Wild Bill

"Indeed they have become surprisingly more liberalesque of late"? Dave, that's what proves my point! Perhaps we have an age difference here that made us come to different conclusions. One of the biggest criticisms Reform made against the PC's was that they were so very similar to the Liberals! In fact, at the time Reform appeared there was a strong popular feeling that Mulroney had turned out to be the same as what we'd had before, only better at it! It was "Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!" Historically, Liberals have never shown any fixed principles except the principle of being whatever was likely to get them into power. This principle didn't necessarily extend to actually DOING it once they got into power! Trudeau proved that time and time again with his price and wage controls, gasoline taxes and the like. There were minor differences but on matters of substance the Liberals and the PC's seemed very much the same. As you can imagine, this had produced a pent up frustration with those voters who wanted something different. Both the parties paid lip service to this demographic but it was always understood that you never actually had to do something to please them. Why? Who else could they vote for? So when a new choice finally appeared it took off like a rocket! It doesn't matter if you agreed with the Reform principles. It can't be denied that in just 10 years or so they came from nowhere to become the Opposition! During that time at one point they had driven the PC's down to just TWO seats! The NDP would have given a sack of diamonds and their left testicle to have had that kind of success, as the old saying goes. So thank you for emphasizing my point!

Ridiculous! The present CPC has ALREADY been taken over by the PC wing of the party! In all word, deed and philosophy it is a clone of Mulroney's PC party. There is NOTHING left of Reform or Alliance in the CPC! If you dealt more with what parties actually DO and not with labels you might have found this to be obvious!

Unbelievable! Frankly, I find your "reasoning" quite arrogant! You know nothing about me or my lifestyle yet you feel free to make impractical suggestions as if they are not only worthwhile but easy! You make an accusation that I personally am responsible for the state of the world today. You make the assumption that first of all your world view is correct (who handed YOU the Gospel?) and that second, I helped it happen! For all you know I could be David Suzuki's personal aide! You also feel free to denigrate the Inuit for using things like generators. Rather patronizing and frankly, insulting! You won't make many friends amongst those people. Sorry, life is just too short. It's time for another addition to my "ignore" list. Somehow I suspect it may be another decade or two before I can expect a better debate from you. Have fun - with someone else!

You seem to have your own definition of "efficiency" that differs from the dictionary. As soon as you used the term "meaningful use" in your definition you made it a political term rather than a technical one. What is meaningful use to you may not be meaningful to me. No individual has the right to impose his own values of what is worthwhile to be produced on all the rest of his fellow men. The efficiency of any process has nothing to do with the inherent value of that process. An electrical generating system may have a certain level of efficiency, which can be technically measured. Whether that system is "meaningful" is totally an individual value judgement. To someone living in Puerto Rico it may not be meaningful, as it may be leaving a carbon footprint larger than that individual feels is necessary. To an Inuit living on Ellesmer Island, it may be VERY meaningful! It might be all that stands between comfort and freezing to death. This sort of thinking is very common amongst those who are young and may not have that much life experience with the practicality of many systems. I am constantly told by younger relatives that I should take public transit more and drive myself less. What they can't seem to realize is that I can't take a family's week's worth of groceries on a bus. What's more, that bus in my town only travels part of the route. I would actually end up walking more than riding. When I was in university, that wasn't as much of a hardship. Even in winter it could be more of a lark! Today, at 57, my younger relatives can frankly go stuff themselves! If I followed their advice with the poor level of public transit in my town it would likely kill me! It has been said that "Everything is possible to the man who doesn't have to do it himself." It's only when you get your own hands dirty that you have to deal with the details of an issue. Anything is easy when you restrict the argument to an academic level.

You must LOVE lobster!

Actually, there's a better example with a poster in this very thread! And as an aside to Moonbox, there's noting wrong with passion in an argument but many posters routinely cross the line into incivility. Just go back and read some of the native issues threads or the climate change debate. I rarely even read such threads anymore and only occasionally participate, simply because I find the endless ad hominem attacks to be boring! You don't learn anything new when posts become so predictable.

I agree. Also, I've never been able to have confidence in someone who debates in what frankly is a rude, ad hominem manner. A sneering, condescending tone implies that the author is trying to demean his opponent in an emotional manner and cow him into submission. Either that or make the entire experience so distasteful for him that he just quits the field. Then the rude protagonist will take this as a win for his side, counting his emotional techniques as equally valid to an intellectual argument! It's just a cheap trick and no one should waste their time with it!

