Moonbox

Yes. The hack job that is the Toronto Star posts this sort of crap all the time. Shouldn't we be thrilled that Harper is bypassing the government workers' unions and going to the public sector, where people have to actually, you know, perform their jobs adequately and only receive reasonable benefits? Keep it up IMO.

The doctors won't perform the procedure because it's dangerous and because the baby is practically done cooking by then. It's easier to make the case that something with eyes and hands etc is actually a living human beings than a bunch of goo in the uterus in the first few weeks/months.

Down south in Bible Land there's a lot of angry Jesus lovers still trying to get abortion outlawed because a couple of cells growing in a uterus has a 'soul'.

He's alive in the same sense that a carott is alive. He's brain dead and would die immediately if he wasn't on expensive life support. We wouldn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to prolong the life of a carott, so why would we do it on the public purse for a human vegetable? I'd be willing to bet big money that most American insurance companies would come to the same decision that the Ontario health system has. The only difference is that in the US the parents could decide to send him to another hospital and waste their own money to keep their vegetable alive, which most American families couldn't afford to do anyways.

You're right. It's not the strongest moral argument. It does beg the question though. Why DOES everyone froth at the mouth about Israel, but yet ignore behaviour that is undeniably worse in other countries? That's just as weak an argument as the one you posted above. There are indeed tons of people who will pretend that any sort of anti-Israel talk is anti-semitism (and it's not ALL balogna), but the real reason I think Israel is so villainized is because it's a democratic country in the middle of a bunch of dicatorships and nut jobs who've made an ART out of negative PR campaigns against Israel. We hold Israel to a higher standard than Pakistan or Iran or Iraq because we can relate to them much more easily, and Hezbollah etc know this and exploit our sense of morality towards their cause. Israel's enemies have an equally big army of people condemning them. The idea of an army of 'apologists' does sound a lot like the regular Jewish conspiracy theories people throw around. Don't criticize people for throwing around the anti-semitism card and then come right back to us and tell us there's an army of jews and apologists controlling the media. That's a joke. There it is again. The Jewish lobby! Oh no! Tinfoil hat time! They have microchips in our brains too! Like the Jews supporting Israel right? Ummm...you're pretty much totally full of &*!*^ on this one. Israel routinely kills children? That's their plan? In their war rooms they have generals drawing up detailed plans of ground formations with schools and day cares as their objectives? Is that what you're saying? The have Apache gunships chasing little girls on bicycles? Give us a freaking break. What about China? North Korea? Iran?

Fighters in WW2 cost about $500,000 in today's dollar figures. A cheap-end fighter of today's standard costs about 120x that. It would take 5-10 years simply to develop the infrastructure and technical expertise to even start a program like this and our economies of scale would be a joke compared to the US'.

The program is cancelled. The planes are prohibitively expensive. The program, overall, was a failure for anything other than experimentation and showcasing US technological expertise, which is impressive. 186 planes for how many billions spent? That's one of the most epic failures in US procurement history.

I will ABSOLUTELY roll my eyes at you, and you deserve it. You brought up Germany in WWII to compare to Canada's G20 summit. That's a freaking joke. Using your brilliant logic, I could say that the black masked protestors were just like the murderous red band communist revolutionaries who overthrew the Czar in WWI. I mean, they burned and smashed stores and stuff and attacked police property etc right? It's TOTALLY the same thing.... Some were protesting peacefully. Some weren't. There may have been breaches in constitutional rights, but they were so minor, particularly under the circumstances and given the history of G20 summits, to be barely noteworthy. Ah. More anectotes. I'd betting you weren't actually at the protests. As far as I know, nobody was seriously hurt, so beat up the citizen day seems like a pretty hokey thing to say. There was maybe a handful of people out of thousands who sustained minor injuries, but they were the idiots who decided to clash against a riot police wall for their own genius reasons.

Also saying that the F-35 and F18E use the same technologies is rather dubious for someone who's read a lot about it. I'm not really all that on board with the F-35 myself, but I'd rather go with that than the F18E

I don't think you've read anything about the F-35.

