Bugs

You may be surprised. The feeling that the the present policies are wrong, and that too much money is being spent, is widespread. Haven't we all lived through a real estate boom? It is engrossing, suddenly you're going to parties and people are talking about their real estate, and feeling rich ... they start spending more than they really should. Others, jump into housing for fear that they will never be able to afford a house. They see other people making money on real estate, and they feel a little envy. Suddenly, the strangest people are flipping real estate. It's been like that in the US for a decade. I think Scott Brown did a masterful job of running as a tea-party person, rather than as a Republican calling on the Tea Party people for their support. He called himself the 'independent voice', and other times, the 'voice of independent Massachusetts' and he didn't advertise his Republican-ness at all. He made a big thing about driving a truck. He radiates some of the same kind of simple virtue stuff that Sarah Palin brings to the game. You may not like it, but the Scott Brown won on the very sentiments that the Tea Party protests are expressing.

You may be surprised. The feeling that the the present policies are wrong, and that too much money is being spent, is widespread. Haven't we all lived through a real estate boom? It is engrossing, suddenly you're going to parties and people are talking about their real estate, and feeling rich ... they start spending more than they really should. Others, jump into housing for fear that they will never be able to afford a house. They see other people making money on real estate, and they feel a little envy. Suddenly, the strangest people are flipping real estate. It's been like that in the US for a decade. I think Scott Brown did a masterful job of running as a tea-party person, rather than as a Republican calling on the Tea Party people for their support. He called himself the 'independent voice', and other times, the 'voice of independent Massachusetts' and he didn't advertise his Republican-ness at all. He made a big thing about driving a truck. He radiates some of the same kind of simple virtue stuff that Sarah Palin brings to the game. You may not like it, but the Scott Brown won on the very sentiments that the Tea Party protests are expressing.

I understand this is a taunt, but I didn't see at all where 'Democracy' figured into it. In Athens, they chose their leaders in panels, by lot, to be sure that the rulers were a cross-section. They thought that was democracy, without a election being involved. We have elections, but somehow ... we don't have the Democracy. Parliament evolved from a group that held a veto on what the King could do to get money out of them. It is an institution meant to put a drag on a monarch's consumption. It's true, the office of chief chamberlain has managed to usurp the power of the monarch, and that the chamberlains are themselves elected, sometimes by as many as 30,000 or more people. We have the rituals of some democracy, but as soon as we get behind the closed doors of Parliament, and we find that it can't get anything done. A private member's bill can pass ... so what? It can be like pushing on a rope. It's because Parliament only gives its assent to policies of the monarch! That's what they don't tell you in school. You want democracy, you have to get rid of monarchy, and put sovereignty in the people of the nation. Everything else is a sham.

Ontario Hydro used to be a state-of-the-art power company. Over time, it became, in fact, an instrument of government planning of the economy, an inducement to industry, etc. What killed it was that it become over-involved with nuclear energy. Nuclear reactors that had originally been amortized over a 50 year lifespan had to be written off in 25 years due to design flaws. The reactors had be to be closed down, and expensive retrofits had to be done. Expensive. The politicians hid from responsibility. In fact, Ontario Hydro's credit had also been used to raise money for other big developments that were being undertaken in the 1980ies. It was Harris' biggest failure, but no one else has solved it, or even told the public what the problem is. But, the situation is similar in other jurisdictions. Hydro Quebec issued its own bonds, to build huge dams and generate massive amounts of power. Perhaps they are a guarantee, but the cost appears on people's hydro bills to this day ... in one form or another. It's because of government mismanagement. Not one party, not one province.

What you say makes sense. I was wondering what kind of amateur would bribe a senior politician with a cheque made out to the oersib ub their capacity as Minister of Finance? Here's a little more about it. I don't know how this would go together,

I know exactly what you mean. I live in Toronto, and a couple of years ago, my landlord approached me. He wanted to put my electricity on a separate meter. I was on the same meter with another vacant unit. Naturally, I was interested in seeing what the bill would be. He pulled it out ... with only my usage on there, it was about $90, but less that $20 was for actual current. That's why this 'smart meter' crap will fail, imho. The consumer doesn't actually control that much of the cost of what they pay. The connection is larded up debt retirement costs, as well as wire charges. Unless you are a heavy user, the smart meter won't save you much money.