You don't seem to be getting a clear answer to your question, Eyeball. I'll give it a try, at least as far as why discussion boards can be far less civil than face to face debate. I think it has to do with having a captive audience. Some folks are just naturally uncivil and rude personalities. In real life they have to temper their acid natures or no one will deal with them! If someone doesn't like your manner they can simply ignore you, leave or maybe whallop you one upside your head! In a discussion board members are loath to walk away for the sake of just one or two louts. If you enjoy such discussion that's the price you have to pay. Depending on the moderators, any board will seek a certain level of civility. It's up to the individual member to decide if the price to participate is too high or not. That's why some folks like myself have no respect for boards like "rubble.com" and choose MLW instead. Courtesy and manners are social mechanisms to help keep us from thumping each other and ensuring a reasonable level of cooperation in society. A faceless discussion board can allow some personalities to ignore all that and let their true nature shine through. We saw a similar social phenomenon in the late 70's with the CB radio craze. Anyone who listened at that time heard what was essentially lawless bedlam. Why? Because users COULD behave that way, with impunity! "Ignore" buttons help but only to a certain degree. Perhaps they need to be used by more members. Rude people tend to fade away when left alone. As boards go, MLW is definitely on of the more civilized examples. I appreciate the work of the moderators and don't envy their jobs at all.

Maybe. I have my differences with Harper but I know that what he's done in Copenhagen is a reason for me to vote FOR him next time! If he had have supported that agreement I would have been very angry with him. So my vote cancels out your vote! The question know is how many Canadians agree with me or agree with you.

RW, perhaps you can answer a question for me. Much is being made about the recent increase in sea ice surface area to be the result of "poor" or thin ice. This is given as an implication that the Arctic is still on the road to being rapidly ice-free. Wouldn't it take a few years to re-build an ice sheet as thick as formerly? Wouldn't a 2 metre thickness be normal over a span of just a couple of years? Surely to regain an original thickness of 10 metres as one poster has suggested would take longer than just one or two seasons! Isn't the present thickness and quality of the returning sea ice normal for the time span involved? Is it not fair to consider it indicative of the process of ice recovery?

Non sequitur. The governments of Israel, India and Pakistan are considered rational, despite any conflicting political goals. The consensus on Iran is that it is ruled by a mad theocracy who cannot be trusted to act in a rational manner. If you have hoodlums in your neighbourhood you can at least expect to negotiate with them. Nobody can argue with a lunatic bearing a nuclear bomb.

You seem to have missed the point. No one advocated just "fighting it out amongst themselves". The premise was that if the "system" refused to do its job in an effective manner THEN victims had the right to use violence in self-defence, including the use of a champion if they were not physically able to compete. From the tone of your arguments you seem to feel that victims have no right of defense EXCEPT through the "system" and if it doesn't work they should still not defend themselves, as "any violence is bad". In effect, you would rather a victim be a "punching bag" than have any other method used to stop the bully's inappropriate behavior but "time outs" and "anger management" sessions. It reminds me of the usual admonition against vigilantism. It's as if some folks believe vigilantism springs from some instinct to drive a pickup truck with a gun rack, just for the sheer joy of it! Nothing could be more wrong. Most human beings WANT the system to work! However, when it fails or is controlled by people with ineffective ideas on behavior modification victims are often left with NO OTHER CHOICE but vigilantism! In other words, vigilantism is an illustration of the failure of the "system" to protect its citizens. Perhaps that's why some bleeding hearts are so vocally against it. It's the embarrassment! That would explain how the first approach is not to truly fix the problem but just to "shut the victim up".

Only if we can trust the peers...

Under the PC banner, obviously! After all, he has abandoned his Reform roots and that was the seed for the WildRose. He has governed like a Progressive Conservative, essentially a clone of Mulroney right down to extending the range of the GST by getting more provinces onside with harmonization. As for the oil and gas industry, if he DIDN'T do something to help protect them he could never be premier of Alberta, with any party! How on earth could someone get to be premier in that province without protecting oil jobs?

