Wild Bill

Certainly I see the disparity! SN is a sovereign country! They should not be depending on another country to pay for their needs! You are either sovereign or you aren't. You can't call your own shots when you are 'on the dole'. Lord knows the Montours with their cigarette money could buy a water treatment plant on their own! Also, let me repeat AGAIN because you just can't seem to grasp the point, a $100 million dollar plant is NOT the only way to get clean water! There are villages in Bangladesh that have built their own solutions FAR, FAR cheaper! It means you have to open some books, surf some web pages, maybe learn some high school math and then get your hands dirty and BUILD IT YOURSELF! Is there a clause under the Indian Act that says you are NOT ALLOWED to do so? Do you have to build a huge central plant? Why can't you build a lot of individual, much smaller ones? Will the RCMP invade the reserve and force the natives NOT to build some smarter, greener solutions? Every homestead on SN could solve their water problem for a few thousand or maybe even a few hundred dollars, if they just researched a bit and fabricated for themselves. However, if they keep graduating lawyers and poli-sci majors they will forever be at the mercy of the white man's government. Hell, I'm a white man and I learned when I was a child that the government is slow, corrupt and usually quite stupid in what it does! Here you are with some kind of child-like faith that government is your ONLY solution! If you and the natives truly believe that, then you deserve what you get!

Aristotle taught us centuries ago that A=A. By this he meant that a fact is a fact. Later another taught us that "The name is NOT the thing!", meaning that an object is what it is, no matter if we try to call it something different. Basically, this and other axioms tell us that reality IS! We all can or should try to understand it as best we can but we cannot deny it. Just because we are crazy enough to think our toaster talks to us doesn't mean that it does or that it has supernatural wisdom. When someone denies logic or reason they are denying reality. They instead have a mindset that the universe is run by 'magic' and it will change according to your WANTS! This is a common delusion. A great number of human beings think this way. Usually they are uneducated primitives but there are a fair number of so-called 'modern' people. The personal advantage of such a delusion is that it also allows you to believe that you are always right and anyone who disagrees with you must be wrong. We've seen a lot of that from CR! Perhaps this syndrome explains why he appears to feel such kinship with ancient aboriginal beliefs. Whatever. The Universe doesn't care if CR believes that it rests on the back of a giant turtle! I don't pretend to perfectly understand how the Universe works either but I know I deny far fewer of its Laws than does our CR friend. That means I am more likely to come up with solutions that WORK, since I don't keep trying to bash square pegs into round holes!

Even if I granted your point about SN putting more into the tax base than they receive (which I DON'T! The question is how much the SN Reserve puts into the tax base! Those off-reserve pay their own way.) you still didn't answer my premise! There are still things SN and other bands could do by themselves! No one is arguing that government money can move slowly. My point was that natives could and should be developing options on their own. Are you suggesting they should put up with unclean water for centuries, if it takes that long to get the government moving? You didn't answer why natives have not beome the LEADERS in new 'green' technologies if they are the ones supposedly so close to the 'Earth'! To sit around waiting for something to be handed to them is no different from white 'trailer trash' that won't move their trailer off of a flood plain. Maybe the problem is that the more progressive natives are the ones that LEFT the reserve! The ones that stay are for the most part unable to cope on their own. I suspect that of those that seek higher education that stay on the reserves, virtually all are taking law and political science. We see no sign of any physicists, mechanical or electrical engineers, or others that could build their OWN water treatment plants! BTW, you should really explore the Zenon Environmental website. Their reverse osmosis systems DO remove heavy metals and industrial pollutants! They've been doing it for a couple of decades now. That's their major claim to fame. You really should expand your knowledge beyond native politics and rude debating techniques. Are you one of these people who can't put a new plug on their lamp? How does a light bulb work? That invention is about a century and a half old! Could you describe how to build a simple motor or generator? Do you have any practical knowledge at all of how things actually work, aside from a twisted notion of constitutional law and perhaps some Amish traditional agricultural devices?

Cry me a river! Is a zillion dollar handout the ONLY way to get clean water? Third world countries are practicing solutions on a pittance of that money! Lord knows there are enough "green" magazines and online pages of homebuilt solutions! If natives are such "stewards of the earth" then why the hell don't THEY build backyard solar hot water heaters, homebuilt purifiers, wind generators and the like! You can buy an osmosis membrane water purification unit from Zenon Environmental for a LOT less than 100 million dollars! Geez Louise, we've got hippies living in trees in California that can do it! What the hell is wrong with natives? If I were in their position rest assured I would build something and not sit around on my ass waiting for the 'white man' to do it for me! If natives are supposedly the ones so 'close to the land' then let them prove it! They should be leading US with alternative technologies! Haven't they developed anything on their own besides putting 3 dead fish around some corn seeds?

