Wild Bill

I see from the quotes that CR is challenging you to get private health care. This is the typical smarmy response when this is debated. You CAN"T get private insurance! It's ILLEGAL in Canada! Why do they think that there are always conflicts over this and that private clinic charging extra fees? We are in the company of Cuba and Angola as one of the very few countries with a government medicare program that at the same time made private care illegal. If a physician accepts your cash or credit card, he's off to the pokey! Of course, once these folks have ensured that you have NO OTHER CHOICE but our government system, they take great delight in proposing that you perhaps should go to the back of the line for being too fat or engaging in risky recreations. After all, you cost the system more! Meanwhile, our elected politicians in Ottawa can use the Veterans Hospital facilities at the drop of a hat. No waiting lines for them or their families! Or if they are rich enough they can go to the States, like Bob Rae did with his granny or Danny Williams for his heart operation. Yup, as always, some pigs are more equal than others!

I respect you for trying, CC but I don't thing you will change his mind. When you're dealing with the "Ned Flanders" crowd, I don't think they know the difference between any drug and certainly they just can't accept the idea that their values are not mainstream, no matter how many polls you throw at them. This is looking to me more and more like a runaway freight train, a fait accompli. We're just going to have to live with the consequences. As I had said, it'll be another John Tory fiasco. Conservative parties these days seem very good at that!

Was it the same? I don't remember the incident mentioned. I've never seen or heard Fox News. From what has been posted in this thread, it's not clear about the circumstances. If Harper deliberately went to an American function to get on the American media to voice disagreement with the ruling party, then I would have been against that too! However, if he was simply accosted in some media scrum HERE IN CANADA and asked his opinion then I would agree that he had the right to express it. I guess the important difference to me would be if his expression was a deliberate act to use foreign media as a tool to embarrass the ruling Liberals at the time, actually going to an American site to do it or if it was a simple response to a reporter's question in some domestic situation. Since I don't know then I can't say if I disapprove. However, this puts me above those who simply don't care if there is any difference at all - they just hate Harper so anything he does is wrong and anything the Opposition does is ok!

Why would an American politician give a damn about the federal NDP? He knows they are never likely to be in power. To him, they would be irrelevant!

Argus, we're usually on the same side but on this one I think you're flat out wrong! See my other posts in this thread! I'm worried sick they are going to throw some nice young yuppie couple in jail, Warren Kinsella will have a field day and the Tories will kiss any hope of winning any big city seats here in the East for a couple of generations! Chretien is going to throw a party! Even more, the whole thing is too trivial to even be necessary! Hitting those who grow for personal consumption will do NOTHING to stamp out REAL crime! Where is the political upside? 50 or so votes in some Jehovah Witness community in the suburbs of a huge city like Canmore? It just isn't worth it! As I said elsewhere, it makes John Tory's campaign team look like political Einsteins!

Are you new???? It will do nothing of the kind! If there are cases in the media of people getting harsh sentences for a handful of plants grown for personal consumption, it will cause disgust and even rage among a large portion of voters! Where do you live, anyway? Some religious commune in the foothills of the Rockies, cut off from mainstream Canada? The Tories have enough problems trying to win seats in the big urban cities here in the East. THIS is how they address their problem? You can argue till the cows come home but this is equivalent to trying to get people to support Prohibition by making the laws harsher! All it does is make Al Capone richer! Mark my words, if this happens the Tories will take a big hit in both Ontario and Quebec next election. Their only hope will be for Dion to come back and run for the Liberals again! I'll put up a bottle of the Glen Livet on this! It's politically stupid! What flippin' idiot in the Tory caucus is driving this, I don't know but he must be undercover for the Opposition, trying to get the Tories to shoot themselves in the foot! If the CPC sends us back to decades of perpetual Liberals I'm going to go postal! I'll leave you to your busy life. I wouldn't want you to miss a Lawrence Welk rerun!

No Topaz, that's not it at all! The Opposition parties are entitled to air their opinion at home, in Parliament and to Canadians at large. That's their job, after all. Going to a foreign country to embarrass the ruling party is a cheap shot! It makes Canada look divided. Opposition parties don't speak for a country on the international stage. That's part of WHY we have ruling parties! I think they shamed us in front of the Americans! It's like a teenager who didn't like a ruling from one of his parents, so he got his mother and father into an argument in front of the whole neighbourhood! It was crass! There's no other way to describe it! They took their squabble outside of family! I don't think "boors" is too strong a word...

