Wild Bill

I am struck by how a very pertinent fact has been completely buried and forgotten in this debate! Am I the only one who remembers how a year or two ago, when the problem of Greece and a few other EU countries first became prominent in the SM, how we were told that in Greece one of the major problems of the Greek government is that almost no one pays their taxes? Apparently, tax evasion is standard operating procedure for almost the entire population! It is part of their way of life! I recall articles that told us the Greek government collects only about 25% of the actual taxes owing annually. Seems to me that not only could Greece fix most if not all of its financial problems overnight, what a great life the Greeks have been living! Now the chickens have come home to roost. No wonder Greeks get resentment from citizens in countries like Germany. Yet we have many enthusiastically blaming the bankers for loaning them the money for their party, excusing Greece from throwing the party in the first place! When you look at it from an outside perspective, it all seems rather loopy...

Once again I am struck by how many people confuse religion and culture. It is not religion that is the problem. There are civilized and primitive peoples all over the planet. Some are Christians of various sorts, some are Muslims and some are a variety of others. What makes them different with the issues pertinent in this thread is their culture. Muslims in the western world are for the most part no different than any other group. However, there are indeed Muslims in some countries that have very primitive and barbaric cultures. Barbarism is as barbarism does. You cannot excuse them just because of their religion! We are all judged by our deeds, not by our words and certainly not by our prayers. It is far more practical to just ignore someone's religion and deal solely with their actions. Using religion as an excuse is just a distraction.

There's an old story that fits his analysis: A biology professor brings out a frog and puts it on his desk at the front of his class. He takes a pencil and tickles the frog near his butt and says "Joomp!" The frog jumps. Then the professor takes out a dissecting knife and cuts off the frog's rear legs. Again, he tickles the frog near his butt and says "Joomph!" The frog of course just lies there. The professor turns to his class and says "You see? Ven you cut off der legs you interfere mitt der hearing!" Greece is feeling the effects of mistakes made for years. The austerity measures are not causes, they are corrective attempts. Greece is head over heels in debt. It now is acceding to austerity cuts in order to maintain credit, since the country has lost the confidence of its lenders that it will ever get its house in order and pay them back. The good professor is blaming the lenders for wanting their money back, not Greece for having blown the money. The lenders are concerned that if they keep loaning money to Greece without any strings they will NEVER be repaid! He is right that the austerity measures are hurting Greece's ability to repay. The problem for Greece is that their lenders have heard this before. They no longer believe Greece will make any attempt to fix its economy without the pressure of terms with their loans. So Greece has no other options. They have run out of lenders. If they go bankrupt, they will not get another dime for generations. So they have no choice but to bite the bullet. The Greek people can change their government all they want but they can't change the cold hard reality that the gravy train is over.

I'm curious as to why you made your reply to my post, considered you ignored virtually everything I said in it.

Good points, from both sides. Still, it is pertinent that her book has been a national best seller every single year since it was published, to this day! It is true that she wasn't a very good writer. She also had a great many personal flaws. However, those are a non sequitur to her philosophy. Her books were all just backgrounds on which to hang characters that would illustrate her beliefs. Those beliefs are powerfully attractive to a great many people. That's obvious, given decades of successful sales levels. Slamming her for poor writing will not convert readers away from her POV to become leftwingers. If anything, it will confirm her beliefs for them. It sounds as if rather than debate her beliefs some would choose to discourage people from reading them in the first place. That implies a lack of confidence on the part of her critics.

It doesn't matter if the teachers are in the right or the wrong. Over the past couple of decades they have made some serious blunders with their public image that has played right into a politician's hands. For over a century teachers were thought of as professionals, like doctors or engineers. Not people who you would trust to take a tumour out of your brain but still, in that camp. Then a serious change occurred. Teachers became militant unionists! Not all, of course, but certainly they show a very strong union public image. Standing up in SkyDome singing Solidarity Forever with Buzz Hargrove was rather obvious! The public statements at contract time sound cribbed right from a Sid Ryan handbook. Of course, teachers have the right to take any political preference they wish and to be as militant a union as they care to be. That's democracy, after all. The problem is, they have limited their public support to the same levels as that of those parties that champion unions, meaning just the NDP. Teacher support is no longer mainstream. To the average citizen teachers appear to be the same as autoworkers. There is a disconnect between teachers and the public, a disconnect that teachers have created themselves. If leftwing unionism was mainstream the NDP would have been in office in Ontario for the past decades and decades. Again, it doesn't matter if you support the NDP or not. The level of support for the NDP is less than the support for the PCs and Liberals added together. Everything comes at a price. The teachers made their choices and its not for we outsiders to say if they were good or bad, in themselves. Perhaps for purposes of contract negotiation they were very good choices. Still, it is obvious that they may not have been the best as far as sustaining mainstream public support. They have handed McGuinty the rope he needs to hang them! McGuinty can screw the teachers over and he will win far more votes than he will lose. It doesn't matter that he is outright lying about what has happened during negotiations. The public does not care. The average parent works in the private sector and they are mostly hurting badly, struggling to raise their families and keep the house from being repossessed. They see the pay scale, benefits and most of all, the job security that insulates teachers from the hard hits of the job market. They then tend to look at McGuinty as a saviour. More simply, if you act like a militant UAW or CUPE worker then the general public will consider you such! That's the way it is today. In politics, perception is everything. I've been watching this build for a long time. I find it amazing hat the teachers have been so naive.

