gullyfourmyle

i just read the tail end of Mighty AC's comment about the fossil fuel industry being the biggest scam in history. Actually, as a scam it pales into insignificance when compared to the scams going in the medical profession. I'll address that in a different Topic Category. For what is going on in the fossil fuel sector to be a scam it would have to be a secret outside of the industry and it's far from that. Plenty of people know about it but the addiction is so entrenched we would destroy our global economy if we divorce ourselves from it too quickly. Every aspect of life today is dependent on the fossil fuel industry and its derivatives. It's not just about oil, gas and coal. it's about every damned thing we use from concrete to toilet paper to electronics to food production. To interfere with the process too quickly would toss us back towards the stone-age in a single generation as much as we would all like to be rid of it. There is a direct analogy between cigarette smoking and our addiction to fossil fuels. Heavy smokers kill their immune systems with the 4000 odd deadly chemicals in cigarette smoke. Over time, their immune systems are replaced by the constant infusions of poisons which become resident in every tissue in the body. If a person in that state tries to quit cold turkey, the person goes into chemical shock, has a heart attack and either dies or is severely damaged. Those that fail to quit re-establish the chemicals as their immune system. Earth's commerce is based on those very same chemicals down to the last molecule. We have to transition out of the addiction slowly and carefully and that is exactly what we are trying to do. But the problem is insoluble without reducing the planet's human population in lock step and that is exactly what we are not doing. That in a nutshell tells you how good our chances of success are.

Global Warming and Climate Change are descriptive terms of symptoms. The core issue is the combination of Chemical Winter and Nuclear Radiation/Fallout. The reason we should be more concerned about the core issues rather than the symptoms is that the core issues affect DNA globally for all species. That means life on earth as we know it is being threatened by the return of earth's atmosphere to pre-life supporting conditions. The cause is of course the well discussed in this thread man-made emissions. But until the problem is defined properly and honestly no real progress can be made. Conservation without a significant human population decrease is meaningless. That is because the number of people world-wide who currently don't have access to emission generating modern technology is about to make a quantum leap forward. No matter how much we conserve it will be a mere blip in the avalanche of new demand globally. Each new person who enters the emission generation stream increased atmospheric heat each and every time he or she uses a power source for heat, transportation, refrigeration, transportation, cooking, laundry and so on. The sheer number of the increase will drive up atmospheric heat way beyond any attempt at conservation. Emissions from power plants of whatever stripe cause the most emissions. But the emissions I haven't seen talked about here are the Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) that are along with nuclear radiation causing genetic alterations to all life on earth. Since a paradigm shift like that affects the viability of all life on the planet, not just us, it behooves us to discuss the problem face on, rather than discuss peripheral issues ad nauseum as has been done so far in this thread. When you consider that the oil companies and the oil rich countries have as goals the extraction of all the fossil fuel currently in the ground as fast as possible and burning them to the last drop, that tells you one important thing about Global Warming, All of that amount of future combustion is going to raise atmospheric temperature. Using those numbers accurately and in context it is possible to calculate how fast we are going to drive up Global ambient temperatures. From there you can then turn to the desertification of Africa and using an even simpler formula; the advance of desertification southwards down the continent at 48 kilometers per year and you can then figure out how long life in Africa has before Armaggedon is reached - about fifty years since the desertification only has to destroy most of the Congo before Africa's billions realize the will die of thirst unless they march on Europe. They will die in the process since Europe will have to fend them off be exterminating them in every way possible. They'll have to die one way or another because Europe doesn't have the resources to accommodate an invasion on that scale. So the Africans will have to be exterminated before they get that far. With that in mind you have to consider what the end result will be having supplied aid to Africa to help them increase their unsupportable populations. When we send aid to Africa, we are easing our consciences now but down the line we are setting the world up for the biggest blood bath since the extinction of the dinosaurs. That folks is Chemical Winter and where we are surely going if we don't define our atmospheric dilemma properly and deal with it as if we want to survive as a species. Most of you reading this thread are going to be alive when this future I've described happens.

While humans have yet to create life from nothing in a lab and thus replicate the process by which life started on earth, I believe it's a question we don't want answered until we've learned how to deal with other issues in a responsible manner. The answer to how life started originally will one day be solved if we remain viable as a species long enough. Evolution has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt time and time again. Humanity is evolving rapidly right now from what we were a century ago to what we have become. For instance our senses are being modified as a species. Our senses of hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch are all substantially diminished and will diminish further. That will not migrate us from the species we are now to the species we are about to become. The species we are about to become will be one that has somehow developed through genetic transformation due to increased radiation levels on the planet. Nuclear accidents and Chemical winter are going to weed out non-competitors. The genetic mutations once established will set a new norm. Those life forms able to live in the presence of much higher radiation will be substantially different from life forms living today. We are seeing the weeding out process with the escalation of cancer in all species not just humans. Some survive, some don't. It will get much worse before it gets better. All life forms will be weaker than those living today since radiation and the chemical emissions are ultimately totally anti-life as we know life. At some point the radiation will recede and the process will work backwards. But in the meantime the genetic damage to life on earth will be profound. Life forms will not longer be as robust as they are now. Genetically Modified crops and higher forms of animals have proliferated to the point where natural forms are threatened. If we become capable of replicating life beyond cloning and genetic mutations, we can expect that companies like Monsanto will quickly emerge and before you know it, artificial humans will have the vote. How badly do you want that? Oh and about the fossils - only a tiny number of everything that ever lived has been fossilized. Very special conditions have to be present. How many people do you know of right now that have become candidates for fossilization? Do you expect to find them any time soon? Obviously with the amount of disturbance we've created on the planet, stuff is going to survive but possibly not what we think due to wars and natural events. New York could be washed away any day now and California could slide into the Pacific at any given moment. Stuff happens but not so as to provide us with a convenient chronology so we can sort out our past. Even though events aren't human friendly, that is no reason to doubt that evolution is a plausible course of events. One thing that is for certain is that Creationism is claptrap and a human created fiction created to justify the abuse and control of women and also as a method of maintaining a form of law and order in the absence of a technology based communications net. The bible, the Koran and other "religious" documents were the official instruments of justice in a time where superstition was rife. History tells us it worked and worked reasonably well all things considered. One of the problems we face now is how to wean humanity off what has become an outdated sociological boat anchor (religion that is) before it sinks the ship? So from my perspective, the fifteen questions are irrelevant. The questions that really need to be answered are all related to how we reduce human population enough so we don't have to experience the Reign of the Fourth Horseman.

