Wild Bill

You'll have to forgive my skepticism. You see, I survived Bob Rae's NDP government here in Ontario. Do you watch "Corner Gas"? They have a bit where whenever someone mentions the name of their neighbouring town everybody in the room spits on the floor! That's similar to the reaction here in Ontario when someone mentions the NDP or Bob Rae, except for the usual small cadre in the heart of old Toronto. No one pays any attention to them because Toronto has absolutely nothing in common with the values and culture of the rest of Ontario, or Canada for that matter. Or maybe even the rest of the planet!

This is what the NDP never seem to get! They take the efficiency of government for granted. If you and all your neighbours needed a park built in your neighbourhood you'd pass the hat to come up with the money. Some poorer folks might contribute in labour. It's like the old barn-building bees in pioneer days. Let's pull a number out of our collective butts and say that the park would cost $10,000. Now, if the government says it will build us a park things are quite different. First, there are at least a few hundred thousand dollar reports that must be done, to see if we truly want a park, if the park will be ecologically a benefit to the community and most important, how to build the park so it will withstand earthquakes and tornadoes, even if it's not in an earthquake or tornado zone. The work must all be done by CUPE contractors, even if they cost double what other firms will charge. Some of those contractors will have connections to various politicians, of course. Money will change hands both ways. When all is said and done that $10,000 park will likely cost somewhere around a million and a half! Where will the money come from? TAXES, OF COURSE! Please don't even try to deny that's the way the system works. I'm 55 years old and have been watching this time after time after time for my whole life! You might as well try to convince me that the sun rises in the west. This is why I could never vote NDP. They live in dreamland.

"Oh, it's 'Tommy" this and "Tommy" that and 'Chuck 'im out, the brute!' " But it's 'Savior of his country!' When the guns begin to shoot.

I think you're ascribing rational thought to irrational people. The Palestinian appetite for bloodshed knows no bounds. Israel HAS had to re-occupy land PRECISELY because Palestinians began again to fire rockets! The Palestinian self-proclaimed goal is to drive Israel into the sea. They do not deny this. They trumpet it! We're talking fanaticism here. Until that changes, how many times should Israel return land only to endure more rockets?

Rue, I respectfully disagree. When you say "yet feel forced to" it kinda scares me. Those are the words that pressure groups use with politicians to justify negative reinforcement methods like increased energy taxes to FORCE people into "greeener" behaviour". As I had written, mass transit simply sucks in my town. I cannot spare 3 hours a day and more walking than riding as a valid option to 15 minutes in my car. I cannot envision carrying the family's weekly groceries on a bike, especially in the rain or the winter. We don't need the government forcing us onto bicycles. Higher and higher energy prices do that all by themselves. My impression is not that people will just grudgingly adjust and eventually feel proud of themselves. Rather, I think people are getting more and more enraged! Most of us feel that gas companies are hosing us and governments are corrupt and inept. We're getting collectively more and more pissed! We're time-poor and more and more stressed. I'm worried that people are going to start going postal!

Actually, I'm not sure it works anywhere outside of Toronto and even that city has some problems! Here in Hamilton it always seems that to get ANYWHERE you have to walk from transfer points a greater distance than you actually ride! To be fair, I'm not sure that no matter how much money you throw at public transit if it ever could be a viable option for all but a fraction of the population. Public transit doesn't work well if you have to carry much of anything. How do you bring home a week's worth of groceries for the family on a bus? What do you do if it's bad weather? Do we expect 50 year olds to stand at a bus stop for hours with armloads of goods? How do they carry it from the bus stop to their home? I've lived here pretty well my whole life and I have never lived and worked in a situation where it matched up to the bus routes. A 15 minute car ride would have become a 90 minute bus trip. That's 3 hours of commuting a day versus 30 minutes in my car. After 8 hours plus the expected office overtime of an hour or two that means a total day of 12-13 hours if I use public transit. Screw it! Maybe when I was 19 going to university but today I would like at least a few minutes a day with my family before I fall asleep.

This leads to another question: Most average citizens can appreciate the irony of how militant Islamists, reacting to a perceived slight that accused their religion of being violent, can then protest by committing violence and even murder! Yet our media talking heads rarely make a comment. To me, this is more than a question of morality. It's a comment on a group's level of intelligence! I'm just not certain if it's a comment against Islamists or against US!

