Wild Bill

I should think Michael J Fox would be interested...

Does the fact that it was a Tory government make it ok? I don't get your point. Just because I have so little respect for most Liberals hardly is reason to respect all Tories! I appreciated much of what Harris did but it would be illogical to consider him perfect in everything he did. After all, the man IS a politician, after all! When YOU support a particular party or politician do YOU approve of EVERYTHING they do? As for moving the old police station to Stoney Creek, I've lived here since 1960. When the hell did that ever happen? As I had said, our police station was closed and the closest one is near Kenora and King Street, well within the lines of the old Hamilton and out of Stoney Creek. As for whining about amalgamation, several generations will have to grow old and die before that happens. You see, there are NO success stories for the suburbs as a result of amalgamation. Worse yet, Hamilton keeps picking at the scabs, wanting to 'even out' the taxes which will increase the load on the suburbs or fighting the idea of the new football stadium being in the east end (after flatly preventing the idea of Confederation Park as a site even being considered!) If someone could come up with even a few ways that the suburbs have benefited by being forced into the city of Hamilton it might dull the resentment. It's been quite a few years now and we haven't heard any! If you're so sure you're right, how about naming 3! Make sure they are REAL things, like how much we are taxed and if a service has been improved!

Upon reflection, I realize you're absolutely right! I misinterpreted the thrust of your question and lost track of the 'flow chart'. My only excuse is that I was trying to be logical and as CR has made me understand, that in itself is delusional. However, sexual crimes are not the majority...unless of course they are all anecdotal... As I later said, the newspaper piece I cited explained things far better than I did anyway.

I'm curious. Did you deserve it? Was it a case of a slap-happy teacher or a mouthy kid? The reason I ask is that both cases occur in nature. Somehow in these arguments people seem to think that things are all one way or the other. Either teachers ALWAYS slap kids for no reason or they NEVER do! We are seeing this type of thinking already in this thread. Someone calls for harsher sentences for criminals and immediately someone else starts ranting that it's unfair to put someone away for life if his 'third strike' is just for spitting on the sidewalk! Surely we can have SOME perspective! As for 'hitting kids', I'm one of those who believes that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of NEVER applying corporal punishment to juveniles! The adolescent brain is usually too underdeveloped to properly appreciate cause and effect, or consequences for inappropriate behaviour. Also, pain and public humiliation can have a strong impact on a juvenile. The object after all is to correct inappropriate behavior in a timely and effective fashion, not to 'coddle' the juvenile. I'm not against using other techniques except that once again, as a 'tech' I have no respect for what doesn't work! From what I have seen with my own eyes and from what my own children, teachers and neighbours have related to me it seems obvious that present 'touchy feely' methods have a poor success rate. Once again, I think the problem comes down to putting corrective power into the hands of competent judges. Just as a teacher should have enough perspective to refrain from corporal punishment for all but the most severe offenses a judge should have the same perspective when handing out sentences. It is equally wrong to give a young offender probation after probation terms when he appears time after time in court as it is to put a man in jail for life when his 'third strike' is stealing a pizza! Come to think of it, if judges practiced effective perspective in sentencing there would be no need for a 'three strike' rule at all! Stiffening up mandatory sentences is really just a band aid solution for having poor judges that are not being effective or responding to the public will. We are trying to 'automate' the process so that judges cannot be too 'soft' and that just causes more problems at the other end. There is no substitute for effective people. If our judges did a better job we wouldn't be having this debate! The whole purpose of a justice system is to protect the public's life and property first and rehabilitate the offender second. We should keep those aims in the proper order and not allow any other yardsticks when we measure its effectiveness.

Ten Years After sang it way back in the mid 1960's: "Tax the rich, feed the poor. Till there are no rich no more!"

