Wild Bill

I guess not enough people are old enough to remember those days. Many presently on the left keep hoping that the CPC will fully morph back into the old PC party, since they are more comfortable with all parties being on various degrees of the left and further from what they fear is a true conservative position. They might be right but from the POV of someone who lived through those times it just doesn't seem likely. Reform's seat count and percentage of the popular vote was FAR more than that of the PCs! At the time the parties merged, the PCs were left with just a handful of seats in the Maritimes. It seemed every time an election was held they lost a bit more. They would likely have been totally dead at the time of the merger except for the very poor and outright goofy leadership of Stockwell Day. Somehow I can't see the majority of those old Reform votes once again embracing the PC party. It just makes no sense at all.

Back in the 1970's before the fall of the USSR a farmer friend took me to a plowing match/trade show. There were rows and rows of combines, balers and of course, tractors. Now at that time most of the brands were domestic, like John Deere or Massey Ferguson. There were a few Japanese units in the rows as well but what made the biggest impression on me was a Russian tractor! All the other tractors had enclosed cabs, with air conditioning to escape the hot sun and radios for entertainment. The seats were well designed and comfortable. The upholstery and padding were better than many cars. Then there was the Russian unit. It was a huge brute and obviously had all the brute force horsepower you could ever want or imagine. However, the seat was a plain metal plate with two scoops for your ass cheeks, with holes so that rainwater would not collect. You sat on this monster with nothing at all between you and the open sky. No radio and this was in the days just before the Sony Walkman. I imagined that Russian farmers must all be rather cranky individuals. If I had to endure using such equipment I know I would have been!

I thought a Globemaster was an old cw transmitter, BC?

Dog, didn't Monty Python pioneer that over 40 years ago?

Well, I suppose I missed the thread drift! I have been following the OP - where GH said he watched "Gasland, the Movie!". I didn't get the sense from subsequent posts that the movie was a valid scientific study.

Years ago some friends of mine moved to BC. After a few years they reported back to me how politics worked on the west coast. They told me that people there would alternate between the NDP and the Liberals. They explained this as "One spends on a party for us and the other pays for it!"

" M > 3 "? Are they talking about earthquakes greater than 3 on the Richter Scale? Until and unless they exceeded 5 no one would likely notice! Still, let's assume that this point is absolutely true and incontrovertible. What about everything else in the documentary? If this point is true, did it cause flammable gas to come out everyone's shower head? What was the distribution of those M > 3 quakes? 80% between 3 and 4? Or only 20%, with 80% being 8.9 or more? If the tremors are on the low side, they may actually act as a safety valve! It seems to me that the picture has many facets and is nowhere near as simplistic and as negative as this documentary apparently claims. If I concede your one point, do I have to accept everything else? I don't think you actually are saying that at all.

GH, I admire your concern but you have to understand that without a technical background it is easy to get snowed! Many enviromentalists are not very technical. When they make movies they can make many mistakes but they always seem to make them in their own favour. They have already decided how something works and will never be convinced by scientific evidence, because they can't understand it anyway! It's advertising! Once of the classic methods that still fools people every day is the old "4 out of 5 doctors prefer..." trick. You can make the claim that 4 out of 5 homes have flammable gas in their well water. All you have to do is keep searching through hundreds if not thousands of such homes until you find 4 with the problem. Then you just take one out of all the others and you can legally claim that 4 out of 5 experience the problem! To the layman, it sounds as if 80% of the people with wells living near some fracking have the problem. I grew up in an area where many wells had much sulfur gas in the water. Our own family home had clean water and so did our immediate neighbour. Then a 3rd party built a house and drilled a new well to the same depth as the other two. Not only did he have much sulfur gas but the other two wells did also! Why? Because there were many pockets down in the ground of softer materials that may have blocked the stuff until the drilling vibrations broke a layer or two up, allowing the sulfur to flow where it did not before. My point is that someone could get gas in their water even without fracking going on. A ground tremor could cause it. To prove something you would need to properly investigate. It's guaranteed that those who make the documentary you watched did NOT properly investigate! They had made up their minds before they started filming. Being technically inclined, I have always had difficulty with such "documentaries". I understand much of what they offer as "scientific" evidence and often see grievous flaws. Michael Moore just turns my stomach! I much prefer Penn and Teller. The reason I am bothered is that when someone cries wolf so often how can you tell if there's really a wolf there? It's important to know! But if I got all excited every time I watched one of those biased documentaries I would give myself high blood pressure problems for nothing. Sometimes oil companies and such MAY be biased too! I am not so naive as to think them all innocents. However, I just can't take documentaries on the CBC or whatever as worthwhile evidence against them. I am left to make up my own mind, with only my own background to fall back on.