This leads to another question: Most average citizens can appreciate the irony of how militant Islamists, reacting to a perceived slight that accused their religion of being violent, can then protest by committing violence and even murder! Yet our media talking heads rarely make a comment. To me, this is more than a question of morality. It's a comment on a group's level of intelligence! I'm just not certain if it's a comment against Islamists or against US!

This leads to another question: Most average citizens can appreciate the irony of how militant Islamists, reacting to a perceived slight that accused their religion of being violent, can then protest by committing violence and even murder! Yet our media talking heads rarely make a comment. To me, this is more than a question of morality. It's a comment on a group's level of intelligence! I'm just not certain if it's a comment against Islamists or against US!

No MM, I'm just an old guy who always was a science junkie! The first real book I ever owned was a Dictionary of Aerospace and Physics given to me by a Gr. 3 teacher who recognized my flair and wanted to encourage it. I was frying wires across batteries in Grade one, built my first tube radio by the time I was 12 or so, and after a few years as a rock and roll roadie touring all over Ontario I settled down to sell electronic parts, just as computer chips were being invented and the computers to go with them. That industry has collapsed to a shadow of its former self in Canada and now I make my living building and repairing amplifiers for the music industry. Not as much money but a LOT of free beer! I've always had enough self-taught background to see through the official crap the "powers that be" rain down on us poor peasants. I cried when Von Braun's team lost the war on how to go to the moon. They wanted to build infrastructure with a space station in orbit that could actually do things, which could build a large, reusable spaceship that would lead to a manned moonbase. We'd then establish industry on the moon, resulting in real numbers of people living and working in space and moving out to Mars and beyond. As we saw, the US went with Apollo, a stripped down tin can holding 3 people that needed huge boosters that were disposable one-shots to land and return with a few pounds of moon rocks, just to win a race against the Russians and ensure national pride! So for 40 years and more since all they've done is dink around with their shuttles and build a small space station, where they conduct "weightless experiments" over and over and over. What a waste! In space zero g you can make PERFECT ball bearings, among other things. You might want to google just what could be done with them and how much money could be charged for them. By now we should have seen manufacturing in orbit, with companies making ZILLIONS! And that's just ONE application! We could have solved our energy problems back in the 80's, with orbiting solar power satellites beaming the power back to the ground. The initial cost was high but the payback was incredible! The politicians wussed out. Their idea of space is Buster Crabbe as Buck Rogers, rescuing Dale Arden from the Lava Men of Mars. Did you know there are ways to farm LARGE amounts of wheat in space? We could feed ALL the hungry! Especially since delivery is so cheap. You just let it fall to earth. It's just ballistics. Any soldier who manned an artillery piece could make sure a ten ton container of wheat fell where you wanted it to. So I follow environmental problems like garbage disposal, with new technologies as they emerge and it pains me to see how woefully inept our politicians are at understanding and implementing solutions that might actually WORK! I've come to believe that a good portion of them couldn't care less if we arrive at a solution. It's more important to LOOK like you're doing something and keeping votes. When things still aren't fixed it's not a problem as long as you can shift the blame to someone else! I know this all sounds cynical what what else can one conclude? Toronto council sending hundreds of garbage trucks down the 401 to Michigan every day is really kinda dumb, wouldn't you think? Yet they were so proud of themselves for shooting down the Kirkland Lake solution! Kirkland Lake had the engineering bona fides and the community WANTED it! A good friend predicted years ago that society is getting more and more complicated and yet as a group we are becoming less and less capable of managing and coping with its problems. I fear he's right! Oh well, as long as ABBA doesn't make a comeback the world can't be all bad!

Through all trials and tribulations Me and Jesus 'cross the nation...

PLEASE! READ WHAT I SAID! THE EMISSIONS WILL BE MICE NUTS! Modern incinerators are not ordinary burning systems. They are extremely high temperature systems. We're talking plasma furnaces. Yes there will still be emissions but they will be so low compared to the old-fashioned method that it would be like comparing a city's entire sewage output with a gnat's fart! You are the second poster who seems to think we're talking a system like burning garbage in a pile in your back yard. Maybe as a people we Canadians just no longer have enough science in our education to get out of the 1950's.

Well, if Hamas gets the west bank back they will have even better sites to launch missiles into Israel...

