Wild Bill

You've put your finger on a key difference in thinking between those on either side of such issues. Who the hell cares about "winning the hearts and minds" of the enemy? You fight someone because he has wronged you or appears to be a danger to you. Your goal is to prevent further wrongs or negate the danger. Winning their hearts and minds is a nice warm and fuzzy bonus but if you have to choose only one outcome hearts and minds would NOT be it!

There is no problem to you and me. We are only two votes. If there is any problem it is for the NDP! The question will be, how many NDP voters feel that a PM, Opposition Leader or even just an MP with dual citizenship has a potential conflict of loyalties. Myself, I want my PM or representative to exclusively have loyalty to MY country! Some of us still feel that citizenship is supposed to actually mean something. But that's just me! Perhaps you are right and the idea doesn't bother anyone, or at least not enough people to matter come voting time. It certainly was an issue with Stephane Dion. If Mulcair wins, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

You're talking about "skin effect", Sharkman. Actually, stranded wire does exactly the same thing as solid, since it is made up of many smaller BARE copper wires that continually short to each other along the entire length. There is no difference electrically between solid and stranded wire, only mechanically.

Yeah, Bose used to be great but things change. Now the suits run the show, over-ruling the design engineers. Actually, as I've said many times, CDs never were as good as unscratched vinyl. Again, the suits had rushed the product to market. It has to do with the sampling rate. And MP3 files were DESIGNED to be low-fi! They stripped and compressed the file to make it much smaller, so that it took less time to be downloaded on the old slow modems. That all changed with the advent of BluRay! For the first time digital formats were BETTER than vinyl! By a LOT! Neil Young had long refused to allow his songs still under his control to be released in CD format, because of the poorer fidelity. However, BluRay impressed him so much that now his entire library has been coming out in the new format.

Yep! Few remember the next part of the poem, though. It says that while "I was born under the lily, I flourished under the rose!" The lily of course is the flower of France, just as the rose refers to Britain.

Is the premise that the CCF was leftwing entirely sound by today's standards? I don't pretend to be a scholar of Canadian history but I had understood that when the CCF morphed into the NDP there was much bitterness and division between the western folks and the new members, since the party was no longer as much for the ordinary farmer or working man and instead became an Eastern Canada union worker party. Also, should we not consider the differences in character between a citizen during Douglas' time and one from today? People back then seemed to have more sense of civic responsibility, loyalty and duty. Socialist or not, this would have to colour their approach to politics and government. Surely we can't equate a hardworking prairie farmer with an Ontario welfare and gay rights activist! The demographics of a CCF member and one from today's NDP seem very different to me.

No GH! You do not need "oxygen free copper wires". You can use fence wire! You can use ANYTHING that is electrically conductive! It doesn't matter as long as current will flow. Using the resistance wire that lights up in your toaster might waste a lot of power but it will do NOTHING to change the tone! And to Mr. Squid - this does NOT need more research! Wire, conductivity and resistance are fundamental basic Laws of the Universe! It was all researched long ago, by gentlemen like Mr. Ohm! No one is ever going to discover a type of wire that sounds better. The phenomenon simply doesn't exist! It would be like looking for a can of steam, or striped paint - crazy as a soup sandwich! The chances of RFI or hum pickup are actually significant but only in specific cases. If you don't hear any hum or RadioFrequencyInterference then don't worry about it! If you are picking up your neighbour's CB radio then a shielded cable can help. Radio pickup is ALWAYS the fault of YOUR setup, not the transmitter's! The speaker wires can pick it up and couple it back into your amplifier or receiver, where the circuitry may rectify it and amplify it as audio. Manufacturers of hifi equipment could prevent this problem with about 50 cents worth of capacitors or coils to block it out but in all the years of hifi very few ever have. Instead, they count on the fact that the problem is not very common so it won't likely affect their sales. In the hifi world of audiophiles, few customers have any real technical knowledge so the way to convince them to buy your product is NOT with specs! The customer doesn't understand them anyway! No, the preferred approach is to first baffle him with technobabble and then charge him a lot of money! Nobody wants to believe that he spent a lot of money and things still sound the same!