Waldo, you've just proven what I thought I was the only one on this board who knew - you DO have a heart! You are a man unfairly maligned...

Dunno about the Yanks Waldo but as far as Canada is concerned, couldn't "catch up" be a factor? After all, we had several decades of neglect, to the point where Sea Kings fell out of the air and killed pilots. We also had stories of truck rims collapsing due to age and rust! If this is true, is it fair to place us #14 if it is not for new materiel but just long overdue tires and stuff? I wonder if old bullets work reliably. Could our guys find themselves in trouble due to old ammo?

I admit I buy a lot of Chinese products. Sometimes I don't know that's where they came from. Sometimes there are no other sources. Still, if I have a choice I try to avoid them. In the real world, that's the best a poor guy can do. As for the Chinese doing the electronic chips for the F-35, it doesn't work like that. There is still some smaller scale manufacturing of such semiconductors done in America. This is used for sensitive stuff like military, aerospace and intelligence applications. Uncle Sam HAS to do this because it would be too easy to put extra stuff inside a chip to give an F-35 pilot or an American spy satellite a nasty surprise. This makes them much more expensive but in the scale of the defense budget it gets swamped out. Sorry to burst your bubble my good Dr. Dre but we're not talking apples and oranges here. I'm sure if an F-35 had a DVD player for those long haul missions it might be Chinese made but that would be about it.

Very interesting! Every poster to this thread should read this carefully! Here's a bit from the end: "Ford’s predictions were well received in London and, three decades later, events confirmed the accuracy of his analysis. Fuelled by advocacy groups often funded with public money, the Canadian courts have launched a vast enterprise of social re-engineering. Thanks to affirmative action and multiculturalism, our traditions have been eroded and privileges given to politically correct lobbies at the expense of the equality of all under the law. The Charter was supposed to give us a new sense of nationhood and pride. Instead, it added a whole range of new divisive issues to the ones that already existed. Canada was transformed into a collection of bitterly opposed, self-interested groups. The Constitution was used to transform their political objectives into rights in order to achieve gains at everyone else’s expense. This result is diametrically opposed to the stated objective. The British prophesy has come true."

None! I never said he did any! In my OP I simply said that Harper was quoted as recognizing that the 'war on drugs' has been a failure. Nothing else! My point is that a Canadian PM has finally seen the obvious. He himself said that he doesn't know what should be done, since he thinks that drugs are harmful. Me, I say, so what? I've got that Classic Liberal hormone in me that says "What the hell business is it of YOURS if I choose to do drugs?" I do not and never have agreed that the State has the right to dictate lifestyle choices. Adults should be able to do whatever drugs they want, adopt whatever sexual lifestyle they wish and basically make their own choices. If they screw up, they should also be responsible for their own mistakes. The role of government should be limited to one of education and punishment for harming others or their property. After that, they should keep an effective army to prevent any wolves from getting in to our Shire or harming our national interests. I don't know if Harper's government will actually do something positive in this area. I do know that as long as governments were in denial about a futile war there was no chance of anything ever happening! It's only been over 30 some odd years since the LeDain Commission. We Canadians are not a hasty folk!

Neither you or CC bothered to read the link, did you? It's kinda obvious! I guess it's easier to castigate your hated Harper for what you think he said rather than deal with what was actually spoken. Forgive me if I don't participate with you. I like to live in the real world.

That was my point, CC! The Bill was not Harper's personal creation. It came from Vic Toew's Ministry. As PM Harper is ultimately responsible but it is naive in the extreme to think that he crafts every Bill himself! No, this is a distinct break from Vic's position with that Bill. It shows that things may be changing on this issue within the PMO. I'm not expecting to see Mark Emery appointed to the Senate any time soon but still, something is going on.

It takes money to make nukes, eyeball. A LOT of money! We can't agree on the F-35. What makes you think we could ever agree to fund a make-nukes program? By the time the usual bunch got through nit-picking everyone else would have left to colonize space, leaving us here all alone!

There's a big assumption in your argument, CC. You seem to be saying that judges are supreme, not our elected government. I and many others have a problem with this. I understand that most of the time the courts should administer the laws that Parliament has passed but sometimes it seems the courts make their own law, at least in the way they apply it. As a populist, I can never accept that!Politicians may not be that good at listening but they are a damn sight less deaf than the average judge! So who oversteps their bounds? The government or some judges? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure but I don't think things are quite the way you are painting them.

