Wild Bill

I have it on good authority that Harper kidnapped the Lindberg baby...

Quite right! It's even worse here in Ontario. Mike Harris has been gone for 20 years or so yet you'd never have known it this last election! The Liberals and the NDP were constantly invoking his name as a shot at Tim Hudak. It just proves that many people of ALL parties have no brains to speak of!

Well, they're still rather new! What's the basis of your opinion of their ratings? Have you a cite? Are their ratings getting better or staying stagnant? Me, I've never liked the CBC's news, not just for their obvious bias but also because they fill their news time with documentaries about blind lesbian fiddlin' riverdancers or homosexual logrollers in northern Alberta! It's mostly stuff I just don't care about! Even when they do something with fabulous cinematography, like ice recession in the high Arctic, they always have to mix it up with politically correct "science", presenting the ice withdrawal as absolutely part of global warming, which is absolutely 100% unnatural and totally the fault of evil industrialists and Canadians who refuse to buy the new compact florescent light bulbs! I've never seen a CBC tv personality yet who I would trust to replace the plug on a lamp. Anyhow, I LIKE SUN-TV! Especially the women anchors! I love to see them push "ethical oil" and break the story about how the Saudis tried to bully our TV with lawsuits! I howled when I found out that CTV had simply caved! Great entertainment! To be fair, over the years I have preferred CTV but only as a last resort. Anyhow, give SUN a couple of years and we'll see how the ratings stand up. Right now, since we've never really had any news from the "right" how can we say if many Canadians like it?

Ah, not much chance of having a gay Palestinian waiter, Bob, considering what the fundamentalist Islamists routinely do to them... Other than that, it would make a humorous scenario!

Once again, you're twisting my words! I never said I liked Harper - I said I liked donations from individual members. I never said most donations were for $1000. I said that was the limit under the new laws. ALMOST ALL of our donations were for $100! That plus spare change in the bucket at meetings was likely 90% of our revenue. Most of our membership were ordinary working folks, NOT rich people! Trust a lefty to be a revisionist for his argument! You simply have no clue whatsoever about the reality of the situation and simply spew out whatever nasty thing you can think up to make those you don't like look bad! And for the record, I don't like Harper either! Just because I might disagree with YOU doesn't mean I have to believe in a list of ridiculous things that YOU ascribe to me! I'll pick my own ridiculous things, thank you very much! Only fair, considering the size of YOUR list!