First F-18E flight - 1995 First F-35 flight - 2006 That's a difference of 11 years, not to mention the fact that the F-18e design borrows heavily from the even older F-18 and shares much of the same avionics systems. So yes. The F-35 is much better and much newer.

I'm sorry if I've offended you. What is crud about it though? As for my physical dimensions, let's just say I'm about 5000 Bigmacs behind May.

Concentration camps eh? It seems we've entered Godwin territory here. My favorite part of the Charter is the part that says, "In a REASONABLE and JUST society". A lot of the stupidity that people cry about when trying to reference the charter goes down in flames when it encounters the 'reasonability' test.

You don't know what you're talking about. The Super Hornet would be close to a 20 year old design by the time Canada replaced its CF-18's. Within 5-10 years we'd be in the exact same position we're in now. We'd have an aircraft nearing the end of its relevance. The US, for example, is planning to start retiring them and replacing them by 2025. Why would we buy into that???

Torontonians on their own streets felt safe. The fools who came out to protest anything and nothing maybe felt less so, but even they were largely left alone and nobody really got hurt. Mulroney was definetly a crook. As far as Adscam went, however, there more than a few people involved. As to our rights being stolen, there was more damage done to personal property and to innocent bystanders than there was to protesters as a result of police actions. Get over it. My family is full of laywers and the 'honest to goodness' conversation I have with them is that the North American legal system has become a travesty of political correctness and pussy-footing.

Hospitality? The G20 security measures were there to make sure foreign leaders and dignitaries felt safe. Me thinks you're painting a doomsday scenario. Personally I'd rather not have our politicians steal from us. Anectotes! So relevant!

The prevailing sentiment in Canada, even with us evil conservatives, is that Sarah Palin is an absolute moron and a snake. As for Elizabeth May, she's a total slob. You don't have to be good looking to be in politics. Look at Hilary Clinton. Some pride in your appearance, however, is worth something. Elizabeth May looks like she's never done a minute of exercise in her life and that does, to an extent, tell us something about her character. Is the irony of having a glutton crusading to save the trees and the animals lost on you???

Doesn't seem like they're too pleased with the costs so far. At any rate, costs per plane are driven by production values not per order per country, but by overall sales. If only we could just decide how much each plane would cost us. That'd be nice I know thanks.

ditto to that. I'd also like all my money back for 'arts' funding. I'd like my money back for transfer payments too. alas, our system wasn't designed to be fair.

That's what I've been trying to say all along. US officials are predicting the program is going to come out with production costs of $120 million per plane, the Pentagon is furious about it but too far invested, and somehow magically people think the Canadian planes are going to come out on budget. Doesn't make sense to me. We might as well start buying B2's at that cost lol.

Welcome to politics. It seems you're new here.

While I can't say I'm excited that they've spent so much money, I can say this is pretty small potatoes and it's not something people really care about. Topaz you really need to choose your battles better.

Yes. That must be why they were given the boot. Your logic in this case is unassailable.

Yeah.....you're really showing it........

I'm going to ignore your complete lack of understanding when it comes to the budget numbers you posted. You're totally clueless, but explaining it all to you appears hopeless so I'll hone in on your Avro Arrow argument instead. The Avro Arrow was an obsolete design as soon as it came on the market. It was designed as an interceptor. Its intended use was to fly really fast and really straight to catch up to long range Soviet bombers before they had a chance to drop nukes on us. It wasn't agile. It wasn't robust. It was a very fast and very straight flying plane. With the advent of ICBMs (Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles), long range bombers were no longer the main nuclear threat. Nuclear Missiles launched from Russia were. The Avro was useless in countering this threat. Continuing with the Avro would have been a waste of money and continuing to fund a tiny military aerospace industry was equally wasteful. We shared continental defence with the world's biggest military manufacturer and the scale at which they were able to operate, and our common defensive interests, made Avro redundant. You don't seem to have any idea what the Arrow was tbh.