I was gonna post a comment on how we're debating how growing ethanol affects farmers and inflates the price of food. Then it struck me how casually we're discussing the situation! The world is heading for food riots, big time! There is going to be so much political upheaval in the poorer parts of the world that the UN hasn't a hope of handling it. Watch for the UN to suddenly start talking nicely to Uncle Sam again, hoping he will spend the blood and money to clean up the mess for them that they're too cheap to pay for themselves.

The incinerator technology referred to is nothing like you seem to envision. It's NOT ordinary burning! It's such a flippin' hot plasma that it would instantly burn up not just the plastic or it's smell but perhaps the very idea it existed! The amount of pollutants released into the air is less than a politician's promise! We're talking CLEAN! Your suggestion just isn't even remotely relevant. Don't be embarrassed. The entire Ontario NDP party seems to hold that 1950's idea of incineration, along with a host of so-called "green" groups. The problem is that these problems cannot be solved by poli-sci graduates. Technical problems can only be solved by technical people.

Check your history books! When Bob was in office here in Ontario we were going into a recession. Bob decided in typical socialist bonehead fashion that we should increase government spending and buy our way out! So they spent $10 Billion dollars! It went down a rat hole, of course. By the time he was voted out we had gone from a provincial surplus to a deep deficit. Bob was even so naive as to think he could balance his government's payroll by getting all his public sector union buddies to voluntarily put in some workdays for free! That they would cheerfully take no pay to help things out! Of course, like all good socialists they flatly refused and threatened to go on strike. The province could go bankrupt but they didn't care, as long as they got theirs! This coined the term "Rae Days" and it is still in use today. This is why the big fear for the Liberals about having Bob as leader is that it might cost them badly in Ontario. They've been putting on a brave face but my take from talking to folks on the street is that people have NOT forgotten. Bob Rae's government made a bad situation far worse. It HURT!

Sorry, when you put words in my mouth with your shot about McDonalds wrappers and SUVs I assumed you were leftist 'cuz that's a common leftist debating tactic. Any, as far as sorting garbage take a look at Buffalo. Or lots of American cities. They DO sort, they just don't expect their citizens to do it. Garbage is taken to a central plant and the sorting is done there. The sorting provides employment. After machines have done some initial processing (like big magnets to pull out the ferrous metals, I assume) you'll see long conveyor belts. Workers stand beside the belts wearing big gloves and sort materials as they flow by. They have proven that we don't HAVE to make citizens separate all recyclables at their homes! It would be interesting if we could scrounge up some studies or stats to show us comparable efficiencies of the two approaches. I still remember how during Bob Rae's term in power in Ontario how he and his people were rabidly against the very idea of incineration. His energy minister Ruth Grier was a fanatic on the subject. They had a 1950's image of incineration as being dirty and smelly. Nothing was going to shake that. Meanwhile, municipalities were running out of landfill area. Toronto was heading for a crisis. Incineration of course drastically reduces the volume of waste down to ashes. Ruth however would not be swayed. Then a company appeared that claimed to have built and operated clean incinerator plants that not only released only tiny amounts of pollution but produced profitable amounts of electricity! They had pictures of their plant in Florida. It was buried under grass worthy of a gold course and except for the trucks coming in and out of the yard you would hardly have noticed it in a residential neighbourhood. It seemed to be as "green" as anyone could possibly ask. Ruth said NO! She refused to even talk about it, other than to say that it couldn't possibly work. I guess she thought that all the working plants must have been hallucinations. The company offered to fly her and her entourage down to Florida at company expense, to see for themselves. Again, Ruth refused. I always had known that the NDP rarely were that scientific in their thinking but I hadn't known they were such fanatics! I assumed that we had a real problem with waste and that the consideration about possible solutions would be based on science and engineering. Man, was I naive! Eventually, the leftists in Toronto "solved" their landfill problem by shipping their garbage with hundreds of trucks every day down the highway to landfill sites in Michigan! They were so proud of themselves for not allowing any "dirty" solution in their city! We desperately need that "B" Ark from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!