Short-term profits? I'm an old guy and I must have missed something here. I thought the oil sands were good for at least 300-400 years at present consumption rates. This is short-term? Or have I missed something?

If I were a Tory and wanted to stir up trouble I would think I wouldn't quite so clumsy at it as to poll for a non-existent byelection! There are lots of better ways that wouldn't so easily backfire. Wouldn't it be more likely that some dumbass somewhere, either a Tory junior staffer giving the job to the pollster or someone in the pollster's office, screwed up? Really, the Tories are SO clearly in the wrong that you'd have to be a pretty thick partisan to think that this was deliberate! As happened, when they started polling it immediately hit the media that the Tories were in the wrong. Surely they would have been a lot sneakier if it was deliberate. But, when you truly hate the Tories so much, as John Crosbie said about Free Trade after it was enacted by the Tory party : "From now on, every sparrow that falls will be blamed on us!"

Man, I haven't seen someone so out of touch with the values of his society since Stockwell Day and his supporters thought Christian evangelicals were actually a silent majority! Usually I find your points true to the mark but on this one, I truly wonder if you and I live in the same country! Poll after poll after poll has shown for DECADES now that a LARGE number of citizens smoke or have smoked marijuana! They've also shown that a majority of citizens don't think that marijuana is any more dangerous than booze or other legal vices. What's more, I think the main point that you and the CPC are blind to is that besides the users there is another large segment of people who while they don't use the stuff don't think it's worth harsh punishments. A smart politician must add up BOTH percentages to judge which way the wind blows! Then to hide behind the cowardly excuse that "The Law is the Law and you must obey it!" When you create an unpopular law people will NOT embrace it just because you tell them to, like some shrill fishwife! The Law is supposed to be an expression of the will of the people. Politicians who do that well earn the confidence and respect of the citizenry. When they DON'T do it well people don't automatically give them the same confidence simply because of their position. Respect must be constantly earned, not demanded. No, going against the values of the people simply breeds disrespect for the Law. Like Prohibition, it can only end in failure. So where the hell is the political gain from this Deputy Dan approach? It seems obvious that the first time someone is put in jail for such a trivial offence the government is going to look like a bunch of cruel, vicious old farts! Warren Kinsella will have more fun than the day he dreamed up tagging Stockwell Day with Barney the Dinosaur! The CPC is handing their opponents the very baseball bat those opponents will use to whack Tories over the head politically! They're making John Tory's campaign team look like political geniuses! I never thought I'd see Harper, the man who always railed against mixing religion and politics, telling the Reform Party members that it would be the electoral kiss of death, do something so stupid!

What about the right of the local citizens to enjoy and use their park? Seems like nobody gives a damn about them, even though it was their taxes that paid for it! How many of the OCCUPY protesters local taxpayers?

I've just read this entire thread and I noticed something that has never been mentioned but first off, everyone please accept my mandatory disclaimer - I really couldn't care less about someone's sexuality. It's their politics that I'm biased against! That being said, as an old guy I still remember the 80's and 90's, when homosexual rights were coming to the forefront and the word "homophobe" was invented. Once again, this is anecdotal, based upon my own experience and memory. The fact that it was all over the media at the time will no doubt be dismissed by some as never having happened. Since this was pre-Internet a cite is not possible so such dismissals are easy to make by those who would rather not admit my points are historical fact. Still, some members may be old enough to remember themselves and confirm my story. When activists were calling for laws to protect gay rights they were very careful to say that no one who's religious beliefs would prevent them from serving gays or in the 90's marrying them would be forced to do so! A priest or minister of a church that felt homosexuality was wrong would not have to. Gay couples could easily find another minister to perform the ceremony and would do so. A merchant who was not comfortable catering a gay wedding or function also would not be forced to do so. This all seemed very tolerant at the time and served the purpose of making any opponents to gay rights look like they had nothing to complain about, since they would not be forced to compromise their beliefs and thus had no right to enforce their beliefs on others. Well, today it all seems like that was all a crock of crap! Not only are bakers now castigated legally for refusing to bake wedding cakes for gay weddings but there have been media accounts of priests being charged for refusing to perform such weddings! Seems like the shoe's on the other foot, to me! Tolerance is as tolerance does. If you have to FORCE someone to be tolerant then you have made yourself a fascist, in my books! The people involved here could easily find another bake shop. The fact that they have to make a federal case out of it only proves that "The love that dared not speak its name is now the love that just won't shut up!" Once again, Bill and Ted said "Be excellent to each other!" NOT "Be excellent only to those who share your values and persecute those who don't!" Freedom is the freedom to believe any cockamamie thing you want. It goes BOTH ways! If having a contrary view is so abhorrent to you then you are going to get us ALL to fight each other!