Intelligent Design was initially the premise that some supernatural being designed the universe and everything in it. It all works, there are no blank spots where we find that something was missed and everything either has a reason to exist or it ceases to exist. Even that is part of the design. There are no missing shadows or inexplicably incomplete shadows. Where life is concerned, we can start with single celled living beings who were first shown conclusively in an on-line video near the turn of this century to have decision making capability. The demonstration took place in a maze and two microbes approached each other in the maze, detected one another and took avoidance action. The experiment was done a few times and has been replicated since and expanded upon. So we know conclusively that even single celled organisms can detect at a distance, make rational decisions and act on those decisions to potentially extend their lives. From there we can jump from the lab straight into a living body. Dog, cat, mouse, tiger, whatever. For a long time we considered all of higher mammalian decision making took place in the brain after we got over the mistaken notion that everything they did was driven by instinct. But it has become very clear since that quite a lot of decision making takes place at the neuron level throughout the body whether fish or man. Lots of studies have been made to measure how long it takes for our sense of touch, hearing, taste and so on take to travel from the moment and location of threat awareness to the moment of reaction. The time it would take for the impulse to reach the brain and return is fatally long. Threat reaction has to occur long before the signal can reach the brain. Other more local decisions are made at the cellular and sub cellular levels. The entire body is aware, alert and all of the cells are working as a unified complex team. To a slower extent, vegetation and moulds follow a similar pattern. As conditions change, new skills and adaptations have to occur as the planet itself changes due to activities on it and in it. Moths for instance change colour in two or three generations to adapt to smog conditions. In sooty surroundings, white moths are vulnerable. In the human body, we have the much maligned appendix that nearly everyone thinks is useless. It isn't. The appendix is a mechanism that alerts its owner to poor dietary habits assuming the owner is in tune enough with his or her body to interpret the message properly. Appendicitis does not occur all of a sudden. It's a result of eating the wrong things over an extended period of time. That does not always mean junk food. Stuff like watermelon seeds can get stuck in there. If the chemistry of the body is acidic, say from eating too much meat, dairy or grain products inflammation soon follows and that causes pain. Unless the host has the sense to stop eating and fast long enough to allow the appendix to clear, the inflammation becomes an infection due to food induced, localized putrification that becomes life threatening if not treated. Just because hardly any doctors know anything about natural healing processes does not mean that our various body parts such as the appendix, spleen, gall bladder and various other parts we are told we can live comfortably without don't have a vital purpose. If they didn’t they would not be there. Modern medicine is not only an imprecise craft, it is really just people floundering around trying with equally imprecise equipment making assumptions about life processes they have no clue about. Modern medicine has evolved from the trades of butcher and barber, not healer and consequently our modern medical break throughs are mostly about cut and paste. Human health from a design standpoint is determined by the quality of water consumed and the quality of food consumed. Food is the body’s tool box. That is where the nutrients the body uses for fuel, growth and repair come from. Consider the nutrients as the most powerful tools in the toolbox, not drugs or anything else a doctor might describe. If this were not so, you would not be alive to read this. Misuse and abuse of foods is, barring accidents and other forms of injuries and diseases passed along by outside influences is the cause of all bodily degeneration. Every living body is a piece of the grand design that is life on planet earth. Everything is connected and woven together seamlessly and with no loopholes. It is all driven by the quest for food and water in order ultimately extend life by begetting new life. Every life form has a shelf life and has to reproduce itself to continue the genetic equation which is in each case the core of the life form, not our brains or other parts of our bodies. The planet runs on DNA and more importantly, the codes within. Everything else comprises the vessels or support structures doing a dance to propel genetic codes of the present into the future. The movie Tron was a beautiful analogy of how the game is played mostly without until recently, our being aware that we are locked into a service that has absolutely nothing to do with religion on any level. Religion is merely an invention to streamline and shape human activities. The shaping process determines which genetic lines prosper and which are extinguished. It's only in the last ten years or so that modern science has been able to discover what animal lovers have known for centuries - that animals can think, reason, feel pain, happiness, tell jokes, comprehend multiple languages, lie, cheat, invent, make and use tools, read - in short, pretty well everything we can do but within the context of their species and their lives. A fox for instance cannot think like a human in all respects and has no use for Shakespeare. But then the much smarter human cannot think like a fox either and we don’t care to scent mark trees or rocks. As much as we can learn about various species we ultimately cannot learn enough about them to live that way except in very exceptional instances - adoption at a young age by monkeys and wolves most commonly. People who have had that happen to them fail to develop properly in all but one case that I've heard of - a child in South America who was kidnapped, abandoned and adopted by monkeys at age 5. When she was captured she was sold into the prostitution trade but was eventually rescued. Her name is Marina Chapman. She was able to be reassimilated back into society most likely because she had years of normality that allowed the major brain functions to develop normally before the kidnapping. But she raised her own children drawing from techniques she learned from her years with the monkeys. For most of our history it has been maintained that humanity was added after everything else was created. The fossil record and the cellular record shows that notion to be wrong. Our bodily processes are similar to identical with practically every living thing. Our mitochondria, the cellular stuff which holds us all together is identical with that of all other species. How is that for conservative, efficient design? Zebra Danios, a common tropical fish species are used extensively to study spinal cord injuries because their spinal chords are so similar to ours. These fish are typically an inch and a half long or three centimeters. American Motors (Rambler) was for decades the number four automotive manufacturer in North America until 1987. It was well respected for its ability to survive using techniques used in nature. The way it survived was by using common parts over and over again so that existing designs looked like they were new designs. The same 6 cylinder engine block designed in the early sixties is still used by Chrysler in today's Jeep. Their V8 engine block was used to make every engine size from 290 to 401. Modern technology has gotten almost 500 cubic inches out of those V8 blocks and over 700 horsepower. It turned out that AMC made the strongest engine block of any manufacturer. All of their engine blocks regardless of internal size (displacement) had the same external dimensions. So the bigger engines weighed about the same as the smaller ones. That meant that suspension only had to be designed once and could be optimized for every model. The other manufacturers couldn’t optimize their big block cars without extravagant, expensive redesigns and extra costly manufacturing of a wider assortment of parts that had to be inventoried. So AMC’s competitors – GM, Ford and Chrysler produced cars that handled like landing barges compared to AMC products. Insect eyes are marvels of bio-technology, their exoskeletons architectural genius. Insects have been shown on TV to be able to understand multiple languages. They need to in order to survive. Insects for most higher animals represent the ultimate vitamin pill and food supplement. Insects are nutrient dense. They are a food staple for grizzly bears for instance. We don’t eat them because now we associate insects with disease. But that association is only made possible by a condition brought about by civilization – overcrowding that generates poor sanitation. As a species, we are living a long way past our optimal species density. The slow learners on this level are human beings who tend to get in their own way and refuse to believe the evidence of their own eyes. The obstacle we can't see past or around is religion that has stated that everything on earth was put here for our benefit. Genesis, Chapter 1 Verse 26 tells you all you need to know about how stupid as a species we have been and how we have allowed religion to warp and stunt our potential as the dominant species. We as a species have had the ultimate opportunity to create a utopian world where all species flourish but we blew it because we thought we had to dominate by force when what we needed to was to dominate with intelligence, wisdom and compassion. We’ve always had the tools but too few of us understood that. Intelligent Design from a Universal perspective has nothing to do with anything created by man. When we look at naturally occurring materials through the lens of a powerful microscope, we see beautiful images, dazzling images. When we look at man made materials, the images are grotesque by comparison. You have to realize that I'm talking in generalities here. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you Google beauty and then go to images, you'll see a frightening array of things someone thinks is beautiful. There is no accounting for taste. As for the God part of the discussion you might go and read the God Thing if you haven't read it already. After that read about how religions started in order to enslave and abuse women. After that you may have a different perspective on Intelligent Design and where it came from.

ZYX Abuse of women is the reason religions were invented. A few years ago, I decided to compare the world's most popular religions to determine what the major differences were between them. To do so I set up what I considered to be the primary tenets of religion based on commonalities. They were things like did they believe in one god or many, did they have a holy day, believe in the existence of a devil entity and so on. Instead of finding a lot of differences, I found a lot of commonalities. So many in fact that it turned out the only real differences were in the customs that formed as a result of geography, language differences and technology - such as the advent and access to printing presses and thus readily available printed material. While determining the commonalities current events were evolving and crimes against women were appearing with alarming frequency in the media. I added this to the chart and when I checked off the boxes I determined every religion had as a pillar of its existence the concept of strict control over "their" women often to the point where women were considered property or beasts of burden with fewer rights than the beasts of burden and less value. Since I'm most familiar with the Christian religion it was easiest for me to look in the King James version of the bible to see how it treated women. I decided I'd start at the very beginning and keep going until I found something if anything definitive that would point to an agenda against women. Out of 31,102 Verses and 1,189 Chapters it only took the writers of Genesis 3 chapters and 72 Verses to blame the entire human condition on women and curse them for eternity. That is the most monstrous penalty ever visited on any definable demographic in recorded history. Nothing any woman or group of women could have done can have warranted victimizing every female descendant for all time. When you read Genesis with that in mind, the intent behind the creation of the bible is revealed and it has nothing to do with there really being a God. The idea of a God was an invention to provided sanction for deeds done and deeds yet to be done with the convenient built in opportunity to shift blame for outcomes such as deaths, mistakes and then seemingly unexplainable events to a "higher" level. Since science was at the time unknown, magic was the fall back position. As anyone who has ever seen modern day magicians perform sophisticated illusions, it isn't hard to imagine credible audiences falling for supernatural explanations when rational explanations and CSI forensic skills were still millennia in the future. When you read Genesis with this in mind, the premise of the Book reads like what it really is – the public face of a conspiracy to shut women out of decision making opportunities in the only way possible – taking the blame for it off the shoulders of men who could be assigned blame by their womenfolk and onto a supernatural being who was inaccessible to women in every way. For this to be plausible certain conditions had to be present and accepted universally. First and foremost, the notion of a God had to be understood and accepted by both men and women. There had to be ring-leaders who did not buy into the notion of a God as a deity who was the prototype upon whom the species of man was based. Magicians typically do not believe in their own magic any more than religious leaders believe in God the way their congregations do. They can’t or they’d never be able to plan anything. They’d always be hanging around waiting for God’s agreement or disagreement. That never happens. The book of Genesis must have taken a long time to write and it must have been done without women getting wind of it. Or if one or more did, they must have been put to death or otherwise have been prevented from speaking out. Most likely it would have been via traumatic injury that was then related to a God has spoken event. The perpetrator(s) would of course have gotten clean away with the act. By page two, Chapter 1, Verse 26 God conceives of making the human species based on himself (not herself and mother nature – that kind of tells you right there who the authors were). A while back I was talking to a competitive horsewoman and asked what her thoughts were about why women were so prominent in the competitive equestrian events. Her response was that horses perceive women’s natural propensity to nurture which is right in line with a horse’s herd mentality and mutual nurturing, mentoring and a matriarchal society. Men on the other hand in equestrian events tend to view the animals as a vehicle from whom the challenge is to see what can be gotten out of the animal in competition. It’s not about the animal as much as it’s about the skill of the rider. This is a generalization but as a man I can see the signs written large through every aspect of human cultural evolution. Horses have paid dearly for their association with man as opposed to their association with women. Still in Verse 26, God having just finished providing a lush, fertile planet; populates it with a vast menagerie of life, then, inexplicably turns over the care of this resource rich planet to mankind without a single thought to conservation, sustainability or restoration. This Verse is the bedrock from which the rape and pillage, hallmarks of Christianity, from which the environmental destruction of the planet springs – and completely sanctioned by God. As a species, we have existed in various forms for about two and a half million years. European civilization as traced from human DNA recovered from sites in Germany has concluded that European civilization is about two thousand eight hundred years old. If you consider that science says the planet has existed for about four and a half billion years, that gives you an idea how long the creation part of the bible took before man was awarded dominion over all of the creatures of the earth and every other thing on it and how short a time it’s taken us to the threshold of the extinction of life on earth thanks to chemical and nuclear emissions. That does not strike me as a logical move on the part of a God smart enough to create the universe and the complexity of life on earth. The creation of all life on earth took place on day six. Still on day six God finally made the man and woman the planet was about to be turned over to. No names given but they were not Adam or Eve. They were someone else and we never find out who they actually were. But it was they who were chosen for world domination. All of this happened in Chapter 1. Adam and Eve happened in Chapter 2 and Adam finally shows up in Verse 7. At this point it’s clear that whoever wrote Chapter 1 didn’t read Chapter 1 Verse 27 and passed off Adam as the guy who gets the keys to the planet. That’s the sort of thing a modern editor would have caught – a human error as opposed to a divine error. An error so fundamental it’s a fatal flaw in the foundation of both the Jewish and Christian religions. It gets worse. By Chapter 2 Verse 16 the premise is set up and then defined in Chapter 17. That provides for the framing of Eve who has yet to even materialize on the scene. She was doomed from the concept stage when the tree of knowledge became iconic as the ultimate temptation along with its fatal punishment. The rationale that supports it is preposterous – Adam is warned not to eat it because upon eating the fruit he would suddenly become aware of the notions of good and evil. What is preposterous is that the notion of good and evil cannot be understood without making the target entity aware of what good and evil are. Once the explanation is made, eating the fruit is redundant. Without understanding good and evil, there is no way to offer a deterrent on that basis that could hope to be an effective deterrent unless the fruit were defined as a poison. If that were the case, then God would have to lie to Adam with intent – which he did with the entire Tree of Knowledge concept – it was just an excuse to set the stage for Eve’s victimization. Such a conundrum is as I said; a man-made construct that has somehow withstood logical scrutiny for four thousand years or more and still counting. Well not somehow. It’s unassailability was probably reinforced with brutal murders by various religious forces often enough to entrench the ideas to the point where there are still plenty of people around today who believe Genesis happened as written. In this day and age to most of us that seems extravagantly childish. But we are only about fifty years or so from most of modern society believing the same thing despite Darwin - the world’s still greatest and most famous authority on earth worms and later - Evolution. At any rate, Adam was told that upon eating the forbidden fruit he would pay with his life. No deadline was set but the implication seemed to be that death would be swift. Bear in mind that at this point Eve is still a figment of God’s imagination and there has never been any evidence that mankind could ever have been immortal – especially as pampered, naïve nitwits living the Life of Reilly in the Garden of Eden. Just before Eve shows up on the scene, keeping in mind this is now day 7, not 6, God once again conjures all the life forms he made the day before as if he’s had a senior moment and has completely forgotten he’s already done all that. Then he makes Eve as Adam’s helpmate. At that point Eve shows up as a fully formed woman made from one of Adam’s ribs, a rib he apparently didn’t need, who has yet to give birth to anything or anyone. Adam was made of dust. Eve on the other hand was made of sterner stuff – solid bone and bone marrow (if we take the bible literally)! Right there we know woman is going to be capable of stuff that would see a man crumble. And now we have a second set of man and woman none of whom were born. Scientifically speaking, unless you are the result of a sperm fertilizing an egg, you are not human; you are a construct – a biological robot a concept alien to human thought process since the science for it is more than four thousand years in the future. In the case of the Day 6 man and woman, no particular set of special instructions were defined other than to go forth and multiply which they surely did. Since this story was really written by man and did not originate in the mind of a deity, no off switch was provided for the leveling out of the population. That early in history, the concept of over-population was outside of the human consideration to imagine. If the story had really been devised by a supreme being, it would already have been demonstrated over and over again what happens when a species outgrows its environment and would and could not have been left out of the calculations. So these two set about over populating the planet and have done such a good job of that, that we as a species have wrecked the planet. Back in the Garden of Eden, Eve meets the serpent – not yet the devil and not yet evil. The serpent tells Eve the truth about the fruit of the tree of knowledge. To understand the truth of that you need to know some science. God as an entity of any sort cannot exist except as the electrical field which holds all matter together and that is part of every activity in every part of the universe and every other universe to infinity. To exist in any other way would be to leave a detectible heat signature. We have detected the electricity but not a God-signature. So if man were made in God’s image, then for that to be true, we exist as part of the electrical field along with everything else that exists. In that sense, we cannot die we simply fade back into the electrical field. If that is true, then God lied, not the snake and Eve cannot be faulted for believing the serpent because she had no way to reference the difference between a truth or an untruth. What she saw was merely a discrepancy that in the face of one and the other, must be harmless. Eve did not compel Adam to eat the fruit. He made his own choice. Afterwards, they were ashamed and felt they had to hide their nakedness. That this is a construct and not a biblical one is born out by the number of tribes living around the equator into modern times who have not felt it necessary to wear clothing. Clothing is a requirement of humans who evolved mostly hairless in the tropics that needed protection from cooler temperatures to migrate north in search of new territory. After wearing clothes for a long time, a shyness develops about nudity. There is no sin attached to nudity. There is only an artificial unfamiliarity with our natural state – especially as we age and attractiveness is diminished. When God shows up he is angry with Adam but he reserves his real wrath for Eve who is entirely blameless. She takes the brunt of his wrath and her punishment is what the entire exercise was about - her status reduced to that of a slave and her existence reduced to one round after another of emotional and physical pain. The serpent was punished for exposing God in his lie, not for telling a lie himself (assuming the serpent was male). If the serpent wasn’t male then every female serpent was thus unjustly victimized as well by association. That all of this is supposed to have been how the earth and everything on it was formed is way too self serving for me to believe especially when you consider women until very recently in history were not allowed to learn to read but what was written and the plot behind the writing was the root instrument of their abuse. None of this is to say that there aren’t good elements in religions. If there weren’t women would have rebelled. There is just enough to ease the mind in religions to gain women’s cooperation and even misled devotion and not much more. Is there hope for women going forward? Only as long as the “free” internet lasts. It is the best instrument of communication and freedom of speech that has ever existed. If the electrical grid and the net ever goes down, women will lose their rights in the name of religion in a generation or less. If you look at third world countries and developing nations of the second world, abuses of women are still fundamental to how their societies function. They are still beasts of burden and property to be bought and traded. The human condition would be far more comfortable for all if this were not so and with the proper education of all women, our over-population problem could at last be reversed and the planet could start to heal. Religion has a lot to answer for.

