body stones. The main difference was that head drugs were thought to 'expand your mind' while body stone drugs just screwed you up physically and clouded your head, like being drunk on alcohol or paranoid and jittering on speed. Most interesting was the idea that the more experienced you were at smoking pot the less you needed to achieve the same mental high. In effect, a negative tolerance where experience meant you needed less! It was all centred around creativity. Young people in those times were all playing guitar, doing art and writing reams of mostly very bad poetry. Apartments would be universally decorated with macrame arrangements. Most of it was drivel and very pretentious but the overall result was a very creative time, as witness to the explosion of new and varied pieces of music and later the computer wave. I worked with those cats at Intel, National SemiConductor, Texas Instrument and many others in the micocomputer and integrated circuit industry and they were almost ALL older hippies! They were a very creative and eclectic bunch. We wouldn't be communicating through this medium if it hadn't been for them! Culturally, things began to drastically change with the drug scene in the mid 70's. Body stone became more desired and head stone was a forgotten term. I would go to a party and see some high school kid smoke more pot in one sitting than we used to do in a year!, pass out in a corner to wake up hours later, shaking his head and groggily commenting on what a wonderful party it had been! High levels of consumption and stronger drugs seemed to be the new goals. Perhaps those of you who also lived those times can confirm if my experience was just a local phenomenon or if it was the same in your part of the country. Anyhow, that's about the time that this old hippy retired and hung up his Foghat albums! Without the head stones, the macrame and even the bad poetry it was just no longer any fun.

My grade 13 was in 1970. Just for fun my friends and I did a fast count one day of all our fellow classmates who we knew for sure smoked pot. No guesses were allowed. They had to be known for certain. The total was within a few decimal points of 80%! It's certainly possible that schools in other parts of the country could have different cultures and different numbers. Certainly there were a couple of christian schools in our area that might have had different attitudes. Or maybe not! My school was here in southern Ontario. Perhaps B.C may have had a higher number! In the culture of those times pot was absolutely accepted! TV shows took it as a given that mainstream youth considered pot smoking to be a safe and fun recreation. Not just shows like the Smothers Brothers or Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in but sitcoms and dramas. The exceptions would be Lawrence Welk, Singalong with Mitch (Miller) and others geared for a MUCH older audience. One significant exception would be "Dragnet", who choose to make the issue almost an inside joke by presenting young folks as "caricature hippies". The detectives would knock on a door and a young girl in a mini-skirt would answer. The girl would also be carrying a large sign shaped like a flower with the word "LOVE" in large letters. As if she was walking around her home with it! Music and FM radio both had drug references as a given - AM radio not so much. Like any popular culture the youth of the time tended to socialize with those who shared the same beliefs. Young folks are likely a stronger expression of this. You didn't have to smoke pot yourself to be accepted but if it was known that you strongly objected to it your circle of friends tended to be much smaller and more similar to each other. In our school the 20% was largely made up of kids from a much more conservative or even evangelical upbringing and they tended to keep to their own. It would be understandable for those kids today to have a different impression of those times, never having experienced anything different. The more "fundamentalist" minority always seems somehow to believe that they actually represent some kind of "silent majority". Consider how when Stockwell Day became leader of the Alliance Party and almost immediately started pushing many of his evangelical beliefs. He and his supporters obviously didn't realize that they were NOT mainstream! Harper had warned the party some years earlier that they should not mix religion with the politics and look at the party as a vehicle for expressing religious values. He flat out told them it could literally trigger a voter backlash from mainstream Canada that could leave the party in ruins. Stockwell and his supporters didn't listen and Manning's movement was severely derailed. Kinsella's "Barney the Dinosaur" stunt was brilliant, if a bit cruel. Still, Day and his people didn't just ask for it, they begged! Anyhow, of course this is just observation from my own personal experience and therefore anecdotal. This means that it probably never happened or happened completely differently. I guess Cheech and Chong never sold any albums. Firesign Theater either. I'm sure there are many old enough to recognize and agree with my recollections but again, be prepared to accept that it was all a (forgive the pun!) pipe dream!

Maybe not. Even a state like Saudi Arabia would have a hard time dealing with 700,000 angry Blackberry users who have just been cut off! I suspect it may simply be a power play by a totalitarian government that doesn't really understand the technology in the first place. They probably believe that there has always been a backdoor key to decrypt msgs and all they have to do is to put pressure on RIM to give it to them! RIM is telling the truth that there is no such key, or at least, none that RIM has! Who knows if Uncle Sam has put enough brains on the problem to crack the encryption themselves? Saudi Arabia may have spies that have told their masters that this is the case. The Saudis likely don't have access to the type of high tech resources to crack the encryption themselves so again, it's easier to assume they can just get it from RIM! I think they'll lose on this one. RIM is likely being honest that they have no such key and wouldn't give it to a government anyway! If the Saudis or the UAE want to shut RIM out and face the heat from all those pissed-off users then we'll see how it works out!

