Wild Bill

Back about a century ago the French used to say that a country wasn't truly civilized unless its mails worked well. They were talking about emerging nations such as those in Africa but I've always chuckled about how it relates to Canada!

Here's the link to an article appropriate to the OP: http://www.thespec.com/news/ontario/article/573157--attorney-general-complains-about-judge "Attorney general complains about judge TORONTO The office of Ontario’s attorney general says it has launched a complaint with the province’s judicial council after a judge let a dozen people go free because a lawyer was late for court. Ontario Court Justice Howard Chisvin dismissed the defendants in a Newmarket court north of Toronto last month after Crown attorney Brian McCallion returned a few minutes late from a morning recess. The accused included a violent schizophrenic, a spouse charged in a domestic abuse case, a disbarred lawyer charged with fraud and a robbery suspect. Some of them had already pleaded guilty." This is the original report. Yesterday's paper is not yet available online but further reports tell how the judge in question is notoriously late himself! The fact that a judge can dismiss 12 cases so cavalierly, including some who had pleaded guilty, with obviously no thought to the effect on society at large is deeply troubling. Then to hear that the judge himself is so often late, for far more than a few minutes! If that doesn't show a divorce from reality I don't know what does.

Harris and Eves? How old are you? The debt accumulation started back in the mid-70s, under Davis. No premier since did anything to fix it, including Rae, Peterson and now Dalton McGuilty. This was never something partisan. They ALL share the blame!

You are making an abstract argument for real world stuff! How on earth could anyone put a value on over a century of investments? What's more, the federal government would only have claim on money THEY invested! How many of those grain elevators were put up by private companies. Should Saskatchewan have to pay for those? And who says private industry didn't drill all those oil wells? If you are claiming that the feds did it, please make some attempt to prove it!

You're setting up a straw man argument. Once again, I might add. Socialism does not cause droughts. However, socialistic societies seem to lack the brain power and initiative to cope with droughts. We all remember stories about how in the old USSR an area might harvest a record crop of vegetables, only to have them sit for weeks on a railroad train and go rotten before they could reach the people who wanted to eat them! Perhaps you could name us a couple of socialistic countries that run very efficiently with such things. Even if you find a few, I doubt if Somalia would make the list. Look at Israel! They had very little fresh water so they developed desalination technology to the point where not only do the plants supply their cities but irrigation projects for food as well! No doubt evil multinational corporations sent mercenaries to Somalia with big guns to make sure they didn't do anything similar or so progressive. I'm a techie. One thing I've learned over the years is that you can be in an area with few resources but brain power can usually come up with something to help you survive. You can either try science and techology or you can sit around and bitch that other countries owe you a handout! There was a clip on one of my science pages some months ago about a young man in some part of Africa that invented a pump made with PVC pipe that gave his village access to well water for the first time. His pump is now being used by hundreds of other villages. What's happening in Somalia?

How could they? France always surrenders first!

