Wild Bill

No, YOU are laughing at her because you already had made up your mind! Most voters are not as rigidly partisan as you appear to be.

I suppose, but again I can only speak for myself. I can't vote for the other two parties BECAUSE of my political views! And I'm not a conservative! I just can't vote for a party that has even more boneheads in it than the Tories! And I agree that's not saying much!

August, not to pick apart your model instead of your point (a VERY popular custom here on MLW!) but my understanding was that the original CCF WAS a rural party! It came from the prairies with Tommy Douglas. When it morphed into the NDP and decided to seek its support with the eastern Canada union workers was when the rural/urban split began. The point of view of a farmer and a guy who bangs bumpers on an assembly line tends to be quite different. Of course, this looked like a smart move at the time to the NDP. There are far more assembly line workers than farmers, when the votes are counted. Still, one wonders if they could have thrown those farmers at least a few bones, instead of just ignoring them.

Waldo, why should Fantino (Excuse me while I spit! I really detest the man!) or the rest of the Tory party need a retreat position? If the F-35 is truly such a financial boondoggle then the Americans will cancel it themselves. Instantly, the Tories are off the hook. Of course, that will still leave us with the problem of what DO we buy but that probably doesn't matter. I'm convinced that by the time our politicians pull their thumbs out of their butt we'll have long since built Star Trek's Enterprise, making the question moot. We're only talking a few centuries here, after all!

This argument about the rich not paying their fair share is an old one. It is also totally bogus! It perfectly illustrates the difference between "head" people and "heart" people or maybe more accurately those who use intuition as a guide rather than cold hard math. Here's an example with the easiest math in the world, so easy that even arts and poli-sci majors should be able to follow it! It does presuppose you can set up a spreadsheet but the math is just "back of an envelope" level. Take a guess at the number of working people in Canada. Don't bother looking it up! As I said, the math is so easy that your guesses are good enough! Now, take a guess at how many of those people make over half a million dollars a year. That's the point where we'll call them rich! Once again, it doesn't matter if you're accurate. When you get to the end you will see why. Take the number of "rich" folks away from the total and you are left with all the working "non-rich" taxpayers. Let's assume the government dinks them for 25% of their income. We all know it's much more than that, with all the user fees and hidden taxes but to keep things simple, let's go with paying a quarter of your income to the government. This should give you a number that represents the tax "take" from the "non-rich" folks. Note that it's a BIG number! Now look at that number you had of all the "rich" Canadians. Figure out how much is 25% of their income. Get the picture? THE AMOUNT OF TAX MONEY YOU CAN GET FROM THE NON-RICH WORKERS IS FAR, FAR, FAR GREATER THAN YOU CAN TAKE FROM THE RICH! I don't care how accurate your guesses were. The enormity of the difference swamps out any arguments. You could take ALL the money from the rich and it still wouldn't matter! Most working folks are not rich but their combined income is so large that they are the target for the government to skim. The income of the rich is just a drop in the bucket! To a math-challenged, intuitive thinking person, it is emotionally satisfying to think that the problem is someone is skinning out of paying their fair share. It's easy to think that all our problems would be solved if we could just make the rich pay! Yeah, and I can regularly fill an inside straight too! The Math doesn't lie! The tax potential of the rich is irrelevant. Some might want to include the wealth of corporations but that too is irrelevant. Their money eventually comes out as income for all a corporation's workers and to salaries for its managers, plus share dividends to all the old ladies and teachers who rely on their portfolio for their old age income. It winds up included in my original example. One would be naive to think that every politician doesn't know this. When people mob a politician, crying that they are being squeezed too hard with taxes, all he has to do is point in another direction and say "Hey! There goes a rich guy! You paid more because he didn't pay his share!" Every time the mob's attention will be diverted towards the rich guy, while the politician saunters away whistling - and laughing!

