Wild Bill

Cite, please? Harper may have wanted to appear as if the rift between Alliance and Mulroney of the PCs had been healed but I seriously doubt that he would have accepted him as a "closest adviser"! Harper actively and cheerfully worked hard to destroy Mulroney's party! Mulroney was Satan Incarnate to Reform! Go on! Find something to substantiate your claim! Convince me!

I agree there are various PR systems. The fact that we were only offered one flawed in the manner I described made me deeply suspicious as to the motives and character of those supporting it! As for "going your entire life without representation", welcome to the club! I'm a classic liberal at heart! After 57 years I've given up ever expecting such a ballot choice, let alone actually having such a representative MP or MPP! In Canada a modern liberal stands for whatever might win, at this particular moment only.

It does get rather samey, doesn't it Morris? Lemme see if I got the picture. Arab protest groups routinely fire rockets at random into Israeli residential areas. Suicide bombers blow up school kids and civilians every day. Some Arab countries cheerfully provide money, rockets and arms to these groups. Some of these countries have publicly vowed and even written it into their constitutions that they will try to "wipe Israel off the map of the Earth!", while racing hurriedly to develop the atomic weapons that will make it possible for them to do that. So Israel has an embargo, where they stop shipping to inspect the cargoes to make sure they are not carrying armaments. Some Arab protesters on one of the ships choose to attack the Israelis as they come on board, with methods that could maim or kill. The protesters vow to either drive the Israelis away or become martyrs. Well, they got their wish! They're martyrs! The soldiers fired back! Can't blame them. Why on earth should they have to stand there while the protesters tried to kill them? The martyrs have proved victorious! The whole world seems to be blaming the Israelis! The protesters have accomplished far more than any suicide bomber could ever have hoped to do! Well worth it, by their values. Me, I'm still wondering about some things. Although various countries that had ports of departure for the flotilla have all claimed that there was nothing that could harm Israel in the cargoes that means nothing. Smugglers don't follow the rules, after all. They would have loaded contraband AFTER the ships had left those ports! Has anyone heard of any inspections of the ships after they were seized by Israel? Have any countries been willing to send their own inspectors? Have CNN or even AL-Jazeera been allowed on board? I would have thought that the protesters, assuming their innocence, would have DEMANDED such inspections afterward, inviting any and all that were anywhere handy to look for themselves! Perhaps I just missed it.

Things are not that simple, wyly! Some of us have been against PR for other reasons than selfishness! The PR systems proposed so far and ESPECIALLY the one that appeared on the previous Ontario ballot didn't just address the lack of power to the smaller parties. They wanted to tilt the result in their favour! It's one thing to want better representation. It's quite another to want the extra MPs or MPPs selected by the parties themselves and not the people directly! As a populist the idea appalled me. Another factor is that so far the proposed systems ignored any need to preserve geographical representation. If your riding gets an extra representative it's natural to want one from your riding and not from 3000 miles away! Some Toronto type folks claim it doesn't make any difference but if you live in a "small town" riding it absolutely DOES! Toronto is NOT like the rest of Canada! One good thing about the First Past the Post system is that it sets a minimum bar to screen out "noise" candidates. There are always "yogic flyer" candidates that really don't represent a significant portion of the citizenry. Trying to accommodate EVERY Tom, Dick and Wingnut is both expensive and ultimately futile! If they can't achieve a minimum majority in a riding then you have to ask if they deserve anything at that level. Mind you, the real need for some sort of PR improvement is not at the riding level. A few hundreds of voters in many ridings adds up to a more respectable number of citizens who share some points of view and there's a good argument they deserve some change to the system! However, so far that's not at all what has been offered to us. The Ontario offering looked to me like solely and only a system to give disproportionately more power to those parties that are perennially unsuccessful in attracting any sort of mainstream support. They knew full well that they would never, ever increase their share of the popular vote so they wanted a system that would give them more power anyway! What's more, they wanted the freedom to appoint their own members and ignore any geographical ties in their selection! Screw them and the horses they rode in on!