This thread is a re-run of the God Thing thread from 2008. Even DogOnPorch is still here saying the same stuff as last time. Or more of what he didn't say then. Back then we came to the conclusion there is no God as has been popularly believed for centuries because it isn't physically possible for there to be one according to our known physics, chemistry and observations. More so now than was possible in 2008. The soul as we know it turns out to be two or three cells deep in the brain. When that light goes out, so do you. No afterlife - that has been proven right here on planet earth. It doesn't need to be pondered any more. Dementia and Alzheimers do not interfere with the self or soul as we also know because even after being submerged for a long time by these afflictions, the self can on occasion re-emerge. But once those particular cells are gone, so are you.

This thread ended years ago but I thought I'd add to it with some stuff I forgot to put in back then. Before I started this thread I had already done a comparison of major religions around the world by entering key tenets of each into a chart. I was looking for common features that would point to a common source. So I started with the normal things like whether or not the religion reserved a holy day each week, had a devil entity and so on. After the chart was done it was pretty easy to see that there are no fundamental differences between any of today's dominant religions. I included aboriginal belief systems as well for perspective. Of them all the aboriginal belief systems were the oldest and the most closely aligned with modern day science. Hinduism was next and the rest flounder in delusion. The worst is Christianity from a science perspective and there are a couple of lines in Genesis that are the bedrock for the environmental destruction that civilization as brought on. The end game for all that environmental destruction is in Revelations. with the advent of the Four Horsemen. To digress a bit, it later occurred to me that all religions including the aboriginals have another commonality and that is they are all based on the intent to ensure that women are repressed in subservient positions to the point where they are owned as property. There is no exception to this. This is such a powerful tenet in all religions that is has to be the foundational concept. The notion of a God was a red herring and those who formed the very earliest religions knew it. No doubt the odd unexplainable thing happened so that they came to believe their own dogma but in the beginning there were a few lazy men who needed a beast of burden that could think for itself and follow direction unquestionably. When there were questions they were dealt with harshly. Women had to be kept in their places so men would be free to conduct their affairs without women interjecting common sense. gullyfourmyle

Not broke; trampled. Regardless, I believe my original point stands uncontested. This site is populated by political wannabes who can't be bothered to lift a finger to really learn about what they're blabbering about. I'd say democracy is in big, big trouble and within a generation, will be history. It's well on its way to being wasted by people who don't appreciate what they have. Once it's gone you people will live to bitterly regret it.

Yes Wild Bill, Most crooks are consistent. That's why they're in jail so often. I believe McGuinty, Broten and Gerretsen should be in there keeping the other crooks company. They'd look good in orange. The trouble is, most crooks aren't too bright. McGuinty, weasel that he is, is also very bright. Unless he was in solitary, before we knew it, the IQ level of of the rest of the criminal population would have improved. You know that Hudack wants to make the prisoners work. That is an excellent idea. But not for the reasons he thinks. I've worked in the prison system and I can tell you our prisons are universities for producing more proficient crooks. There is nothing about our prison systems that would cause anyone to be re-habbed while in there except by accident. Most of the prisoners could be be rehabbed if they were given proper education along with morals and ethics training then real job opportunities when they were released. Forget religion. That's nearly a total waste of time and mostly a scam inside and outside prison walls. Don't think prisoners don't know that well and like anything else, can be turned into a pretty efficient weapon. Just imagine someone like McGuinty blabbering in prison. Before long he'd have corrupted the inmates. They'd be superb con artists and a plague worse than politicians.

What part of the 20 billion dollar fraud do you think I was the personal victim of? If you had read my book Abuse of Power, you'd know that the many people who were victimized by the police did not include me. But I did gather their stories and they gave great insight as to what was going on. Some of those stories came from the police themselves, some from lawyers and some from paralegals. There were many other abuses related to the street racing legislation but not directly part of it that were used by the police to illegally extend their powers during that time period. It was no secret the police were and still do regularly perjure themselves to get convictions. None of this matters to the average citizen until they become victims. Then in an instant, everything I've said snaps into focus in an instant. By then it's too late. It kind of gives me a sense of the mindset you Uncle 3 dogs are trying to defend when you launch a petty attack on my credibility rather than ask insightful questions about the 20 billion dollar fraud. I would think a 20 billion dollar fraud claim would be cause for some skepticism since it represents the single largest crime in Canadian history that does not include criminal offenses against aboriginals. The fact that you would even think of making an attack rather than sound me out to establish whether or not my information is accurate basically confirms my assertions about the lack of political acumen and interest that floats this site. If you had any clue at all you'd be researching the Seaton Land deal. But you aren't. You're content to babble. There has never been a Canadian government that has so disregarded the sanctity of the Rule of Law the way the McGuinty government has. Their transgressions have set important legal precedents and you people who consider yourselves watchdogs of democracy have had it all happen right under your noses without your having suspected a thing. What does that tell you about your indepth knowledge? You don't know enough to even defend yourselves. I'm not trying to insult you here. I'm trying to wake you up. No matter who wins the next Ontario election, McGuinty has set the stage for further massive abuses of power regardless of who wins. You people could be whistle blowers. But not unless you get your acts together and start learning something about how seriously our rights are being eroded for no good reason.