Oh dear! Angus, I wouldn't bother with high priced speaker wire if I were you! This is another of those "mojo" marketing scams out there. I know a lot of people believe in it but it not only has ZERO basis in physics it actually contradicts it! It has also been disproven many times, occasionally spectacularly. You see, wire has absolutely no tonal qualities. Tone refers to changes in portions of the frequency range. Wire is simply a resistance. It opposes current flow with no regard at all to audio frequencies. To a resistance, they are all the same. Some people claim to hear a difference but their ears are being fooled. Thin wire has higher resistance than thick wire. This means that once you start to use more than 10 or 20 feet the loss in power can become noticeable. So your ears might hear a drop in volume. Believe me, Angus, there is LESS to substantiate this myth than for astrology! If you do some googling you will come across a speaker wire "shoot out" held some years back. I believe it was some engineering students who rigged up a test setup where different types of wire could be switched between speakers and invited some industry "gurus" from the hifi magazine world to participate. The hilarious result is that they almost all chose the same type of wire - which turned out to be pieces of barbed wire from a farmer's fence! Sonic Frontiers in Oakville used to sell a brand of speaker wire for $400 per FOOT, U$D! I guess when you pay that much you can't help but convince yourself you're hearing an improvement! As a bit of history, in the golden years of hifi, back in the 50's, no one thought about the speaker wire, usually just using whatever was at hand. Since the larger speaker cabinets were of much higher efficiency than modern cabinets, home hifi amplifiers often ran only 10 or 20 watts. That was plenty to make things LOUD! Then came the 60's, the era of rock and roll and outdoor concerts. Soundmen soon realized that they were losing much power in their speaker wires, since they could be LONG! The resistance was adding up to several ohms and the standard impedance of the loudspeakers was 8 ohms. This meant that as much as half of the power could be wasted as heat in the wires! Power amps were still expensive back then so this was not very cost effective. It was Celestion Speakers (then called Rollo) in Ipswich, England that came up with the 15 ohm voice coil. Using nearly double the speaker impedance meant the loss in the speaker wires was much less of a percentage of the total power. Simple lamp cord of at least 16 gauge is more than adequate up to 50 feet. What IS important is that the connections are proper and do not reverse the phasing between the cabinets. So put your money into your turntable or whatever, Angus. Or some good beer!

There is an old joke that supposedly came from UN diplomatic circles about Canada and the process you describe. Apparently it was making the rounds during the late 80's and early 90's, as a response to the typical Canadian approach to problems. It goes like this: A German physicist discovers a new property of physics. A month after he publishes his paper an American engineer thinks of a commercial application and patents a working model. Within a few months he's got a company going and is producing products. By the end of the year a Japanese firm (remember, this was the 80's!) has found a way to produce it cheaper and is making global production under license and royalties. In 10 years Canada holds a debate to decide if it is a federal or a provincial matter! The sad thing is that the diplomatic impression of us has the sting of truth!

"Much support"? That was always an assumption! If you were less willing to label people you might not get such surprises. The classic evangelical Christian who thought Ned Flanders from the Simpsons was the ultimate role model and who wanted to enact law to FORCE people to be that way was always a straw man spread by the left. In all my years with Reform I don't think I met ANY other member who fit that description. Maybe there are a few small communities of such in the hills near the Rockies. I've never been there so I can't say. Of course, there was Stockwell Day but he was an aberration in the extreme, not representative of the party as a whole at all. Look how fast he was turfed when he tried to act as if believing evangelical Christian tenets were mainstream! I think you are so hidebound that you won't believe me but I have actually met a few gay Reformers! What's more, when Reform was at its peak as the Official Opposition the cameras during Question Period could not help but show that there were FAR more visible minority faces on the Reform side than in all other parties combined! I still remember Preston Manning being interviewed on CBC NewsWorld by some sweet young thing, who was trying her damnedest to make the party out to be a bigoted bunch of white bread. Preston kept smiling and finally pointed out the fact of how there were more visible minorities in his party. "Aha!" the sweet young thing pounced on him. "Just exactly how many?" Preston just sadly shook his head and replied "I really don't know. We don't believe in counting them!" That to me summed up the biggest difference between Reform and its critics! The fact that nobody was counting them like some kind of tokens was probably a lot of the reason so many visible minorities were willing to run as MPs for Reform!