Margrace, do YOU know how a motor works? Or a generator? Can you replace a plug on a lamp? The technical problems with alternative power have been stated repeatedly in this thread and then you jump in with a post that ignores all of them! They are based on the Laws of Mother Nature and she couldn't care less if you're a big businessman or a poli-sci student.

Jack, you and others in this thread keep dodging around an essential point. Western alienation is real! You can disparage it and threaten to hang it all you want but it is there and it will not go away. That being the case, the question is how do you deal with it. Keep telling Albertans that they are simply whiners with no basis at all for their frustration and you're not just telling them to leave if they don't like it. You're telling them you WANT them to leave, as fast as possible! There are a lot of people out west and they represent a lot of votes. Unfortunately, because of the structure of our federal system, they have never had strong representation for their region. Historically, they HAVE been screwed over in favour of the East, more than once! If Central Canada keeps telling the other provinces to just "Shut up and soldier! Who gives a damn if you have a legitimate gripe or not!" then eventually it will be no surprise that Central Canada will be the ONLY part of Canada left! I've seen this attitude a few times at hobby clubs, only on a smaller scale, of course. You have an executive running the club that has become an old boy's clique. Any new blood is snubbed when they try to give input. If they complain they are told "That's the way it is so be loyal and shut up!" It's no surprise that the new blood tends to disappear over the years. Eventually the club starts to shrink, as the old boys die off and no new ones are interested in joining up. It's human nature for people to join groups for mutual advantage. Members who are treated as just a source of club dues and in tough times are used as cannon fodder cannot help but become resentful and feeling disenfranchised. You've all been railing against Albertans for many pages of posts in this thread. If I were a new member reading your messages and I was from Alberta I think I would be rather pissed at the lot of you right now! You're the best thing to happen to the Wild Rose recruitment campaign in months! "Albertans! Stop whining! You have absolutely no substance to your complaints! There is no need to ever change anything! If you keep doing it we will either hang you or throw you out of Confederation!" Canadian unity? Some of you guys could set Dale Carnegie back 100 years!

At Harper, of course! Haven't you heard? Mulroney is now accepted as Harper's longest and best friend! Forget all those years with the Reform Party! It was all just a misunderstanding! To be fair, Harper asked for this confusion himself. I guess he thought it was part of the healing process after the Alliance and the old Progressive Conservative parties merged. Trouble was, no sooner had he begun the process of welcoming Mulroney as an "elder statesman" of the new party when the Airbus Scandal broke! Immediately Harper tried to distance himself from Brian but it was too late. No good deed ever goes unpunished! Still, have no fear! If Ignatieff stays true to form he will indeed shoot himself in the foot. The man is truly inept.

I can hear Al Capone laughing in his grave! Prohibition is a tactic of the "holier than thou" brain dead! How many hospitals would the anti-drug money buy?

I guess I should tell my wife and all her friends to stop bothering to go shopping across the border. All the savings are apparently imaginary! Seemed real to me, I must admit. Milk and eggs for about a third of what we pay here. Shoes for less than 25%, with a much better variety and selection. Tops Supermarket must use air-borne drugs in their store to fool all the Canadians. I have a mental picture of Smallc standing at the Rainbow Bridge waving at the returning shoppers, shouting "You didn't save any money! Things are cheaper at home! I have statistics to prove that your savings are all imaginary!"