What the three replies above indicate to me is a complete lack of practical experience with the police who enforce the laws and the courts who enable the police to perjure themselves at will. You obviously have never experienced what it's like to have a couple of police inspectors interpret law to suit themselves. Bear in mind we are talking here about a legislative proposal. The street racing legislation started the same way and from start to finish was an exercise in legisative brutality and fantasy with no attempt to relate the legislation to reality or even the dictionary. Consequently, nearly all of the people victimized by the law were ordinary citizens who had never participated in nor contemplated participating in a street race. Thousands of people have been robbed by the police ever since. You can say the most important word above is ACT but to me, any thing supercedes it because the intent is to give the police G20 discretion within this ACT. That means the powers of the police to become a roadside judges, juries and executioners. You people seem to think that all police are rational normal human beings. That unfortunately is very far from reality. Go to the Thin Blue Line website and if you dig deep enough you'll find the real police mindset. And yes I was paying attention in class and yes the Third Reich was built on a framework of legislation that systematically stripped freedoms from its citizens ultimately brought the entire German nation under one of the cruelest reigns of modern times. At the time there were plenty of people saying the same things you people are saying. That it was all nonsense, not to be taken seriously. I was educated on that score by a family friend who grew up during the rise of the Third Reich. She was not a Jew. She told me plenty of stories of what went on and how according to her, most Germans did not believe such things could come to be until they did. McGuinty has made a practice of resorting to criminal methods to achieve his objectives. The most glaring one was the SEATON LAND EXCHANGE fraud. This is a fraud worth about 20 billion dollars because it involves the proposed Pickering Airport. The entire deal hinged on the Environmental Assessment for the Seaton Lands being approved so the land swap could take place. The assessment required three things to be assessed: air, water and soil. The water and soil assessments were done. The air assessment never was. Instead, an assessment from downtown Toronto was substituted in a cut and paste. Since the assessment was part of the real estate documentation, this constitutes a land fraud even if it is the government that does it because they knew at the time they were committing a fraud. The importance of this fraud to the eastern GTA goes far beyond money. Using a downtown Toronto air quality assessement set the air pollution benchmark in Durham region to a highly polluted urban level against which all future monitoring will be measured against. Even today, there is virtually no air pollution in this area. So what the government did was create an air pollution window of opportunity that will allow polluters a huge lattitude for contaminating Durhams's air shed. Durham Region's air shed is the only corridor by which urban Toronto gets fresh untained air at present. All the other air corridor approaches have massive sources of air pollution upwind. The projected air pollution load increase for Durham Region is 500 million tons annually. That is substantial impact for taking the opportunity for a little cut and paste don't you think? The guy who physically did the cut and paste now works in Ottawa and after my explaining what he was party to, his not a happy camper. But his response was that "we do it all the time." Great. But that does not make such deceptions in any way legal no matter who does it. So virtually every Environmental Assessment that involved air quality for many years has the potential to have been based on a fraud. This is just one example. There are many, many more, some involving loss of life. So before anyone starts saying I haven't done my homework, do some yourself.

Highly dangerous erosion of human rights contained in the Ontario Ministry of Transport's proposed legislative language as part of a revision of the Highway Traffic Act: PART XVI PILOT PROJECTS Pilot projects 228. (1) The Lieutenant Governor in Council may by regulation authorize or establish a project for research into or the testing or evaluation of any matter governed by this Act or relevant to highway traffic. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33 (1). Project may conflict with Acts (2) Under a project authorized or established under subsection (1), (a) persons or classes of persons may be authorized to do or use a thing that is prohibited or regulated under this Act, the Dangerous Goods Transportation Act, the Motorized Snow Vehicles Act, the Off-Road Vehicles Act or the Public Vehicles Act or to not do or use a thing that is required or authorized by any of those Acts; ( the Minister or Ministry or any person authorized or required to do anything under this Act, the Dangerous Goods Transportation Act, the Motorized Snow Vehicles Act, the Off-Road Vehicles Act or the Public Vehicles Act may be authorized or required to do anything that is not authorized or required under any of those Acts or to do anything that is authorized or required under any of those Acts in a way that is different from the way it is authorized or required. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33. Limited to classes (3) An authorization or requirement described in subsection (2) may be limited to any class of persons, class or type of vehicles, class of equipment, devices or highways, parts of Ontario, time of year or day, activities, matters or any other things. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33 (1). Regulation to create own scheme of rules (4) A regulation made under this section may regulate the doing of anything or the use of any thing or prohibit the doing of anything or the using of any thing. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33 (1). Insurance (5) A regulation made under this section may require a person or class of persons to carry insurance of a kind and in the amount specified. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33 (1). Time limit (6) A regulation made under this section must provide that it is revoked no later than the twelfth anniversary of the day the regulation is filed. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33 (1). Project prevails over Acts (7) In the event of a conflict between a regulation made under this section and any provision of this Act, the Dangerous Goods Transportation Act, the Motorized Snow Vehicles Act, the Off-Road Vehicles Act or the Public Vehicles Act or of a regulation made under any of those Acts, the regulation made under this section prevails. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33. Offence (8) Every person who contravenes a regulation made under this section is guilty of an offence and on conviction is liable to a fine of not less than $250 and not more than $2,500. 2005, c. 26, Sched. A, s. 33 (1). While the language of this proposal is as garbled as any I've seen, the essence of what could too easily become a vast and unanswerable human rights crime against all Ontarians that is unprecedented since Nazi Germany was a legal political entity is contained in this paraphrasing of the proposal: "A regulation made under this section may regulate the doing of anything or the use of any thing or prohibit the doing of anything or the using of any thing... ...In the event of a conflict between a regulation made under this section and any provision of this Act... ...the regulation made under this section prevails." The key words in the above aggregate sentence "any thing". This dandy little legislative horse of a decidedly Nazi stripe would give the Ontario government and thus the police the power to set in place almost instantly a police state tighter even than Hitler's leglisation whose aim was to subjugate entire races and exterminate them. I have no idea whether or not any of you were paying attention in history class when the evolution of Nazi Germany and Hitler's rise to power was covered but I can tell you that if you need a refresher course, just get yourself a copy of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The legislation that gave the Nazis their power was written just like this Highway Traffic Act proposal. Why is it so important? The last seven words in the paraphrasing as shown above can be used to set aside the Canadian Rights and Freedoms Act just like happened with the infamous street racing legislation and be even harder to combat in court. As you would know if you read my book "Abuse of Power" the street racing legislation passed by the McGuinty government was passed using fraudulent means. At the time of its publication I said it was but the proof could not really be demonstrated until the ORSAR for 2007 was finally published amost three years late. That report confirmed everything I said about the corrupt means Fantino and the Ontario Legislature used to have the bill enacted. That ORSAR was delayed on purpose to keep it from blowing the street racing legislation out of the water. None of the street racing incidents upon which the legislation was based turned out to involve street racing. The example used the day the vote was taken as recorded in Hansard was a robbery chase involving police. All of Fantino's figures - his percentages to support his claims were false. Look what happened. A massive abuse of power and abuse of human rights by police ever since. What this new section purports to do is give the Ontario government the right to do anything to Ontario citizens at all and get away with it. This proposal sets itself above the Criminal Code and the Rule of Law - the legal foundation of the country itself in a legally slippery way that once in place would be almost impossible to remove witihout an armed rebellion or even civil war. You will notice that the financial penalties proposed are minor (unless you don't have the money) but financial penalties can easily be increased upwards at a moment's notice without telling anyone. Other penalities such as detention without cause can also be added as has been well demonstrated by the G20 and the street racing legislation. The McGuinty govnerment is very prone to use criminal means to achieve its ends and so often I've literally worn myself out trying to keep up with the number of actual major criminal code offenses committed by the McGuinty Liberals. The reason we and other democratic nations have the Rule of Law is to prevent exactly this type of autocratic thinking and jackboot abuse of power. My parents, your parents and millions of others fought the Second World War to defeat this type of polictical criminal thinking from gaining a foothold in free countries. The street racing legislation was the first legal dandelion and now we're seeing the second. This is McGuinty minus the tiny moustache attempting to corrupt all of Ontario's fabric of life and warp it into a Nazi regime. Hitler would have been proud. My reference to criminal undertakings by the Liberal government is no whimsical statement. McGuinty's administeration has achieve quite an impressive list of initiatives accomplishe using criminal means. I don't mean his administration doing things inadvertently. I mean his administration commtitting intentional acts that, since they were known at the time by the participants to be criminal actions, they were in fact committing indictable criminal acts. These acts were not small potatoes. All of them involve from millions to billions of dollars. They are all extremely complex and were kept will under the radar with the conivance of the Toronto Star and its last two publishers despite my best efforts. People gripe on here all the time about things they don't like that the government does. My view is this: if you don't like what's going on - read the legislation governing ever aspect of your issue. At the end of your research you will either shut TFU or you'll know something useful we would all be glad to read. In the above cases I've endeavoured to do just that and in the process studied the Crminal Code at length as well as many other Acts. Most of you have no clue how close legislators skate to the line between legal and criminal or how often they cross that line. If the people on the forum really enjoy politics and have an interest in the future of freedom in this country it's time you got off your collective asses and brought yoursevlves up to speed before your freedoms have gone the way of the Dodo.

Sorry for the mix-up Michael. As far as splitting up the original post, it already is more or less in three sections. If I were to go back and repost, I'd end up using even more room on the site that I'm doing now. All anyone has to do that's interested in the fraud is stop at the end of the Seaton section. Those that want to read about the medical crimes can just read that part. The street racing legislation is another section that can be read as a stand alone. I suppose reading it all for the first time can be intimidating and overwhelming. From my fogged in perspective, having lived with that stuff and more in my head for years, what I posted is the tips of three monstrous icebergs. There is a lot more that could be said about each. The street racing one in particular is very brief considering how much I've posted about it on other sites from other perspectives. It isn't as informative as I'd like either because to really explain how the government committed the crime takes quite a bit of explaining and some of it is very complex if you aren't used to dealing with legal jargon. The bottom line is though that even the police, once they understand where I'm coming from concede that the street racing legislation is a train wreck. They won't go so far as to say it was passed fraudulently but they don't need to. All the information that proves the law was passed by employing fraudulent means is on government websites. Their own language convicts them.