I'm not a religious man myself. Much more of a devout agnostic! Still, let me be the first to wish everyone on MLW a Merry Christmas!

Yep, we used RIAA as well. Our markets were always too integrated to use something different. Even most of our hifi manufacturers were either branch plants of American brands or building American brands under licence. Radio Speakers of Canada in Kitchener/Waterloo Ontario built Jensen speakers that way. It was a good deal for all parties in the days before NAFTA, when otherwise American speakers couldn't be imported without paying such duties as to make them uncompetitive. This was one of the major objections up here to the Free Trade deal between our Mulroney and Ronald Reagan. With the tariffs removed much of such manufacturing was shut down. The brands just kept warehouses here, fed by manufacturing down south. The problem of course was that warehouse jobs don't pay as well as manufacturing ones. Now it seems like BOTH of us have nothing but warehouses, with the manufacturing done in China!

Maybe with this one issue, Topaz. Still, it's hard to believe you when I don't believe I've EVER seen a post from you that attacked a Liberal or and NDP. It's always anti-Harper! If I ever saw you actually say something nice about Harper or the Tories I think I'd be reaching for my heart pills!

It's pretty obvious that the NDP, like the Liberals, are a party only for city folk! They both have a LOT of work to do if they hope to win any seats outside of city limits. That's because they consistently take positions that favour the whims of city folk and ignore the wishes of rural citizens. Ever since the Liberals enacted their gun registry, every time a fox raided a chicken coop a farmer cursed the Liberals!

You're right,BB! And once again there's a technical reason for it. The sound is familiar - it's what you grew up on! Music on AM radio is put through a compressor/limiter and an equalizer, to boost the mid frequencies and make the average level louder. This is because historically most of that music was listened to in cars or with small, table top radios, where the speaker(s) were small and unable to properly reproduce the full hifi audio spectrum. Car systems today are much better but still nowhere near as good most of the time as a proper home hifi setup. After a number of generations of this tone it has become a de facto standard, since people have been born, grown old and died listening to it. Hippy times of rock and roll, in the late 60's and early 70's, was a revolution in radio sound. Formerly you only found classical music but with so much of rock encompassing a wide frequency range, like Moody Blues, Genesis and others, music quickly moved to the FM band. At the time country was much less popular than it had been and so many AM stations took to it in order to survive, having lost much of their popular audience. If you have them available, try listening to the same rock song on an old 45 and then on an LP. Right away you'll likely notice that it's not just that the LP song is longer than the "3 minutes or less" AM version on the 45. The fidelity on the LP will be far higher as well, as the LP was always used as the source to play the song on FM. The tone will seem louder and "punchier" on the 45, as it was equalized for the AM band.