Straw man and ad hominem, Qwerty. I never said any such thing! Did I not say that in principle recycling is a good idea? If you read my words again perhaps you'll see on the second pass that what I'm arguing against is not the idea of recycling but doing it for real with methods that have true positive benefit, rather than just trying to BS citizens that we're accomplishing something 'cuz "we're all in this together!" It's been revealed that here in Hamilton if the price of recycled glass is too low the city often just throws all the collected glass into the regular landfill. Also, the buyers for recycled paper are well aware that the city can only stockpile a couple of weeks worth of paper. So they offer a very low price. If the city doesn't like it they just wait. In a couple of weeks the city is desperate to get rid of it and sells it even cheaper! McGuinty made a campaign promise to close down the Nanticoke coal generating station, one of the dirtiest on the planet. After he got elected he finally figured out what anybody with a high school education would already have known, that if he closed it he didn't have any extra power capacity to cover it! So he broke his promise and kept making new deadlines at least 10 years in the future, when he hopes to have new nukes on board. Meanwhile, because with Nanticoke he heated up his own political hot potato, he flatly refuses to talk about modern smokestack scrubbers that will clean up all the pollutants coming out of the plant! He doesn't want to be embarrassed about his broken promises so he won't at least clean the damn thing up while he's still running it for the next 10 years! There are all kinds of REAL things we could be doing on the pollution front. As I had said, if we allowed companies to separate recyclables at a central depot instead of every citizen having to put in the time we'd probably get a lot more people putting stuff out in their blue boxes. We also could use modern clean technologies of incineration to drastically reduce landfill and produce power as a bonus. If we ponied up the costs of transmission lines from Winnipeg and Quebec we could buy electricity from fellow Canadians instead of buying it from the Americans down south. Our neighbouring provinces have cheap surplus power in spades to sell to us. The Americans often can't help us out 'cuz they are short themselves! On a bigger scale, we should've built some new nukes 20 years ago. It's true that the Ontario Hydro blew it with cost overruns on the reactors they built years ago. So what? There are a lot of other countries that have better managed technologies. We could simply tell those domestic vendors to take a hike. Many American states have laws that if you produce power on your own you can sell your surplus back to the grid, with a 2 way meter. This really helps. You can make enough money when you have extra in the warm months to pay for what you have to buy in the cold ones. In Ontario you can't do this! Only a large scale operation can get such a deal. Homeowners are told officially that they can do this but in practice they make you jump through so many silly building codes that you just can't afford to do it. Why? I'm not sure if it's just stuffiness but I suspect that the Ontario government really doesn't want us to get "off grid"! There's still 30 some BILLION dollars of stranded Ontario Hydro debt that we here are paying off with a surcharge on our monthly bill. If we got off grid and didn't get a bill then they wouldn't be able to make us pay back that huge debt THEY ran up! So go ahead and call me down for not wanting to join your "touchy feely" crowd, Qwerty. Meanwhile, I'll be supporting approaches to achieve YOUR VERY GOALS that might actually WORK!

Raise awareness? Sorry, that smacks of just "touchy-feely" to me. I feel I already know more than the average person, thank you. I'd rather see concrete action than just more "raise awareness" programs. Recycling in principle is of course a good idea. Sadly, in practice it often gets impractical and inefficient. Here in Hamilton the city chose to make citizens do their own garbage separation. What they're really doing is downloading the labour onto the taxpayers. Frankly, I'm busy enough. I'm just glad I no longer waste an extra 3 hours a day in commuting to work. If I was still doing that and had to come home to separating all the recyclables I think I might snap and go postal some day. Across the border in the USA they recycle at destination. Big plants collect all the garbage and people have jobs using machine assist to separate all the recyclable materials. Seems to work fine for them. Citizens pay taxes for services so THEY DON'T HAVE TO DO IT THEMSELVES! Where is this idea of downloading labour onto the citizens going to stop? What advantage will we have to live in cities then at all? Turning out the lights for an hour struck me as so goofy as to be almost irresponsible. I worried about the power surge when the hour was up and things were turned back on. That was just asking for a failure in the power grid! Moreover, while it may have "raised awareness" that's about all it did. Electricity cannot be stored. It must be produced to meet demand. Save 10-20% for an hour and you have NOTHING in the bank! You've accomplished nothing to help meet demand the next hot summer day when the airconditioners are all cranked to the max. Those new compact florescent bulbs are not exactly what we've been told, either. Lighting is the smallest part of your monthly bill. Compared to the power to run stoves, air conditioners, washers/dryers and furnace motors the charge for your lights is "mice nuts". It WILL slightly reduce the load on the generating stations, which is a benefit for the provincial electrical company. It just won't even buy you an extra case of beer or two with any savings on your home bill, so no real benefit to YOU! Conservation is really just another name for efficiency. Even if you could achieve the utopian goal of 100% efficiency you still need more capacity if your population and infrastructure needs have grown. We've ALREADY done the easy things for energy conservation! Pretty well everybody has changed their bulbs and insulated and caulked as much as they can afford. Now what? The Ontario government hasn't built new generating capacity for years, choosing instead to push "conservation", as if the problem is OUR fault as citizens! Now they are frantically playing catchup, with new nukes that will take years to implement. McGuinty lives in fear of another summer or worse, winter blackout. People won't listen to excuses at that point. They will just blame the government in power and he knows it! Suppose you had a farm that supported a community of 50 people. A few babies are born so there's a few more mouths to feed. So you go out and improve farming efficiencies and grow more food. You keep doing this and after a few years you start to hit the limit for any gains in food production, no matter how much you've "conserved". Then 500 hungry townsfolk come into your community. Conservation or no, you will then HAVE to start plowing some new farmland! If you don't have new generating capacity, you're gonna starve. Believe me, going hungry in the cold and dark will efficiently raise your awareness!