I don't think we live as good today, Jack! I remember how in the 70's I never had to worry about finding a job. I'd go out in the morning and find a job before noon! The person doing the hiring was almost always the person who would be your supervisor. He didn't worry much if you had all sorts of accredited post-high school courses. He would ask you questions to satisfy himself if you had the background and especially the aptitude for training. I had no problem paying for an apartment, a car, household expenses and several nights a week hoisting a few beers while watching a rock and roll band! My father had raised us four kids on just his income. Mom stayed at home. He was a steelworker and managed a modest house, a car and a surprising number of "toys" like a colour TV, a finished rec room, a fireplace and the like. Now it takes both marriage partners working to provide a similar level of living. The only difference is that the "toys" have become much cheaper! So it takes both of you to cover the mortgage, cars and all the main expenses but it's easier to buy DVD players and outfit that rec room with some home theatre. My father's annual income was about $6000 when he bought his house for $22,000. That's a ratio of about 3.7. The average income today is around $45,000 for a non-elderly, single earning individual, as per this link: http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/famil05a-eng.htm?sdi=income Assuming EVERYTHING has stayed the same in living costs after adjusting for inflation, that ratio of 3.7 means you could afford a house costing $166,500! Of course, everything has NOT stayed the same! Taxes are higher. User fees nickel and dime us everywhere. Gasoline is MUCH more expensive! In 1971, my best friend's dad bought a brand new Plymouth Duster for $2200! Electricity was much cheaper. We hadn't run up the debt of all the patronage that went on building the nukes! How much of a house do you think you can REALLY buy for that kind of annual income? What's the average price of a home these days? In St. Catherines we have stats for 2008 showing a detached bungalow (like my dad's house, to keep apples with apples) going for $204,000 in 2008. In Burlington we see $316,500. Toronto shows over half a million dollars, more in some areas of the city. Here's the link: http://www.stcatharines.ca/forbusiness/ecodevt/eco_dev_market.asp Looks to me like our living standard has slid by about 50%, if it takes more than 2 incomes to provide a similar living standard formerly supported by just one. That's one of the great things about getting old. If you've got a reasonably good memory it's a lot harder for the "powers that be" to snow you with BS contrary to what you experienced first hand! It's natural for every generation to focus on their own status quo, never thinking about previous history to develop an idea of whether we're on a positive or a negative long term trend.

I can't help but think that "2010 to be Canada's Decade" is just "rah rah" spin. I have heard that exact same prediction since I was a lad in the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, 2000 and now in 2010. At the start of every new decade some politician makes this prediction and everyone stands around beaming at each other. By itself, the prediction really doesn't mean anything, one way or the other. It's just another "Go Team! Give it one for the Gipper" inspirational cliche.

I'm surprised it took so long for someone to make this point, Morris! This is NOT the first time North Korea has done such a thing. It's not the second, either. Every few years it seems to happen. How long can a country let such go on? Every couple of years some other country will kill 50-100 of your citizens and threaten total war if you retaliate! Do you continue to pay such blood tribute forever? It's funny how appeasement is always such a popular policy when it has such a miserably poor record in the long term. It also seems it's never championed by the victim but rather by the bystanders, who think it's a reasonable price for SOMEONE ELSE to pay, if it keeps the status quo from getting out of hand and affecting themselves.

Step back a bit and look again, AG! Of course criminal elements will always find a piece of everything for themselves. The question is, will they be participating to the same extent they are now? After Prohibition ended we still saw and see crime with booze. However, the levels involved are vastly different! Today we have some illegal booze coming through the border reserves to escape the duties. That's a far cry from Prohibition levels. If the taxation is not too onerous people tend to buy through legal channels. It's only when taxes make the difference in legal and illegal pricing so ridiculously high that contraband flourishes. Back in the early 90's when Quebec, Ontario and the Feds cut the price of a carton of cigs down to $25 from over $50, to match the contraband price, the smuggling problem shrunk to a pittance overnight! I vividly remember those days. I was an "outside salesman" and once a week my route took me through the Six Nations Reserve. There must of been a hundred kiosks selling smokes along that stretch of rural highway. I would buy at least two dozen cartons, for family and work mates. I didn't smoke myself. I also never charged a dime in profit. I just was so offended by government hypocrisy that I enjoyed the chance to thumb my nose at politicians in general. I went along the same route the week the taxes were reduced and already most of the smoke huts were gone! I always wondered why so quickly. Why the rush? Then I realized that they all likely were just leasing their small spot of land so it made sense that they'd not want to pay any unnecessary rent. Anyhow, I'm just pointing out that there is rarely an absolutist solution but that doesn't meant we shouldn't do anything!

