Wild Bill

Folks might remember that Trudeau made his chauffeur a senator!

In Steyn's book "America Alone" he talks about clashes of cultures and mentions how the British in India were confronted with the Indian custom of "suttee" which is a tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. He quotes General Sir Charles Napier as "impeccably multicultural" by stating: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours." Anyone who thinks that all cultural traits are equally moral and valid deserves whatever "David Pearl" type of fate that some other culture chooses to hand out to them.

The Queen has nothing to do with making us British subjects and hasn't for years! Civics 101 lesson! We happen to SHARE a Queen with Britain! We are an independent Dominion, not a colony! While the Queen is figuratively our Head of State she has no legal power. That ended when Trudeau brought back the Constitution. Where have you been all this time?

Yeah, it seems strange to me as well. Politicians of all stripes have been too afraid to build new nukes for some decades now. So the existing plants get old and past their design lifetimes and suddenly "Surprise!" we have no alternate source for medical isotopes! I agree that Harper forcing a re-start of the reactor is cause for concern but I've always found Harper to be much more of a real world guy than Dion and his predecessors, like Chretien who spoke with imaginary homeless guys in imaginary bars. I've worked in engineering circles and there's always a big difference between going by the book and what's actually necessary to be safe. That's especially true in nuke plants where the "fudge factor" is deliberately made HUGE to ensure safety! So I'm sure he's talked to qualified people at the reactor and found out if they can safely do this. Since they work there themselves they have a vested interest in being realistic! Still, if the plant is old then the plant is old. They should have built a replacement long ago but as I said the politicians simply responded to irrational public fears. Well, the public got what they asked for - how do you think they like it now?

My post was not based on my opinion but rather on history I have read about Trudeau's time in office. His experience with a premiers' conference was a historical fact. If I trip across one of my books that contains the reference I'll post it for you but frankly I'm not going to spend a lot of time searching just to educate you about history. Believe what you like. You won't change what happened.

What do you suggest they do? It takes a finite amount of time to safely do the physical things necessary to overhaul the reactor. If the parts had not been ordered ahead of time they take as long as they take to manufacture, test and ship. You can't just send someone out to Home Depot! This is where politics and bureaucracy meets reality. You can yell and demand all you want but the Universe works the way it works and just doesn't care how you feel about it. The real problem is obviously the people running the plant. Something tells me they weren't all hired by Harper since the Tories took over in Ottawa. Still, it's a safe bet that the Opposition will blame them for it anyway.

I think I must be the only "old guy" on this board! Many of the founders of the BQ/PQ were monarchists! They were proud of the Queen, just felt that she should be their Queen of an independent Quebec, just as she is of an independent TROC. There are still large numbers of Canadians proud of their British Heritage. SOMEONE has to be, now that we live in a multi-cultural society that values any country's heritage BUT Canadian! Any politician who wants to make us over into a republic would have to consider this group of votes.

What about a pay raise that was just enough to kick you into a higher taxable rate? You get a raise of $1000 but now you're taxed at 22% instead of 18%, or whatever.

What are you missing? I would say that you're not making a distinction between primary and secondary industries as foundations for our economy. Simply put, primary industry means made, grown or dug up! Secondary means we installed, cooked, painted or taught it! The difference is that only primary industry creates new wealth. All secondary industry has to do with handling or modifying the wealth created by a primary industry. So you can't have a healthy economy merely by doing each other's laundry and cutting each other's lawns. Otherwise we could have cured all our economic ills long ago by drafting everyone into the postal service and have us all mail letters to each other!

So who has protected myself and my family all these years? Not Mike! We could all never afford to buy all the beer we owe each and every soldier!

+1! I've heard this claim about stolen guns for years and never seen a firm stat on percentages of stolen guns ending up used in a crime yet. This leads me to believe that if such stats exist the real number must be very low or else the registry fans would be trumpeting it to the heavens! My brother-in-law is a cop and he tells me that anyone can go into almost any bar in downtown Hamilton, quietly ask around and within 30 minutes buy an illegal handgun. I believe him! The system catches only 1 or 2 out of hundreds of growops and only a tiny percentage of illegal drugs in the country. We're supposed to believe that a gun registry will protect us from gun crime? It's absurd. As for police claims for continuing the registry, police have a huge blind spot! They tend to believe that they can keep the peace as long as you give them enough laws and resources. They will never posit scrapping an ineffective law. They want as many tools as they can get! As long as enough people continue to believe that passing a law is enough in itself to fix a problem our politicians will be very, very happy!

This debate always comes down to the same point: how can you control illegal guns? Law abiding citizens comply with gun registries but they were never the problem in the first place! Cops claim that the registry lets them know if there's a gun in a house but they still have to treat EVERY house call as a possible gun situation 'cuz only a psychic could know if there's an ILLEGAL gun in the house. No, it has nothing to do with American style desires to have a gun rack in your pickup truck. It's just the simple practicalities of the situation. Making gun registration more and more complicated is just smoke and mirrors. The Liberal gun registry never added ONE DAY"S extra sentence for illegally USING a gun! In fact, when it was first introduced the penalty for not registering was greater than the typical sentence for holding up a convenience store! Me, I couldn't care less how much new gun control legislation is introduced, except for wondering how many hospital beds the money could have provided. We've always had more than enough legislation. It's logistically impossible to try to prevent illegal guns from entering the county. I would much rather see real deterrent penalties enforced and applied for the illegal use of firearms. A mandatory 5 years for simply carrying a gun while committing a crime that cannot be plea-bargained away might actually do something concrete.