Pliny said, referring to Mme Huffington ... I think people have different virtues. She's intelligent, and articulate, but her special virtue is a sense of how ordinary people look at things. She used to be for the Contract for America, when that was popular. The good thing about her is that she noses out stories that justify peoples' feelings. Normally, I'd agree with you, but doesn't it seem to you that the big banks are looting America right now? I agree, traders needs a certain amount of latitude, but they should understand when they are abusing their position sometime before they stick the American public with God-knows-how-many-$trillions as the bill? When you consider that some of these people voting for a Republican in Mass ... aren't angrier than they are ... many of them have lost jobs, have lost a big bite of their retirement funds and are losing their homes! There is a growing movement out there that people should 'Starve the Beast' in preparation for a coming collapse. They mean to prepare yourself for a much diminished standard of living by, as much as possible, buy things from the smallest, most local businesses, and let the big corporate people take care of themselves. Huffington's comments fit into that kind of thinking, which is taken up by gold bugs and survivalists -- all the fringy pessimists and doomsayers' time is coming.

Ah, yes, Condi Rice ... Darth's Jedi daughter ... Mistress of the Dark Side ... I remember, in those days, we had a road map, and Hezbollah had to start rocketing Israelis, because ... it was making progress. Now that Obama has pushed the 'Reset Button', where are we? Back at square one?

This is a peek at Obama's rally for Coakley ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gRcTNrhxy8

Are you kidding? This is just a random selection of what the mainstream offers. This clown seems to have the worst features of Limbaugh without the star features ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVwqorhJG_E And what about some of the others. What his name, McConnell? Frankly, in 40 years of watching TV, I have never seen such opinionated people giving the news, and interlacing their own extreme attitudes with the readings of the factual stuff. When Obama was new, it was almost intolerable. Don't misunderstand, I don't have any loyalty to either of the parties. I liked the Democrats back when ... I still like LBJ, how about that? I thought Reagan was an actor run by a corporation when he got elected. Since, I have changed, buy, like a lot of Canadians, I watch like its sports, and my team has been eliminated. I am probably an old-fashioned liberal, circa 1960, which makes me hidebound in 2010.

An 80-year-old preacher speaks for the 'Right'? What you see on the Right is a marketplace of ideas. Media voices put material into that debate, but there's no playbook, no set of slogans, no visions of an idealistic future against which to tick off the present ... that's the other folks. The Haitians are no Na'mi. A lot of their problems are their problems. Nobody did anything to them. They're poorer than Cuba. This earthquake is different. It's a human disaster. Actually, I think we're doing a lot. No doubt, you are critical of those evil people in Canada who think that generally its a good idea to balance the national budget ... and who wouldn't want to ridicule that? But even such a viperous critic of all-things-conservative as Haroon Siddique have the honesty to give some credit. http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/751486--siddiqui-micha-euml-lle-jean-and-stephen-harper-do-us-proud-in-haiti

We all peer into the future, wondering about our future prosperity ... of course, right now, the signs are ominous in the extreme. Probably none of has lived through what is to come. We are about to lose our favoured child status. I am talking about inflation. Nobody talks about it, really. Ben Bernanke mounts the pulpit periodically to proclaim that, "Be of good faith ... for, when the time comes, your Fed, which is in Heaven, will make the problem vanish ... " The journalists (mostly) feel their skin crawl when they have to report a story with numbers in it. Inflation ... is even worse. History indicates that Inflation starts with the public sector, which is the main beneficiary. Then it moves to the banks, who are the next beneficiary. By the time it gets to most of us, the benefits are illusory. We experience rising prices. When the crash comes, everybody loses ... but some lose more than others. So far, we have experienced very little in price increases, but it looks like they're coming. It looks like our first taste of the coming misery. Comments?

Well, one difference is that Stephen Harper government withdrew its original budget because of opposition demands for more stimulus, and provided it in a redrafted budget. The last budget was, at least in some ways, a product of the minority government. A second difference is that, whatever else, the stimulus wasn't a pork-laden monstrosity, and it is being far more effective, to the point of contributing to a bit of bubble in real estate and the construction trades. ======================== I agree with the spirit of your question, though probably from the other side. It seems to me that, for right-wing people, economics and democracy come into conflict. I mean it in this way. The Austrian economics model would be to make the banks eat the losses, even if they go bankrupt. Protect the dollar, extend unemployment, open soup kitchens if you must, whatever to get through the next two to five years. And let the sucker go down. Why is this best? Because what is wrong with the system is that there are a lot of bogus values in the marketplace. Think of the stock market -- what hope leads people to bid that market up so high, based on realistic prospects of earnings? It's things like the bailouts profits of the financial institutions, the revived hopes of GM. Similarly, the inflated house prices are not passing from the market. Even giving people bonuses to buy these houses, even with 3% mortgages, the buyers are only trickling back to the market. The economic cure is to get rid of these false values as fast as possible. Let the crash happen. But this solution conflicts with every political instinct of successful democratic politicians. In fact, letting a crash like this happen would inflict huge political penalties on any party. For this reason, Obama is now doomed -- he has gone past the point of no return. His choices, from here on out, are to waste all of the bailout money, and crash the economy -- or, to continue to print money and risk a genuine hyperinflation. He's going to see no way out, and we are all going to have a nasty incident with inflation, starting in the next two or three years. You will start to hear of the misery index again ... as we go into stagflation ... the worst economic outcome of all, inflationary depression, which, of course, will necessitate a devaluation and monetary reform.