What's wrong? They are mostly opinion, Star! Sure, there is some history involved but for the most part they are long on opinions as to what factors were discriminatory in the past and what have been the effects of legislating them away today. Since everybody and anybody can have an opinion this would seem to be a hard thing for a teacher to evaluate. And what about bias, or political correctness? So we see adherence to orthodoxy as a substitute. The answer may be simply agreeing with a politically correct teaching in the curriculum but it is very quick and easy to mark. When you parse a sentence or work out an equation using the Binomial Theorem there is no opinion or political correctness involved. It's nice that someone can have an opinion but it is far more important that they can actually do something real! Things seem to have been "dumbed down" a lot. One instance that happened back in the early Pleistocene Era when I was in school was the abandonment of essay answers on exams and tests, in favour of point form. It made it easier for a teacher to mark but it also meant that the student was missing the opportunity to develop clear thinking and expressing it in clear prose. Point form answers reduced learning to mere rote. A truly educated adult needs a strong basis of learning to be able to think clearly and creatively adapt to new and changing situations. That function seems to have been supplemented by continual retraining over someone's working life. This is a rather new phenomenon in our history. It wasn't that long ago when we routinely learned new things constantly on our own. Nowadays this idea would seem to be unknown! Today, if you learn something on your own you get no credit for it and it is no asset to a job. Yet during the beginning of my career if you COULDN'T learn new things you wouldn't KEEP your job! To illustrate the difference, I was there selling the first computer chips and rode the high tech wave. In the very early 80's we began to computerize our operation, first with just accounting functions and later with virtually the entire distribution/sales operation, putting a CRT terminal on every desk. There were no computer courses in word processing or spreadsheets in those days. They hadn't been invented yet! Menus for job functions on a screen were just beginning to be seen. Programmers were just starting to learn how to write such programs! When the time came to switch over to a completely computerized system we managers had meetings on how to handle training our employees on the new technology. This is how we did it: we came in on a weekend and put a terminal on everyone's desk, wiring them all up to the central mainframe. Then we took away ALL the manual paperwork and locked it in a room, leaving no one access! When the employees came to work Monday morning they were quite surprised to see the screens. Many noticed the lack of the manual paperwork and asked "How are we going to do our jobs?" We told them "Everything is now being done through the computer. If you can't learn how to do that then there's no way you can do your job!" For the rest of the week there was much loud cursing, howling and crying. We managers and supervisors were run ragged helping everyone adapt. However, by Friday things were running smoothly and NOBODY wanted to go back to the old "clunky" way of doing things! The most popular observation about the change was that no longer was anyone stopped in their tracks by being unable to find paperwork or in having to wait for the paperwork to reach your point in the process. As soon as information was typed into the system at one workstation it was then available to anyone else anywhere who needed it! Contrast this with what happened 10 years later with my wife, who was working for the city. They were beginning to computerize and the staff immediately rose up in fear and anger! They demanded that that they all receive courses of training, some of which lasted for a few MONTHS! And this all on the city's expense, of course! Star, at a Westinghouse location where I once worked, a half dozen or so employees were put into a department of their own where they could continue to work under a manual system, as they found using a computer to be too difficult and "scary"! I kid you not! Things came from a computer system and were converted to printouts when it hit this department's door. They were SLOWLY processed manually by these "Luddites" and then passed out another door where a data entry clerk fed things back into the computer system! Westinghouse was not the only company with a union that had to take this route. Star, my company brought the first ever personal computer into Canada. The boss gave me one on a Friday and told me he expected a report on a printout for Monday. I took it home and cursed at it all weekend. I had to learn how to both word process and develop a spreadsheet for the first time! I said many very bad words but I came to work Monday with that report nicely printed out! Later I found out I wasn't the only one, merely the first. We ALL learned! On our own! And thought nothing special about it! If a company tried to do something similar today there would be mass walkouts! The very idea of self-teaching seems to have been lost. Even hobbies are almost gone! Back in the 80's variety stores were filled with racks of magazines for making your own sawdust, home hifi amplifier or hot rod engine. Have you looked at those racks in the stores lately? Virtually all of those magazines are long gone. What few remain contain mostly product reviews and extremely simple construction articles. Dumb? Star, did you ever build a plastic model airplane when you were young? Painting and gluing all those tiny pieces? Have you gone to a shop and looked at those kits today? You take the upper and lower half of a plane, run some glue along one edge and slap them together! I swear, they're designed for the mentally deficient! Look for yourself if you don't believe me! Our problems with education today are greater than first glance. They now are not just structural but cultural! No wonder the Chinese are cleaning our clocks!

It's the large donations from corporations and lobby groups that were made illegal! That's the whole basis for this situation! Chretien made the changes before he left office so that there would be a $1000 limit and donations must come from individuals. Geez Bud, that was a while ago! Ironically, it was the Reform/Alliance/CPC that was hurt the least by those changes, since they had a highly developed machine to solicit smaller donations from individuals. When I was active in Reform pretty well all local members were constantly raising funds, including the traditional car washes and bake sales. At every meeting we would pass around a KFC bucket and would never fail to get a few hundred dollars every time. The Liberals and NDP both had no such machine or experience, having always depended on large corporate and lobby group donations. They were the party of Bay Street, after all! Closing down this source of money left the Opposition parties with pretty well only the kickback from Elections Canada for the votes they had received. If they understood the need to develop machinery for fund raising from individuals in small amounts they seemed to do nothing about it, perhaps being too pre-occupied with leadership fights and getting control of the party. So the corporations are NOT scratching Harper's back, Bud! Certainly not in the manner that they used to scratch the Liberals' and the same as unions would scratch that of the NDP. This is why I hold so little respect for the Opposition parties over this matter. Reform proved that a party can thrive by direct contributions from its membership, who obviously cared enough to dig into their own pockets. I see no difference between giving parties $1.95 for every vote out of general tax revenues and any kind of corporate welfare. If your members won't VOLUNTARILY kick in a few bucks then you simply don't deserve to exist as a party, as far as I'm concerned. Those small donations show a level of support that cannot be denied, whereas a welfare vote stipend means nothing. Anybody can cast a vote for free. That's easy! Opening your own wallet is much harder.