Actually, I didn't lose the election in a landslide. Considering the odds stacked against me, I did spectacularly well. I went into it because the incumbent was pro-development and no one was opposing him. I didn't want to run and my wife was totally against it. She was worried our house was going to be attacked or I was going to be murdered or both. The hype was such at the time due to my vocalizing the fraud that practically everyone who knew me was suggesting I get 24/7 protection and it was offered. But if someone were to bump me off, they'd have made a martyr out of me and then the fraud would have come out in spades. I thought one of the councillors was going to run for mayor. If he had, there was no point in my candidacy. I waited until two weeks before the start of the campaign before I threw my hat in the ring. The day before the race started, my father-in-law died and I had to leave the country. So I lost the first week of the campaign and still had no campaign committee and zero funds. By the end of the campaign I managed to raise $2,500 to pay for a few signs and literature. I even had a website but that happened so late in the campaign few people saw it. A lot of people campaigned for me once they found out I was in the race without my even asking for help. Some of the councillor candidates even campaigned for me. The people who stepped forward were amazing and we had a lot of fun on the stump. The reaction at the door was intense. When I told people what my platform was, the standard reply was: "You got my vote!" During the course of the campaign only seven people stated they would vote for the incumbent regardless. In each case they explained they had personal ties. Can't hold that against him. But most people were furious and I had to listen to tirade after tirade against the incumbent. That led me to believe I had a pretty good shot. But the reality was that I was simply not able to get my message out fast enough. I feel good about it though. I ran the greenest campaign in Canadian history. I shot straight from the hip and told the public the unvarnished truth like no one before me has ever done that I know of. What I got for that was my truck damaged and my signs destroyed. In the end my $2500 generated 5000+ votes against the winning budget of $53,000 and 15,000+ votes. If more people had known I was running I'd have done much better. If my campaign had as much media publicity as the winning effort, I most likely would have won.

Okay, I can accept that August1991. What you've said makes perfect sense. But I put Barber in because he is a microcosm that illustrates just how complete the the blackout of information is on these and other important subjects that the media censors. I don't believe I was slagging Barber. The man is a top notch journalist. The thing is, if a top notch journalist who has publicly stated that my methods and issues are exactly what he wants to hear about and then does nothing when he does hear, that should tell you something very important about what is going on in the media behind the scenes - especially when you consider that every media outlet with the exception of Rogers did exactly the same thing - black out my campaign. Unfortunately Rogers Cable doesn't have the distribution that would have made my platform and the Seaton fraud go mainstream. Since then only one reporter has ever returned my calls (different reporter for the Star this time). He said he'd call me back after I described the issues. He didn't. But I had his e-mail so I contacted him again and he begged off saying that despite the fact that he is an investigative reporter and lives right here in Pickering, this was not his area of endeavour - don't call me, I'll call you. That was it. Bear in mind that the Seaton fraud is by far the biggest fraud in Canadian history and fraud is far from the only crime or the most serious that the Land Exchange encompassed. Imagine a fraud to the tune of 20 billion dollars with a 'b', not an 'm' and the media implies by its actions that no one wants to know? But we do want to know about a petty theft at a convenience store? The Seaton fraud should be the story of the century. Instead it's the best kept secret in Canada. It's not hard to understand the consternation my claims cause. The province has been caught red-handed committing the largest crime in Canadian history. Among those who were defrauded were the developers. The public was defrauded in a totally different way. Then there is the public safety issue that's so big that it doesn't come under the Criminal Code, it comes under the Crimes Against Humanity Act. The politicians get funded by the developers. The media gets funded by the developers. They all know each other. This is politics. This is what you people on this site ostensibly want to know about. This is not a skeleton in a closet. This is the entire boneyard. The corruption is wall to wall. And in a classic case of poetic justice, it was the Toronto Star itself that inadvertently put the finishing touch on proving the crimes were undeniably committed. There is no way out. These crimes come with long jail sentences. They are not petty crimes where you get a year or two or a slap on the wrist. The sentences for crimes of this nature are among the longest you can get in this country. Please give it another try August1991, I appreciate your clear thinking.

If you actually read the piece, you would know how these three criminal cases are connected. Empty cars killing more people than street racers is not a premise. It's a factoid that resides in the mountain of garbled information that the Ministry of Transport keeps regarding traffic accidents. Sometimes the empty vehicles are moving; sometimes they aren't. Apart from investigating government crime, I study legislation. Since this is a political site, I presume those of you on this site must do the same thing because unless you understand how the legislation works, you can't fully understand the significance of what is being said in the political arena or in my post. Without a proper understanding of the legislation and the history of same, your contributions are going to have limited value or no value. This country runs on legislation. If you haven't read and understood the legislation that is behind my post, then I can understand your problem with it. Of course the legislation I'm referring to is the Criminal Code. I expect you are all familiar with that? If you have a problem reading my post which is fairly lucid, how do you manage to understand the concepts delineated in the language this country runs on? Have any of you actually read and understood any legislation yet? If not, I suggest you start with an easy one - the Provincial Environmental Assessment Act - tell me in 30 words or less why it is completely worthless. Be as brief as you can. I dare any one of you to do it. Or you can do it as a group.