From what I've read over the years, scientists are agreed that memory is NOT stored in individual brain cells! It's not like it's written on little bits of neurons stacked up like books in a library within the brain. Rather, memory is an overall pattern imposed on large sections of the brain as a whole, like a hologram. The information that allows a hologram to make a 3d picture is also stored as a large overall pattern in some physical media like a crystal or film on a glass. If you break the media in two both pieces will reproduce the entire image. If you keep breaking into smaller pieces you don't really lose the image as a whole but instead the definition or clarity of the image will begin to get poorer and poorer, till the image becomes so fuzzy as to be unusable. I remember reading that scientists cut away large portions of animal brains before memory began to be impaired. There was no one piece that held one specific memory. So if an Alzheimer's patient still had enough functioning brain cells all memories could still be there. The problem might be in accessing and processing the information. Adding enough new healthy cells to the mix might restore those functions, along with ALL the memories! Of course, we won't really know for sure until the premise is tested but there is surely grounds for hope!

Only once, when I was reporting a possible heart attack. There have been many other occasions for myself and my family and no, no BP was taken while we were waiting. The only thing that ever happened to my wife was when I brought her in with a high fever they immediately took her temperature. However, afterwards I asked them if she could have some Tylenol or something during her wait and they said OK. Of course, that brought the fever down. An hour or so later they checked her temperature again and stopped paying much attention. Another lady waiting nearby seemed more experienced with the way things worked. She told us that once my wife's fever dropped she was no longer in a higher risk category. She advised us to let the fever rise in order to get attention or we would be waiting there forever! We did so and a couple of hours later they took her temperature again and with it being higher they then finally got a doctor to see her. When the doctor saw her there was a flurry of tests! This was in the middle of the SARS epidemic. It turned out that my wife was in no real danger and I had much respect for the wit of the doctor. I can't really say the same for the ER procedures but since it was a personal experience it was merely anecdotal and likely was just a product of false memory syndrome!

That was never MY position! My premise was that there was much less crime, especially violent crime, in the early 60's than today. I was positing that those who make the claim that "crime is down so no need to be tougher with sentencing" are comparing a drop of a few percent over the past few years, which is mice nuts compared to 50 years ago. This was in today's Sunday Sun: http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2010/07/30/14883086.html "That is, while crime rates in Canada are today falling slightly on a year-over-year basis and are down from their historic highs of the early 1990s, they remain alarmingly and stubbornly high compared to the early 1960s, when comparable crime stats first started being kept. I can now tell you there were 920 violent crimes reported to police per 100,000 population in Canada in 2009. The good news is that’s a slight drop from the 936 violent crimes reported per 100,000 in 2008. The bad news is it means our violent crime rate remains more than 300% higher than what it was when comparable statistics first started being kept in 1962. At that time, our violent crime rate was 221 incidents per 100,000 of population. That means last year’s violent crime rate of 920 incidents per 100,000 was 316% higher than in 1962. A similar pattern can be seen for other forms of crime." It's a good read and makes the point much better than I did. Of course, I guess you can prefer to believe that crime REPORTING is over 316 % higher than in 1962 instead of crime itself but 316% is such a huge number that I'm not sure anyone would care to defend that position...

I too come from a family of Bluenosers, my mother's side being from Pictou and Antigonish. We came and settled down in Ontario when I was about 8 years old. To this day, if I get too drunk or excited I lose my Ontarioan accent!

Interesting! Personally, I or anyone in my family has never experienced tests while we were waiting but I suppose it happens some where, some time.