You know, I've googled before looking for such info and it seems to be rather rare. There's some vague and poorly substantiated "propaganda" stuff but that's about it. What you do find seems to always say that things today are wonderful! When you dig into it you find that the authors are always people with a vested interest in that POV. Yet personal experience of perhaps thousands of parents between the way they were taught and what they see with their children tends to differ! Of course, without hard data which is virtually impossible for parents to come up with on their own, their experience is blown off as "merely anecdotal". Parent after parent is simply told they're wrong! I wonder if home schooling and private schooling is more common than a few decades ago. That would perhaps show parental dissatisfaction with today's schooling. Whatever, I worked very hard with my daughter's to make sure they had every chance. I read them stories every night from before they could talk and the end result was that both were good readers before they went to kindergarten. They were also quite comfortable on the home computer. In kindergarten it was just computer games geared to their age level but by the end of grade 1 they were surfing the Internet. It required more time from both me and my wife but we thought it was well worth it. When the school would send grade 8 students to the lower grades to read stories my kids would be reading better than them! As a result both girls are honour students. They also were told from an early age that even though school could be very boring for them they didn't have to let that be a limit on learning. They could and did use the Net to learn as much as they wanted about whatever interested them! They grasped that they had to "render unto Caesar" as far as regular school was concerned, that good marks were necessary to do well later in life and even though they didn't find formal schooling all that much to be proud of, that was going to be the price for the use of the computer outside of school! It wasn't easy sometimes but both of them learned to accept the system the way it is and not to let it bother them! Frankly, overall they haven't found it all that hard to keep up honours standing. I did have to wage one fight for one daughter. Her teacher had discovered how bright she was and decided that the way to keep her challenged was to give her twice as much work - only at the same boring level! Believe me, that was a diplomatic challenge but we weathered it! One recent change I've noticed was the effect of dropping the old grade 13. A fair number of students seem to be simply spreading their course load over 2 years anyway! How can you accept a graduation mark as equally valid when the student needed an extra year to achieve it? Why should an employer? Whatever Star, I don't have all the answers. I'm happy with how things worked with my girls and that's really all I could do. If there is truly a decline eventually I'm sure the "system" will address it but in the meantime a generation or two will suffer and as they move into positions in work and society the country itself will be the poorer for it. Witness what happened in the late 70's and 80's with the abandonment of phonics! I noticed that in the 90's they came back, albeit sometimes under a different name. Meanwhile, some of the workmates and even bosses I had that were schooled without phonics seemed to me to be functionally illiterate! It might also be interesting to find data on just what percentage of adults actually read books these days! Among younger generations it seems to be a lost pastime for many.