February 3, 2009 RE: ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO FUND – John Honderich – SUNDAY STAR, FEBRUARY 1, 2009 OPTION #6 – investigative journalism by the unfunded As noted by you Mr. Honderich, “In order for us to live meaningfully and participate in our community, we must be appropriately informed.” In your article, you suggested five options for ensuring that funded investigative reporting can continue as a mainstay of democracy. The following is why I believe there is room for an Option 6. Personally, I don’t think the Toronto Star has been fulfilling the role of keeping us appropriately informed for some time on key issues even with funded reporters. Let me explain: The Seaton Land Exchange is an excellent example. My research has shown that much publicized deal amounts to a twenty billion dollar fraud perpetrated in plain sight by the Ontario Government right under the noses of every journalist involved. When I ran for Mayor of Pickering in the last municipal election, an important part of my campaign was devoted to publicizing Seaton and what I saw as theft of public land for development uses the residents of Pickering and the GTA in general did not agree with as noted in a Star survey. I expected the news media to carry on as the story developed. But they didn’t. Instead every newspaper in the GTA complained at some point about how boring the municipal election was while discussing Miller’s haircut. John Barber of the Globe and Mail wrote an entire article outlining exactly what he wanted to see in those elections. He described my candidacy like he’d written my literature and invented the issues himself. When I contacted him, he told me to keep him in the loop and never returned my calls after that. Rather than picking up on my campaign, (with the single exception of Rogers Cable who televised the mayoral debate in the complete absence of any other media) the Pickering Mayoralty campaign which should have sparked debate all over the GTA was essentially blacked out and it ran in a media vacuum. What history is going to record as the biggest fraud in Canadian history is still being kept under wraps. In the intervening years, I haven’t stopped talking publicly about it and have written letters to every level of government. The replies I get are the usual slimy responses that avoid any mention of the actual subject and no mention of the crimes. The big deal about the Seaton Land Grab is not the financial aspect of the fraud, big as it is. It’s the public safety aspect of the fraud. It’s now beginning to rear its ugly head as the huge problem I predicted in 2005 when decisive action should have and could have been taken. Right now, the City of Pickering, Durham Region and York Region have a conundrum on their hands. It was, despite objections by me and many others, agreed by all concerned levels of governments to run the Big (sewer) Pipe from York Region to the Pickering Water Treatment Plant on Lake Ontario to facilitate more environmentally burdensome development in York Region. All was well and good from the government’s point of view right up until Cherrywood residents found out that the pipe would be vented right near their little neighbourhood. Suddenly all hell broke loose. The City of Pickering got on side to oppose it too and Durham Region said it would take another look at the issue. The subcontractors running the project [the Environmental Assessment process] never once raised the possibility of the Big Pipe becoming a Stench Trench during public consultation. I was there. So much for open and transparent public consultation and informing the public in an open and honest manner. The 407 is going to pose exactly the same problem and so is the incinerator planned for Courtice that industry and the Ministry of the Environment are actively planning to make redundant long before it can be paid for. It's called zero waste. It's going to happen. All this is about a noxious smell that will attract disease laden flies to the area by the millions but the air itself will not physically injure anyone. What they’ve all conveniently forgotten is that the Big Pipe is being run to facilitate more developments in York Region that are going to generate hundreds of millions of tons of new, less smelly air pollution. (Toxic air raises risk of death – Toronto Star, Noor Javed , Jan. 30, 2009) That air pollution is already chemically injuring every single person downwind in the GTA and is killing thousands prematurely. But in the east where this effect is currently much less, the Ontario government has taken the bizarre, irresponsible and completely avoidable step to ensure that the existing safer air quality in the east will be intentionally downgraded to match and exceed the existing hazards in the west. Once implemented, the death toll will never stop. The air pollution is a much bigger deal than the smell of raw human sludge. The sludge won’t kill or injure anyone. It will make living near the odour unbearable when there is a leak. There are always leaks. No one can guarantee there will never be a leak. So is it acceptable to reside downwind from millions of tons of air that will certainly injure and eventually contribute to our premature deaths but not acceptable for the air to smell like shit on a stick? The injuries we’re talking about are so serious they alter or destroy DNA. That means they disrupt the ability of afflicted residents (and animals) to expect to bear healthy, non cancerous future generations. Imagine doing that intentionally to half of the GTA? That is exactly what is beginning to happen. There is no honest science anywhere that can dispute that assertion. During the Seaton Land Environmental Assessment, I wrote and contributed a submission titled “Land Grab in North Pickering” that explained in simple detail the dangers of developing the Seaton Land and how it’s the lynch pin to an air pollution catastrophe. It also explained how the public safety factor works when applied to developing the Seaton Land. That included other projects such as the Big Pipe, the Incinerator and the 407 extension. It explained the legal responsibility the Ontario Government has to explore any public safety issue that might be brought to light by a public submission during an Environmental Assessment. That in fact is exactly why Environmental Assessments are done. Rather than explore the public safety issue, the Ministry of the Environment substituted air quality information from the central Toronto area and described it as similar to air quality in the study area – which it was and is not. The map accompanying Noor Javed’s article in The Star shows clearly that I’m right. Combine that with a map that plots the jet stream and prevailing winds and its clear the Environmental Assessment was a fraud – a criminal offence that upon conviction comes with fifteen years in the slammer even if you are a Government Minister. Then the Ontario Government stated that it had completed the Seaton Land Environmental Assessment when in fact it had not. It then based the land transfer on this false information, thereby committing a massive and intentional fraud against the developers and the residents of the entire eastern GTA whose health they chose to dismiss as irrelevant. The fraud does not end there because the proposed Pickering Airport is a huge part of the plans for the area. So the federal government if it chooses to go ahead with the airport will be drawn into the fraud as well as an additional victim of provincial dishonesty. It is certainly going to base its decision on all provincial development issues having been conducted legally. They certainly were not. When I made the submission, I set it up to establish a “known by date”. A date whereby the Ontario Government was officially aware and in possession of the facts regarding the public safety issues I identified and that have since been confirmed by independent scientific research and published in the media – the Toronto Star for a local example – the very same paper that pointedly refused to publish this same information when it was part of my election campaign when it would have done the most good. The “known by date” established legal responsibility for all participants. I have the signed and dated receipts. The failure of the media and in particular The Toronto Star to step up to the plate has allowed the culprits to remain at large so far. As a private citizen I have explored all avenues and have met with government corruption at every turn. All of the physical dangers I warned of in the submission are now coming true. People are being chemically injured and killed. The public is starting to pay the monumental price for the failure of the media and local governments to fulfill what is a legal Care of Duty, an obligation assumed by those who work in the public sector when they know. They did. I hand delivered the information. So you might think the $2,250.00 was a low budget for alerting the US public to the reality of the Viet Nam war, but sadly, I think I’ve trumped that by my efforts [totally unfunded] to alert the Ontario public to the formerly avoidable but now inevitable and unstoppable genocide committed by the Ontario government that can only get worse. The only difference is that the media in the US, as biased as it was, was a hell of a lot more open minded and more intelligently run than the media here is and the government did belatedly take action. The killing and injuries did stop. Here in Ontario and Canada we still have air quality regulators who wake up every morning in Disney’s Fantasy Land. Again, the intentionally escalated killing and injuries are just ramping up and there will be no end, it can only get worse. Ultimately millions of people in the eastern GTA are going to pay a formerly avoidable physical price with their personal health and lives. Then there is the Dr. Richard Austin situation. That was a story that was brought to the public’s attention by the Toronto Star itself. Only, after identifying a serial medical malpractice case, the Star dropped the ball. CTV picked it up and expanded on it, did it again a year later and then dropped the ball again. I counted and recorded what I believe to be 17 different criminal offences illuminated by the stories run by the Star and CTV’s W5. After exposing the stories, neither media giant followed up to see whether or not the police would lay charges. They didn’t. So I followed up. When I did, the Toronto Police Service (William Blair’s office) lied in writing about why they were not investigating on multiple occasions. That’s covered under the Criminal Code. It’s called Obstruction of Justice. I have their responses in letters they wrote to me. It turns out the Toronto Police are not at all familiar with the Criminal Code where the medical profession is involved. They may be incompetent; over-worked or ignorant of their duties. Or all three. Or maybe they just can’t be bothered. By lying to me, the person reporting the crime, the police committed a crime against me and involved me directly in the case as a complainant. Important questions need answers. Why would the Toronto Police Service’s office lie in writing on multiple occasions about why they have not investigated such a highly publicized series of criminal acts? How far up the chain does this go? Who is being protected? Why hasn’t the Ministry of Health stepped in and ordered a criminal investigation? Who is accountable? If there was indeed no crime, then why lie to me? Two years ago I wrote a national internet campaign that went to every national elected MP and MPP (with the exception of Alberta as they were in election mode). In that campaign I talked about government and medical crimes and corruption. I thought at the time I’d quickly follow up with examples. But what happened was that I was overwhelmed by a barrage of cases that never made it to the public forum. It’s taken that long to dig myself out and make sense of the amount and variety of government committed crimes and cover-ups such as the Electro-magnetism issues here in Ontario and more seriously in Newfoundland where there have been many human fatalities that the federal government denies and refuses to do anything about. The crimes committed against the four hundred women [breast cancer detection process] in Newfoundland that were allowed to be heard without threat of criminal charges against most particularly the Premier, Danny Williams. How does one man’s comfort zone out-weigh that of four hundred women and the media doesn’t utter a whimper? There’s a juicy money laundering case in Quebec involving Caisse Nationale, wrong-doing by the RCMP and a former federal cabinet minister. I have copies of the cheques. In fact I have a copy of the entire file. It’s an open and shut case. Neither the police nor the media seem to want any part of these issues. There are legislative tools to make embarrassing issues “go away”. You see this on TV all the time but it really hits you when you have the evidence in your own hands. It hits you again when you realize the media are not only not interested but actively in fear of covering the stories. Where are the professional investigative journalists? Hiding under a rock? Meanwhile, the police are living under a delusion that medical crimes are properly dealt with by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. They are not. The College has no jurisdiction when a criminal offence has been committed and has no obligation, expertise or will to conduct a forensic investigation. So they don’t. And so far, they know they can get away with almost anything. You know it too. The stories published by the Star and broadcast by CTV were excellent and well done. Unfortunately, Dr. Richard Austin was charged, convicted and found guilty by the media; not the criminal courts where the crimes should be dealt with. Unfortunate is not nearly powerful enough a word. My extensive research on the subject has led me to believe that the Doctor might just be entirely innocent of all charges. If he is innocent, then who is guilty? Someone or some people are for sure and there needs to be a reckoning. Right now, there’s a class action civil suit being brought to bear on the doctor. No matter the outcome, the doctor is sure to be a ruined man in every way if he isn’t already, by the end of it if he lives long enough. A civil suit is not going to determine who committed the crimes. It isn’t going to establish whether the doctor is guilty or innocent. It isn’t going to fix the system that betrayed the doctor and the women, which is exactly what the women who were harmed have gone on record as wanting. From my perspective, the case needs a forensic investigation that includes examining the doctor’s staff, Scarborough General Hospital administration, the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Ontario Medical Association and the Ministry of Health. It cannot be done without a thorough forensic police investigation of the system from top to bottom done by competent officers who are not paying lip service to formality and who are not bound by government intervention, a gag order or limitations on what they can and cannot investigate. Would anyone familiar with the dark side of the medical system be surprised if the police uncovered other unrelated criminal offences while they investigated the Dr. Richard Austin case? The Doctor Richard Austin case represents a unique opportunity to dissect the system like never before, identify shortcomings and fix them. But the police and the media are showing no signs of interest. Where are the investigative journalists when you need them? Funded or not? Sixty or more women were allegedly maimed by the doctor. When that many people are involved, you’re well beyond the realms of incompetence and malpractice. Crimes at some level are definitely being committed. That apparently is okay with Toronto’s finest so far. I had to trick the freedom of information people to learn that the police are still not involved over a year after I reported the crimes. It is apparently okay with Toronto’s media too. No one at The Star or W5 wants to know unless it was them that had the idea first apparently. So much for the Right to Know – It’s The Unkindest Cut of All. But let’s not stop there. In 2007, Ontario passed the new street racing legislation into law. Having written one book on the subject, I thought I’d better research the new law to see how it related to my book STREET RACER and maybe add a chapter on the new legislation. The more I examined what the government had done, the more the old familiar odour began to surround the issue. Just like the Big Stink in Pickering this law had poop oozing out of every phrase and dangling participle. The chapter I was going to write about the new street racing and stunt driving law turned into a second book titled ABUSE OF POWER. Turns out, by my understanding of how the law is supposed to work in this province, the Ontario Legislature collectively committed fraud when they passed the law! You don’t have to take my word for it either. You can go to May 14 2007 Hansard. There if you read objectively, you’ll see how the Ontario Legislature transformed itself into a lynch mob mentality before they voted to enact the law. Factual information was not an issue. Only one minor “fact” was even mentioned with respect to street racing and it was irrelevant. It’s very obvious to anyone who knows anything about street racing, road racing, drag racing, stunt driving and so on, that none of the people present when the vote was taken had any understanding of the issue they were voting on with the single exception of impaired driving that should not be in the same section. That it is amounts to legislative sloth of the first water. Besides, they didn’t even get that right. Essentially, the legislation – supposedly designed to catch street racers and drunk drivers instead targets everyone but street racers and has done nothing to stop drunk driving because it wasn’t written to catch real street racers or stop drunk drivers. It was written to increase tax revenues. The legislators will deny it but the complete results speak for themselves as does the information that was ignored or fabricated by the standing committee. The public thinks it was told the truth. It was not. Meanwhile the real causes of accidents, as documented in my book and as recorded by insurance industry research, go almost completely unaddressed except where I explained to them their own liability if they didn’t do something about cell phones. It took only three weeks from the date I submitted the information on their legal liability to the announcement of the new law. And still they bungled that too. These are people who know so little about issue relevancy and put so little effort into getting the facts it’s no wonder we have the problems we do. Besides being in my view, unconstitutional, Section 172 depends on information contained in data published by the Ministry of Transport when it gets around to posting it. They are three years behind right now as they try and block me from getting more damaging information on them from their own numbers. The public has for years been fed partial or erroneous information by the government and the OPP in particular about causes of accidents. The MTO’s information comes directly from the police. Their own information shows that both the government and the OPP have been lying all these years while artificially keeping accident numbers high so they can collect revenue from speeders. That means the province has intentionally maintained a position that ensures people are killed and injured unnecessarily to harvest revenue it doesn’t deserve. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with street racing. Again you don’t have to take my word for this; it’s all on the MTO website if you can figure out how to read it. The only trouble is, to make sense of it, you have to take their numbers and rebuild all of their charts into something meaningful. As the information is organized and published it’s almost pure gibberish. That’s how the authorities have managed to get away with this deception for so long. You might as well buy my book and save yourself the trouble. After writing the ABUSE OF POWER, I learned there was an on line petition opposing Section 172. Over 8,000 people had signed it. Hardly any are real street racers for the simple reason; there are hardly any real street racers. Street racing in fact amounts to 3/10ths of 1% of the total accident problem and it’s almost totally centered in the GTA. Of those, only a much smaller fraction are actually real street racers. Real street racers almost never have accidents – period. As a group in terms of accidents, they are the safest drivers on the road. End of story. Sure there are occasional accidents, but generally those few accidents are by young drivers with little experience and the fact they are racing at all as explained in my book, can be laid squarely at the government’s door. Per capita, according to MTO, the unsafest drivers on the road are sober, between the ages of sixteen and fifty, driving at or below the speed limit on dry roads in broad daylight and clear lines of sight. Most are men but plenty are women. Real street racers represent less than one thousandth of one percent of the total number. Empty vehicles kill more people than even Learner Street racers do every year. As my book started to get known, my name was passed to a Global TV reporter who said she was putting together a story about the other side of street racing issues from the street racers’ perspective and would be interested in my story. She interviewed the author of the petition, Tim Chisholm, me the author of two books on the subject and a private citizen who had been victimized by the OPP with a fictitious stunt driving charge. He defended himself in court and the OPP officers were caught perjuring themselves in court trying to get the conviction. The officers were not reprimanded for testilying – an illegal tactic apparently used regularly by police. The police got away with a blatant case of perjury. I’ve heard plenty of other stories like it since. Collectively we contributed about nine hours of interview time and plenty of documentation to support our contentions. When Global ran the mini-documentary, it was nothing like we expected. All of the information about government criminal wrong doing was gone and the program was merely a sugar coated same old, same old that completely ignored the salient points of our contribution. Looking at it, I could only assume the producers had taken several hours of information and chucked into the garbage. The show was titled One Year Later – it was a travesty on the one hand and another affirmation that there is no such thing as honesty or integrity in Canadian media. Were we naive? No. We knew at the outset just from being realists that there was potential that our information would or could be discounted. But the depth and breadth of journalistic treachery by the producers in this piece was breathtaking, disappointing and a heads up that traditional media has become not a conveyor of news but an obstacle between the news and the public. The irony came when a Global News truck was nailed for street racing on its way to a story and the truck seized. At that point, maybe the producers finally got religion. If they did, it was too late to save the story and set the record straight with the truth. (Make no mistake; my objection to the street racing law had nothing to do with the effort to stop reckless people committing what are criminal code offences with vehicles. It had everything to do with the dishonest way the problem was dealt with by legislators – especially the standing committee responsible for the hack job on the actual language of the legislation.) Did the media pay any attention even then? No. Except for the single exception that I know of – Jim Kenzie. But even he has been set aside as an anachronism despite being 100% right in his position. He was frequently vilified by his own readership that lacked the mental equipment to grasp his position. The difference between his position and mine was that he hadn’t realized that the government had bungled the legislation even worse than he thought and it certainly never occurred to him that the legislature engaged in a criminal offence when they enacted the law. Elected public officials tend to believe that when they commit criminal offences that do not involve stealing money, assault or murder; that they are beyond the reach of the law. That is not so and that includes the entire legislature when it collectively commits a felony as happened with Section 172. As elected members of parliament, you are there representing public interests and safety – physical and financial. You have a Care of Duty to do your jobs to the best of your ability. If you do, you cannot be charged with a criminal offence. The language of Section 172 rests on information within the Ontario Road Safety Annual Reports (ORSAR) being accurate. To the best of my knowledge it is. However, the language of Section 172 does not reflect what is in ORSAR. Section 172 is based on the assumption that street racing is an activity so heinous that it required the denial of constitutional rights enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. ORSAR shows clearly that the reality is quite different from that assumption. The standing committee had a responsibility to deliver language that was based on fact. It did not do that. The House had a responsibility to understand the language of the proposed legislation to ensure that what was about to be passed into law did meet not only a standard of honesty but also a standard of necessity as required by Section 33.1 of the Charter of Freedoms and Rights. The Legislature did not do that either. As a result, thousands of completely innocent people have essentially been robbed by the police on behalf of the government via the non-refundable administration fees of various sorts. To make matters worse, many of these people have lost jobs and income due to the failing economy. That lost income is making the difference between putting food on the table, paying mortgages, rent and the ability to look for work. That is a hardship imposed directly by a Legislature that failed to use even a modest amount of common sense while developing and enacting Section 172. The person I mentioned earlier is one of those people. He was completely innocent, yet he lost thousands of dollars to defend against phony charges that were part of a plan to nail him whether he was committing an offence or not. He is a single parent trying to put two sons through school, one of whose university education is now at risk. He has lost his job to the economic downturn. He is in dire financial straits, and will soon lose his car and his house if things don’t change soon. The money spent paying the administrative charges and for his defence is needed urgently right now. Thousands of other people are in his situation as well. This is a penalty exacted by the law that over-reaches its stated intent and places undue burden on society. The crime is this: any and all of the legislature had access to the same information I did. It was your jobs to make sure that the reason for the law was based on fact. As such, based on the Criminal Code, you should have known. Not knowing is no excuse when it is your responsibility to know. None of you did your jobs. You all assumed the police and the standing committee were telling the truth. It was not a reasonable assumption to believe the police would provide truthful information. The track record of the police in court in terms of veracity is far less than sparkling clean. You should have known that too. What would anyone expect of a police force that perjures itself with impunity on such a regular basis to enable conviction quotas that a word was coined to describe that crime: testilying? What would anyone expect a police service to say when it has the opportunity to increase its budget, its personnel and buy an airplane by distorting data they feel no one will ever bother to check? Past performance is generally a good indicator of current and future performance. You should all have known that too. It is your job. Thus, the entire Legislature that voted yes to enact Section 172 committed a Criminal Code offence against Ontario drivers and their families when it enacted Section 172 and put them in needless peril. Every driver found not guilty or acquitted should have all of their money refunded complete with costs whatever they may be. Anything less tells me the Legislature is being run like a gang of thugs. The law itself if intelligently written by knowledgeable people could have gotten the job done without victimizing a huge chunk of the innocent driving public. When my election was tampered with as I mentioned earlier, the minister charged with dealing with it – Municipal Affairs and Housing’s John Gerettsen said I should take my concerns to the Ontario Press Council for a ruling. It turned out the Ontario Press Council was an old man sitting in a room with a secretary. The rest of the Council was made up of the people representing the companies who had blacked out my campaign. Guess what the ruling was by the kangaroos? In your article you said: “…the important thing is for the dialogue to begin. At stake could be nothing less than the vibrancy and health of our society.” Very true. But from here, I don’t know anyone who fights harder and does more research to get dialogue started to preserve that vibrancy and health in all its dimensions as a private citizen on a zero budget than I have. Your company does not want to know. Another thing to consider is that the environment has consistently become an order of the day topic. It is the news. Yet there isn’t a newspaper in Canada that has an Environmental News Section where issues can be expanded upon and put into an understandable format. There is nowhere for ideas to be discussed and developed among readers. Instead it’s scattered like filler all through the pages. Peter Calamai’s Science column was reduced to an anecdotal sidebar this past Sunday. That editorial decision tells you clearly why the environment is in the shape it’s in. It’s still being treated as anecdotal by the media, business and by the government despite appearances. If that were not true, Seaton, and countless other environmental disasters being perpetrated by our sanctimonious, environmentally illiterate governments would be having brakes applied. Out here in Pickering, we get the News Advertiser. It is a MetroLand paper owned by The Toronto Star. My Mayoral election platform was completely absent from that paper. My part of their questions to the candidate that should have been visible in September didn’t appear on their website until 10:30 pm the day before the election in November. Failing me and the electorate caused the News Advertiser to lose substantial credibility in this area. People wanted to know what I stood for and they still want to know the truth behind the Seaton Land Exchange. It is the biggest story in Ontario and the GTA and it has yet to hit the media three years later. You said, “… as newsrooms shrink and editorial budgets collapse, it is precisely this type of in-depth journalism that I fear will disappear.” Sorry, you’re wrong – not about the budgets but about the journalism. In-depth investigative journalism is simply being driven back to its roots by lily-livered editors. Back to the amateurs who have a stake in the stories and access to the internet – back to people who have the courage to go where the funded media does not. Investigative reporting is a good fit with the internet. On it, support and awareness can go international in seconds flat as this story has done. Sure it would help to have funding. Sure it would be better if the traditional media was not so self serving but that’s why funded investigative journalism is in trouble. The news media has exactly the same problem as the Big Three domestic automakers. The public wants to know but the newspapers don’t want to print information that could be damaging to their advertisers – in particular, real estate interests. No one wins in the end. The public has alternatives called YouTube, Facebook, Myspace and countless forums. They grow in power and reach every time the traditional media distorts the truth in the news. While I as a private citizen investigate massive government crimes as an amateur with no funding, you say we should be concerned about investigative journalists wondering where their readership, funding and paycheque is going. If the media wants to restore readership the media needs to take a long hard look at how editorial decisions are made and who’s being paid what by whom. That answer is found in colour in the advertising sections of newspapers – especially under “Homes”. The media has sold its soul and is paying the price. I don’t think the print media cares about investigative journalism. Advertising pays the bills, professional investigations cost money. I’ve told MetroLand it’s papers are dead trees decorated with advertising by the pound, not news. For a while, they upped the real news to advertising ratio. But the ratio has slid away from news once more. Money talks. Thank you for writing your article John. I was waiting for a trigger to set me off. Your thought provoking article hit the bull’s-eye. Long as it is, this article will be e-mailed to every federal and provincial elected politician in Canada. While these are Ontario issues for the most part, they can happen everywhere. There are no shortages of crimes being committed by governments or within their institutions despite the hysterical objections made by one provincial Minister of Health when I e-mailed my original allegations so long ago. (Then it turned out he was having to initiate the investigation of a local medical crime himself at the very same time and the story with his photo was on the front page of his local paper the very next day…) Yours truly, John Newell, Pickering, Ontario