With you on that one, American Woman ... I don't like Coulter much myself, but here's the thing ... Rush, Coulter, et al argue their opinions, and can be publicly refuted. They don't claim to be objective. Isn't Schultz a liberal version of Rush? Doesn't he claim that his show where America comes for the truth? Besides, this goes beyond the normal editorializing ... this is right into counseling a felony, if you ask me. This is one of the things that drives conservatives nutty -- the bias in the media. Trent Lott had his career ended, while Harry Reid gets a hug from Sharpeton, for acts of approximately the same degree of inappropriateness. Don't think that I have loyalties to Trent Lott, or any party in the US. I consider American politics the greatest show on earth. I don't say this as a partisan. Rush always seems to me to be cogent and he educates me, as a Canadian, about a whole other side of American politics. It isn't so much that I believe him. I don't know who's right, but he opens my eyes. This guy? Not so much.

You make a good point, but the clinic is still probably an enabler. It runs a 'needle exchange' which distributes an incredible number of needles. The real way to judge their effectiveness would be against the reduction in AIDS cases in the area, over time. But I don't think that that works, either. Here's why ... The facility has six to eight beds. I don't know how many junkies that can accommodate a day, but presumably they know if the have an OD on their hands or not within 4 hours. Let's assume that they can keep 4 junkies safely high a day, for each bed. That's a potential of about 200 a week. They probably do less. Guess what? They have a rule that any one junkie can only use the facility once every 15 or 21 days. My specific figures may be off, but the point is ... if someone has a $100 a day habit, they can only hit up one-time out of every 15 or 20 times they shoot up in the back alley. The figures of Insite themselves show that they basically treat a pool of 1700+ or so, who use the facility maybe once every six weeks. Many of them are long-term junkies who are resigned to dying as a junkie. Why? Because Insite, in fact, is not very effective at successfully getting people permanently off drugs. Not surprising. Not many programs work any better than your old-fashioned 12-step programs. I suspect this is very expensive. The building, equipment, and three shifts of professional staff ... it's easy to imagine a $750,000+ budget, all so that 1700 junkies can have $450+ worth of premium health care, and free needles, so they can trade for drugs amongst their circles. If this is truly harm reduction ... then it should be possible to give us the cost benefit analysis. How many cases of AIDS have been prevented? How much extra money been spent, or has it been saved? The fact that nothing is ever said about this is all you really need to know, probably. They'd tell us if they had something good to say about this part of the story. Their problem isn't who funds them. The problem is their exemption from the criminal code. And that is not entirely in provincial hands.

Well, Doctor, partisanship forces you to say things like that, no doubt, but the facts are pretty clear. Canada's finances were in deplorable state after the Trudeau years. Since that time, Canada's finances have been handled well by all the parties. Mulroney and Wilson brought in the GST, which, whatever you say, made it possible to balance the budget. Secondly, they, through their Bank of Governor, put us into a recession to give us a strong dollar, and without a strong dollar, we'd have never got the interest rates low enough to pay it down. Beyond that, they fought an election to get free trade with the USA. It took some political courage. They were followed by Chretien and Martin, who inherited a strong dollar and low interest rates. They brought in the budgets that balanced the budget. Not only that, but probably as important, in hindsight -- Martin refused to allow the Canadian banks to merge, and thus be big enough to get in there, with Lehmans and Goldmans Sachs, going for the long green. Think about it -- we could be facing a situation where a quarter of the houses in the country Since the, the Harper/Flaherty tandem has supervised the return to normal, putting "paid" to the Trudeau extravagance. They have lowered taxes and tried to remove the political barriers to wider trade. I think any reasonably objective review would show that, regardless of the political craziness that has whirled all around this country, our finances have been comparatively well managed ever since Trudeau departed. All of the politicians deserve credit, at least for the way they handled Canadian finances, but I would put Michael Wilson ahead of Paul Martin here, because I think the harder bit of medicine was implementing the GST, while negotation free trade, in the midst of crushing interest rates and years of 10%+ unemployment. Paul Martin was so deep in the grass that people didn't see what he was doing. While he was professing that he would never balance the budget on the backs of the working poor, that's exactly what he did. He used EI premiums to skim off the money he needed. At the time, it was only assessed on incomes up to $36,000 a year! He probably delayed him from taking action for a year, but who can deny his deviousness worked? Comments?

