Wild Bill

"A duck is still a duck..." Aren't you proving MY point? A liberal will always be crooked because they were before? Same logic! Or is it that only conservatives can be ducks? Your partisan'slip' is showing!

Gee, the Reform Party sprang up because they hated the Mulroney Tories for thought, word and deed. They drove the old PC party down to 2 seats. They had pathetic remnants of PCs in the Maritimes crying in their beer, calling the Reform/Alliance Satans incarnate! The two parties eventually merge, with like a 90%/10% split in favour of the Alliance. Now, some people keep insisting that Mulroney's party and the present CPC are the same thing. I've been scratching my head trying to think of why. Suddenly, it hit me! Of course! They are both called Tories! How could I have been so dense? They have been labeled with the same name! So of course the very idea of the initial split in favour of a brand new party and all the animosity against Mulroney and his Progressive Conservatives must have been all a dream! Same letters, in the same order! Proof positive! How can I ever get by when I rely on first hand experience and memory instead of listening to you? Gee, I just didn't realize that Mulroney is a hero and integral founding part of the present CPC. Why, how ever could I have gotten such an idea? Thanks again!

Don't confront me none, Molly! I've never given a rat's ass for the detainees!

Oh boohoo, boohoo! Max, get a grip! She's a POLITICIAN, for Pete's Sake! Save your sympathy! She'll live!

Quite right! I've always suspected the "sweet smellers" are always in the minority! However, the partisans who can only see evil through their right eye will try to paint this as indicative of the entire Tory caucus being crooks and therefore not worthy of our vote. The fact that this leaves us only an alternative that has been PROVEN to be corrupt will be airily dismissed as trying to say that "the other guys are bad too". Well, the other guys ARE bad! To a much higher degree than the Tories! Some of us still haven't forgotten how much Adscam money was never traced. Certainly all we ever got for sure was ONE culprit serving some time and a PITTANCE of the money returned! Me, I like to be an equal opportunity critic of politicians! I support the Tories at present only because in philosophy of government they stink less to my nose than the alternatives. Give me a better choice and I'll dump them in a flash! In the meantime, I refuse to base my judgement simply by who's party I like or don't like. So I'll cheer as I watch Shory's ass fly out the door of Parliament! However, when we're watching pigs fly, don't try to convince me that only TORY pigs can fly! Meanwhile, when the law of averages pops up a LIBERAL pig, keep your eyes on Ignatieff and see if he has the guts to prune his own party. There's a saying in business that "Anyone can make a mistake or have something bad crop up. The REAL test of character is in how they handle it! If they spend more time in covering their ass than in fixing the problem then you shouldn't give them your business."

TB, government types ALWAYS have yet another "system" to make things work! They see reality as some sort of clockwork mechanism, where if the clock just won't track time accurately to the real world they think all they have to do is add yet more tiny gears inside the mechanism. So we get laws after laws and departments after departments yet far too often real world problems still persist. How about Prohibition or lifestyle laws? Those are always a stunning success! Too many citizens buy into the same sort of thinking. If a political party passes a new law, they think that is the same thing as actually solving the problem. Often the new law has no teeth, with no money behind it for enforcement and no real punishment for anyone who IS caught! The party reaps the photo op benefit for free! Worse yet, sometimes the party and the people BOTH believe the same BS! Often this disconnect from reality stems from an academic philosophy, where "having read a book or an article" leads someone to believe they actually have an indepth, detailed grasp of a problem or its solution. Hence someone like eyeball giving a technical "solution" that someone like yourself, actually EDUCATED in the specifics, recognizes as too academic to satisfy all the real world details. After reading your posts and especially when you mention your background, I have to ask, are you a big fan of Dilbert? Most IT guys are. You've been sounding like Dilbert trying to argue with his pointy-headed manager!

I guess we just differ and can never agree. I'm willing to admit perhaps a minor role for the Harris government, but very minor. You see, I've worked in the materials testing field. I know what is involved in doing a test. I can appreciate how important it is to test water! Anybody over the age of 6 years could understand that! Apparently, some folks blame Harris more than the Koebels. They seem to feel that they were just witless pawns who were left adrift for lack of supervision. I'm sorry. I can never buy into this! If someone shoots into a crowd, I don't blame the mall cop. I blame the shooter, first and foremost! Stan Koebel was hired by the Walkerton Council to do the job of monitoring and testing the city water supply. They weren't asking him to do rocket science! The testing and the procuring of water samples is a simple thing. You just have to follow a few simple steps religiously. He chose to become a drunk and not bother, instead! He was smart enough to falsify samples! Seven people DID die, and another 2500 became ill, out of a town of 5000! Stan eventually received a year in jail. His brother Frank got nine months of house arrest. I would have tried them for murder! Or at least, manslaughter! How far have we gone when we can let two such miserable bags of skin off so lightly and forever after make partisan attacks at a provincial premier, just because we didn't happen to like his politics! Do we not have any sense of individual responsibility anymore? May Stan and Frank forever be your neighbours! Don't worry! If anything happens to you we will punish McGuinty!