Exactly! It will change little. Radical Islamists will continue to slay and torture innocents. They will continue to hate the West as much as they would have anyway. "American Infidels! Now we will blow you up twice! We will build our Trade Towers back up so we can crash them down again!"

That wouldn't entirely a bad thing, Michael. There would be more jobs here, certainly. We likely would have no more poison in our pet food, or our baby food for that matter. No more lead paint on children's toys from Mattel. No more who knows what chemicals in food imported from China. No more steel made with zero in the way of anti-pollution measures. No more barges full of dead car batteries shipped to China and dumped in open-pit holes, or even just sunk in the ocean. Profits for CDs, DVDs and software would go through the roof without the piracy! Many of our companies would no longer have their trade secrets or patents stolen by Chinese competitors. And on and on and on! Once again, things are not entirely black and white.

They wouldn't replace them at all, Derek! Or they would go with something cheap but useless, as a symbolic gesture rather than an actual solution. These critics see no need for Canada to have any effective military force at all. If they got their way, we would have none. Of course, if we then actually needed some effective force they would be nowhere around to take the blame. In effect, if they get their way and are wrong we ALL suffer, with no hope of avoiding the pain! Certainly, if we ever needed someone to defend us they would be worse than useless.

I dunno, Eyeball. I actually agree with you on a couple of your points. Still, I have a problem about national referendums on military matters. You see, I believe that if that were the case sooner or later we'd all be dead or enslaved! Look at the example of Neville Chamberlain. It's easy to brand him as gullible with the hindsight of history. He kept appeasing Hitler until Hitler was strong enough to begin a world war. He must have been the equivalent of a granola crunching idiot, most say today! What we forget is that he was a political leader. He got to be Prime Minister of Britain because more Britons WANTED him to take that approach than didn't! If he hadn't have appeased Hitler he would likely have lost the next election, assuming of course that war didn't break out, which it unfortunately did. It's human nature to want to avoid conflict. War is distasteful, to say the least. It's also easy to think that because it's quiet outside there's no wolves gathering on the other side of the hill, where we can't see them. The more power you give to a people to tie the hands of their leaders the more they will exercise it. As far as keeping leaders from meddling and instigating conflicts this would be a good thing. Where it fails is with situations where a clear and present danger is born and is growing. How many lives would have been saved if nations had stood up to Hitler at the beginning of his rise to power? Leaders like Churchill saw the danger and did what they could to prepare their nation but until the balloon went up there was not a lot he could do. Of course, when war broke out all of a sudden the people WANTED a leader like Churchill, recognizing that someone like him was more likely to save their asses than ol' Neville. However, when WWII broke out it was very nearly too late for Britain to ramp up and compete militarily with Germany. She very, very nearly was conquered at the time of the Battle of Britain. Today, we have even less time to catch up. Today's wars are "come as you are" wars. You fight with what you have on hand and by the time you could even begin to start ramping up your military assets it would be over. If you lose, too bad and so sad. I think it unlikely that we would ever actually be invaded and conquered but I could see the day when some brutal thug grew powerful enough to seriously hurt our economy, causing much hunger, hardship and suffering. Not to mention hurting or killing large numbers of our allies. With the traditional high immigrant percentage of our population I'm sure significant numbers of Canadians have no desire to stand by and watch their relatives get bombed or even nuked! So if we had your super majority, I think it would mean that we would NEVER handle a problem while it was small! We would ALWAYS wait until it became large and very, very bloody! That's where we expect our leaders to have some foresight and give them the power to use it. Your system would tie their hands. As I said, this might be a good thing if they were instigators but as far as making sure we have what we need to defend ourselves it would be very bad indeed. Maybe if as a people we were so stupid we would deserve such a fate! A bloody Darwin Award, as it were. In an academic sense I could agree with that. Certainly it would tend to kill off the short sighted. Still, it would be a much higher price than I would care to see paid.