When did you ever hear of a gun law being enforced? When the coppers bust in the door and find the drugs, money, and guns ... which are often stored together ... the theory is that gun possession increases the penalty. Anyone remember that being in the papers? The sentence is supposed to be a deterrent to crime. Hmmmm? What makes gun control doubly farcical is that it is only enforced on rural people who have guns for practical reasons.

Why wait? Don't we already know global warming was a pack of lies, packaged into a movie, and used to create an irrational panic? I heard on the radio yesterday that the temperature on Jan 13, 2005 was 17ºC! Yesterday had a high of slightly over freezing. If the global warming thesis is right, this dramatically cooler weather would have to be off-set somewhere else on the planet having correspondingly high temperatures. Climate change snake-oil seems salable then, but now that normality has returned, it seems dubious.

Amusing. The Liberals ran a deficit from Trudeau's ascension, to until Paul Martin's budget in the mid-1990ies. Mulroney, the only serious interruption to Liberal rule in that time, took over in the midst of huge inflation, and really had no chance of balancing the budget -- his fight was with inflation. The idea that the Liberals are a party that normally runs a balanced budget is something that hasn't been true since Lester Pearson.

Yes it is.

Why is this what you expect? My own sense is that Harper has a pretty good idea about how Canadians in general react to things. The majority of people don't care about proroguing and that kind of stuff. Canadians aren't torturers, either, so that's a dead issue. The Liberals think this approach will, one day, sooner or later, lead them to an issue that has traction. I think you are wrong, Mr. Fortin because, in English-speaking Canada, people do not consider the Liberal Party to be capable of governing -- at least not at the moment. The Liberal Party has been a great political institution, with a glorious past that's almost synonymous with 20th Century Canada. But at the moment, it has lost its way. Its leadership is confused, the party has no apparent plan, and their critique of the Conservatives is erratic and opportunistic. When they overplay their rhetoric, they look fatuous. The Liberals have another problem. People now look askance at Liberal coalitions. Essentially, a coalition with the NDP is OK, so long as the two parties have enough seats to give them a majority. If they need the Bloc, however ... very dangerous. Hyperventilate as much as you must, but for the Liberals, the way back to power involves going back to the grass roots, and rebuilding, not campaigning on suspicion and innuendo.

The US Federal Reserve made a record $46.1 billion in earnings last year! It's kind of shocking, I know, but it isn't really a surprise. All the money, by the way, was turned over to the US Treasury. It just shows you the scale of the enterprise -- and the extent to which the Fed has become involved in running the economy.

I think it's a good idea. Don't underestimate Huffington. She's an intelligent woman. In the US, one of the worst aspects of this mess is that a lot of good, local banks -- still of good size -- could go out of business, even though they loaned money prudently. By moving money to smaller, more local banks, Americans can help them to survive. All the populism aside, the system requires that the risk-takers take the burn. The too-big-to-fail banks are the ones. Fannie and Freddie are the ones. That's what gives the system its integrity ...

The man in charge of Health at the Council of Europe has accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of running a scam over H1N1. The Council of Europe has passed a resolution backed by Dr Wodarg. calling for an investigation into the role of drug firms. An emergency debate on the motion will be held later this month. The article is worth reading.

Why? The Bible is full of great Jewish warriors and their stories. The problem is so few atheists have read the Bible, so they don't have a clue what it's about -- particularly the Old Testament. But I don't see what there would be about being a 'real Jew' that should exempt you from defending your homeland. There's this idea afoot in the land that being religious makes you a pushover. Or ought to. That's a misunderstanding. Turning the other cheek is a tactic to prevail. Not all tactics work in all situations, but these guys walk around the settlements with AK-47s. Remember the devout dude that shot up the Mosque at Temple Mount? Israel gives its ultra-orthodox a raft of special privileges, and yet, the Orthodox are the knobbiest when it comes to compromises. There are all kinds of Orthodox, of course, (illustrating a kind of heterodoxy) but in general, the Orthodox feel that Biblical prophesies are being fulfilled, and that Israel needs to get all of its old territory back ... whatever it was (now that Canaan isn't on the map) in whatever year, BC ... for the prophesy to be fulfilled. (Which means Man is actually doing something to make sure God's prophesy comes true ... oh, never mind!) Face it, they're as bad (or good) as the worst Moslems.