The gateway to discrimination is in how the law is administered - without checks and balances. A cop can take your car and your license. It costs you a lot of money. Then the charges can be withdrawn. The victim has no legal recourse. It's happening. Even police have been helping me with the research. To be charged under this law, you don't have to be doing anything wrong at all. The cop just has to think you look like you are going to break the law. But really he doesn't have to think anything of the sort. Reality says he can do whatever he pleases. If he or she doesn't like you, your colour, your attitude or your car, chances are you can kiss your car and your license good bye. You then become a "notch", a scalp or some other type of tally in the police game to see who nails the most street racers. Except hardly anyone caught is a street racer. When they finally catch someone who really is street racing it's so unusual it makes the news. They denied everyone's rights for those rare moments all over Ontario. But most of the dangerous street racing occurs in the GTA. How do you suppose people in Chapleau feel about that? My beef is that the government broke the law in several important ways to enact the law. Look it up on another thread. There were plenty of people on various sites who initially didn't understand that the street racing law destabilizes Ontario legislation in total and trashes the entire Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I can't republish the entire book here or the updates, but there certainly is enough material on this site for you to learn that your rights have been savaged. But the complete story is in the book and in the updates. It's pretty major stuff. That's why the paralegals are using it. The Constitutional Challenge is six pages long. I can't publish the whole thing because it wouldn't be fair to those who have bought the book. I'm just making this site aware of what's going on as a courtesy since I don't believe anyone from this site has purchased the book. But readers here are interested in the legislation. It isn't often you have a government committing fraud - a criminal code infraction - to enact legislation and are then able to catch them at it. This fraud involves those in the legislature who brought the legislation forward and sold it to the rest of the legislature with literally nothing to substantiate the law. MTO and Fantino's information was only fragmentary. If it weren't, the law could not have passed.