The first book I ever owned was a science book on astronomy and astronautics. It was a personal gift from my grade one teacher, who recognized my early passion. Science has been a large part of my life and it has shaped me greatly. I say this just to make you understand that I have some familiarity with these issues, not as much as an accredited scientist in most fields but certainly more than the average joe. My science heroes are people like G. Harry Stine, Richard Feynman and Kary Mullis, rather than David Suzuki. I think it is because of this background that I have never been able to accept the man-made global warming arguments. Not just because they always sound a little too pat and extreme but because they always seem to pushing some solution requiring goals that are more political than scientific. When they were first calling for the ban on aerosols and CFCs I would be the one thinking "They don't mention how even ONE volcano puts out a zillion times more CFCs in one eruption than Man has ever created!" Or when Carl Sagan warned against invading Irag in the first Bush war lest Saddam torched the Kuwait oilfields, which he claimed would likely trigger a 'nuclear winter' from the particulates. I couldn't help but think "Carl, you're older than me! Haven't you ever heard of Tobruk! Why didn't so many such incidents in WWII trigger such an effect?" It just seems that the global warming crowd is so politicized that I just can't trust much of their science! I took the trouble to download the Kyoto Accord. If you haven't yourself you really should give it a read, TM. Even a layman can quickly see that it contained almost no science at all! Almost the whole thing was about 'wealth re-distribution' and systems to funnel money into third world countries, with little or no mention of any auditing for waste or diversions into military spending. You expect people to read your cites, TM. Well, how about reading the whole Kyoto thing? I'm sure that no matter what your beliefs about global warming you would be honest enough to grant that I am right about it. I'm not saying that your side of the argument is wrong. I'm just saying that when it mixes with people like Al Gore and schemes like Kyoto it does itself a great disservice. I know one should keep an open mind but we all are forced to screen out much of the info that constantly is flying at us, in order to keep it down to a level we can deal with among all the other demands of daily living. I'm afraid that I've been almost forced to put the global warming movement into the 'alarmist' and 'political schemer' categories.

Argus may be right about the type of citizen we see with Jamaican immigrants but not for reasons of accent. Immigration Canada just seems to let in all the 'lowlifes' from the island with little or no screening! This has been explained to me by several Jamaican-born Canadian friends, who left the island to get 'away from that crowd', among other reasons. As for accent, I think he is making a classic assumption that not being perfectly articulate in one's own language somehow makes a person less intelligent. This notion is not only illogical but frankly 'nuts', unworthy of Argus' usual points. One of my first jobs as a young man was a cable tv man, where I was constantly meeting new people as I visited their house. I still remember installing the cable for an immigrant family who spoke almost no English. They were getting by with waves and gestures to show me where they wanted the cable to be placed for their tv. I had no idea of where they were from but just for hellry I gave the father a try with my high school french. His face lit up and he began to talk to me in perfect parisian french! Suddenly I was the one 'just off the boat". He was an engineer and he and his family had lived in many different countries around the globe. It seemed they had born a child in each of these countries. One boy was born in Spain and the entire family spoke perfect Spanish. A girl was born in Brazil and they all spoke Portugese. They also all spoke German and a few other languages. They were both kind and courteous with me and my 'mal francais'. They fed me a sandwich made with delicious home-baked Portugese bread and gave me some VERY good homemade wine! For a young hippy lad who had never been very far from his own pond it was a vivid lesson that someone's accent or speech pattern was a total non sequitur to assume anything about his character or basic brainpower. What often goes along with Argus' false assumption is the old idea (brilliantly parodied many times by Monty Python) that if on holidays among 'foreigners' who don't speak English you just need to speak both slowly and very loud!

No doubt you will be told that your experience is merely anecdotal and therefore untrue, Sir Knight. However, I for one believe you!