We've already discussed this. I guess it was before you dropped in. We don't have grids with that distribution capacity over large enough areas of geography. We would have to build them. We also do not have all the necessary technology at hand. We would have to develop it. The necessary building and developing will also cost us a LOT of money and will take a few years at least to make happen. We have barely enough generating capacity for the present demand. If McGuinty closes down coal fired generators and replaces them with wind turbines then when the wind stops we will have MUCH less available capacity! This is why technical details should never be left to politicians and political science students. If you don't know how to build a generator or a motor yourself then you're simply not qualified to make these decisions. Judging by McGuinty's words, I wouldn't trust him to replace a plug on a lamp! He and his people obviously have zero background in understanding this technology. His initial promise to close down the coal-fired plants while being totally ignorant of the need to be able to replace that power set the tone for everything he's suggested since. The man is a "techno-rube", pure and simple! The problem is that all of us in the province are going to pay the cost of his ignorance! What he needs to do is to keep going with the wind turbines, get some more nukes up and running to provide all the backup capacity we need and THEN shut down the coal generators! He won't do this because he feels political pressure to close them down before the next election. The nukes will take much longer to be built and come on stream. So he will most likely have to buy power elsewhere, at whatever gouging price and assuming New York has excess available, or we will have blackouts. It's that simple! If you don't have enough power WHEN YOU NEED IT the lights will go out!

Well, I haven't partaken in decades so I'm not sure if I'd bother getting back into the habit but I suppose I might do 3-4 joints over a weekend. I really can't imagine doing any more than that. In fact, given that today's product is supposed to be stronger I might actually do less!

Assuming that's true only for the sake of argument, so what? What happens when the wind stops? Since you can't store power in a large central grid then you must either build more conventional generators for backup or suffer blackouts on windless days. Unless you have some solution the experts haven't heard of that you care to share...

Well, I'm not looking at stats, I will admit. My business is building and servicing equipment like guitar amps for the entertainment industry. I have hundreds of musician customers and see at least 3-4 of them every day. Perhaps your town is different but your comments are 100% at variance with what my customers tell me and what I've seen for myself around town. We didn't see the rise of DJs 'cuz they provided better music. Rather, as the industry got poorer some venues went to DJs, 'cuz they were cheaper! A good live band was always a better show. Anybody's kid brother could spin a record! No talent involved there. We still have a lot of live music here in Hamilton. It's just that the musicians don't get paid very well for it! A typical rate for one night is $200. That's for a single act or a 6 piece band. Once you split the take it's far less than minimum wage. The musicians are doing it for love, exposure or in the case of the older players, inertia! The better money is in concert venues, corporate gigs and ocean cruises. It's just that the entry path formerly offered by playing clubs has been mostly closed off. Oh well, things keep sliding down. The centre cannot hold. One generation fought to keep us free and then put men on the Moon. Now, we have hiphop and reality TV shows. We really, really need a "B" Ark!

Hard to say. We know the figures involved are HUGE but we don't know them exactly! It will also depend on how MUCH the state taxes the product! There are taxes on beer and alcohol. Everyone knows that it's cheaper to make your own but relatively few people do. That's because the taxes are reasonable enough that for most users it's just not worth the effort to make their own. Contrast this with the situation in Ontario, where the taxes have been jacked so absurdly high that estimates cite that at least HALF of all cigarettes consumed are contraband! I always wondered how the stats were collected for such products, given that the suppliers were highly unlikely to file reports. A recent newspaper article explained it. Apparently, people are paid to collect butts in smoking places and count the legals and "illegals". The article cited the delicious irony of how contraband butts where picked up on the sidewalk outside of the Supreme Court! Anyhow, if California levies taxes that keep the retail price reasonable to discourage people growing their own, or perhaps even keeps CULTIVATION illegal to protect the state's interest, I'm sure that the tax revenue will be very large! It might be a stretch to make the claim that pot can singlehandedly wipe out the national deficit and revive a Mars colony space program but nonetheless, I doubt if the treasurer of California would turn his nose up at it.

