Wild Bill

Security must trump religious freedom. If citizens are not safe then everything breaks down. It's pretty hard to tell the family of someone dead because of a terrorist hiding under a burkha that they should feel better because at least religious freedoms were respected. However, I will admit that so far it is not a very likely circumstance but only because the numbers involved are so few. I can understand how some people would believe that because a thing hasn't happened yet it will therefore never happen. I don't agree with the logic but I understand some people think that way. So I suggest that we allow veils and burkas, with one stipulation. If it ever happens that a terrorist hides under a veil or a burkha then at that point they are banned forevermore! We should test the premise. We need only to sit back and wait. If nothing happens, well and good!

Well, we've all seen a number of times before that Day is a man of faith more than of reason. He also doesn't seem to be that quick a thinker. I'm not saying he's dumb, just that he's not good at thinking fast. Was it Butterbur the innkeep in the Lord of the Rings who was described as not a fast thinker but "he could see through a brick wall, given time."? He seems to have done a reasonable job since he gave up the idea of being the leader in favour of being a "second lieutenant". Not amazing, but reasonable. It's hard to tell if ANY of Harper's crew are quick witted, given how he makes them all hide their talents under bushels. Still just the best of some bad choices, Molly. The Liberals showed themselves to be all TOO quickwitted, given their scandals. As for the NDP, they remind me of a hippy we all knew when I was growing up, who was convinced that if we just let him on stage with his bag of granola the positive vibes from the bag would radiate out and change the world!

Shouldn't we send him out first on the 'B' Ark?

If we stop shaving up to 2/3 off every sentence, would that not mean we would need more cells because more prisoners are staying the full term?

You must be having an off day here, TB! You're always one of the smarter guys, even if I happen to disagree. The question is not the number of attacks by veiled people so far. Rather, it is how many would we have if veils or burkhas became common? There have been incidents reported of terrorists hiding under burkhas to commit terrorist acts in the middle east. Obviously, if it could be done here sooner or later someone would do it! It would be just to tempting a tactic to ignore.

How about the young girls in Afghanistan who would like to go to school and be educated? Are they wrong? How about the folks who work in skyscrapers? Are they wrong to believe that they shouldn't have to worry about an airplane taking them out?

Tried to send you a PM but got a msg 'the member cannot use the msg function'. Anyhow, here's a link you might find interesting: http://twm.co.nz/pribram.htm "MISHLOVE: You're very well known in psychology and in neuropsychology as the developer of the holographic or holonomic model of the brain. Can you talk about that a little bit, and how it relates to the mind -- or rather, to the mind-body process? I have to be on my toes with you today. PRIBRAM: Yes. The holonomic brain theory is based on some insights that Dennis Gabor had. He was the inventor of the hologram, and he obtained the Nobel Prize for his many contributions. He was a mathematician, and what he was trying to do was develop a better way of making electron micrographs, improve the resolution of the micrographs. And so for electron microscopy he suggested that instead of making a photograph -- essentially, with electron microscopes we make photographs using electrons instead of photons. He thought maybe instead of making ordinary photographs, that what he would do is get the interference patterns. Now what is an interference pattern? When light strikes, or when electrons strike any object, they scatter. But the scatter is a funny kind of scatter. It's a very well regulated scatter. For instance, if you defocus the lens on a camera so that you don't get the image falling on the image plane and you have a blur, that blur essentially is a hologram, because all you have to do is refocus it. "

The fact that you can even ask such a question pegs you as more of an intuitive soul than a 'scientific' one. Essentially, you are starting from the premise that you are 100% correct, incapable of being wrong and anyone who disagrees with you must be either dishonest or not too bright! The word for this is 'righteousness'. I've found that people who believe in this manner tend to be 'faith' people rather than 'head' people. Nothing wrong with that. We need all kinds of people to make a world. It's just that while I can develop confidence in something I really have never had FAITH in much of anything! It always seemed to me that faith was something people hung on to when they couldn't deal with the facts. I make no claims to godhood or perfection myself. I just try to be as logical as I can. I am never surprised that there are people who disagree with me. They may have info that I don't or have worked out a different line of reasoning. They may even be right and I am wrong! Their arguments are what I use to test my own. If they don't appear to make a lot of sense or they don't fit all the facts then I tend to not accept them. I've said many times that I am not a blindly partisan Tory supporter. I can see fault in any party or politician. It's just that the Tories at present reek less to my nose than the Liberals and especially the NDP! So I don't 'swallow all their nonsense' but I would never go so far as to make the claim that 'everything they say is wrong', just as I would never say that of a Liberal or even a 'Dipper, for that matter. I might say it about Elizabeth May, 'though. I swear sometimes she makes it look like she finds a stop sign to be a week's good reading!