Young dude! You should ditch those ear buds or those rinky dink small speakers! You know, the ones you bought when your woman complained the old ones were "too big!", that you just couldn't hear with your receiver turned to '10'! So you go back to the store and the salesman asks you what kind of receiver you have and snorts "That old thing's your problem! You need this 300 watt home theatre machine!" And you do! The new boxes being so small have an efficiency of about .5%! They've also thrown away tons of tone, particularly the bottom end. Bass frequencies need big cabinets. That's just Mother Nature's physics and you can't win against Mother Nature! They try to compensate with "space age" cones and magnets but it just doesn't work. You need all that power to overcome the inefficiency of the new, small cabinets. I run a Bogen stereo receiver, ALL VACUUM TUBES! It runs 30 watts per side into some big ass Fisher cabinets from the 70's. With that amount of power I could blow the windows out of my house if I turned it all the way up! And the tone is heavenly! I've got vinyl from the late 60's I still listen to. You haven't lived until you've heard Randy Rhodes of Black Sabbath on original vinyl, or Gordon Lightfoot if that's more your style, through a REAL hifi system! For that's what this old techie believes is what's wrong today. The marketing 'suits' have successfully conned an entire generation to no longer know what real hifi sounds like! Christ, they sell sub woofers for cars that are tuned to only one bass note! Sounds powerful as hell at first but after you've had it a while it gets kinda samey. They've already got your money, of course. As for ear buds, what would you expect from something small and puny that came from China? As for .flac being better than .mp3, what the hell would you expect? I was there when the .mp3 was invented! It was designed to strip and compress the crap out of a music file so that it would be much smaller, meaning that when you downloaded it with an old fashioned slow baud rate modem it wouldn't take so long. It worked, but the fidelity took a helluva hit! From a technical standpoint, I'll agree that digital has finally got there. Of course, they now sound as good as what we started off using, back in the days of tubes! Made a lot of manufacturers rich, I guess. And CD's did work better than vinyl in your car. As for MAKING music, most professional guitarists won't use a modern solid state amp unless you put a gun to their head! That's because the physics of tubes and transistors is very different. Tubes don't obviously sound distorted as you start to overdrive them. That's because their nature means that they will first start to compress the signal, making it sound thicker and "sweeter" to the human ear. There's a long ramp until the distortion becomes excessive and unpleasant. When I went pro as a technician for my business plan I bought every guitar player magazine on a Chapters rack and tallied all the ads for guitar amplifiers. About 80% were tube designs and the other 20 claimed to sound like tubes! There are still nearly 1 BILLION dollars annually of vacuum tubes made and sold world-wide today, virtually all for the audiophile and music market! Solid state devices stay absolutely clean when overdriven until they lose it, at which point they can sound like you've shredded your speakers! So transistors and stuff make good amplifiers for when you've ALREADY made your signal, as with a CD, tape or whatever! They will just make it louder and unless overdriven will not add any audible distortion. However, if you're MAKING the signal with an electric guitar it's SUPPOSED to sound distorted! It's just that not all distortion is the same or is pleasing. Tubes fit this bill and transistors really don't. Many listeners find that tube power amps sound better to their ears than modern transistor designs. There is also some basis in physics for that phenomenon as well. Tubes tend to use what are called "push-pull" circuits, that tend to cancel out odd harmonics and enhance even ones. Transistor amplifiers use a "push-push" quasi-complementary circuit, that does exactly the opposite! To a sensitive ear the difference can be noticeable. Enough ranting! I'm passionate about this stuff, especially since tube amps are where I make my living. To get back to the original topic, do yourself a favour and seek out some audiophile friend with a tube amp and a good quality vinyl setup, with REAL speakers! Then come back and tell us "old guys" all about it! PS to BC: Are you familiar with a Yaesu FTdx-560? It was perhaps the last all tube ham transceiver made. It's the pride and joy of my shack!

As an Easterner Max, I'd just like to say that those western farmers should know their place! Just because our farmers in the East have the freedom to sell to whoever they want is no reason why a farmer in Saskatchewan or Alberta is entitled to the same! Canada's entire history is based on those western farmers not having the rights of eastern ones! Again, do they not know their place? Have they no respect for tradition! Keep the CWB, I say! And tighten things up even more, to include all those other crops they've been selling in freedom! Damn revisionists want to change everything! They should take the price for the wheat that the Board tells them and ship it to Ontario, paying a big Crow rate for the rail charges! Then we'll grind it into flour here, bake it into bread and ship it back to them, telling THEM what they'll have to pay for it! It was good enough for our fathers and our grandfathers! It's good enough for today and tomorrow too! 'Nuff said!

Yeah, but little parties that just can't attract enough votes to get into power LOVE PR and referendums! It means they get a chance to stand in front of a microphone in the Commons and act like they're more important than they actually are! In a real Italian style PR "pizza parliament" such small parties with more limited public support can force large parties to make deals with them, even though such deals subvert the will of the majority. Eventually you get a whole pack of little tails wagging the dog...