The following is the first page of my letter to Premier McGuinty to formally challenge the legality and constitutionality of the 2007 amendment to Section 172 of the Highway Traffic Act. I do not expect him to respond to the Challenge so within the next two weeks I'll be filling out the forms and making it official. I plan to represent myself and the people on this. If there are any other challenges, this will give me intervenor status and thus able to make a contribution. My book, Abuse of Power is now being used in the courts to fight Street Racing and Stunt Driving charges. I haven't heard any outcomes yet but I haven't heard any complaints either. A number of paralegals and others are helping me with the research and the process of making the challenge. If you want to follow along, PM me and get a copy of the book that including the updates. November 05, 2008 Premier McGuinty, Legislative Building, Queens Park, Toronto, Ontario, M7A 1A1 CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE TO SECTION 172 OF THE ONTARIO HIGHWAY TRAFFIC ACT Dear Premier Dalton McGuinty, On behalf of all Ontarians, I am respectfully demanding that you instruct the Lieutenant Governor in Council to file a constitutional challenge to the 2007 amendment to Section 172 of the Ontario Highway Traffic Act (HTA) with the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) and notify me on November 24 2008 that this action has been taken. That’s two weeks after your return from China. If I don’t receive notification you have done so by that date, I will file the Challenge. The following are my reasons for demanding this legislation to be struck down or made to conform to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: My extensive study and research into the matter indicates to me that the amendment to Section 172 denies most of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and indeed the overall intent of the Charter itself. The following is a point by point summary of my objections to the 2007 amendment to Section 172 of the Ontario Highway Traffic Act: 6. (1) Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada. (2) Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right (a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and ( to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province. See the explanation of Section 6 combined with Section 9. 7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. Section 172 entrenches in law that police officers have the right to detain and penalize without cause any person and find them guilty on the spot by seizing their car, truck or other vehicle and assessing financial penalties at the roadside on suspicion. Charges do not have to be laid or can later be withdrawn but the penalties are in force and are not recoverable. This allows police to discriminate against anyone but it makes visible minorities especially vulnerable. A crime or other misdemeanor does not have to have been committed for this harsh action to be taken.

Since 80% of fatal accidents are caused by driver distraction and no more than 7% of fatal accidents involve speed to the point where speed is a major contributing factor but not normally the sole cause, there are plenty of ways to reduce the number of fatal accidents without resorting to unreasonable and illegal legislation. When I sent the information to the Attorney General, this is the response I received: Dear Mr. Newell: On behalf of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, I acknowledge receipt of your correspondence of August 13, 2008, concerning the exercise of authority by provincial justices of the peace. As you are aware, while the Parliament of Canada is responsible for enacting criminal law, the administration of justice in a province is the responsibility of the provincial governments. Therefore, if you have not already done so, you may wish to raise your concerns with the Honourable Chris Bentley, Attorney General of Ontario, at www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca. Thank you for writing. Yours sincerely, L. Bisson Manager, Ministerial Correspondence Unit The contact info L. Bisson gives is where I sent the information... That's your tax dollar in action.

Apparently the street racer special starts tonight. Christina, the reporter who Tim and I were interviewed by told me it was to air on October 1st. Maybe tonight is a lead up. There was a couple of short advisories about it yesterday but I thought I'd wait to talk to Christina or at least Global but after several tries, I've had no luck. Whatever is on tonight, it comes at the end of the six pm news I think on Global. It seems there will be a different aspect each night so the show could last the entire week. When Christina interviewed us, she seemed pretty positive about what we were saying so maybe the issue is going to be treated fairly.

Most of the accidents that involved muscle cars were from tailgating while girl watching. Girl watching was as much a sport in those days as street racing. It has fallen out of favour now due to public awareness of all the perverts there are lurking among us. Another significant cause of muscle car accidents was due to most of them being equipped with drum brakes. Those of you who are too young to know what driving a car with drum brakes is like cannot begin to comprehend what it was like to be behind the wheel of a car with a large heavy engine at the front of the car, no equalizing weight at the back, no sway bars for stability and drum brakes. The interior architecture built into the doors didn't happen until 1971 and air bags didn't happen until the late eighties. So driving those cars at any speed was and still is a risky business. Accidents happened frequently at speeds of less that 50 kph. Especially in rush hour. The actual power of the cars was not the problem. The problem was how poorly equipped and designed the cars were at any speed. The cars excelled at accelerating fast from a stop until the speedometer was buried as long as the road was straight and free of traffic. If there was a curve, most of them still went straight - into whatever immovable object was in their path. The other thing was the tires. Tires today are so much better than they used to be that it's impossible to understand how unsafe our tires were then without driving two cars exactly the same - one with modern tires, the other with the old bias ply belted tires. One of my vintage cars has those old tires on it and I don't drive it at all. It's too dangerous to go around the block in. It's still fine in a straight line but no way for corners thank you. That's why you don't see muscle cars involved in the new and far more dangerous form of street racing so popular today. And that's why it didn't matter whether it was a muscle car or a normal every day car. In fact if you look around at car shows, you'll find that the survivors are about 95% or better muscle cars and 5% regular cars. The attrition rate even before the race to restore muscle cars was much higher among normal cars than among performance cars. A good part of that was that the general public had accidents, including fatal accidents with far more frequency than street racers and still do. Street racers of the day for the most part looked after their cars. That's why they survived. Joe blow average doesn't maintain his vehicle with anything like the level of interest a racer of any stripe takes in his wheels. The graphic difference is in the accident statistics and they are not in favour of the unimpaired, normal driver then or now. The gas shortage at the end of the muscle car era had statistically nothing to do with actual street racing. It had to do with that fact that cars used for street racing were also the very same cars used for commuting back and forth to work. Most people couldn't afford or didn't have room for their muscle cars and a commuter car as well as the insurance for both. At that point, most were getting married and starting a family. That's part of the reason I got my first muscle car and the reason I parked it in 1975 and got something newer and easier on gas. For most it came down to which did you feed? A thirsty muscle car or a hungry baby? Those babies are represented by the middle agers right now.

Not so. Back in 1971, we went through the first major insurance hiccup. Rates were hiked so high, the muscle car era effectively ended in the same calender year. Lousy drivers were not the target. The target was horsepower. Driver competence was not part of the equation though driver intent was. The idea was to reduce horsepower to a level where the horsepower and the mechanical capabilities of the car were in sync. That was done. Street racing continued using older cars and there were very few complaints. Of course accident rates were the driving factor. But it was the cars themselves that received the blame. Certain models and horsepower ratings were used as the criteria for setting insurance rates. That's why big block high horsepower engines disappeared from manufacturers's option columns, not because of driver competence. The car/engine combos were unaffordable and that translated to uninsurable. Today is a different story. Handling and horsepower have reached a high degree of sophistication but the mental ammunition of the drivers has been left behind. That's an educational issue that's never been addressed properly. Being a street racer does not make anyone a lousy driver. In fact it generally makes a person a much better, more adept driver. It takes a high degree of skill to street race that the average driver doesn't possess. The trouble arises when the learners practice on the streets and have terrible accidents. It may interest you to know that quite a high proportion of today's drivers are former street racers. They are as a group, the best drivers out there. However, driving on streets in the muscle car era was a totally different thing. By today's standards, the roads were the same size but virtually deserted. Street racing now is more of an obstacle course than anything else. Rush hour was an hour long. That's why it's called rush hour. Rush hour today is nearly four hours in the morning and four hours in the evening on a normal day - the equivalent of a full day. The average commute is a little under an hour but in a few years commute times will triple. That means rush hour will be all day and into the night and very early morning. The psychology of drivers then was no different than now. The accidents were just as spectacular when they occurred. They were rare events then and they are rare events now. Street racing does not depend on speed to be a race. A street race can happen at less than 50 kph and be exciting. It depends what you are driving. You can be just as insane at low speeds as at high speeds and just as dead when you hit something. The stupidity of street racing today does not come from the ability or inability to handle a car. It comes from a lack of judgment that allows one to make the decision to race in the first place in a location where the potential for an accident is high - a city street or on a highway. It's the faulty judgment that's at issue and that faulty judgment is something that can be identified through profiling before the person is even granted a license. If driving a car is a privilege, then the act of getting a license should be treated as a privilege rather than the bubble gum machine scenario we've all complained about. Drivers should be trained to handle cars under extreme conditions and they should be taught to race on a track. If the can't handle a car on an empty track, they can't handle a car on a crowded street or highway well enough to understand how their vehicle will react under abnormal circumstances. The rest of us gamble our lives on the inexperience of those beginners and incompetents. Far more people are killed by incompetent drivers than are killed by street racing. None of this need happen if there were just somewhere for young drivers to get the racing bug out of their systems in a sanctioned format. Like maybe a multipurpose track at Downsview Airforce Base. That would and most of the problems in the GTA and the problem itself is a GTA problem and the lack of facilities is a contributing factor and has been a contributing factor since the late sixties.

Uninsurable is when you can no longer afford to pay the fee demanded and still eat and house yourself. If you can afford $1500.00 per year and it jumps across the board to $3000.00 year and you can't pay it you are uninsurable to all intents and purposes. If you have deep enough pockets certainly you can insure anything. But I'm talking about normal people. When you start missing payments, you're ability to remain insured is severely impaired. That's why people without cars still pay their automobile insurance premiums. The increase in rates if they don't could mean the difference in driving in the future and hitchhiking.

I haven't seen or heard of any rate increases either on acquittal. There probably won't be any until there's another round of hikes and Spanish Inquisition-like tactics by the insurance people. An acquittal does not remove the one week loss of license notation against your driver's license. When you are looking for insurance something like that is probably going to affect your rate. It might not at that point be technically a premium hike, just a new customer rate but the bottom line is that your bottom line could take a hit somewhere along the line and it'll be when you're most vulnerable. Another rarer situation could be that you were being dropped by your insurance company for missing a payment so you are looking for a new insurer. But since you just lost your license you just got kicked in the teeth - especially if the charges are dropped or withdrawn before the court date. But guess what? You may now be uninsurable...