Of course all the teachers came out! Quelle surprise, duh! How many folks of the public at large were there? Not other unions supporting each other like push button robots but ordinary parents of school children? In other words, how much ordinary citizen support do teachers have? This is all that matters, because McGuinty knows full well that screwing the teachers will bring him more votes than he will lose. And that's all a politician of any party cares about! Realpolitik 101, For Dummies!

Boges, if the case comes down against Ford the left in Toronto will do everything in their power to turf him as far out of town as possible! 3 thousand dollars? They would do it for $3! As for Bill Clinton, the double standard would never occur to them. If you pointed it out, they would simply reply that Ford is evil so it's ok! These people have no fixed standards, only likes and dislikes and a sense of entitlement towards getting their own way. Ford will never get the benefit of perspective or proportion at their hands. Their brains just don't work that way. Justice and fairness is only for who they like and anyone they don't like they would cheerfully crucify.

Once again you are probably correct, Dr. Dre. Still, I'll bet I would have little problem selling my idea to victims! More than that, whenever a victim leaves a courtroom feeling he became a victim twice, our system has failed! If it happens too often it will breed disrespect. That happens too often all by itself. We don't need our system deliberately fostering this attitude.

Sorry punked. It's been so long since we've debated the Senate that maybe you younger guys are new to the topic! The Reform party thrashed all this out over 25 years ago, calling for a Triple E Senate. This means Equal, Elected and Effective. Every other parliamentary in the free world that has an Upper House structures it differently than is other House. The Commons is "rep by pop" which means states or provinces with more people tend to have more seats and more power. The Senate, or Upper House, runs on "rep by region" where Rhode Island has as many Senators as California or New York. This is a deliberate attempt to have a check and balance government. Smaller regions would have the power to block anything unfair to them being rammed through by regions of larger population power in the lower House. It seems to work reasonably well for everybody else in the world. That was also how we started out in Canada, similar to the British House of Lords. Of course, being Canadian we had to screw it up! Each province does NOT get the same number of Senators! The Senate also can't do much but obstruct legislation from the Lower House, usually for partisan reasons. If the Senate was Triple E it would go a long way to making Canadians in smaller provinces feel more equal. If you live in PEI you have a totally different attitude towards Ottawa than someone in Ontario. The scenario you describe would be truly pointless. You would simply be duplicating the Commons, which of course would be of no value.

Agreed, Shakey. The last thing we should want as monarch is a Rod or Todd Flanders. What's next? Instead of Elton John at the Queen's Jubilee we get Walter Ostanek playing polka?

One way or the other, eh? Nothing in between? How about reforming the Senate? Seems to me that abolishing it would be missing an opportunity to have more citizen input into our political process. I guess, if you love top down bureaucracy, it sounds like a great idea to abolish it!

Well Pik, my first question is, how did anyone know the poor dear had dementia? Senators always vote along party lines, just like MPs. Especially Liberals, who held a visceral hatred of Reform and its firm commitment to having an MP vote his or her constituents' wishes first and those of the party second. If she had been of sound mind I have no doubt she still would have voted like a trained seal. So how have we been injured with a result out of the ordinary?

Well my good doctor, perhaps you are right. Perhaps Peter is as well. Still, it seems to me somehow that the victim in such cases is of the lowest priority. Justice for him or her seems to be forgotten, except for eyeball's idea of the victim becoming some kind of heroic martyr to our "highest principles". I guess where I diverge from the thinking behind how our system treats this issue is that I believe that the justice system should redress wrong to victims first. Not as some faceless mass concept but rather as specific individuals. I have posted before over the years of how I believe in the "consent to be governed", where citizens long ago gave up handling justice personally, with all the mistakes, over-reactions and iniquities that entails in favour of justice being the province of the King, or State, who would have far better resources to administer justice and if necessary, punishment. Somehow, to blithely accept letting the guilty walk if necessary rather than accept evidence improperly obtained seems contrary to putting the victim first and foremost. I understand the need for deterring officers from abusing the process. Couldn't this be accomplished with extremely severe punishment for improperly obtaining evidence? No matter how anyone in this thread dresses it up, it still seems to me that the victim is considered of lesser priority. I had thought that courts and trials were a means to search for truth and justice, for victims most of all. This thread has convinced me that I must be mistaken.