Nothing like the rest of Canada? Well, Reform proved that wrong. When it got to Ontario it got a couple of million votes and was steadily increasing. The problem came when the Alliance got impatient and decided to morph into the old PC party, thinking that would be their ticket to a majority. The fact that it was a wrong decision does not change the amount of support they had garnered up to that point, or the fact that their support was still growing. Wild Rose could capitalize on all the "disenchanted reformers" left dangling by the CPC. If they managed to severely hurt Harper's party I doubt if they would be so foolish as to repeat the Alliance's mistake. By then it would be pretty obvious that there's a price to be paid for turning your coat and rigging the game. The present situation has been blatantly manipulated. The PMO is well aware that their Reform support has little or no choice but to vote for them. The problem is that no one likes to be manipulated! And the kind of people that joined Reform tend to have long memories. If they are ever offered an inspiring choice I truly believe the CPC would pay dearly for taking supporters so callously for granted. As Manning had said, our enemy is not each other. It's Ottawa!

It's heartening to see voters given an actual INSPIRING choice! If they ever formed a federal party it would be interesting to see how the present CPC would be able to compete...

This doesn't address the legitimacy of either side of the argument but it DOES point to the impracticality of the entire carbon credit system: http://news.sympatico.cbc.ca/World/ContentPosting.aspx?feedname=CBC-WORLD-V3&showbyline=True&date=true&newsitemid=eu-carbon-credit-trading-fraud "CBC News Fraud within Europe's carbon credit trading system has cost taxpayers more than $7 billion in the last 18 months, European police say. Officials at Europol, the body in charge of co-ordinating police forces inside the European Union, say fraudulent activity on the EU's Emission Trading System was first suspected in late 2008 when police noticed the volume of trades in certain countries would mysteriously spike. "It is estimated that in some countries, up to 90 per cent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities," Europol said. Since late 2008, the total value of fraudulent activity is believed to be in excess of five billion euros ($7.7 billion Cdn) from bogus trades in European unit allowances, or EUAs, the credits that companies in some countries buy to offset their greenhouse gas output." Gee, who woulda' thunk it? What a surprise!

One category I'd love to see is a breakdown of what KIND of education those college grads received and how that affects for whom they will vote! I've had a theory for years but so far have had no hard evidence that people educated in hard sciences, engineering and such disciplines are far more likely to vote "right" and that liberal arts majors tend to vote "left". It's a generalization of course but I'd love to see some actual investigation of the premise. I'm NOT suggesting that people in either camp are less intelligent but I do believe that "leftist" education tends more to the intuitive and academic. Engineers and hard scientists (physicists, not botanists) tend to be more practical, or "utilitarian". Such people would be attracted to what works rather than what seems a "noble goal". A thriving society needs both types of people. When things get out of balance or one camp takes control of an area that they are not best suited to handle we can get into deep trouble! One should never let an academic build a bridge for you. It will likely not only be unnecessarily over-budget but prone to fall down when you drive across it! Still, it would be a benefit to let him give input. Otherwise the bridge may be unnecessarily ugly!

Quite true. Sometimes I can't help but wonder if we made a mistake giving everyone the right to vote...

I repeat, we are talking about a handful of particles colliding here. It happens and has happened naturally all the time in the Universe at large and so far it's still here. This is not the Omega Particle from Star Trek Voyager...

Dog on Porch has already pointed out that the Shah was big on women's rights but I thought you might not also be aware that the mini-skirt is older than the Burkha! There is no record of any women wearing the full burkha at any time before the mid-70's! So it is NOT a historic Islamic custom but merely something a few Islamic misogynists dreamed up on their own to subjugate women in just the last few decades.

As much as David Susuki...

I wouldn't be too worried. We're not talking pounds of material being slammed together, only a few sub atomic particles. This happens every so often anyway, just by random chance. So far we haven't seen stars blowing up all around us and black holes being more common than regular stars. We're not doing anything new here. We're just making it happen in a manner and at a time when we can observe it. It's like making a wave machine in a lab to study tsunamis. There are an infinite number of waves happening all the time around the oceans. If we make a tsunami in a lab should it suddenly break free, run out the door and wash away Boise, Idaho?

Why would it hit with a force of 20g's, when the moon's gravity is only 1/6 of a g, or .17. In order to do what you claim, you would have to deliberately fire the retrorockets the wrong way! They would have to be pretty powerful, too. How's that tinfoil hat fit, anyway? Have you studied any real science since your bean sprouts died in that jar full of paper towel that you used in your Grade 4 project?