Wild Bill

Just thought I'd throw another log onto the fire: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/iZeusi+summoned+to+help+break+archipelago+ice/1135252749787 " The Baltic Sea is now under thicker ice than the average in the past ten years. The seven icebreakers of Arctia Shipping are opening sea lanes night and day, but it isn’t enough. There is so much ice that many freighters have had to wait for days in some cases to get the help of an icebreaker. The state has commissioned the help of the privately-owned Zeus. " Don't see what all the fuss is about. We have been reliably informed that the recovering ice is actually just "poor quality ice" and not any indication of a recovery side of any natural cycle. Those freighters should stop whining and just sit tight. All that ice should be gone very quickly and they won't be bothered anymore.

Would it not be simpler to avoid such problems by not having government meddle in the first place? Governments should not subsidize such R & D projects at all, or pick which ones to support. Politicians are simply not qualified to choose and to vulnerable to deception if not flat out corruption. When conventional power gets too expensive the private market seeks ways to offer cheaper solutions to customers. Much of our problems with energy costs can be traced to people like Sir Adam Beck in Ontario, a man who is usually hailed for leading the way with Ontario Hydro as in effect the only source for electricity. Actually, he was a socialist who believed that private generation(and thus competition!) was evil! So we ended up with a government monopoly so incompetent it ran up a debt of over $30 Billion dollars, mostly on sweetheart salaries and sourcing deals for its friends involved in building nuclear reactors. Then socialistic apologists blame nuclear power in itself for being so expensive! It's Kaffeka-esque, to the max!

I think you are missing a few important factors! First, the subsidies are HUGE! This is money taken from taxpayers. How many hospital beds would that translate into in the total budget? Second, governments are very poor at picking areas of R&D to subsidize. When private industry sinks money into R&D they have usually qualified the subject as one worth looking into, to pay off as a profit! It will eventually result in a new product or process that will be valuable to investors. Governments are not doing this with areas like wind and solar power. It's all about scoring green points at election time. People like Harper, Ignatieff and certainly Jack Layton have absolutely no hard science background. They have no idea whether the subsidies will pay off or turn out to be a total waste of money and time. We can pay for widely spaced wind farms so that there's always power coming from somewhere but high and low pressure fronts can cover entire provinces! It could be quite common for half or more of Ontario to have little or no wind at a given time. That's the problem. We have no practical way to store electrical energy. Wind power could have a 1000% over capacity on a Monday and that's of no help at all on a windless Tuesday. You have to have the power when you need it. You can't bank any surplus. That leaves building massive wind farms across the entire country! Remember, you need THOUSANDS of turbines to equal ONE nuclear reactor! Now, how are you going to get that power from one part of the country to another? We don't have a national grid! The wires just aren't there from Manitoba into Ontario or from Quebec to Alberta! So we spend more BILLIONS of dollars! We build a national grid! Unfortunately, as we build it we discover that we don't yet know how to make a grid work with power sharing across such vast distances and besides, the losses in transmission lines that long become ridiculous! At this point and for the foreseeable future, the whole thing just doesn't work! Every techie can plainly see this. Only arts majors who think that if you don't have enough electricity you just need to put more plugs in your house think that wind power will work. Even given our present level of technology, it would be FAR cheaper to have government subsidies to enable every home in Canada to have some amount of self-generation from wind and/or solar power! Leave the present system alone and enable individual people to produce enough power on their own to reduce or eliminate their load on the system. Of course, politicians are NEVER going to agree to any scheme that reduces dependence on centralized, mega-sized systems! Ontario still has at least $30 BILLION dollars in stranded debt from the stupid way they wasted money building nukes and such in the 70's and 80's. It's being paid by a surcharge on each and every homeowner's electric bill. If enough people got off the grid, who would pay that debt? The only hope for individual citizens is to wait for the cost of having their own solar and wind system for their home that's affordable. ANY reliance on a provincial or national power system will ALWAYS be expensive! The government has to pay off the subsidies, after all. Right now a home system costs about $30,000. That means about 15 years before it will have paid for itself. After that the power is free but your system is 15 years old. What about maintenance costs? Nothing lasts forever. Like I've said before, when it comes to picking advisers and decision makers for political policy on such things, anybody with some technical background seems to have been BARRED from the room! The agenda is political. There are lots of companies that will take advantage of a politician's ignorance. Look at Dion and his Green Agenda! There's nobody easier for a techie to con than an academic!