Nice dream but do you have any specific details on how to make it happen? You're up against the same problem we've had since Man came down from the trees. Some people have an instinctive work ethic but most don't. Back in the late 60's there were all kinds of communes out west. Some friends of mine visited one and told me how the commune had been forced to institute a custom. Everybody new was given 3 days grace, but not told about it! During those 3 days the regular commune members would watch them. Some folks had the manners to try to earn their keep, helping with chores and the farming for the food that fed them all. Unfortunately, most spent their 3 days getting high and sitting on their ass, while eating the food that others had worked to grow and cook! On the 3rd night they would have a campfire where everyone would attend. They would ask a newcomer who had failed his grace period to stand up and then told him that he would have to leave! The regulars would all start to sing "Hit the road Jack, and don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more!" Some of the lazy buggers were shocked and left in tears but it didn't matter. The commune had learned the hard way that they just couldn't support freeloaders. It wasn't just the fairness of having everybody contribute. It was just that the more people there were the more the work had to be done and a few hard workers could never do all the work for a large group that sat on their ass but still ate! While you're making a wish, wish up a pony for me!

Sorry Michael. I guess you have such a hard on for Harris that you just can't see reason. You are blaming the cop while letting the real perpetrator totally off the hook. To me, that's just nuts! Could you have looked in the eyes of a Walkerton mother with a baby sick from the water and seriously told her to ignore Stan Koebel and just hate Harris for cutting the overseeing budget? Would you seriously have expected her to hate Harris and forgive Stan and his brother? From your words it would appear that you actually would! I think you would have then been surprised at her reaction. If I had been the father rest assured that Harris would not have been the target of my anger!

Nukes would take too long for McGuinty. His goal is not to ensure our electricity supply and presumably at an affordable price. His goal is for himself! He made a promise to dump some coal-fired generators and looked like an idiot when he found out we couldn't afford to lose that amount of power. Now he desperately wants to keep his promise before he faces an election next year. Nukes will take longer than that to go through all the studies, environmental assessments and whatever. So yes, nuclear is the better choice for US, assuming that we don't see the waste and patronage like we had with the Bruce Nuclear plants run up a huge public debt. Wind and solar are better choices for McGUINTY!

Michael, I do think your aversion to Mike Harris affects your perspective! Harris cutting the budget to oversee the water testing was a minor part of the puzzle. Surely the municipality itself , who choose the people involved and work with them everyday are far more responsible to oversee jokers like the Cable brothers than the province itself! There's a case to be made that Harris merely saved some money for redundancy! Moreover, ever since it hit the fan it seemed like Harris' budget cutback was the ONLY factor ever mentioned! It was the sheer intensity of the anti-Harris slant that took away all credibility from the argument, as far as I was concerned. It got so bad I could've sworn that apparently the Cable brothers were just nice guys that made a few understandable mistakes until Harris put a gun to their heads and FORCED them to poison the water! No matter how you slice it, the Cable brothers were 100% responsible. If someone commits a crime you don't let them off the hook because some politician cut back on the number of cops that might have seen them beforehand and warned them not to commit the crime! Even now, years later, any article mentioning the incident will always mention the Harris budget cutback, implying that it was a major factor. As far as I'm concerned, this is a load of horse feathers! The Cable brothers should have been charged with attempted murder, or at least manslaughter! What's more, the Walkerton town council should have been charged with aiding and abetting! Anti-Harris partisans just don't seem to realize that their excessive zeal in condemning Harris also seriously dilutes any blame on the truly guilty parties! Harris' actions are certainly no alibi or excuse for the Cable brothers or the Walkerton town council but their responsibility seems to be conveniently ignored, or admitted only as a footnote to the "Evil Mike Harris". It truly blows my mind!