Not quite, Dr. Dre! People will invest in renewables ONLY if they are competitive with traditional sources. If the only way to make them competitive is to artificially bail them out with political subsidies then unless someone can find a way to make them become competitive they will command investment only as long as the politicians are willing to keep propping them up! This idea that if you subsidize renewables then eventually volumes will lower costs and make them competitive is a very dangerous game! How do you know what's a good bet and what isn't? It's hard enough for the private sector. Do you really think a politician like McGuinty would be a good assessor? Would Dalton be like Jimmy Buffet and be able to tell what renewables would be good investment bets? Lots of variables can screw up the whole idea! Maybe no one will be able to come up with cheaper and more efficient solar cells? Maybe battery technology hits a brick wall. A smart investor waits until technology improvements show some promise before putting in his money. McGuinty has just shoveled in OUR money, on blind faith! I'm one of the techies on this board and it seems like I have seen the same old articles in the media about how cheap solar power is just a year or two away for decades now. I have some magazines from the early 60's making those claims. I should dig them out and reference them for anybody who cares to research them. I'm NOT at all saying we WON'T see technical breakthroughs! It's just that breakthroughs don't fit schedules very well. Many engineers have pinned up cartoons on their desk's wall that show management flow charts, with someone giving a presentation and pointing to a box on the chart labeled "Engineering out-of-the-blue breakthrough HERE!" Real investors watch and wait and put their own money in only when and if the signs are coming together to reduce the risk. Dalton has just shoveled in OUR money! Then he's implemented policy YEARS BEFORE we can see if things are going to work out! Investing in politically subsidized programs leaves one very vulnerable. I have breakfast several Sundays a month with an old friend who has been a farmer all his life. He and other farmers watched McGuinty's MicroFit program carefully before some finally signed up. Many others signed up a few months later and promptly got screwed! The Liberals had realized that they had a far larger backlog of applications to process than they had ever expected. This meant 2 things. First, they were going to have to pay out far more money than they had thought, far faster in time frame. Second, they didn't have enough bureaucrats to process all the applications within months and months of time! So they just arbitrarily announced that they were not taking any more applications! What's more, all those who had put their applications in months earlier and were piled up in the backlog were screwed! They would not be allowed in the program at all! These farmers had spent money and effort researching the MicroFit program to see if their farm situation would not only fit the government criteria but make the farmer money! Now they were being told that they were out of luck! Worse yet, the Liberal changed the rules in the middle of the game! They announced that only roof-top solar panels would get the full rate. Ground-mounted installations would get much less. Most farmers have far more fields than roofs! Fortunately for some, the political flack got the Liberals to give in about those applications that had been waiting in the backlog and allowed them to be processed. They did NOT budge about the reduced rate for solar panels on the ground! It has often been said that when it comes to business politicians are very poor at picking winners. Now we're watching one trying to create a brand new industry! You can understand why some of us are a little skeptical!

You must be a richer man than I am to expect me to pay "his meal tab forever". I was sort of hoping I could pay for a chinese food meal for my daughter this weekend. Maybe even put enough aside to pay my taxes this year! Thanks for the guilt trip! Besides, if we buy their food then their leaders can afford guns! That's how India got the atomic bomb. We fed their people with our wheat as foreign aid. It dollars are just about equivalent to their bomb program!

What a fascinating paper! I've always wondered about the illogic of attacking the right of self-defense. This lady makes it very clear... many people who support this idea are nuts! Not "funny farm" nuts, just "can't face it clearly" nuts. Projection, special status and so one are perfectly sensible explanations. To do this is so human. We all fool ourselves in various ways to various degrees. It's just that those who think the police can protect them from some Marc LePine nutbar take it to a higher level. I've saved this to my files.

Just to make sure, I just read the Wiki "History of Somalia". Isn't it possible that socialist governments, alliances with the Soviet Union, ethnic prejudices and rampant tribalism, civil wars and racist atrocities might have had some small influence? It seems to me that if you gave many Somalis a fish their first act would be to hit their neighbour over the head with it! Next you're going to tell me that evil capitalistic corporations put guns to the heads of the Tutus to make them murder the Hutus... At least, you're not being condescending.

Teach a man to fish, Oleg. If he doesn't want to learn then paying for his meal tab forever is not a positive solution.

This kind of silly thinking seems trendy among management today, both in the public and the private sectors. For instance, has anyone noticed the new 'buttons' at Home Depot? So you don't have to wait for help at certain stations like for paint mixing or board cutting, they have installed "buttons' we can press which will madly keep paging store clerks. The catcher of course that they never hired any more store clerks! The usual reason you had to wait was because the too small number of clerks were busy with too many customers. Now, while they're frantically trying to cope, they have the added pressure from the 'buttons'. This is Dalton style management at its finest. Don't solve a problem, especially when that might cost money. Do something that APPEARS to solve a problem! If most people buy it, you've won!

As we speak, the electric companies are awaiting approval of their application for a rate increase.