Good point! Look at the mess that happened with corn and ethanol. The whole thing was politically driven for votes in the Corn Belt, with subsidies galore. It sent the price of corn for food soaring! Then the bubble burst. Subsidies were used to create an artificial situation that could not be sustained because the initial premises were not real world but political. Politicians meddle in the market place to achieve political ends, like carbon credits. Since the real world doesn't work like a political situation their meddling fails to achieve their ends.

You must have missed the start of my difference with normanchateau. The original premises involved have nothing to do with your points. Here's what triggered my exceptions: "A Harper supporter suggesting that a university degree is worthless...why am I not in the least surprised? Tell me, typical Harper supporter, where you would suggest that the physicians of tomorrow should be educated. A bible college? A Sunday school? Do you, like Stephen Harper and his Evangelical fundamentalist co-religionists, believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old? Do you, like Stephen Harper and Fred Flintstone, believe that dinosaurs and humans co-existed. Do you, like the ignorant Stephen Harper and George Bush, oppose embryonic stem cell research on religious grounds? What's your hypothesis as to why less than 27% of Canadians with a university education now support CPC versus 40% for LPC?" ---Norman Chateau replying to Bloodyminded, re: his implication that better educated university grads support Harper, conversely Harper's support comes more from the poorer educated. Norman appears to be saying that either you are a well educated university graduate which means you are more likely in your wisdom to be anti-Harper and pro LPC OR you must be some bible thumping fundamentalist neanderthal! He limited the choices, leaving his opponent with only some ridiculously extreme choice that would be impossible to defend. My point was that having a university degree no longer suggests a better likelihood of wisdom and more logical thinking. They tend to be bastions of modern liberal, politically correct "thought". I gave up on universities after Queens banned Jewish lecturers and paid students to prowl the campus eavesdropping on private conversations, butting in if they heard anything politically incorrect and admonishing the speakers. Here's a link: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/letters/story.html?id=c92f9bfc-e0f1-48b6-a9b1-e6f04eff3ade "In their finest moments, universities provide an open and safe environment where students can immerse themselves in higher learning and debate. At their worst, the folks who run these institutions can come up with some strikingly unintelligent and oppressive ideas. If Queen's University authorities believe they are benefiting education by enlisting six student monitors as a cleansing force to eradicate impure thoughts on campus, then it may be time for an overhaul of the school's administration."

It follows from the premise that most modern universities have declined in standards over the past few decades and are often more politically correct than logical in their thinking. In California since the mid 80's a sky high percentage of new university enrollees are made to take what is commonly known as "bonehead english", since the average competency of the high school graduates is so low.

How typical! Here in Ontario we've been merrily replacing stop lights with new, energy saving LED models. Now we're starting to have accidents because LEDs don't generate any heat like the old fashioned bulbs and the lights get covered over with snow and ice! To be fair, this doesn't mean the energy savings and better lifetimes aren't worthwhile. It just means that the people making the decisions as to which models to buy and what specs to demand are simply not qualified! Any high school student who learned how an incandescent bulb and an LED worked would have likely anticipated the problem. I am convinced that anyone wanting a job in political office or bureaucracy who took real science after Grade 6 is barred from getting the position! If they are really any good they are shuffled off to a research institute with some government grants and only allowed to publish what agrees with the government's misconceptions in the first place! We used to call such things as the wind power debacle "Liberal Solutions", meaning "It doesn't have to work as long as we can say we've got one!"

I never said that! I mentioned those other states! My comment was on the cavalier attitude of Charest to expect auto companies to instantly be able to adjust, since the new rules were immediate. You have not addressed my actual post in any way.