Here's the link: http://news.sympatico.cbc.ca/world/war_on_drugs_not_working_harper_says/43eefecd "Prime Minister Stephen Harper took Canadian journalists at the Summit of the Americas by surprise when he conceded the war on drugs is a failure. But, he added, that didn't mean he supports legalization." I always believed that Harper was for the most part a logical fellow but I never expected this. He still doesn't support legalization but admitting the war is a failure is a giant first step! Now I know that there will be posters on this board who will say that Harper wants drugs to stay illegal because he's a Tory and they enjoy destroying people's lives but we all know the issue is more complicated than that. Whatever is going on, it sure looks like ol' Vic Toews is no longer calling the shots, which many of us predicted what was going to happen when Vic introduced his Spanish Inquisition crime Bill.

Eyeball, judging from past posts you seem to think that a nuclear weapon is some kind of magic wand that will eliminate the need for any other aspect of a military. That's just not true! It's too simplistic. First off, to answer your specific question, the Bomarc was a deal of over 50 years ago. Do you seriously think such political deals last forever? Do you seriously think that a deal to put nukes on a shared Bomarc missile defense meant that we could buy as many other nukes as we wanted, for our own purposes? Give your head a shake, my friend! You usually don't make such mistakes. I can only assume that you are starved for some coffee. Having nuclear weapons as your only military tool is like having a flamethrower to keep flies away! A nuke is a weapon of LAST resort, not the first! Virtually always disputes are well within the capability of conventional military options. Why do you think countries still have infantry? Because sometimes you need to administer a spanking, not annihilate half a country! Besides, as soon as you use one then you can expect to have one lobbed back at you. Do you really think Canada can afford to play that game? As a techie, I can say with certainty that often the simple solution is wrong, because it ignores all the important details.

Of course, that's different! These bogus discrimination claims always work only one way. As a species, we seem to be especially thick! We implement affirmative action programs and then can't see how they are unfair to individuals, because of some ancestral obligation of a race. It is racism in reverse, which of course is just racism, period. Someday we will achieve a Star Trek universe,where people are all just people. Unfortunately, we have to wade through a lot of politically correct crap first.

No! Sez who? The point about the Bomarcs is that they were pulled out and scrapped because they wouldn't work! Geez, CC! Don't be so quick to twist everything to your arguments.

Yes! Read for yourself! It's called "google"! That's why there was so much heated debate not only in Parliament but internally within first the PC and then later the Liberal Party!

Recheck your history, my friend! Maybe google "Diefenbaker Bomarc". Here's a good link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIM-10_Bomarc "The Bomarc Missile Program was highly controversial in Canada. The Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker initially agreed to deploy the missiles, and shortly thereafter controversially scrapped the Avro Arrow, a supersonic manned interceptor aircraft, arguing that the missile program made the Arrow unnecessary." Dief did not just accept "Uncle Sam's offer to protect us". He deployed Bomarc missiles in Canada! We were protecting ourselves. In fact, they were supposed to be nuclear armed. Dief's government fell and the Liberals took over. They decided to go with the nuclear option and the first nuclear Bomarc was operational New Year's Eve, 1963. Then came Trudeau, who wanted to get rid of them but found he couldn't due to internal politics. It all became moot anyway because there were some embarrassing accidents and also, the Bomarcs were proved useless and obsolete. Uncle Sam scrapped them and of course Canada followed suit. So there was no such protection deal, eyeball! We were supposed to protect each other, with Canada pulling its weight. The idea of mooching off of Uncle Sam came much later, during Trudeau's reign.

Because that is the logical outcome of your argument, CC! You have given no alternative that would work! So, if we followed your opinion, we would have no useful air force at all. Maybe a token showing of useless planes as a symbolic gesture. That would be it! Since this seems to many of us to be so obvious that you yourself must be aware of it, the only possible explanation must be that you have a "hidden agenda" of ensuring we have no effective air force at all!

Hey, it's Sweden! They are quite a ways down this 'unisex' path! http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/307262 "Young women in Sweden, Germany and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating." ...'more crucially because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women.'' One argument is that if women can't do it, then men shouldn't either. Another is that standing upright while relieving oneself is ''a nasty macho gesture,'' suggestive of male violence." I used to find Swedish women attractive but now I find them downright frightening!