I can't help it! It's the only way I can wake up in the morning! The other guys put me back to sleep!

Topaz, it's more likely that if something happened it happened earlier in our Afghan involvement. That would have been under the Liberals, not the Tories! The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of an investigation!

You've put your finger on it, Wyly. If one party stays in power for too many terms it tends to foster a sense of hopelessness, resentment and powerlessness with those who don't like the incumbent. Conservatives and Reformers shared this feeling for about a decade and a half of Chretien and the Liberals. I agree it's not usually a healthy situation but in Alberta you have to remember that the Liberals hurt an entire generation of people so badly that they will have to grow old and die before the liberals will have another chance at winning a significant number of seats. When you lose your job and/or your home it tends to be branded strongly in your memory. When the Liberals were strong it probably seemed an easy trade -some resentment and losses in Alberta for huge numbers of votes in the East. It worked too! At least for the short term. Likely the Liberals also underestimated the degree of resentment in Alberta and how long it would last. Many pundits have said that Diefenbaker had no idea of the depth of the negative repercussions with cancelling the Arrow project. There's a quote kicking around about a Tory aide calling A V Roe after the layoffs hit the papers, inquiring if they were truly necessary and asking why a manufacturing plant couldn't just retool and make tractors or refrigerators or something! So politicians can make mistakes and usually they have to pay for them. I've no doubt that many Albertans are also getting tired of the CPC but so far they have seen nothing attractive or having changed in the Liberal Party. As an old salesman I love to keep preaching that it's not enough to have your competition look bad. You also have to give the customer a reason to think that your choice is better! Otherwise it's just human nature to stay with "the devil you know". This is also the same mistake the provincial Tories keep making here in Ontario. Hudak just kept hoping people would keep disliking McGuinty. He did little or nothing during his campaign to tell anyone why he was a better choice. So I understand your pain! I just think that there's not much that can be done about it, at least for a while. Someday, all those pissed off Albertans will be dead. Someday those Liberals will finally get back to the real world and get their act together. Meanwhile, relax, have a beer and watch them all make fools of themselves!

The world is way ahead of you, BC! Vinyl has already made a huge comeback! Not just for re-releases but for new artists too. In the UK a couple of years ago vinyl sales exceeded those of CDs. Most of the major hifi box stores are selling turntables again, although most of them include a USB port, which strikes me as ridiculous. Why throw the quality away by digitizing the analog signal? Still, they're not always cheap, ranging from $60 to $500 here in Canada. The CD never had the high fidelity of unscratched vinyl, due to its inadequate sampling rate. It wasn't until the BlueRay DVD was invented that digital finally exceeded the quality of vinyl. However, vinyl means an extra step or two to pirate, and most young lougans won't bother. And of course, there's the return of album art! Check it out at Amazon, or at any music store, BC! The good days are back.

Dr. Dre, that just doesn't sound practical to me! It sounds like an accounting decision and from the 80's on I worked for several companies that were run by accountants - and went into the ground! The reason was that although accounts are usually very good at counting all the nickels they are no better than anybody else about how to get those nickels coming in! In practice, they were worse and each time I and others lost their job. You've heard the old joke about the statistician who thought that if you had on leg in fire and one standing on ice on the whole you really had no reason to complain? I think risk management applied too ruthlessly to combat capability would be worse than no decision at all! With your example, what plane, no matter how old and useless, couldn't run patrols and shoot down an airliner? Wouldn't a CF-5 fit your purpose? No, unless I'm missing something that you could show this old guy, with your situation we might as well have no planes at all! This of course would mean no combat capability, no support for our allies, no ability to conduct our own defense and return Canada to the position of being a military deadbeat dependent on our allies to even get our troops to the theatre. Have you forgotten how when Chretien sent our CF-18s to the Kosovo conflict our IFF avionics were so primitive that we could not fly with our allies without the risk of either causing or receiving friendly fire? That we were relegated to "make work" patrols in the rear of the theatre? When you are called to a rumble you have to be ready to actually fight. You can't expect the enemy to respect your need to only fight with those in your weight class. If you can't contribute, then stay out! You'll only get in the way of those who have to do the REAL fighting! We would have to stay in the rear and run the canteen.