The present system of community colleges was instituted the year I entered high school. Since then it appears to have developed some severe problems. The colleges were sold as a way to "pre-train" workers, to gain the support of industry. To us students, it was to be a strong advantage to getting a job in the trades. We would be taught by "people fresh from industry"! In the 70's I worked at an electronics store and dealt with many college teachers. It soon became apparent that once they got the teaching gig they never went back into industry. After a while, particularly in a rapidly changing field like electronics, it became obvious that these teachers were getting more and more out of date. Industry took the easy way out with hiring. Instead of the department manager being the primary decision maker as to who got hired, the "personnel" department that traditionally looked after filing employment records and making sure you got your holiday pay got renamed "human resources" and became the first and main point of hiring. It was easy for them to conduct an interview after all. All they had to do was check off little boxes as to what community college courses had been completed and what sort of graduating marks had been achieved. The process was made completely academic. The HR interviewer had no hands-on experience in what was required for the job and often was woefully ill-equipped to recognize it in an applicant. By the time the late 80's rolled around many department heads were furious at the quality of new recruits being selected for them by the HR department. Some of the more progressive businesses restructured the process to allow for more involvement by the managers of the potential new employees. Many unfortunately still haven't and have suffered for it, without really understanding why! However, it has made a great many new jobs for teachers! Every new community college meant large numbers of new teaching positions that had never existed before! I agree with you that universities have taken the same attitude that quantity and not quality of students is all that's important. If you keep the schools full then you won't be expected to lay off any teachers. It's as simple as that. Meanwhile, countries like China and India are cleaning our clocks in the global market. They are not nearly as focused on "sheepskins" as we are. Having not just background but TALENT is more important to them! It is a long standing axiom among the Left that anyone can do any job. It's merely a matter of training and of course, the company is responsible for training and therefore will always be responsible if the employee does a bad job! You can achieve high marks in a college course and be totally inept at the job in the real world. If we get to the point where talent and the rewarding of it becomes totally irrelevant in the workplace then we are indeed doomed!

Scriblett is a lady! And judging by your "rabble.com" style of courtesy, you ain't no gentleman! She has over 5,000 posts to this board and has been well respected for all that time. I've never known her to lie! She might be mistaken, and so might YOU! The only attitude I sense is YOURS! I think perhaps you should work on your "people skills" or else find another board. You may run out of people willing to pay the price of being snarked at in order to debate with you. With a few exceptions, this board has been pretty civil. We'd like to keep it that way! If you keep over reacting and being a crankbag you will start getting reported. At that point you'll start getting suspensions or even an eviction. However, its a free country! If you really feel that you are totally in the right, every one else is a deliberate liar and there is no need for basic human courtesy then go ahead! See what happens! Perhaps I'm totally wrong in giving you a friendly warning or even <gasp> LYING!

Who cares? That's still no excuse! We were better, we are now poorer so we should be trying to get better again! Pointing fingers at other jurisdictions is just a diversion.

I'm sensing a pattern here! You're testing people out to see if they're good enough as rightwingers. If someone disagrees with you then they must be bullshitting. Who died and left you as King? People can disagree with you and not be evil, you know! And maybe, YOU don't measure up by THEIR standards!

I'd be willing to bet on forever, Michael! Government enterprises are run by political factors, not economic. The way for an employee to advance is not through higher productivity. I just don't see how you could change that! Look at the crown corporations we've had throughout our history. Can you cite ANY of them as shining examples of cost-efficiency? Instead, they had to respond to political forces. Governments had them pad the payroll to give more people work. They bought supplies from more expensive sources because they were domestic, keeping the money in Canada but making the final product uncompetitive on the world market. If you know of a way to get around these problems I'd like to hear it!

There's a big difference between funding the construction as a one-time deal and subsidizing the PRODUCT forever! Your Dad might help you with the cost of a car but he surely would balk at paying 80% of the gas for it, for the life of the vehicle!

That's only because in the States the Democrats drifted farther and farther left, dragging the centre with them until they defined a new one! Me, I'm right where I've always been, "laissez-faire" and "rights of the individual paramount".

I'm with ya, Jack!

o1p1fan, I'm 59 years old and have been following politics since before I went to kindergarten, reading Pogo cartoons in the newspaper. I've seen so damn much political corruption that I'm just not fazed by it anymore! That's not to say I approve, of course. Just that I've been somewhat numbed to it and no longer share your horror. What's more, I've seen so much from ALL parties that I just can't lay it all on just one, as you seem to do. I've seen Conservatives send a spy into another candidate's inner circle, betraying friends to do so. I've seen a corrupt Liberal MP abusing his position by getting a local grape farmers organization to pay his enormous bar tab at a local motel, then watched him bang off the walls trying to walk to his room, with piss running down his leg! I've sat at a dinner table of a new friend and made the mistake in conversation of mentioning an NDP MP of the highest position, causing an instant freeze! Later, I asked my friend what did I say wrong and he told me it wasn't my fault but his sister had been living in an Ottawa apartment as that NDP members mistress, since she was 14! She had been snowed into believing he was going to leave his wife for her and of course, he never did. You'd think that this all has made me jaded with politicians but not as much as you would think. They are all human beings and subject to the same human frailties as the rest of us. It's just that their position makes it more vivid. So give it a rest, o1p1fan. You sound like a virgin! A partisan one at that!