I think you've touched on the biggest factor when you mention big institutions and monopolies from big utility companies. What is really happening is that we are witnessing the start of a "war" between individual citizens producing their own power and big utilities trying to retain control and stay "big"! Windfarms are "working" in Germany because of subsidies that cannot be maintained forever. Wind and solar need extra "backup" generators for when the wind dies or it's overcast. The cost of such backup could be reduced a lot if we had battery techology that could store megawatts of reserve power but today that's just a dream. For some time yet wind and solar are not going to be able to supply anything but a pittance to the total capacity of a large utility. However, battery technology has lots of cost-effective solutions at the level of an individual's residence! Not everyone has a convenient back yard situation, especially in older parts of a city but still, LOTS of people could use wind and solar just FOR THEMSELVES! And if you added up all the people who potentially could drop off the national grid that would represent a HUGE slash in customers for large, centralized utilities! Here in Ontario, we still have a "stranded debt" for all the years of using nuclear reactors as a patronage slush fund and a gravy train for politicians and their friends that's somewhere to the tune of 30 BILLION dollars! Every homeowner pays a small fee on his electricity bill to pay off that debt. How could that debt be paid if big numbers of homeowners never bought their electricity from the utility company again? There are no "universal fits all" techologies for every application. Different strokes work better for different folks. Wind and solar are no exceptions. They can be a good fit on an individual basis but not so on a large scale. The problem is that we have evolved over a century into a large scale, central supply grid. That grid depends on customers for its very existence. I'm sure the "suits" at the Ontario Power Generating Corporation are not that happy with McGuinty encouraging individual wind and solar installations. Still, if you look closely at his new MicroFit program, it's set up so that there's no batteries involved! The individual does not produce any power for himself! He continues to draw and be billed for the power use in his home in the traditional manner. The power from his wind/solar system is fed directly onto the grid. There are meters on both systems. So he gets his regular bill but he also gets a cheque for the power he produced. Without a battery as a reserve bank, he cannot supply power to himself! He has to stay connected to the grid forever and of course, paying that stranded debt fee! :angry: His only option is to scrounge up a battery bank of his own and go totally off the grid. If he does, he CANNOT sell surplus power to the grid! Obviously, this has been done deliberately to serve the interests of the utility company.

Well, I've mentioned before that I tend to avoid EU products, if I can. I have relatives that are sealers down east. Do unto others as they have done unto you, I say. With some people it's the only way to teach 'em!

If you got rid of copyright and patents then who would bother to invent anything new? It takes hours and hours for days and days to write software programs. How would you pay your rent? Why would you waste your time? Generally, any musician who has to work a day job to pay the bills kinda sucks at music. That's because he just can't spend the time or accumulate the experience when he's gotta eat somehow! So he writes a hit tune but there's no copyright. So it doesn't make him any money. How the hell can that work? Perhaps you can explain it better. It just seems kinda like a creativity killer to me.

Gotta side with you on this one, BC! I've always admired the American "melting pot" and had little respect for our own "mosaic" concept. It touches your heart when you see some American immigrant, hardly able to speak English, taking off his hat at a ball game to cover his heart and sing the anthem with tears in his eyes! To me that sort of patriotism is a great virtue and an American strength. I'm reminded of my Italian inlaws, who came to Canada in 1950. They had chosen Canada as their new home and as far as they were concerned Italy was only a hatful of old memories. They got themselves a Canadian doctor, lawyer, dentist and all. They deliberately would live anywhere but in an Italian "ghetto". When I was courting my wife in the early 80's it made me smile to see her mother, who still had an accent when speaking English so thick it was hard for me to understand, gobbling up English editions of Harlequin Romance novels by the bucketful! My father-in-law was never comfortable with the idea of official multiculturalism. He couldn't understand the need for it! He was a proud Canadian, through and through. Once in a while he would be cheering for an Italian soccer team on the tv but that was only because Canada has never been a serious contender. He flew a Canadian flag on a mast for years at his home. As I said, he came over in 1950. I contrast his attitude with many of those who came over in the 80's and 90's. Totally different philosophy! Hyphenated Canadians, with the accent on their birth country and not Canada. Not all of them, of course. Still, a dismaying number.

Uncle Sam has to go to his mom for the big decisions too, doesn't he? I understand his Mom is Chinese! She holds all his money!

Hey, Mike Harris was no better. So what? Does that make McGuinty right? How about they both were mistaken! Harris forced amalgamation on us in the first place. Since then the resentment seems to be perpetual. How can it ever die when there's not a single success story for amalgamation as far as the quality of service or the taxes necessary to pay for them? It's just salt in the wounds, forever. Argus is quite correct about the economics of wind power but there is still the issue of plunking down a wind farm in an existing neighbourhood where there may be real inconveniences to people who may have lived there for generations! You can't say that there are NO negatives to living beside such farms when McGuinty refuses to even consider the issue! He essentially is saying "WE think this is a good idea so we really don't care if it screws YOU FOLKS!" McGuinty is really just trying to finally fulfill his promise to scrap the coal-fired generators before the next election. That promise really showed how stupid he and his people were. They were totally ignorant of the fact that we couldn't afford to lose that much power and we had nothing immediately available to replace it. If he had turned those generators off Ontario would have been in blackouts! Once he realized he couldn't shut them off he's been dinking around for all these years and finally is pinning his hopes on the wind generators. In the meantime, it would have cost him FAR less to put anti-pollution measures into the coal generators to make them clean and green! Other folks in other states and provinces have done that with no problem. McGuinty has chosen to stick with the idea of just closing coal-fired generators down. That's also the real reason he's ramming wind farms down many communities' throats. He has no time! Studies and consultations would take months if not a few years. McGuinty needs this done before the next provincial election. There's no way he's going to let any homeowners stop him from burying his dirt before the next vote comes up. He has enough negatives on his scoreboard already! Notice how these wind farm complaints are coming from more rural areas where he's not likely to get any votes anyway.