Quite true!

Perhaps that's the most important factor. The Marines WILL try to identify the perps and take action! I hardly think the Taliban would do such if the situation were reversed.

Yeah, it will. Taping was a dumb thing to do. However, the criticism does seem to be rather one-sided. Nobody says boo about atrocities committed by Taliban and other Islamist radicals. I think that's because when you criticize someone or something in the West someone actually listens and might care about what you think! Taliban types would just snort and ignore you. If you became too much of a pest about it they'd likely shoot you without a second's thought! There's no fun in being righteous when you don't have an audience.

Well, yeah! Just not for the reasons you imply! Israel doesn't have Iran's reputation as ruled by a bunch of nutbars who want to nuke their neighbours! Meanwhile, I wouldn't expect to see Iranian nuclear scientists resigning from their jobs. Who says they have a choice?

Woo Woo Woo! Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk! Moe, Larry and cheese! Moe, Larry and cheese!

You seem to have an interesting sense of perspective. You remind me of the man who yells "The Jews are a bunch of liars! I have proof that it wasn't 6 million killed in the gas chambers! It was only 5 million!"

No, it was a little different. Here's a wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahra_Kazemi "Zahra "Ziba" Kazemi-Ahmadabadi (زهرا کاظمی احمدآبادی in Persian)‎ (1949 – July 11, 2003) was an Iranian-Canadian freelance photographer, residing in Montreal, Canada, who died in the custody of Iranian officials following her arrest. Although Iranian authorities insist that her death was accidental and that she died of a stroke while being interrogated, Shahram Azam, a former military staff physician who used his purported knowledge of Kazemi's case for seeking asylum in Canada in 2004, has stated that he examined Kazemi's body and observed that Kazemi showed obvious signs of torture, including a skull fracture, broken nose, signs of rape and severe abdominal bruising. Iranian officials claimed that Azam had been afflicted with mental health issues and that he had been discharged before Kazemi's death. Her death was the first time an Iranian's death in custody attracted major international attention.[2] Because of her joint citizenship and the circumstances of her death, she has since become an international cause célèbre. In November 2003, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression honoured Kazemi with the Tara Singh Hayer Memorial Award in recognition of her courage in defending the right to free expression." So you're right about no apparent stoning and her head was not "logged off" (I actually said 'lopped off'. Are you saying her head was disconnected from the Internet?) Still, she's just as dead and if you believe the Iranian cover story then perhaps you have brain death yourself.

A Triple E Senate was a fundamental plank in Reform's platform. Equal, Elected and Effective. Now Harper acts like any other PM we've ever had and just appoints them. Tell me again that there's still some Reform left in the present CPC!

They lobby. Who pays them? Saudi Arabia? Screw them all and the horses they rode in on! If you're not a Canadian you should be banned from lobbying in our country. The Saudis and Chinese use their money and power for their OWN interests, NOT for OURS!

No, you have shown that most of them have proved to be such. You have not proven that THIS specific person is indeed a CIA spy! This is my point. The fact that there are lots of burglars in a neighbourhood doesn't mean that you can grab any person there you like and brand him as such. He may be innocent. Guilt needs to be proven. If 9 out of 10 are spies is that sufficient justification to hang all 10?

That is indeed a shame. Still, crime happens everywhere. Canadians have been killed while in the US, or any other country, for that matter. My father was Canadian navy and had nothing but wonderful treatment in American ports. He particularly loved to visit Buffalo, NY, or more properly Niagara Falls, NY. As a Canadian sailor came down the gangway there would be a herd of taxis driven by black folks. They would ask "What time do you have to be back?". They would then take Canadian sailors like my father to THEIR part of town, showing them a great time and buying them innumerable beers. No matter how drunk the Canadian sailor got, he would be gotten back to his ship on time! This treatment stemmed from over a century past, with Canada being the end of the Underground Railroad to get slaves to Canada and freedom. Those people never forgot! This was the 50's and I don't know if the custom continues today but my father thoroughly enjoyed himself and deeply appreciated the friendly, generous treatment.