Please! Hamilton is Hamilton. They may have some cops on beats in the old part of the city. Stoney Creek is a suburb. We are a conquered people, thanks to amalgamation. We DON'T get beat cops, or much of anything else! We are merely a source of tax money for Hamilton councilors to waste for endless attempts to make a silk purse out of the downtown core sow's ear. Some parts of Glanbrook don't even get police or fire protection anymore. At least, in practice. Officially they do! It's just that now those services are no longer locally provided but are booked out of the main city. This means that for a fire the trucks will arrive just about when the coals are burned down just right to toast marshmellows. As for the police, criminals have long since figured out that they can clean a house out and be gone long before the police arrive. Farmers are locking their doors at night for the first time and are keeping more dogs. They also are more likely to have an unregistered shotgun or two hidden in the house! It was the fireman's union that killed their local fire protection. They had had a very successful volunteer force for years but when amalgamation occurred the firefighter's union made an issue about allowing 'scabs' on the force! Hamilton did not want to pay for more full time positions so the local force was gone and things were covered by the main city services, located much further away. There is a police station there. It's just that despite how it always looks nicely cleaned and tended there's no one actually in it! In Stoney Creek they tore down our police station. We're covered by a tiny office in the east end of old Hamilton, backed up by larger stations downtown. Now the residents are watching as Hamilton is calling for 'area rating' of taxes, which will mean an 'evening out' across the entire new city. Since those rural suburbs like Glanbrook or Flamborough don't even get as much as a bus or two the bitterness is quite strong. I guess in theory you're right that there are still police on foot patrol. It's just that "some pigs are more equal than others", I suppose.

No argument! There's an old joke about how everyone has an opinion! What bothers me however is that smallc is championing a system where we all have opinions but the minority opinion rules! I have a healthy fear of elitists! An elitist is someone who might think it a good idea to chop off YOUR arm! People as a majority can make mistakes but they can also learn from them. When a minority has the power we are subject to their whim! If they are wrong we all suffer, without any check or balance to correct the mistake.

Ah so! I particularly got a kick out of "officials blame rise in visits"! They're saying the problem with their ER wait times is that people visit the ER! Logic worthy of CR! Anyhow, we've drifted far from the real question. Is it a problem of money or of management? The report you cited for the Ottawa hospital says that they've done poorly despite being given an increase in money. My experience with my local hospital is that their management is loopy! When you have minimum times of 8 hours for an ER visit it does not make sense to put in parking meters that have a maximum of 1 hour's time! Or when people complain to address the problem by putting bill changing machines on the wall! In my work career I found that old companies like GE or Westinghouse operated in a similar fashion to these public sector institutions. Being a salesman for high tech electronic parts gave me the opportunity to visit literally hundreds of businesses and get to see how they operated. Over the years I noticed many old names go under or drastically reduce in size, for not being able to change with the times. Public sector accounts still persist in their "horse and buggy" attitudes because they have nothing to force them to change! They are funded on perpetual tax money. I've come to believe that if your institution is not subject to market forces it may be impossible for you to stay modernized and even half-way efficient. Interestingly, some of the private companies that were very badly run were run by engineers! Some brilliant engineer would come up with a great new product and form a company. Invariably, the only department that worked well would be engineering. Accounting, shipping, purchasing or whatever was always badly screwed up. Why? Because managing a company is a completely different skill set than being an good engineer. Yet that brilliant engineer always seemed to have a blind spot about that and believed that he could manage things just fine himself. I learned very quickly with such accounts to keep a close eye on their account balance and their credit rating. I suspect there may be a parallel with how hospitals are run. Sir Bandalot may be able to tell us from his experience if hospitals are run by the best doctors or the best managers. Like with engineers, they are rarely the same person. Throwing more money at hospitals may be a waste of funds to solve problems like ER waiting times. I would suggest perhaps a management structure revue might work better but still, hospitals are in the public sector so that may be a also just a waste of time. Maybe there just isn't any solution with a government-run medicare system! Maybe it will just continue to swallow ever increasing amounts of money until we all go broke!

Or, as a tech would say, you can't plot a curve with only one data point! However, most life experience is experiences repeated over a long time span. Yes, it should always be questioned but sometimes it's enough that it makes sense. For instance, suppose you went to a card game that had been held for years at a neighbourhood home. They play poker and you have had innumerable reports that the games were strictly legit. You would think that you could accept all those reports as a large body of data and participate in the games without fear of any cheating. However, as a game progresses you begin to notice that there is INDEED cheating going on! You don't make a scene but a week later you have to make a decision. Do you consider the incident to be an anomaly in the face of all those reports? Or do you decide not to play there any more? Suppose you have had repeated dealings with a government bureaucracy and every time it has been a frustrating experience with rude employees hiding behind illogical rules. Some government department cites a press release touting how the measured index for pleasant government dealings with citizens is 98%! Are you going to automatically believe it? When I follow my life experience it is not for having only one data point! I'll forgive anybody for making a mistake! It's how they handle it that truly reveals their character. What's more, I am certainly NOT going to blindly accept a cite to a press release of hospitals measuring THEMSELVES and providing positive stats contrary to repeated personal experience!