Have you heard the great news, Dog? http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1680818/bill-and-ted-3-alex-winter.jhtml "God gave rock and roll to you, and if you're lucky, he'll give you a brand new "Bill and Ted" adventure as well! That's the plan, at least, according to one half of the dimwitted duo: Alex Winter, who starred as Bill Preston Esq. in both "Excellent Adventure" and "Bogus Journey," isn't just hoping for a "Bill and Ted" reunion, he's getting close to making it actually happen. "I think the reality is that there probably will be another one," Winter told MTV News during a recent interview about his new Napster documentary, "Downloaded." Indeed, Winter and co-star Keanu Reeves both recently confirmed that a third "Bill and Ted" script is finished (and totally excellent). "

You really do like making cartoons with straw men, don't you? I vote PC in Ontario. I have no problem with my gay friends, except for some of them and their taste in music. No problem with a women's right to choose, either. As for religion, as a devout agnostic I favour the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the creator of the Universe. Now, I guess if you like symbolism over substance, think guilt or innocence depends on belonging to the political stripe YOU favour, think you can create an entire windmill turbine and solar cell industry by rigging the market and are so unscientific you think that if there's not enough electricity we should all install more outlets in our walls, then you must be a Liberal Voter! There! I can make straw men too! Isn't my reasoning just as good as yours? Give me a flippin' break! No wonder the Chinese are cleaning our clocks...

It IS disgusting! The Minister SHOULD resign! However, the days of Ministers resigning to preserve the appearance of integrity in their government are sadly, long gone. What's more, McGuinty's government seems to have successfully conditioned the Ontario electorate to consider such incompetence to be NORMAL! No one is shocked anymore - not even surprised! I think we have gotten long past the point where most people think there's any point to outrage. Government is no longer thought of as something driven by intelligence, that you can talk to and influence. Rather, it is an elemental force, like the weather. This scandal may be a hurricane but what's the point of yelling at a hurricane? Might as well try to tell the tide to hold back!

Well, there's a LOT of room before armed intervention! How about money? Ottawa could and likely would immediately stop all financial transfers to Quebec. A sovereign Quebec government would immediately have to cover all pensions, EI and the rest. That's a LOT of money! Quebec could talk about closing the St. Lawrence Seaway but we could talk about denying commercial aircraft the right to fly to Quebec over Canada's airspace! There is a HUGE amount of 2-way trade with Quebec from Ontario and the Maritimes! What if we applied tariffs? What if we decided to seek other sources and not buy from Quebec? How about that Churchill Falls deal? Would Quebec send in troops if some Danny Williams clone turned the switch delivering all that electricity to Quebec to the "off" position? A lot of ground to cover. The separatistes all seem to have this naive notion that any separation issues would be calmly and rationally negotiated with TROC, with scarcely any pain. This is total crapola! Divorce always has hard feelings. The voters in the rest of Canada will in the main be extremely hurt, bitter and angry, except for those who had come to the belief that we'd be better off without Quebec anyway! Parizeau understood this perfectly. That is what he meant when he said that after a "yes" vote Quebecois would be like lobsters in the pot! He knew there would be immense hardships for the Quebec people but figured in the long run it would be worth it to be independent. Perhaps if I was a Quebecer as well off as he I might have agreed with him. A little old lady on an old age pension might have felt differently. This is the reason the PQ and BQ have always downplayed any talk about such problems with separating. The MPs for TROC will have to heed this sentiment. With Quebec gone, she will have ZERO seats to give any party in Parliament! Voters in TROC will be the only ones Ottawa will cater to, for they will be the only ones to keep them in power. As usual, things are far more complicated than they may first seem.