If you start with 100 places and then have 80 go under, it's not surprising that the 20 that are left can be busier than before. My point? Your one local pub is not an entire industry. Neither is one nightclub frequented by your kids. Tell it to the former manager of Lulu's, a club that boasted the biggest bar in the world! It was in the Kitchener/Waterloo region and used to have VERY big name acts and was a very active bar for years. The K/W area was one of the first targets of the anti-tobacco movement. Lulu's was one of the first casualties. The owner made no secret that the anti-smoking laws made it impossible for him to attract enough customers to make a profit. That was when I first heard the claim that eliminating smoking would INCREASE business! Incidently, there is still no equivalent to Lulu's in business today. Clubs are far smaller, trying to get by with drinking, a bit of dancing, some pool tables and moving a lot of pub food. This is a much smaller venue than before. We used to see several hundred people in dance clubs. Now we are lucky to find a place that can hold 40-50 and its rarely full. That level of patronage can't possibly sell enough beer to pay for a decent band. That industry has been virtually destroyed, primarily because of the anti-smoking movement. Another claim was that it would protect employees. I guess that was true. They rapidly became FORMER employees since their place of employ closed down and they had no jobs. Still, it was true that they were no longer exposed to passive smoke. The area is a University town and it hurt many students in traditional jobs of waitressing and bussing tables. I'm making no judgements as to whether or not we're better off from a health aspect. I just take exception to what were bald-faced lies as to the financial aspects of smoking bans. To say it's all worth it is one thing. To claim that it could and was achieved with no hurt is quite another. Usually, the ones who claim it didn't hurt financially have had little or no long term experience with clubs and music so they were and are pulling stats out of their butts! This is the part that rattled their credibility with me. What else might they lie about? Obviously, the anti-smoking movement is largely madeup of people who believe that "the ends justify the means". On any issue, such people have always frightened me!

Actually, while they weren't as expensive as you implied they were still not cheap. Casinos and bars/clubs used them for years and they worked great! There was an issue a decade or so ago in Hamilton where clubs invested in such ventilation systems to keep the air "pure" in the non-smoking areas. However, despite promises from the local politicians that the status quo would be maintained for some years the local council suddenly up and enforced total non-smoking! This meant that all those clubs had spent the money on ventilation systems for nothing! They had no time to recover their investment and essentially it was a dead loss. That hurt! As a matter of interest, while the clubs ran with smoking and non-smoking areas at no time did anyone ever see the non-smoking areas full and the smoking areas empty! You ALWAYS saw a full up smoking area with a line up to get in while the non-smoking area held only a few patrons! It was pretty obvious that non-smokers were not fervent patrons of the clubs anyway. Perhaps it was the music. Their tastes may have run more towards Walter Ostanek. Whatever, when the scene became totally non-smoking we did NOT see a big increase in non-smokers coming out now that the air was "pure"! Rather, what we saw was pretty well just the smokers, who would run out to the alleys between sets to grab a puff. Within a few years, their numbers started to decline. They drifted away to other forms of entertainment where they could also indulge their habit. It was conclusive that in general non-smokers didn't want to go to clubs anyway! What's more, attendance went DOWN and not UP when smoking was totally banned! Clubs had been struggling from other factors as well and the non-smoking rules seemed to be just the final straw. They started going bankrupt in droves! Politicians became very embarrassed. They had bought the line that non-smoking rules meant that thousands of non-smokers who only stayed away from clubs and music because of the smoke would come out in herds to fill non-smoking clubs. The club industry would be even healthier, making downtown areas fun and filling municipal tax coffers! No one mentioned that non-smokers never came out to the non-smoking areas before, no matter how well ventilated. So here in Hamilton they threw a bone, allowing clubs to stay open till 2:00 AM instead of 1:00. Big deal! Now the owners had to stay open to an empty house for an extra hour! This was a decade ago and things have recovered a slight amount. The scene seems stable, although nowhere near as large as it used to be. With non-smokers not filling in the slack, you have to wonder why they did all the bitching! It only makes sense if the real goal was never to protect non-smokers from passive smoke but rather to remove places where smoking could be practiced. Clubs featuring cover bands and dancing had been a thriving form of entertainment for over a century. Now it is a shadow of its former self. Some clubs do remain but in my mind they are not as "healthy" in other areas but smoking. We see mostly hiphop clubs where odds are high that someone will shoot someone else with an illegal gun (likely unregistered!) or techopop 'raves' where a girl has to watch her drink to be sure someone doesn't spike it with a 'date rape' drug. Oh well, at least there's no passive smoke! Ned Flanders won another one!