You already posted this in another thread and may want to look there for my reply. Suffice to say to THIS post is you seem to be making the assumption that things are only bad in the US! We have our own problems, too. We also have high unemployment. You might not find a job here! I suggest you do some research or you might well regret it.

As a graphic artist I guess you don't have a lot of hands-on electronics experience. TimG has already set you straight on part of the problem. Another is that you can make everyone's house its own solar generating station but you can't just feed it directly to the grid. Present power grids are nowhere near advanced enough to accept power from so many points and distribute it properly across wide areas, according to demand. So you need to spend billions upgrading your grid, billions on the individual installations and as Tim pointed out, billions on backup power. It would be far more cost effective to develop generation methods for everyone's house. It won't help the urban apartment dweller but it would help those who live in houses, enough to reduce demand on the main power grid and save the costs of expanding it. Anyhow, it's flattering to hear how you find our country attractive but you should consider a few things first. Our unemployment is also high! When manufacturers moved their factories out of the US they never moved them to Canada. They moved them OUT of Canada as well! Those jobs went to China, India, Russia and Mexico. They are not waiting for you here! From the media. I would suppose that the best employment picture is in Alberta, with all the money floating around from the oilsands and the oil companies. I hear they have such demands for workers that restaurants can't even get enough waitresses, despite paying much higher wages than you would anywhere else. Of course, the cost of living is probably higher in proportion as well. Perhaps some posters from that part of the country will chime in and give you more advice. I live in Ontario and I wouldn't suggest you come here. Unemployment is high and we have LOTS of graphic artists all fighting for too little business to make a living! I build and repair guitar amps for a living and I get 2 or 3 "graphic artists" offering to pay their bill by building me a website every week! How many webpages does a guy like me need? Obviously there are too many of them chasing too few customers. Also, being a quick study is no longer as useful as it was. Today, our society has become very focused on "certification". It doesn't really matter if you can do the job. You must have taken courses and have a certificate saying you can do so. This has expanded to such a point that it's really getting rather ridiculous. A farmer friend of mine found that he needed a different 6 week course and a certificate to sell firewood from his farm than the one he took to make it legal for him to cut firewood on his own farm! He learned very quickly to sell only to his neighbours, who were personal friends and would keep it quiet. He cuts his own firewood but doesn't mention it to anyone else, so that no one will charge him for not renewing his tree-felling license. Good luck!

Eyeball, If you PM me I can give you my FB page and make you a 'friend'. A relative of mine is shaking inside her house as rioters are wrecking things up and down her street. She's also a limo driver for celebs. She makes a lot of posts to her page that are echoed on mine. You might find the perspective of someone who lives there and is personally threatened by what's going on informative. I don't expect to change your mind but surely first hand info would be interesting to you.

More correctly, the media presented me with the story that SOME scientists were touting the "ICE AGE" theory and a bunch of ignorant but often influential people were buying it. I never bought it in any way from the start. I also never believed that it was sanctioned by the entire scientific community. There is a big difference in how scientific and non-scientific minds think, or should think, at least. If I point to a house on a hill and ask someone what colour is it, the average person might say "White!". A scientifically educated person would take a long look and reply "It seems to be white on the side I can see!" You perceive the difference? And just as a sidebar, did you ever read much from Omni? I'm curious if you dismiss it out of hand from personal experience or just from second-hand reputation. Many very well respected scientists wrote articles for Omni. Does the fact that they were owned by the same man as who published Penthouse change the value of anything they wrote? I find the fact that you could even imply such a thing significant.