Dogs can look very different but they are all of the same species and can breed true. The human animal is no different. We are all the same species, with many racial differences. That being said, any animal breeder knows that 'mutts' tend to be stronger! Breed too finely and inevitably you get offspring with genetic problems. Collies and others become prone to hip problems and other breeds have similar genetic problems. So 'miscegenation' is actually healthy for the species! I would say it's obvious that Mother Nature recognizes that fact! We are born with a natural attraction for the exotic. A new girl at school of a different race or colouring often is considered far more attractive than the 'incumbents'. Nature WANTS us to mix our gene pool! It means healthier kids with more likelihood of POSITIVE traits cropping up! Like it or not, we are heading towards a 'Star Trek' population of mixed parenthood. What's more, our race will be much the better for it!

To be fair, the natives of that lacrosse team are refusing American or Canadian passports! They have been using their native passports for some years and up till now they have had no real problems. However, the fact that they haven't had problems doesn't mean that other countries HAVE to and must continue to recognize them! This time they ran into a snag. We shouldn't blame those on the sports team. If they have been able to use the passports for years then they could expect they would continue to be able to use them. It's just that they got by on luck more than other countries recognizing the legality of their paperwork. So they may be legally wrong but they are NOT hypocrites! Meanwhile, the point of my opening post is that we have a certain poster on this board who previously informed us that native passports where indeed valid and internationally recognized and that we were all ignorant and racist to question the idea.! The same poster has recently made claims that the Queen has recognized native sovereignty. So when this news item came up about some countries NOT recognizing the passports and that one of the major players was Britain, the home of our Queen, I thought it only apropo to start this thread...

Is it really fair to define me by how I vote? I'd like to vote Liberal but how can I if they don't act like Liberals? I've been voting CPC only for lack of a better choice. Again, I'm more of a classic Liberal, which today looks more like the Libertarians.The modern Libertarians have some loopy aspects to their party platform so they're not THAT good a match for me and besides, it would be as much a waste to vote for them as for the Yogic Flyer Party. When I was very young I voted Liberal but they changed too much for me under Trudeau. Like most Canadians, I voted for Mulroney for both of his landslide majorities until I realized that he was just like Trudeau's party, only better and slicker! Reform was the first and only party that roused some enthusiasm in me for my vote! I did think that Manning was a bit hokey at times but the streak of populism in the party made me forgive any of that! I have enough confidence in my fellow Canadians that I was sure that if a party was based on responding to their wishes and values that it would do a better job looking after us than what we have seen from the other parties all these years. Besides, if Reform did what we all wanted and it turned out wrong then we would have had no one to blame but ourselves! Might have been good for many citizens' education. So if you're going to brand me a conservative because I have no other voting choice then fine, if that's how you look at things I can't do anything about it. However, I do think it would be more fair if I had the chance to vote for a Liberal party that actually acted like classic Liberals! Maybe I would even be happy if the Liberal party acted like it had any firm values at all!

You're re-writing history again. We've already seen instances of bands getting the feds to build them a water treatment plant, demanding that all the operating jobs are given to natives, the plant falls apart due to poor or non-existent maintenance, the band gets media coverage about how they don't have good water and presto! the feds build them another plant! Natives mostly don't seem to have much technological capacity in their communities. There's nothing wrong with that per se but when they don't recognize that and allow for it then they can't expect things to work! If you want the jobs of running machinery you have to not just attend the training but learn and practice it! If you can't or don't want to do that then you should hire others more qualified to do it for you. Machinery doesn't give a damn about 'culture'. It works by Mother Nature's Laws of Physics and Chemistry. You obey Mother's Laws or the machine breaks down and stops working. Period and end of story. This also stands for mainstream Canada. Too often we see technical problems being addressed by those without the background to make a decision that works, such as McGuinty with electrical energy. Everybody's got an opinion that won't work, yet democracy says that everybody is entitled to be heard. If enough yammerheads want a system where water will naturally flow uphill then huge sums of money can be wasted trying but in the end, the water will NOT flow uphill!