Found this in my surfing travels: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html "The new paradigm created by the generation of 1968 is more political and less economy. Without government intervention, utilities normally avoid wind energy. Wind's erratic power feed destabilizes power grids and forces engineers to stand by, always ready to fire up traditional generators. Wind does not fit into an electric supply model made up of steady massive low cost "base load" coal or nuclear plants backed up by on-call natural gas powered "peaker" units which kick in during high demand. No coal or nuclear power plant has ever been replaced by wind energy. Although carbon credit schemes often assign profitable carbon credits to wind farm operators based on a theoretical displacement of carbon emitted by coal or natural gas producers, in reality these plants must keep burning to be able to quickly add supply every time the wind drops off. The formulae do not take into account carbon emitted by idling coal and natural gas plants nor the excess carbon generated by constant fire-up and shut down cycles necessitated to balance fluctuating wind supplies." "In early 2009 the Socialist government of Spain reduced alternative energy subsidies by 30%. Calzada continues: "At that point the whole pyramid collapsed. They are firing thousands of people. BP closed down the two largest solar production plants in Europe. They are firing between 25,000 and 40,000 people...." "What do we do with all this industry that we have been creating with subsidies that now is collapsing? The bubble is too big. We cannot continue pumping enough money. ...The President of the Renewable Industry in Spain (wrote a column arguing that) ...the only way is finding other countries that will give taxpayers' money away to our industry to take it and continue maintaining these jobs." Best quote has gotta be this one! ""If wind power made sense, why would it need a government subsidy in the first place? It's a bubble which bursts as soon as the government subsidies end." " This article chronicles the history of wind power over the past couple of decades, reporting how thousands of wind turbines have been abandoned. The premise is that wind power is only profitable if heavily subsidized and cannot ever compete on its own. Governments have pumped in money for the photo op of "going green" but have been forced to drop the subsidies as they run out of money. It's a good read all the way through. Obviously the authors have their bias but are they wrong? Is wind power cost-effective anywhere on its own? Will the subsidies be a huge drain until and unless we see the day when electricity rates have moved into the stratosphere and we all live a "poor as church mice" lifestyle anyway?

You may be right. Still, it seems to me that perhaps once again politicians like Charest have shown that they have little or no technical education. It's not easy to reach those California standards! It also drives up the cost. Already we have seen media reports of how many models are simply not available to Quebec dealerships or are being priced higher than Quebecers want to pay! The auto companies need more costs and market restrictions right now like they need a hole in their heads! They have just come through facing financial armageddon! Over the past decade they have managed to adjust to service the California market and maybe a dozen other states with the same sort of standards. Now with no warning they have been told Presto! As of tomorrow you have to figure out how to service the Quebec market! In the real world, designs have to be changed, parts sources have to be set up, manufacturing volumes and delivery schedules have to be adjusted. It takes time and money. What the hell did Charest think would be done? Someone in upper management in each car company would just wave a magic wand? It would have been far more practical if he had announced that he was giving them 2-3 years as a deadline and then phone them up and make sure they understood that Quebec intended to stick to it! The only way the car companies can hope to meet the new Quebec standards is to abandon more gas models and try to sell more hybrids and/or electrics. This is not as easy as it sounds. First off, you've still got older models coming down the factory pipes. What do you do with them? Scrap them? Second, hybrids are still a bit pricier. What does a dealer do when not enough Quebecers are willing to pay the price? A few government fleet orders of cleaner vehicles might have been a nice gesture to help with the situation. What do Quebec politicians drive? Are they setting a "green" example or do they have chauffeurs driving gas-guzzling limos? I'd be interested in knowing.

I'm not sure what you mean, Michael. Are you saying we should shoot the messenger and not deal with the message?

Well, I didn't think about searching the Sun's site. I haven't consistently read the Sun since the NP was first formed. The Post stole a couple of the Sun's columnists who I always liked so I gravitated to them. I've read two papers every day for maybe 30 years. I read the Post for national news and the Hamilton Spec so I can keep track of who died at home. And for something to wrap fish in! I WAS perhaps the most dedicated Sun fan until after the early 90's, since the Sun too had first been formed. However, they kept watering down the Sunshine girl for my tastes. Much more politically correct but for me simply not as appealing. So I voted with my feet! I have been getting the Sunday Sun for about 10 years. I had taken out a trial subscription in order to get a free electric razor. They've never sent me a bill and every Sunday for all these years a copy is there in my mailbox. So since the Sun hasn't been as much of an influence on my reading I never thought to check them out for details on this issue. Thanks for reminding me! I'll check it out.