Remember Angus, this thread is talking about PERSONAL generation systems which have differences from commercial generating facilities. You'd be quite correct about a windfarm but for Angus' own home a wind turbine can be a very cost-efficient supply of electricity. Especially if you can "do it yourself" and are good at scrounging materials, like a free tower! Angus, you might consider making that tower a "tilt-over". It would then be far easier for you to work on it, both for installation and for maintenance.

Don't Panic! I'm waiting till you all head out on the "B" Ark!

This is a difficult one. Not for your example. You can't hang someone on a "what if". You can "what if" anything! We have no way of knowing what Hudak would do with another kind of generator. We can only deal with the wind turbine issue and it's more complicated than your OP spells out. Is the fuss against wind turbines by themselves? Or with where McGuinty wants to place them? So far McGuinty and his crew have never impressed me with how they deal with anything the slightest bit technical. I'm still pissed about doing my laundry after 10:00 pm to save on my electrical bill! Frankly, I don't think anyone in his entire caucus could replace a plug on a bedroom lamp. Anyhow, so far McGuinty DOES seem to be plunking these things down where ever he wants and if the residents have issues he just blows them off by saying it's just NIMBYism on their part! Isn't it at all possible that in some situations residents WILL be bothered by a wind farm close by? It's similar to how the city of Hamilton, after drafting all the suburbs into itself with amalgamation, put a methane recovery system into a dump in Glanbrook, a nearby farming community. This was just done as a fait accompli, with no local consultation. True to form for Hamilton, they screwed up the installation and for months the stench drifting over to many farmers homes was so bad that they couldn't sit outside! Now mistakes do happen, of course. Eventually Hamilton fixed the problem. My point however is that at the beginning they blew off the local residents affected as "grumblers" who didn't understand the "needs of the many". That ignited a political firestorm and the Mayor had to do a lot of damage control. Politicians can be arrogant and McGuinty has always struck me as a prime example. Somebody has to champion the underdog. We need more info about this situation before we can take an informed position.

By now you've surely read WIP's post #99. He makes a good point that the majority view in Ontario has always seemed to be that we should provide one public school system and anyone else is on their own. I could live with that, although it would bother my Libertarian bone to have citizens taxed for services they don't receive. Then again, childless people contribute to education through their taxes as well. The rationale seems to be that they receive the benefit of a better working society if the educational system is working well. That's a moot point, if you ask me but I can see why some people would champion it. As a compromise, we could fund ALL other schools to the degree of the taxes it's members contribute! This would be another version of the old Reformer idea of "vouchers", where parents would receive vouchers equivalent to their portion of the educational budget, based on the number of children they have attending. They could then give these vouchers to whatever schools they want. To me, this seems eminently fair but there was a huge wail from the teachers' unions when this was first proposed. Apparently, they were livid at the idea that a parent could pull not just his child but the funding out of a school that was felt to have problems with its teacher(s). Right now unless there's evidence of child molestation teachers are pretty well impervious to any parental concerns.

I've said it many times. Toronto should not just it's own province, it should be its own planet!

Looks like I pushed some buttons with you and BC, AW!

Perhaps you're right, AW. We should stop worrying about increased trade with the USA. If it's not that important to Uncle Sam then we shouldn't fret about it either. There are other countries that are rapidly overtaking the US in terms of trade. China is one obvious example and India is another. China would dearly love to make a deal for our oilsands oil. They could easily lock up the entire production if they were allowed to do so! They already have been buying up huge portions of our mining and smelting industries to get all the metals and such for themselves. I guess we Canadians are living too much in the past and should look elsewhere for our future. I don't think the Chinese would need us to build their bridges for them!

My impression from the media reports that it was not some clear cut knee jerk reaction, at least not totally. However, I just did a google, which gave a Globe and Mail article that the new cirricula had been posted on the Ontario Ministry of Education's site. So I went there and couldn't find any trace of it! Mind you, most government sites are not the easiest for a layman to navigate but I tried my best and used the site's search engine. No luck. I even used the "Wayback" internet search engine to see if I could find an archived copy of the site from more than a month ago that might have the information. Again, no luck. "Down the memory hole, Winston!"?