As opposed to our present system, where in practice NOBODY decides? When's the last time you heard of a judge being asked to step down for giving sentences contrary to public opinion? Hell, Harper would be happy if they just followed the minimums! Overwhelming judges are obviously refusing to give anything but the least they can get away with...

Nicky isn't the first to label me incorrectly, SH! By classic definitions, actually I'm a Liberal! It seems that the modern Liberal party has drifted so far left that they left me behind! Actually, by modern standards I'm more of a Libertarian. To many folks like Nicky it would seem that a conservative is first, anyone who disagrees with them and second, anyone who is to the right of Libby Davies!

Whatever makes you think I'm a conservative?

No argument from me, GH! I've been saying that we should concentrate on getting totally off the grid for years! Of course, it would leave the provincial government with the problem of how to pay off the stranded Ontario Hydro debt when no one has an account with them anymore! However, we have a long way to go to make that work. My techie friends and I have been "blue sky-ing" ideas for years but we keep coming up with the same problem. Any approach is FAR easier if you live in the country than if you live on a small city lot, especially an inner city one! However, technical breakthroughs keep happening and that opens up more options.

Sadly, I think you're on to something, MB! Especially since the population seems to have been steadily "dumbed down" and our critical skills have "gang aft agley". "Entertainment Tonight" trumps "Foley's War" any night of the week. Which leads to an even scarier thought. Could we be heading for an election shootout between Justin and Ben Mulroney? I think I'd rather see disco make a comeback!

That many or may not be true. However, what about all the huge sums of money and the expensive programs presently being given to First Nations? Are they constitutionally guaranteed? We can argue about their efficiency and the fairness of the usual distribution channel being through the chiefs but the basic point is, if enough bad feeling occurred could that money tap be turned off? Could First Nations bands survive without it?

No disrespect to you personally intended, Capricorn, but to those of us educated a few decades ago what today is called 'Standard English" we used to call "Bonehead English"!

You're right in theory, Dre. Once again, the devil is in the details. Imagine how big a hydro electric dam has to be to power a city like Toronto.. We're not talking a few swimming pools here! We're talking an appreciable fraction of Niagara Falls. A hydro storage system would have to be large enough to supply a city's worth of power. It would need to be a fair sized lake! Places to build such a lake and dam, with a lower collection basin equally large for the water, that are also close enough to the planned wind farm to negate excessive transmission line losses are not found like service centres every 10 miles along the 401. You would have to have a natural fall in elevation between the holding lake and the collection basin as well, as trying to do it with a water tower is also likely to be prohibitively large. Again, the difficulty is in the scale. What is practical or at least possible for one household with one small perhaps homemade wind turbine gets rapidly out of hand when scaled up to a wind farm to supply commercial quantities of kilowatts.

Capacitors don't do much of the work, TB. They are a necessary part to smooth out the power but the voltages have to be in the ballpark in the first place. Capacitors are NOT batteries! They store power but they want to release it almost instantaneously. So they can smooth out a ragged sinewave but they can't bring a low voltage up to a desired higher one for any sort of time. We're still lacking any sort of battery that can operate at a scale big enough for a windfarm to supply a town or city with the battery taking the load when the wind dies or slows down, charging up during the windy periods. There are small scale solutions for an individual home owner but my mind boggles at the thought of a compressed air tank large enough for a city like Toronto!

Geez Louise, Jack! Still to your words, for Pete's Sake! You're starting to remind me of McGuinty yourself...

Yeah, that's a valid viewpoint. Me, I guess I'm more jaded by my work experiences. The co-workers I've known that were "good in groups" were often NOT good managers! They just got by with "schmoozing" and never did much of anything that was positive to overall productivity. I recognize management skills but I'm talking about "Grima Wormtongues" here!

Actually, the quote threw me at first until I realized that it had been "anglicized", perhaps for the benefit of the new generations. I'm 57 and have read and seen that quote many times but it always went as Burns actually wrote it: "But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy! " Things keep getting watered down for dummies, I guess. The centre cannot hold...

Here's the link: http://www.thespec.com/News/Local/article/807271 "When they were about to leave Sunday night, the British government refused to give them visas because the U.S. State Department wouldn't guarantee that they would let them back in without American or Canadian passports. The Iroquois national team has traditionally been allowed to use native passports." I seem to remember one poster here on MLW who some time ago had insisted that native passports were valid and internationally recognized. I also was surprised to see that apparently Britain is the main problem in this instance! Gee, couldn't someone just wave a copy of The Silver Covenant Chain Treaty at them and clear all this up?