Which leads to the question: does this make it impossible to please a reasonable majority of the electorate? Perhaps we should make Toronto its own province, or maybe its own country! It has almost nothing in common with the rest of Canada yet its population and seat distribution lets it command an inordinate amount of political power. If you please Toronto to get elected, the rest of Ontario or even the country will likely hate you! Maybe we should give up trying!

I think you're missing the point. When your grandfolks came over they weren't grandfolks! They were young and of working age! Today, 70% of immigration is "family reunification". They come over as old grandfolks! You're not likely to see them working on construction sites.

We are very close to having enzyme technologies on the market that will make ethanol directly from scrap bio-waste. There'll be no need to use corn or sugar cane. Just process the stalks that are left over. Now what will that do to corn pricing?

+1! I get so tired of people who defend the present system by saying "Immigrants built this country!" When 70% of new immigrants are grandmothers and grandfathers, how many houses do you think they can build? They can each easily cast a vote for the Liberals, of course.

Well, I for one am starting to suspect that there may indeed be neurological differences! I've read that if a child is not taught to think in terms of scientific method before the age of 8 or 9 he likely will never be able to do so later in life. Logical thinking and scientific reasoning is not natural to human beings. Intuitive thinking seems to be the way we are wired. This serves us well in simplistic situations but is often lacking with the complicated problems of today's world. Perhaps others can chime in with their own experience but I've found over the years of my life that "lefties" rarely are good at math or hard sciences! Disciplines that are based on "cause and effect" tend to be rather sparse of red Liberals or NDP types. Intuitive based thinkers act as if science is simply magic. If you've decided that a substance should be banned "just in case" it's harmful to the environment, even if the evidence is weak and the cost of looking for a replacement horrendous, you take it for granted that a replacement is simply a matter of throwing money at the scientists or engineers. The idea that perhaps there IS NO replacement is something incomprehensible to such thinkers. After all, magic can do anything. I'm saying that Jack Layton and Olivia Chow dropped science when their bean seeds failed to sprout in those jars full of tissue paper! It's telling that the major scientist spokesman for the meteorological factors behind the so-called global warming effect is not a physicist but a botanist, namely Mr. Suzuki! Or that most of the protesters marching in parades to save the planet are poli-sci majors and not engineers. I'm not passing value judgements here. We need all kinds of people in a balanced society. It just seems that in some areas we're letting blind folks dictate the colour scheme. We listen to people and confuse their being articulate with knowing what they're talking about. I find it interesting that a society like Japan has such strong traits of science and engineering. The entire society not only accepts but delights in new gadgets and technology. Witness their fascination with robots. Japanese parents seem to prefer sending their children to engineering school, rather than accounting or law. How strong does the Left appear in Japanese society? I don't know if the the difference is a result of hard wiring or environmental factors, but I'm convinced that there is a dramatic difference in how "left" and "right" folks think. Now if this doesn't start a flame...

Old joke: Doctor says to patient: "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you are NOT paranoid! The bad news is that there IS someone after you!"