Actually, transistors are all right for hifi applications. The main difference between the two types of devices is how they handle distortion. Transistors are very clean reproducers of a signal. Even less distortion than tubes, although both devices can deliver THD levels below what the human ear can distinguish so that point is moot. The problem is that they have no slope to the curve as they enter distortion territory. It's clean, clean, clean, - fuzzbox! It also tends to be a harsh and grating form of distortion. Tubes have a long shallow slope into distortion as they're overdriven. This actually more closely matches the properties of the human ear. The distortion initially is more of a compression, with the wave not clipped hard at the top but rather just reduced in peak amplitude. This sounds like the tone is becoming "warmer" and "thicker" until it finally becomes too "over the top". This makes tube sound far more appealing when you are dealing with prerecorded music, especially when it has fast and loud transients like the "whap" of a snare drum or the sudden initial "boom" from a strong vocalist. What engineering types don't understand is that an electric guitar is NOT SUPPOSED to be hifi and undistorted! Unless you're Wes Montgomery playing clean jazz, of course. Rock and roll is all about distortion but it was pioneered with tube distortion. This all means that you can't sound like Eddie Van Halen if you use transistors, period! Perhaps more important, tubes are immune to the effects of the EMP triggered by nuclear explosions. If one were exploded over your city every transistor device within miles would be "snackered". Even those made by AMD!

Interesting how the views seem to fall into one of two camps. One camp thinks mathematically. If the result will be trivial, why bother? The other camp is more emotional, inferring that "making an effort" is in itself worthwhile and making no attempt to calculate if Canada would achieve anything beyond reducing a tiny fraction of the total problem and at what cost. One camp won't even try and the other would knock itself out but in a futile manner. Something tells me the planet is in more trouble than the emissions debate would indicate...

When I first started work for an order desk selling electronic parts Intel had just brought out the world's first 8 bit 5 volt only CPU! I don't know what Intel is like to deal with today but in those early days we found them to be incredibly arrogant to both customers and their distis alike. Ever since then whenever I buy a new motherboard I go with AMD if at all possible! I was there through those times, on the cutting edge of all the latest and greatest. We brought the world's first personal computer into Canada, the Osbourne I. Couldn't keep them in stock, they sold so fast. Now I'm back with vacuum tubes! High tech, soft touch, as the guy wrote about. Guitarists have never really accepted transistors. They don't sound at all the same. For clean tones like jazz or bass guitar there are some successful transistor amps but for blues, rock and vintage guitarists wouldn't use a transistor amp if you held a gun to their heads! It's a niche market. Schools haven't taught tube circuits since the mid 60's so there's not a lot of guys like me around. Not a great amount of money but man! do I get a lot of free beer!

Ah, the old "fixed pie" concept! Thought that had been discredited years ago. No, 10% will not leave but they may well throttle back their plans for further investment. Lower taxes encourages investment, resulting in more taxable revenue. Higher taxes discourage investment, leaving less taxable profits. In effect, one approach results in more pie being baked and the other in less. People invest to get a return, not because of some inherent genetic programming that you can take for granted. My career was mostly in electronic part sales to manufacturing, an industry which has virtually collapsed over the past six or so years. Many of my former mega accounts have left the country. Some of the production went to China of course but a surprising amount has fled to Ireland. Why? Less taxes and a LOT less red tape! Ireland is now an economic powerhouse and for the first time in over a century has more immigration than emigration.

Just putting in some inventory. I run a guitar amp sevice/build business from my home. Once in a while I'll make a cabinet for some speakers or a new amp I've built. It just seemed appropriate to mention, with posts claiming how metric we've become!

I wanted to jump into this thread earlier but I've been busy with some household woodworking. Just got back from a trip to Home Depot where I picked up some 4'x8' sheets of plywood and some 2x4's. I looked for them first in metric but I couldn't find any...

A couple of excerpts taken out of context and you can pass judgement? Read the book and then I'll listen to you. You can dig negatives out of anything, if you look hard enough and are sufficiently biased.

Then Trudeau was also a coward?

The replacement is late for the same reason no new nukes have been built in decades - anti-nuke hysteria! I find it ironic that the result of this unscientific fear has been the unfortunate negative effect on so many people needing isotope products to try to save their lives. As has been said so many times, intelligence is a constant divided by the number of people involved.

You obviously have never read Steyn's book. He takes great pains to point out the difference between militant Islam, moderates and those who while not violent support those that are. I never saw anything to indicate an intelligently directed "conspiracy" from any but the small minority of militants. Steyn talks in terms of demographics, which require no intelligence to exert effects. When he talks about militants he freely admits there's only a small percentage that advocate and commit violent acts. He just takes the logical next step in doing some simple math. A few percent of millions is a fairly large group. How many does it take to set off a bomb? He also points out a very common misconception among many western folks, that Islam is similar to other religions that accept the concept of separation of Church and State. He quotes chapter and verse to prove that Islam does NOT! This gives way to a set of values very different from that of western societies and it would be illogical to deny any conflicts. Anyhow, Steyn is more than capable of defending himself but if you are maintaining he's some kind of anti-Islam bigot when you have never read the book in question then I would say that you are simply talking through your hat!

For the same reasons Trudeau shunned them - he gave them a meeting and all they did was gang up on him with excessive demands for money! After the first time he swore "Never again!" and he stuck to his oath!

Except for those that now they have moved in and are comfortable are now leading the charge to demand we abandon our Queen and British Heritage!

You just won't let it go, will you! Because he's a Tory he has to be dirty! If the NDP can drop it in embarassment, what more do you want?