Actually, yes I can still argue! You are assuming that I must accept your cite as gospel. I don't! It is all predicated on a press release! A health minister issues a press release through its Liberal Party media arm, the Toronto Star. It touts how the ER wait time at one specific hospital has been cut from 26 hours to 10 hours. There is no mention of who measured this decrease or what are the criteria involved. Far down the page it mentions how the average has dropped over the last 2 years from 10.3 to 4.3 hours. Again, there is no mention of any report that the public can examine. Besides, this is an average! How are we to know if there are some hospitals that have INCREASED wait times? An average is precisely that, an average, after all. Highs and lows become an average. This is what Michael meant when he talked about the confusion between stats and just press releases. Your cite is nothing more than a press release. Apparently you expect me to treat it as gospel and stop arguing. If you believe that a press release is gospel then I am going to stop arguing but not because I concede the point. I just believe that there's no point in further arguing!

To be fair, that's true enough. You need adequate reason or evidence to change your opinion and I guess I can understand that. However, the reverse is also true. When you make a claim that contradicts someone's direct personal experience there is no way you are going to get them to change their mind! All the cites in the world will not get someone to throw away direct experience. As Galileo once said "Nevertheless, it moves!" When I speak of my own personal history and experiences or Sir Bandelot mentions hospital management techniques that he directly witnessed it is usually impossible to provide cites or sources. Certainly no manager of any hospital would want Sir B's experience aired publicly! Neither of us then can ever agree. Sir B and I have the evidence of our own eyes and ears. You have your cites. You do seem to take them all as gospel, unquestioningly. If they comfort you, you are welcome to them.

That's not the situation being discussed! I'm talking about when someone posts a cite supposedly as a rebuttal but they haven't actually read it closely enough to understand that it doesn't rebut but rather SUPPORTS the other's argument! Frankly, isn't that deserving of mockery?

Sorry, Sir Knight! Despite the fact that you work intimately in the field of the debate, have 20 years of direct personal experience and have been told first hand by the management involved as to how they actually deal with the problem, you have no credibility! Your experience is merely anecdotal. You gave us no cite for each and every one of your personal experiences. A quick google failed to turn up anything to confirm what you've told us. As Bullwinkle J. Moose would say "It's just a figamentation of your imagination!"

Only 20 geese? Lord knows we can spare them! Those 'sky rats' are worse than sea gulls! Might help keep a few more airliners from crashing during takeoffs or landings.

Why not? It has been proven time and time again that Wiki is a biased source! Just try to make a post or an edit that goes against their orthodoxy and see how fast it gets zapped! Besides, if you actually read the article you'll see that there is no proof that this was sanctioned by the CPC or even that they knew it was going on! It likely was just some sympathizer who took it upon himself. Refugees from 'rubble.ca' do it with articles by climate 'deniers' all the time! Just try to prove it was officially sanctioned by any 'climate change' organization.

Bonam, does it sometimes seem to you as well that some posters will post cites they don't appear to have read themselves? It's as if they simply take a big chunk of url's from a quick google, expecting the sheer quantity of cites is enough in itself to prove their point!

Well, that would certainly free up a lot of money to address the REAL crimes! Prohibition laws are really just political pandering to the Ned Flanders set, who tend to run on 'faith' and no amount of evidence or logic will ever change their minds. Me, my hippy days are long past but I bitterly resent being taxed in order to waste money on a futile "war against drugs". If others can be catered to for some of their pet foolishness I have a few foolish ideas myself I would appreciate being addressed...