Then why does Harper poll so much better than Ignatieff as best choice for PM? Why do the Tories enjoy a 10 point lead while the Liberals are now lower than they were under Dion? The Liberals have consistently been sinking lower and lower and lower. Doesn't seem that THEY are proving themselves a better choice to me! We've agreed that we see only poor choices. To me, that means tie goes to the incumbent.

I think you're right on this one, Argus. The Liberals do seem more like muck-rakers than honest investigators. Their plan seems to be to just rake up whatever muck they can and hope something sticks. There's no sense of substance to their muck and for that reason they keep slowly losing popular respect. Political junkies like ourselves may get all wigged out on some particular point of order or legality but to the "masses" it's all rather esoteric. In other words, it's not really interesting muck being raked and the muck-rakers keep getting more and more boring. It's kind of a desperation tactic, like spending your entire paycheck on lottery tickets. They are obviously hoping that something big will come up in the muck and the Canadian people will rise up in anger against Harper, to then sweep the Liberals back into power! I guess this is easier than actually developing leadership and substantive policies of your own! Perhaps the Liberals are so confident that they will find something of substance in the muck because they think the Tories are the same as themselves. Who knows, maybe they will find something. Still, I'm glad it's them spending all that time and energy and not me!

Just read the 'wiki' on Iron Dome, Mr. B. Seems well within our technology limits today. Merely a question of will to provide funding. All this from the microcomputer chip. In 1977 I was a young lad starting his career in selling electronic parts to industry and manufacturers. Intel released the world's first 5 volt only 8 bit microcomputer chip just as I was putting a stapler on my desk! Shortly I was fielding orders for Eproms to video game manufacturers, for hundreds of thousands of dollars per order! Those were heady times. You sparked a question with me and I wonder if you might share some comment. If a system can calculate the ballistics of an incoming projectile so quickly it can launch something to intercept it, whether it be another missile or a laser beam as with the Skyguard system, couldn't it also accurately calculate the point of origin? Couldn't such a defense system theoretically figure out precisely where the rocket launcher was based and accurately launch a retaliatory strike, with a warhead calculated to destroy the target with a minimum of collateral damage? Surely that would tend to limit the number of Hezbollah repeat offenders!

Who do you mean by "our society"? Yourself and your friends down at Timmy's? Millions of Canadians disagree with you. I guess they're NOT "our society"! Perhaps we should put the issue to a national referendum? I think you might be quite surprised. You sound like a member of the Christian Right, who believes that they actually are the majority, it's just that the majority tends to be silent. Stockwell Day found out he was dead wrong on that perception when he won the leadership of the old Reform Party. I've no doubt he cringes even today at the sight of a Barney the Dinosaur stuffed doll. Hell, "our society" as a general rule couldn't explain how an electric lamp works, even though it's a simple device over a century old. Wasn't that long ago "our society" thought the Sun orbited around the Earth. Wouldn't surprise me if a majority still did! Anyhow, when you make a claim as to how "our society" thinks on an issue you might consider getting outside of your own Walter Ostanek Polka Fan Club and asking a reasonable number of people how they really feel!

Non sequitur. I thought my point was clear. If non-smokers were clearly warned that a restaurant allowed smoking they could stay out. How on earth would they then be at risk? If a mother has her car windows down as she drives her kids to school, realistically to how much smoke would her children be exposed? What if it were a convertible? I made no comment whatsoever about the dangers of passive smoke and yet that's what you bring up, ignoring the point I actually DID make! Do you wonder why I keep putting you on 'ignore'?