You have made the claim about the violence before. You would have us believe that its possible that Caledonia townsfolk crept ninja-like through the native protest lines to reach and blow up an electrical transformer, blacking out the area for several days, in order to make the protesters look bad. The very idea is flatly absurd! That's worthy of a 9/11 conspiracy theory that the Americans blew up their own Twin Towers, or that they never put a man on the Moon. You may be trying to establish some lawyer-trick "reasonable doubt" but no one who lives in the real world would ever believe it. As for your claim that 80% of Canadians want to settle land claims, you're moving the goal posts AGAIN! This seems to be one of your standard approaches to debate. I have never said that I have any issue with native land claims! My differences are solely and only with protester TACTICS! I don't agree with attacking innocents or targeting them for their race, whether they're white, native or Martian! I say again, if the protesters had chosen to block roads into Queens Park I might have supported them. If they ran ATV's through McGuinty's back yard I would have cheered them on! Most of what the SN protesters did directly and negatively impacted the residents of the town, first and foremost! That is what I find unforgiveable and no amount of damage control propaganda can change history. Sometimes your attempts to twist what occurred are worthy of Goebbels. The SN protesters wronged their townsfolk neighbours simply because they were white and they were handy! It's as simple as that! That's why I compare them to the KKK. It was never the townspeople who had the power in their hands to settle land claims. The protesters had no problem however targeting them first. Can you name ANY protest action against specific individuals in government by the protesters at SN? Did they block Dianne Finley's driveway? Two wrongs never make a right! Tell it to Galtieri!

A wise woman once said that there are no contradictions, just wrong premises, Molly! It seems especially true in politics. We get confused thinking that politicians are actually trying to address a problem and/or come up with something that works. When we see screwed up results that could easily have been avoided we are puzzled, thinking that surely even a politician couldn't be that stupid! The answer is that we're wrong about their goals. They never cared about things working in the first place! They simply cared about getting political credit. "Green" stuff is perfect for this. Most folks don't really understand the issues so they tend to give support and approval based on a politician or government APPEARING to do something! The effort is enough. Nobody understood their plan in the first place! I mean, look how the rationale for this new "eco-fee" is supposed to fund disposal of hazardous materials. Look at the list of items in one post. Imagine yourself squirting that lock de-icer into the key slot of your car. Once you've squirted out that stuff, how do you intend to recycle it? We already have a venue for empty plastic bottles but the de-icing liquid is long gone. Sometimes much of what we hear from these "eco-warrior" groups reminds me of kids making spaceships or cars out of empty cardboard boxes, scratching out instrument panels with crayon! Yet when you realize that often no one is really trying to do something that works it all makes more sense.

Not necessarily. The sad thing about programmes like the HST is that they can be just as expensive to repeal as to implement! If Hudak were to achieve power and repeal the HST he would have to pay back the federal bribe that McGuinty received to take the deal. He would also likely have to give business rebates to cover their costs to re-convert their accounting systems. Plus, we see only the obvious part of having to pay the HST. Behind the scenes many things are also set up to use the money! He would have to spend the money and time resources to cover those as well. Rest assured, the Liberals in Opposition would be making sure that Ontarioans were all well aware of the monies Hudak would be spending. While perhaps a majority of voters would be happy at an HST repeal it's possible that the negatives could be significant, especially if Hudak acquired some other negatives during his term. As for the NDP, they love ALL taxes! Their end goal is for them to get ALL the money and then they will give each of us back as much as they think we should get, according to their own dictum "To each according to their ability, to each according to their need". Fortunately, it will be a LONG time before we have to worry about an NDP government here in Ontario! So I don't blame Tim for not making the promise. I'm not happy about it but if you're not a realist then you will never come up with anything that actually works. I have a hate list of McGuinty actions that is miles long! Broken promises, taxes that are called something else and expensive programs like what he's doing with electricity. Surely a vote for Hudak could be worthwhile in enough other areas! Remember, we're Canadians. We don't get GREAT choices anyway! We only get to pick who smells the least!

Simply 'reply' to a specific msg. That msg will then appear in your edit/reply frame as a quote, with all the references. You add your own reply after it. It's considered good form to edit out chunks of a really long quoted msg, leaving only those parts pertinent to the point you wish to rebut. Some of the posts can get rather long and if people keep quoting them in replies it gets rather overwhelming. It also unnecessarily inflates the bandwidth used by the board and somebody somewhere has to pay for that!