Most strange, Max! I distinctly remember following the streetcar deal a few years back. It had a lot of coverage in the NP. Howard Moscoe, one of their councillors, was always featured front and centre for insisting on giving the order to Sudbury/Bombardier to make it a union contract. The pricing quoted was double. Now I just spent 20 minutes googling the web and searching the NP site. I find NO mention of this at all! I find this very odd! "Down the memory hole, Winston?"

It's really not that baffling, Max! Toronto is a totally different culture than not just the rest of Ontario but perhaps the rest of the country. It really should be its own province. Toronto cares about Toronto. It believes to its very core that what's good for Toronto is good for everywhere else, or at least, it SHOULD be so people everywhere else should not complain! Toronto has become accustomed to entitlement. It gets extra money from the province or the feds no matter how badly it screws up its own budget. It can cheerfully buy streetcars from union shops in Sudbury at twice the price of other sources and have other governments bail them out for the price difference, with taxes collected from citizens who DON'T live in Toronto! It's not likely to ever change. Why should it? It's all about the seats they can deliver! The way things are, Toronto folks can vote themselves bread and circuses forever, counting on others to pay for it. In return the Liberals and to a certain extent the NDP will receive their votes. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose...

I find it very ironic that some of the posters vilifying Harper haven't jumped to defend the accused Colonel. After all, he is Canadian and thus must have all of the rights associated. Perhaps that only would apply if he had stayed a while in Gitmo. Or maybe it only applies to new Canadians and not those native by birth. As for the elected government appointing bureaucrats, it goes quite a bit deeper and goes back to Pearson's day in the 60's. When the forces were unified the top level positions started to become more and more political appointments. In a surprisingly short time they seemed to be more bureaucratic than military. I'm not describing the american system where their president appoints their Chief General. I'm talking about treating high level military promotions by the same criteria as high level civil service promotions. There is a very big problem with doing that. It ignores the concept of honour! A properly run military has it in its very bones. It permeates the entire corp to the point where it is always a factor in leadership and command. In the civil service it is an entirely foreign concept. I'm not saying that if our military was more independent it would have filtered out possible serial killers. Psychopaths can be masterful liars. Still, if there were any negative whisperings about a candidate for promotion in an armed service where honour was a major factor it couldn't help but have an effect on the promotion list. In Canada, there would seem to be little difference in how we promote our top military brass and advancement in the postal service. Again, I'm not advocating giving up all political control of our military. Obviously, the highest level must be accountable to the PM and Parliament. I'm saying that the political control has migrated down too many levels. This has too high a price.

Well, there's a premise that's obviously flawed! Should we blame your university? Why would those be the only alternatives? You are implying that universities are teaching in the only manner that could be done! How about educating those "physicians of tomorrow" at a university that has corrected its flaws and reversed its slide into decadence? More simply, you can have both good and bad universities. The decline of our educational institutions is well worth a thread in itself. Younger folks have little or no opportunity for comparison. Yet something as simple as perusing a 6th grade reader from 100 years ago will show how watered down things have become.

That's exactly my point! Today, even the titties are often plastic! It's all hype and marketing today. It moves a lot of product. In "the old days" rock was too new. There was an explosion of new music happening in a tidal wave. The "suits" had to follow the herd. The artists themselves were in the lead. Today, pop music is a much bigger portion of what we see on the media. There are other genres of course but they don't get as much air time. TV shows on who gets to be Paris Hilton's best female friend sell clothes and perfume. The suits own it all, right down to the CD store chains. Unfortunately, no one buys CDs anymore so they're frantically scrambling for new revenue streams. Poetic justice, perhaps. Taylor Swift doesn't have to be real, anymore than a cartoon show like Josey and the Pussycats was real. You can fake her voice or dub in someone else's who can actually sing. Look what Billy Cyrus did with his daughter Miley. We've always had pop. The difference today seems to be that pop is the lion's share and some of us older folks are appalled when we confront some of it. Kimmy convinced me that there is still much good music around but you seem to have to dig more for it. Actually, you don't even have to be able to sing or play anymore. You can rap! If you can't even rap, there's always what we in the trade call "cookie monster metal". That's where you don't even have to speak clearly, just grunt like Cookie Monster! Just the thing for Saturday night slam dancing! The bar keeps getting set lower and lower... The saving grace is that there seems to be more and more really GOOD stuff bubbling to the surface! Perhaps the pendulum has reached the end of its swing. Younger folks are feeling unsatisfied with what the "suits" are force-feeding them so in the indie markets they're striking out on their own!