I get the impression that you think the answers are all on the Net somewhere and if we google long enough we'll find them. Science doesn't work like that! Most of the answers are not discovered yet. All you can do is improve your background knowledge to the point where you can start to make some educated guesses. So we can't blame the media for not reporting what is not yet known. Again, I am puzzled by what leap of logic you used to draw a certain conclusion, that I "fell for the bogus 'Ice Age' red herring". When did I ever say that? I would have thought it obvious that I never bought into it from the start! It was my accumulated scientific data that kept me from buying their story! Michael, now I might be the one who sounds patronizing but please believe I do not mean to at all. To properly form an opinion on these scientific subjects might not require a degree but it does pre-suppose a great deal more background knowledge than you appear to possess. No matter how intelligent or well-spoken you are you won't be able to do it with a pile of cites and a copy of some Cole's crib notes. Just go back through this thread alone and count the number of times you needed to be corrected. How many times did you demand a cite from Tim and he just cheerfully obliged? I suspect you may be a teacher. Again, not being patronizing but I have often had the experience working with people of academic backgrounds who make the mistake of thinking that somehow their liberal arts education was 'universal' and that an intelligent person from such a background can fully grasp a subject just because he has taught from a textbook. It's like thinking you can learn to play a guitar without having one to play, because you took piano to the point where you are certified to teach it. Some things, many things, demand first hand experience and a long time accumulating background. If you were charged with a crime, would you like me for a defense lawyer? I've never actually done any law but I've got some great books and a list of helpful websites! I can build a guitar amplifier from stem to stern with no need to consult any books so I must be intelligent enough to understand how to properly conduct your defense, no? Notice that I refrain from expressing an opinion of the nitpicking details of the climate change argument. I readily admit I don't know enough for my opinions to be credible! However, I do possess enough background to form an opinion of someone's credibility when they are presenting a climate change argument. Even on MLW, we have posters that start a rebuttal by belittling their opponent. For me, that's more than enough to dismiss them out of hand. Certainly, I won't expect anything positive from a debate with such a person. I'm suppose to keep wading through abuse, providing the person with much entertainment, on the slim chance I might actually learn something worthwhile? If a poster feels the need to lead with "ad hominem" then chances are he has a very weak argument. Life is too short to waste time. Anyhow, I think you are going to be disappointed trying to use raw brainpower to understand scientific thinking. You really need more background. Some of the people you debate with have been doing this most of their lives. It's how they feed their kids and pay their mortgage. They keep having to educate you on point after point before you can understand why they disagree with you. I did NOT mean to insult you by suggesting you're an academic! Society needs academics as much as any other group. I'm just suggesting that this is an area of debate where you need some more 'hands on' experience. One of the scariest things in the world is calling a plumber and having a university kid show up, armed only with a book! There are just too many details involved for you to trust in his ability to fix your leak.

This is a very poor metaphor, Michael. You still seem to be hung up on "consensus". Who CARES what the jury finds? A scientific premise is either true or false. It can seem true within the limits of our understanding at a given time and later be proven false but that is far different from having a jury decide what facts are true. Consensus is irrelevant to science! Tell it to Galileo! We've had times where the consensus was that the Earth was flat or that everything in space orbits the Earth. Millions of people believe in astrology! You're wasting your time on this consensus thing.

You are trying to fit me to a caricature that serves your argument. You are wrong! First off, there WAS significant high-level support for the new Ice Age theory! I never mentioned the Club of Rome and "The Limits of Growth" but there was the same swallowing of the Kool Aid by politicians, scientific spokespeople and other policy makers. I have a complete set of "Omni" magazine, from issue #1 to the last. There's all kinds of info there that overwhelmingly supports this point, from that tme period. There's a few "Scientific American" issues in the mix as well. If you'll pay the shipping, they're all yours! I probably buy at least 2 or 3 science books a month. I have an extensive library. I visit various sites on the Internet every day, starting with The Daily Grail. Don't try to tell me I "refuse to learn and debate science". Do YOU read and follow as much as I do? How big is YOUR library in this area? Please don't patronize me unless you have been at it as long and as deeply as I have. "Refusing to learn science"? Michael, I learn and have learned science constantly every day of my life! It's been my passion since before I went to school, when I first learned to read! I just refuse to waste my time on the climate debate. How many Watchtower magazines do you expect someone to read before he refuses to read any more? Everybody thinks that their POV is new and worth consideration. I've been there and gotten the tee shirt. If I sniff even the slightest hint of leftwing politics I refuse to waste my time any further. "Never well served by the media"? Who says the mainstream media was my only source of information? What's more, it took me a couple of DECADES before I decided to just give up!Surely over 20 years is a fair look at the alarmist claims! I didn't just watch one or two NOVA PBS specials and then make up my mind! I LIKE PBS specials! Long ones, with "people calmly explaining lots of boring facts"!