. Well, if it bothers you, stay home! Wait for the "B" Ark!

I would expect in all cases! Just as I would expect that whoever obtained evidence in an illegal manner would also be charged in all cases! There needs to be a deterrence to prevent police and others from obtaining evidence in an illegal manner. I agree with that and support having those involved punished. Throwing away the evidence does hurt the crown's case, of course. So I can see that being a deterrent. However, it only further hurts the victim! Surely we can choose other punishments towards officers abusing their powers than to hurt the victims of a case? Should punishment not be focused on those who committed the sin? I truly do not understand this at all. Perhaps I am just too naive. I always thought the justice system was supposed to redress wrongs against victims, not magnify them as collateral damage in a cheap shot to punish an officer who made an error.

Scrib, don't you know, it's all Mike Harris' fault! It's ALWAYS Mike Harris' fault! Just ask them!

Wyly, you don't need a very fast spin to "fake" a 1 g gravity at the surface of an asteroid 10 MILES in diameter! The stress on the rotating body would be mice nuts! We live on a body that spins virtually eternally. Don't see everything collapsing every day. You are making the problem overly complicated.

It would be great to see a rally against the teachers. Unfortunately, most parents have to work for a living.

I do not understand your argument, DR. Dre! I said a number of times that I supported charges against any officer for improperly obtaining evidence. Hang em, if you like! However, why throw that evidence out? Why let a rapist or some other perp go free, to wink at their victim as they go out the door? What has throwing out that evidence accomplished, other than maybe a bit of embarrassment to the officers involved, the way it is today? I'm saying if someone is to be punished let it be those who did the crime, namely obtaining evidence in an illegal manner. The evidence itself however, is what it is. Why punish the victim? So far, no one has even attempted to explain that to me, except for perhaps eyeball who told me that victims and their families should be proud to be martyrs to the high principles of society. They have just raged against the use of torture, which has nothing to do with what I asked.

Davy's wife?

Man, eyeball! You are in a dream world of drama! Here's a hypothetical but perfectly possible situation. One of my daughters is killed! Due to procedure errors with how some critical evidence is obtained, the killer walks free. Eyeball shows up to the funeral! He makes a speech about how properly obtaining evidence is of paramount importance to society. He praises my dead daughter and holds up a cheque he has written towards a memorial for her grave. He calls her a martyr to the cause of society's values. Then he is rushed by all the mourners and his body is never seen again! Eyeball, you come on like some warm hearted lefty but from my perspective, your views are incredibly blase and cruel sometimes. I don't see some academic view here. I see real people and real victims, who deserve much more than you offer.

CC, why are you assuming we are talking about letting the police do whatever they want? Way back at the beginning I posted that if police improperly obtain evidence they should be charged! With severe punishments! I understand that police should be punished if they break the law over how they obtain evidence. I just don't understand how throwing the evidence away serves society and the victim! It seems somehow as if embarrassing the police is the punishment! I said then and I say now, keep the evidence but punish those who obtained it improperly.

You just refuse to face the issue in question, don't you? All you see is the land claims. To you, the TACTICS of the native protesters are either irrelevant or "nice". There is no point in talking to you. You deny reality. You don't have to convince anyone here. Try convincing the entire town of Caledonia. Try convincing Sam Gualtieri, who was bashed in the head with a two by four and now has permanent extensive brain injury. It was NOT an isolated incident! This has all been hashed over in several threads. It goes nowhere, mostly because of people like you who refuse to talk about HOW the natives protested! Enough. I would rather watch paint dry. More productive.

Not again! Listen! It's not about land claims! Those are a separate issue! It's about violence and a double standard in applying the law! The natives could get 100% of what they claim in Caledonia and it will still be irrelevant to the townsfolk. Their issue is what THEY endured! It's like the natives punched townspeople in the face and then said "Oh, don't blame us! It's the federal government's fault! You should be supporting us!" I actually heard such a ridiculous claim on a TV clip. I am going by memory for the name of the native protester who said it, but I believe it was Janie Jamieson. Whoever doesn't really matter. I personally held much support for the natives in that area, until I saw the WAY they protested! At that point I lost all respect for them. They chose the townsfolk as the target of their protest. If they had roared through McGuinty's backyard on ATVs I would have chipped in for the gas! The townsfolk had been not just their neighbours but even family for centuries. The protesters treated them as cannon fodder. The government abandoned them, because after OKA no one will ever believe that native protesters would not have arms again. Much easier to push the non-natives around, who tend to grumble but still do what they are told. So if you want to start a thread of your own about land claims then do so. THIS thread is not about that.