Ageism, Molly? You realize that if it were indeed just imagination a lot of politicians would sleep easier. Voters with no memory! They'd think they died and went to heaven!

The burkha was invented in the 1970's. There is no record of a burkha being worn anywhere in the world before that time. It appeared in some Moslem countries that culturally are particularly repressive towards women. So it's not as if it's some long term religious symbol. As Mark Steyn wrote, it is as old and venerable as platform shoes.

Don't care how people feel? You're going to make a very good lawyer! How does that connect? I suggested that we allow face veiling until and unless it actually was a factor in a terrorist act. Then and only then would I support a ban, in the interests of better security to help prevent such an action from happening again. What does the choice of weapon have to do with anything? Sometimes keeping you on topic is like nailing jello to the wall! You always start arguing about something different than what I said!

How am I surrendering my own values? Veiling one's face is NOT one of my values! I would think that a better example of cowardice is to allow yourself and others to potentially be in danger by bowing to political correctness.

It's only one poll! In the middle of the summer! And you're calling a 3% gain for Ignatieff enough to win the next election?!!! I'll remind you of this about the end of September!

When I was a kid, my neighbour friends all worked on their muscle cars. One loaned me his car for my driver test, a 1965 Chevy convertible 396 SS, with a 4 speed Muncie and custom rear end gears. I think I passed my licence 'cuz the car scared the examiner and he just wanted to get rid of me! A few years later I was ready to buy my own first car but the OPEC crunch had hit, sending gas prices skyhigh. Everyone was scrapping their big blocks and buying little gas misers. Power disappeared almost overnight. After that, I could never get the joy of that rear-wheel drive big block power again! Front wheel drive and small blocks just didn't cut it. Once salesman sat me in a Chrysler Daytona Turbo and said,"Feel that! 140 Horsepower when the turbo kicks in!" I just looked at him. "The cars I used to drive, they got 140 HP out of the starter motor!" So, all I care about is air conditioning and how many speakers. I began to drive vans for the convenience of the room. Why not? There was no power thrill to be had! There was and is nothing much available that's affordable for the average guy. So I totally failed the test! Once they switched to front wheel drive and more "aerodynamic" styling, pretty well all cars look the same to me. About the only one that I can recognize is a P T Cruiser.

Again, you ignore my point and argue about a different one. What else is new? The Ipperwash inquiry can only state a conclusion. This is NOT the same as a fact! It is only what they believe, given the evidence they had and the reasoning they applied. As a matter of interest, just HOW was it proven that the protesters had no weapons? Did the OPP inspect them all? Did the OPP get to inspect any native protester vehicle? Did the OPP get the opportunity to sweep the area with metal detectors in order to find any buried weapons caches? I'm just trying to fathom the logistics of coming up with PROOF there were no weapons! Perhaps the inquiry simply asked a protester "Did you have any weapons/" and the protester replied "Nope! Not us!"

Well, you may be right but there's no way I'd risk any money on those predictions! First off, if Ignatieff has slid so far in the polls, stayed as low as he can go and yet would jump up when an election campaign starts to win the election it would be a historic first! It would be like the guy with no legs surprising everyone by winning the footrace. WAY too much of a long shot for my money! Second, it would also be a historic first for Liberals to pull big numbers away from the Tory party. Tory supporters consistently are the most loyal. I suspect that is because most of them are like me, in that they don't love the Tories so much as they have no respect for the Liberals! Again, I'm holding onto my money. Sooner or later the election will be called and we will see what happens. In the meantime, I think you are letting your wishes cloud your perspective.

Not sure what this poll means. I can understand the drop in Tory fortunes. Incumbents always drop in support over the summer. People are more interested in beer and barbeques than politics right now. I keep noting how the Liberals never seem to pick up any of the support the Tories lose! Ignatieff doesn't seem to have advanced at all in the polls, after all this time. I'm not sure what this means overall. It may mean that people are ticked off with the lot of them! We just can't bring ourselves to get excited over any of the choices! That may be the case, but when the writ is dropped we will have no choice but to vote for SOMEBODY! That means people will have to hold their noses and make some kind of choice. Harper's support seems a bit up and down but usually it is well above that of Ignatieff's. As I've often said, it's not enough to knock an incumbent choice. You also have to provide a better looking alternative. If he can't manage even a trivial increase in the polls, would that alternative be Ignatieff? What if they held an election and nobody came?