Michael, you're asking me how I formed my opinions when the process began over 40 years ago! I'm afraid I don't have an eidetic memory! I'll make an effort for you, however. First off, I guess it started with the "Man is triggering an Ice Age!" folks back in the late 60's and early 70's. Now, I know you have claimed that this was never an "official" position but I was there! It was all over the media, from newspapers to books to television. Don't bother asking me for a cite. The Internet wasn't even imagined back then! I still have many books and magazines from that time but I'll be damned if I'll spend the time making it a big research project to settle some points in this thread! I'm too busy trying to make a living. Anyhow, these articles never impressed me with the science of their claims. They seemed to be shy on specific evidence and long on "Man is bad and should do things our way!" It was the start of mixing politics with science, which is like oil and water if you are seeking truth. I didn't make a list of the specific claims so that 40 years later I could provide you with them, Michael. For me it was enough that the credibility of such claims had become so poor that I didn't bother giving them any further attention. Things seemed to be in a holding pattern for a decade or two. The claims of a new Ice Age slowly vanished. Then the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed! Stupendous political changes were happening so fast that no one seemed to have time for much else. I guess it was as the 90's started rolling that the same sort of hype began again in the media, only this time it was all about Global Warming. Instead of freezing to death, apparently we were all going to fry! Again, the scientific part of the arguments seemed always to be rather thin. They may or may not have been true. I never really got that far! Virtually all of it seemed steeped in leftwing politics! It was really all about transferring money from the Free World to the Third World countries. It was all about how the "rich" countries had ruined the planet and owed it to the lesser developed countries to give them massive amounts of foreign aid. When Kyoto happened I actually downloaded the thing and read it from stem to stern. Did you ever actually read it, Michael? If not, you really should. It was ALL about money transfer! It was just warmed over collectivist crap! All the former communist or socialist fanatics had been cut adrift when the USSR ended. Now they appeared to have a new manifesto! Worse yet, Kyoto had zip all about auditing the money transfers! We were to just hand it over to any third world dictator and take his word for it that he would spend the money on "green" projects and not on guns and ammo. I'm NOT exaggerating, Michael! Read it for yourself! By this time I had no credibility left for the eco-movement. I'm willing to admit the possibility of a warming climate change but this idea that it is all the fault of "rich" countries seems to me to be just warmed over Marxism. Mother Nature is a HUGE eco-system! Man is a very small player in her game. Even scientists I had formerly respected shook my faith. Carl Sagan had been one of my heroes for years until during the first Gulf War he was publicly warning against antagonizing Saddam, lest he torch the Kuwaiti oilfields and thus trigger a nuclear winter! Michael, this was total crapola! Compared to Mt. St. Helens and other volcanoes torching those oilfields was like backyard fireworks! Moreover, had Sagan never heard of Tobruk? For that matter, when many of those same protesters had claimed the Valdez oil spill was going to wipe out all marine life along the western seaboard for generations, had they never heard of WWII? How much oil was torched or spilled from sunken warships and merchant marine vessels? The sheer quantity and magnitude was so much higher during that war than any eco-catastrophe today yet we all grew up without any sign of wiping out all marine life at all. Sagan obviously let his politics as a known pacifist overcome his scientific perspective. He was far from alone! Now I see things like climategate and doctored "hockey sticks". To me, this is all indications that many if not most of the high-profile people leading this movement have poor character. They obviously have decided that they are already right and therefore the "end justifies the means". They don't have to be honest, because their cause is so noble and important! The rest of us are just supposed to shut up and let ourselves be taxed more for them to spend as THEY see fit! Why should we Canadians have to give an extra dime in taxes? Compared to China, Russia or India, our emissions are not just mice nuts, they're "amoeba nuts". What are we told? We must comply, because "we have to set an example". An example? Grandmothers have to cook their suppers after 9:00 pm because of McGuinty's power plan, old folks can't afford the electricity anyway, along with their house taxes and the heating bill just so we can set an example??!! THAT'S why I refuse to agree with it, Michael! I will not waste my time learning and debating all the "science" of the debate. I don't share the urgency in the first place and I don't respect the opposition's character in the second! I've already spent more time on this than I wanted. I've got amplifiers to fix so I can afford to get some food for my dog! I've been poor for years now and when I get handed the sort of "guilt trip-Kyoto atonement" crap that's all over this debate I get very, very resentful! You wanted me to tell you how I came to my opinions and I have done that. That's all the energy and time I care to contribute. There's other subjects in other threads that interest me more and I can only spare so much for any of them. I'm off to see if Kimmy or Jack have posted a good nostalgic music video!