Doesn't matter! It's like if a coin toss has come up heads 3 times in a row, the odds on the next toss are still 50/50. Perhaps it would be better if you were to make a statement like "Due to my opinions of the Tory actions I have seen before I have confidence that they are in the wrong again this time." Perhaps I'm being too picky. It's just I can't help but take exception to someone presenting their own opinions as if they were gospel fact. It bothers me as much as those posts where someone claims that "everyone believes..."

Perhaps you missed my previous post, #10 in this thread.

Ad Hominem, ad hominem. I share your view over Day being an idiot, but that has nothing to do with whether or not he is right on this point. Only an idiot uses ad hominem tactics in a debate.

Now you've really gone off to Mars! "They are more likely to get responses from people who have been victims of crime and not the population at large." At whom is the question aimed? "More and more people are not reporting crimes being committed against them". Wouldn't it be the victims of crime who give the responses? If the question asks if you did not report a crime against yourself why the hell would the population at large answer?

I'm not talking about an appeal. If citizens feel a judge consistently is too lenient in his sentencing what WORKABLE recourse do they have?

Well, if it wasn't completely static you'd think that after all the years since our country was founded we would have seen an example of a judge getting corrected once in a while! Except for the rare sex scandal the idea seems unheard of! I can't imagine any other category of citizens being so perfect and ideal... It really sounds like when you and smallc make the claim that judges are policed under a higher authority you're really talking about just a technicality and not an actual practice.

Dunno about a useful list but it may not tell you what you want to know anyway. You have to consider that we had already made an investment in the early design stages of the F-35, under a previous Liberal government. So we had already put money in the pot and the F-35 was chosen as the best fit for our defence roles. Since only Lockheed Martin makes the F-35, no competitive bid was possible. That leaves arguing if the F-35 was indeed the best choice. You have an argument about open bidding and also if there was a better choice. Any other aircraft would probably have been sole source as well. Things kinda become a dog's breakfast. It would be much clearer if the choice of aircraft was left open and we dealt only with initial bids, assuming that all bidders would be offering a suitable choice for our military. That didn't happen. Our government made the choice of aircraft first and that forced a sole source contract. It's not likely that there was some kind of "donor bribe". If the F-35 was the only real choice then why waste the money? And if the other planes were just not appropriate then there would be no point in those manufacturers making a bribe. Worse yet, once everyone got a look at what we were buying and saw that it was a lousy choice compared to the F-35 there would have been corruption charges over that decision! To prove your premise I think you would first have to establish that there was another suitable choice of aircraft and THEN prove bribery! Even if you're right you've got quite a challenge to prove it!

Oh, I see. You've gone from praising those who put people in peril by revealing information to trying to blame ourselves for not being able to evacuate all collaborators in the event of someone being a blabbermouth! Newsflash! It's the blabbermouths who are to blame! We WERE protecting the 'collaborators' by keeping their identities secret! The people who operate Wiki should be tried for treason! One thing is for sure. Any Afghani would need his head read before helping any Allied force against the Taliban. At one stroke, the Wikileaks have dried up all the intelligence info being provided by the Afghani people! Nice move, idiots!

Aren't you exaggerating just a bit? You paint a picture where there are no courthouses, just gallows in a stadium and someone to count all the thumbs up or thumbs down! You are describing essentially no court system at all and that's flatly ridiculous! It takes time to create and change laws. It takes a political process. How fast do you think it would be for a law to get changed in Canada? If the public mood changed on a particular sentence for a particular crime, do you think it would be changed in a weekend or two? Not bloody likely! It would take years or maybe even decades! Leaving that aside, you really do seem to have a very low opinion of your fellow citizens. I like to think that most citizens are fairly responsible and moral people. Perhaps your problem is that in a few key areas you yourself are out of step with the majority and can't abide the idea of not getting your own way. As I keep saying, you can be a populist or an elitist but there's really no room in between. I can abide a populist who is wrong once in a while better than an elitist who is usually right. When an elitist goes wrong REALLY bad things tend to happen! Elitists LOVE dictators who agree with them!