As hard as any other paper? Perhaps, but they were the very LAST to start, if I recall. Meanwhile, all through the Chretien years when all the other papers had front page articles about Shawinigate, HRDC and all the other liberal scandals if the Star covered them at all it was buried on page 15, bottom of the page in the inside corner. Didn't you read the Star back then? Were you blind?

Well, I guess if Elections Canada will give liberals extension after extension with their campaign debts, contrary to the laws of the Elections Act, then Parliament is NOT supreme! If politicians can get a free pass with the money then why should they worry about anything else they might do as a transgression?

Interesting. I think this thread shows how so many of us were raised in a different time with different values. Back when the Vanilli bros scandal broke the typical rock listener was a product of "hippy values", children of the 60's and early 70's. In that culture rock was a blow against "the system". Most of the time we really had no idea just what was "the system" but lip-synching was DEFINITELY bogus! Remember, we were the generation whose nursery songs had lyrics like "Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky! Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same!" Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention sang about people and things being "plastic". That culture is long gone from the mainstream market today. Pop music is just a big machine. Every couple of years you replace your lead 16 year old pole dancer! There's always a new one waiting in the wings. Who cares if she can sing? That's what studios and auto-tune effects are for. The LOOK is everything! Does she look stylish and sexy? Who cares if she can write songs! Who cares if she can play an instrument! There are studio musicians and songsmiths for hire. It's all about GAP jeans!

You must be talking about us classic liberals...

You don't like McHale. You've made that obvious. Therefore, you don't think he should have equality under the law, since after all, he's a "douchebag". You DO like Fantino! You've also made that obvious. So you think that he should have some sort of immunity to the law as regards his actions in Caledonia. You know, believe it or not I would insist on a fair trial even for YOU! Afer following your reasoning while posting in this thread I really wonder if the feeling's reciprocal. Your attitude of justice only for who you do or don't like frankly scares me! At the risk of inciting Godwin's Law, I can hear jackboots stomping...

Non sequitur. Harris is long gone. The question of whether he was responsible was moot. No one ever laid a charge on Harris or the OPP commissioner at the time. This case is different. There WAS a specific charge against Fantino! Originally, the JP refused to issue it. He had to be forced to lay the charge by a judicial order. Now McGuinty's Crown Attorney drops the charge without it ever being put to a judge. This is wrong on so many levels. Politically, it looks like Queens Park interference! If they had of gotten an out-of-province Crown Attorney involved he might have done the same thing. There IS a good argument for poor prospects for conviction, after all! This would have looked far less corrupt. We have the dropping of the charge against Fantino, not that long after the secret deal with the Chatwell/Brown property. Is there ANYONE who believes McGuinty anymore? Welcome to Ontario, the banana republic of the North!

Not at all! It's been written since before Socrates that youth tends to be inexperienced and idealistic, whereas age tends to be experienced and practical. There is a quote that goes "If you're not a socialist at 20 then you have no heart. If you're not a Conservative at 40 then you have no head!" I was part of the general population who thought this was a Winston Churchill quote but a quick google proved me wrong. It's actually at least a hundred years older than that! "The phrase originated with Francois Guisot (1787-1874): "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." It was revived by French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929): "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." Whatever, the point is still valid. Youth has the benefit of more energy for passion but there is no substitute for actual experience. That's why academics usually make very poor managers or tradesmen. They have book-learning but no "hands-on". Books usually give only the overall view but when you actually have to DO something it's the details that are most important and cannot be ignored. The older you are, the more often you've had to deal with the details.

Exactly as I predicted. Now, the question is, how will this play out in the general public? It may not be the major issue next election, but McGuinty has sure handed the Opposition some ammunition. Some pigs are more equal than others, as Orwell said.