Michael, it's an opinion of how that sort of thinking could get started despite or without conflicting data. How could I possibly state where I got that opinion? It is a suggestion of HOW such a thing can be! When you start demanding cites for something like that it's time for you to go have a beer and relax a bit! You're starting to come across as angry, perhaps because TimG has clearly been winning! Your relief at Waldo joining the fray was palpable! This is more the reaction of someone defending a faith rather than a scientific position, which is precisely why I no longer spend much effort on these sort of things. The scientific method does not allow for taking things personally. Me, I'm too old to be a crusader! I live by myself. My electricity bill is quite low and I cook and dry my clothes with natural gas. I drive relatively little. I have no control over the weather or the climate and no influence with the politicians, except to indicate my aversion to being taxed for programs that are mere photo-ops and can't do a blessed positive thing, like McGuinty's MicroFit! Old lions conserve their energy. They only pick fights they can win.

Please let me state my own premise! Don't set me up as a "straw man". I can screw up my own ideas my own way, thank you very much! What I think is that some scientists made up their minds on the strength of limited data, possibly mixed with politics. Scientists can have political beliefs as well, you know! There are alarmists within the scientific circle and also those who are experts at furthering their careers by manufacturing crises. There are scientists who genuinely believe that transferring money to the Third World is a GOOD thing! There's no need for faking data. Once you've already made up your mind you simply only accept data that agrees with your presumption. You don't allow any data that would question your presumption and you certainly don't accept anything that might refute it! There's always LOTS of data and LOTS of studies! That's how these people earn a living! There are leaders and there are followers in this "academia". Many will believe because of confidence in certain of their peers or simply because they feel there is a consensus, even though this would be a totally unscientific viewpoint. We are all human beings with human failings, after all. As Mudhead said to Porgy in the old FireSign Theater radio skits, "What'll you do when you get old, Porgy"? The answer was "Hell no! I'm gonna find a bunch of guys who dress alike and follow them around!"

Classic example: An ad company wants to do an ad for Aspirin, having a man in a white lab coat state that "4 out of 5 doctors prefer Aspirin!" They poll doctors and it takes them 500 doctors to come up with 4 that prefer Aspirin. So they take those 4 and 1 of the other 496, discarding the 495 that don't prefer Aspirin. Now they can legally make the claim that "4 out of 5 doctors prefer Aspirin!" Michael, they simply discarded 495 opinions as "bad data". I'm afraid that's what your argument sounds like to me!

So who led the charge to take rights away from smokers, eyeball? The Liberals and the NDP, that's who! Whatever, ALL politicians have done this, because it's popular. In fact there is nothing as popular as telling your neighbour how to live his life, except for maybe taxing him to pay for YOUR pet idea! It's just human nature and so politicians of all stripes cater to it. Thus, it cancels out as a voting choice factor, since they all do it. The Tories may be "paternalistic" in your eyes, Eyeball. They are a bit in my eyes as well. Still, the other two parties are a HUGE reek in my nose! Harper's not much of a choice but at least he doesn't make me gag like a skunk that's been dead a week on the road...