What do you expect? I'm NOT a Conservative! I don't even consider myself rightwing, unless you count the fact that everyone else over the years have drifted so far left as to leave me sticking out on the new right of centre... Don't feel bad. It's a common mistake on this board from leftwingers. Anyone who hasn't swallowed THEIR Kool-Aid MUST be a rightwinger! They all see the world digitally, on/off, black/white, Left/Conservative, good/bad, saintly/evil. If you need a label for me put me down as a Classic Liberal. You know, the kind of Liberal that hasn't been seen in Canada for a century or so...

Now don't get all testy! I don't mind looking at a cite. I just feel that if it was someone else's cite then it's someone else's point. Therefore, if you chose a cite that doesn't clearly support your point then that was your fault, not mine. The onus of proof was on YOU! I shouldn't be expected to spend my precious time researching a poor cite of YOURS! Hell, you would have jumped on me fast enough for a poor point and certainly refused to research all its footnotes! Justifiably so! I wouldn't expect YOU to waste your time proving MY premises! I'm still willing to buy you a beer, as long as you don't nitpick overly long about the brand!

Hey, I will cheerfully include any and all politicians in my list! As a fervent Reformer, I have my own beefs with Harper! He destroyed the only party I ever truly liked! He's turned it into a clone of the old PC party, the one that millions of us had abandoned! As I keep saying, why did we ever bother?

Why shouldn't I? Is it compulsory to agree with you? You MUST be a leftwinger!

I may not agree with you Jack but I'll defend to the death your right to support a city-folk, metrosexuals ONLY party!

Sorry Waldo but I just don't have time to peruse the footnotes of an article to prove a point that the cite couldn't do for itself! I have amplifiers to fix for guitarists, a tower for a ham radio antenna to erect, tons of housework and to be honest, I'm just too old and fat to get it all done! To ask me to spend time proving your cite is more than I can spare. The cite can prove itself or not, as far as I care. If I have any time left I'll be out at a local blues bar listening to my customers play. If you want to drop around sometime I'll buy you a beer!

You're wasting your time, Capricorn. You're quite right to use the same argument against McGuinty that the Left uses against Harper, when they say that if he only got 40% of the popular vote that means that 60% of all the others were a unified vote AGAINST him! Usually they throw in all the people that didn't vote as well. However, these folks can only see it working one way - their way! Their hero can do no wrong and their enemy can do no right. That's just the world they live in. Might as well try to argue with a Witness at your door Saturday morning.

Well, one positive note is that he's the first minister ever to take a foreign company that promised all kinds of things for federal deals to buy up a Canadian company to court, for breaking their promises. US Steel bought Stelco here in Hamilton, saving it from bankruptcy. They made promises as to how many jobs they would keep happening and how much production would be kept in Canada. Then when Obama instituted his "Americans First" policy US Steel promptly caved and shut down their production in Hamilton. Every time before this when something similar has happened no one has done anything. It was Tony who said "Screw this noise" and launched a lawsuit. It hasn't been easy or quick. Apparently, since it means breaking new legal ground the lawyers can drag it out for a few years but hey, at least he's trying! Even if he loses, the legal work will mean that the next time some foreign company makes similar promises the government will better know the legal wording that will make a lawsuit stick. Nobody is all good or all bad. I just want to point out something good about Tony - something that no politician has done before. Foreign companies have been getting away with breaking their promises made to get government welfare for too long.