Dr. Dre, for basic procurement the steps you laid out are valid and I would agree with you. However, with modern military aircraft there's a kicker that you don't seem to have considered. First, let me give you an example of traditional purchasing approaches that were inappropriate to a situation. Back in the early 80's when I was selling integrated circuits and capacitors and stuff the company brought the world's first personal computer into the Canadian market. It was the Osbourne I and for giggles you might want to google it and compare it to what we use today. Anyhow, within a few years a number of models had hit the market and then IBM brought out the XT and it became obvious that would be the world standard. Everyone fell all over themselves bringing clones and compatible computers to the masses. Meanwhile, the Ontario government had decided that perhaps these computers were going to catch on. Maybe they should teach about them in our schools? Now the stores were filled with IBM compatible models and competition was continuously driving down prices while accelerating computing power. One would have expected our schools to ride this wave. Of course, the moles in the Ministry of Education did nothing of the kind! They held a powwow, being careful to exclude any front line teachers with some computer experience and limiting the group of decision makers to only those at high levels of management, who all had minions to do their computer work for them. They sacrificed some chickens, read the entrails and decided to have a personal computer of their very own! They came up with a list of needs and specifications, whomped it into a tender and released it to the market. It was called the Hyperion and it was to be their very own computer for our schools. Not one company submitted a bid! To anyone in the real world the reasons were obvious. Ontario was asking for a computer that was totally custom and would require its own custom software. This grievously violated one of the cardinal factors of the new personal computer universe - Economies of Scale! Personal computers were affordable only because of high manufacturing volumes. There was no way Ontario could possibly buy enough Hyperion computers to make any sort of realistic pricing possible. In fact, the requirements asked for some things that meant totally custom computer chips. In those days, you didn't make a few of those at a time. In fact, you didn't make just a few hundred thousand at a time! "Chips", or integrated circuits, were made by the BAZILLION or not at all! The Education gnomes were shocked! They had no idea that no one would play in their sandbox but they couldn't ignore the fact that no one would bid. They then did the usual political attempt at a solution. They found somebody connected to them and gave him money to set up a computer manufacturing company! He became a sole source bidder! At last they got an answer to their ridiculous tender. The Hyperion never did get built, Dr. Dre. Each unit came in at over $60,000. EACH! Not even those education gnomes dared to spend that kind of tax money. Besides a few more years had passed from this process. The IBM PC world and the compatibles had grown into a mountain that could no longer be ignored. If you try to google up this history most of the ridiculous acts committed by the gnomes will be hard or even impossible to reference. Gnomes are very experienced at covering their tracks. However, there were hundreds if not thousands of us in all the support industries and working for all their suppliers who were of necessity plugged in and well aware of what went on. If you have older friends in those industries and you ask around you will eventually get an earful! Now back to a substitute for the F-35. I believe that there is no way in world that Canada could possibly buy enough such planes to have something totally custom to our needs. 65 such aircraft might get built but economies of scale would dictate a price probably several multiples more than that of the F-35s. That leaves buying another plane that has manufacturing volumes arrived at from multiple countries buying numbers of them. I believe we've chewed this over enough here in MLW to see that at present no other plane of similar capabilities exists. At this point,we are down to one option - lower our expectations. Stealth is out! We can forget about that. We will have to avoid any confrontation that involves modern anti-aircraft weapons. After that, I just don't know if we should even bother but for Heaven's Sake, let's hope the feds don't emulate the Hyperion!

Oh Jack! Why'd ya go and say that! The mental image soured my supper! 20 miles of bad road!

You well know the answer to that one, BC! The whole world fidgets in their seats, hoping and waiting for Uncle Sam to pick up the cheque...

I can understand why you hold this view! I even agree somewhat, although I don't see how in modern times you can have effective ground-based Canadian peacekeepers without leading edge air suppport. Certainly, we are moving into times where if your aircraft aren't sufficiently stealthy they will just get blown out of the sky. At that point the technical term for your ground-based troops is "intercoursed"! We agree on the icebreakers and Coast Guard but still Waldo, we again have to face the cold hard fact that perhaps we need to spend money on ALL these things! We are paying for decades of neglect and now we have to modernize and replace EVERYTHING all at once! Imagine how much easier it would have been if the EH-101 helicopter deal had been allowed to stand. A few years later we could have budgeted for some icebreakers. Maybe 10 years after that some decent APCs to protect our troops instead of those death trap Iltis. Looking at the F-35 today might not have seemed to damn expensive if previous politicians (mostly Liberal) had not gone on the cheap. I have some soldier friends who have told me they have been driving an army truck only to have a tire rim collapse, folded over because it had rusted through! There's no excuse for allowing things to deteriorate that far!

You know, the entire OP for this thread is wrong on so many levels! The idea that the NDP hates Canada is, in the words of That 70's Show's Red Foreman, crap! NDP folks may hold some ideas that others of us don't agree with, or even find downright loopy, but that doesn't mean they don't love their country as much as anyone else of a different political persuasion. They just look at things differently, that's all!I am the first to call some of my NDP friends ideas goofy but that doesn't mean I stop buying them a beer! Without differences of opinion to knock the corners off an argument you have a much harder time finding the truth. Trying to do it only with people who think the same as you do only ends up with everyone fooling themselves. It's as lowbrow to call NDP folks Canada-haters as it is to say Conservatives want to hurt welfare people just for the thrill of making them cry! We really should try to keep this board running at a higher level!

That's a valid question Waldo but I don't think it's a complete one. A better one might be "How many such missions would we WANT to be in?" Another might be "Did we want to be in more than we were but were just too ill-equipped to participate?" The 3 engagements you cite might well have been the only three we could even pretend to make a contribution! Also, you are only talking about peacekeeping style missions, where we go "over there". Unmentioned is what we need for our own defense and expression of sovereignty. Or do you also believe that we should just stick the Americans with it while complaining that no one on the world stage takes us seriously?