BM, this argument is getting ridiculous. Some of us are taking a good experience just in their own community as indicative of the whole. If I were a politician charged with defending our health care system, I would maintain one community hospital somewhere that is perfectly run and constantly point to it as the example of how things are working! My repeated experiences are more similar to Argus'. We both live in Ontario. No one is trying to deny that Winnepeg may have higher levels of service or other parts of the country. What I want and what I assume Argus and every other Ontarioan wants is high levels of service at EVERY hospital in Ontario! The problem is looking more and more like it is not really about the money. Somehow the bureaucracy involved seems wasteful and outright loopy at times! Certainly the pay scales are far above that of the private sector. Not so much for the nurses as for all the less skilled workers, like dishwashers and floor sweepers.

Non sequitur. We were living a suburban life and we didn't pay nearly as much for it! Amalgamation is a separate issue. Suburbs that ALL had balanced budgets, high levels of service and very low tax increases were forcibly amalgamated into the City of Hamilton, which had always struggled with deficits and poor taxpayer services. Hamilton was and still does survive by begging Queens Park for special handouts! The net effect of amalgamation was that the old city core was able to take the suburbs money instead of the province being on the hook. Of course, the inevitable result was that Hamilton blew the suburbs' money by treating it just as a windfall and now it is in debt worse than ever! Your point may be true as a generalization but in the case of Hamilton the facts speak for themselves.

That's one view, and you're entitled to it. Me, I'm different. When I see something on a downward slide I don't look for something sliding faster to compare it. If something is broken my instinct is to recognize a problem and try to correct it. When I get a guitar amp to fix I don't blow it off by saying "This one's not so bad! There's one in the corner in worse shape!" It just seems to me that too often we dodge problems by pointing at worse examples and never get around to fixing much of anything! It's as if avoiding the blame is more important that fixing the problem.

Perhaps you should take a look for yourself at downtown Hamilton.

Glad YOU are happy! Some of that information might eventually put one of our soldier boys in peril, perhaps even killed! If that were to happen, whoever leaked the information should be forced to confront the victim's families and then hung by the neck until dead! Wiki should look up from what's in front of its nose and have some perspective on the possible effects of their publishing all that information. "Useful idiots", the lot of them!

Well, there are corporations that have the money of course but they also have to answer to their shareholders. Not all shareholders are Conrad Blacks. Most of them are ordinary people, like little old ladies trying to build their pensions or even teachers with their pension funds! The problem is that building in Canada means high taxes and tons of paperwork that you have to pay people to do to give the reports to the various government departments! My career was spent selling electronic parts to printed circuit board manufacturers and that industry has virtually collapsed since 9/1/01. It has hardly recovered at all. Many of the larger accounts I used to service have moved to China for cheaper taxes or Ireland, both for the lower taxes and also a FAR lower paperwork load! Surprisingly, in that industry labour costs were not that big a factor. There is so much automation in the assembly processes that human labour is not that great a percentage of the costs. Rest assured that any CEO who builds a big plant in Canada will hear it from those little old ladies and teachers when they find out they could have had bigger dividends if the plant was build in Ireland! CEO's can be fired too, you know.

The old police station was on Lake Avenue, in the heart of the Stoney Creek downtown. That's about a mile from the east end station. Incidently, they don't normally have many cops in that station. If you actually visit it you will see only a 'cop assistant' to take the information since it is a vehicle accident reporting station. Maybe cops in cruisers stop there to use the washroom, I dunno. Certainly there are no beat cops walking in Stoney Creek since amalgamation! As for "Maybe it helped a little, I don't know.", I live here! I DO know! I know how much my taxes have increased! I've watched as my services have been lessened! I just watched the parking meters go up in our downtown, which is going to absolutely KILL the local business! Things will improve for me personally. Within months I will be moving into the old part of Hamilton. My taxes will drop to about a third! I will actually be able to take a bus somewhere and ride more than walk! It will be nice to be on the receiving end of the trough for a change. Might even take in a football game, assuming those nignogs on Hamilton council don't force the Ti-Cats to leave!

Wasn't the point of the newspaper article I cited that while things may have dropped a few percent in the last few years that is still 300+% higher than in 1962? Doesn't that mean some folks are arguing about the trivial end of the curve?