"The best place to be...is here! The best time...is now!" Ted Logan & Bill S. Preston -Esquire

Hey Waldo, I'm the techie, remember? I haven't turned the question back - I simply don't feel you've answered the REAL question! I don't see how it matters if you can only afford one and not both. In a military situation, you either can do the job or you can't. You have the ability and resources to win or you lose. Period and end of story. If things are as bad as you imply that we can only afford one or the other then we must examine whether or not we should even try! You are focused on the money. It's a valid point that we have to examine our resources and our priorites. However, we have to keep in mind that it takes a certain amount of resources to get the job done. The most expensive military is the one that turns out second best. If affordability is truly that much of a problem then perhaps we should chuck it all and invest in a case or two of white flags!

Moonbox, you do realize that Derek is a techie? Techies don't use terms dependent upon context or popular usage. To the engineering mind, every term is specific and consistent. Anything else is synonymous with "thingy" or "doohickey".

I don't quite understand your point here, Waldo. Are you saying we actually have the option of choosing one over the other? Wouldn't that mean if we beefed up our navy we would have no defense against aircraft, or vice versa? Would any enemy be so polite as to give us the choice of weapons?

So eyeball, are you saying that we should not have an effective military at all? Is that real-world option? You do realize that it would be the end of any Canadian peacekeeper roles. How many snipers does a UN force need?

This whole thing is SO Canadian! We long ago established that there is no other plane in the world with stealth technology and suited to our needs. Nobody has been ignoring the entire world of aviation technology for the past 15 years! The idea of politicians setting the specs for our aircraft is downright scary! I wouldn't let most of our politicians set the specs for a new bathtub! They are for the most part poli-sci majors and lawyers. What do such know about technology? They couldn't program their VCR! Some of them need a secretary to access their emails! No, their idea of important factors would be all political. The idea that the aircraft actually has to PERFORM A MISSION is irrelevant to those bozos! I can see the way this is going. In the truest Canadian fashion, based upon our proven history of handling such issues, we are going to abandon the F-35. At that point, we are going to study things all over again for another 10 years. Then the politicians will fight with each other so that their opponents won't get to take credit. If there is a change of government whatever was chosen will be cancelled, no doubt to incredibly high cancellation fees. The next government will begin the selection process all over again, being careful to write the specs so that the previous government's choice will not be an option, even if it was the best choice. 20 years from now we will still be flying whatever is left of our fleet of CF-18s. Our international partners will refuse to let us fly in any peacekeeping mission because our aircraft will be dangerously obsolete. This won't bother our politicians at all because they never care if our military is effective anyway. It's enough to be there, show the flag and bask in the glory of the photo-op. The CF-18s of course will be so old that they will be regularly falling out of the sky, like our SeaKings before them. Eventually the government of the day will be so embarrassed that they will implement their final option. They will appoint a Royal Commission to study if it is a federal or a provincial matter! Why do we even bother?

Seems pretty clear to me, Waldo. We have Mr. Williams quoted as saying that everything about the F-35 deal is wrong, bad and being covered up by the Tories. Then we have a quote from Mr. Williams when he was in the government that made the deal saying it's the greatest thing for Canada since sliced bread! That is obvious blatant political partisanship. What more could you possibly need? Question his veracity indeed! If these statements are indeed both his then he is clearly just a party hack!

Hey, another Kipling fan! Good one, Dog! How about this one: Oh its Tommy this and Tommy that and Chuck 'im out, the brute! But it's "saviour of his country" When the guns begin to shoot!

Very good point, my son! (Sorry, sometimes I lose my Ontarioan accent!) A lot of people don't seem to realize that nothing is free! It takes a LOT of money to wage a campaign and there's no point in wasting it.

I can't speak for all conservatives, especially since I'm not one myself. All I can say is that I would never try to make such arguments, for a very simple reason: they don't make sense! If you want just to try to make your opponent look bad you can throw poo like a monkey. If you want to prove something you need brain matter, not fecal matter. Even more, I rarely hear those kind of flawed arguments from the right side of the political spectrum. It is virtually always from the left - the younger left even more so. I have no doubt that advisers high up in the NDP party are analysing the results of the by-election. I have no doubt they don't agree with you either! They have to deal with what works. They can't afford the luxury of flinging monkeypoo.