murraysovereign

Are you referring to this?

I vote for the US Rangers climbing the cliffs at Omaha Beach. Technical grade was perhaps not high, but the constant machine gun and artillery fire from above added a level of objective hazard not commonly seen in places like the Valley. When you add to that the men were seasick, cold and wet, loaded down with combat gear, and no doubt scared absolutely shitless the entire time, it's a pretty impressive accomplishment. Honourable Mention to the First Special Service Force's climb of Monte la Difensa in December of 1943. First ascent, in winter, in full combat kit. It was technically a more difficult climb than Omaha Beach, but they weren't under constant fire because they were sneaking up behind the German positions, which is kinda like aid, really, compared to the Rangers' frontal assault at Normandy.

So, here's the question that's been bugging me. What, exactly, are all these diplomats doing driving around in a war zone? What meetings are they going to that require risking the lives of a handful of innocent Iraqi civilians every time they drive across town? If they really thought about it, if they really asked themselves if this or that meeting was worth potentially killing a father, a mother, a couple of children, maybe some grandparents, how many of those meetings would actually take place? Or at the very least, how many of them would take place in the "red" zone? I don't question the need to provide security for diplomats, but I do question sending diplomats into areas where providing their security necessitates the use of murderous levels of force against the very people the diplomats are supposed to be helping. It seems a tad counter-productive, doesn't it? For instance, if the various parties involved had known their meeting of a few weeks ago would result in 17 deaths just to get everyone to the location, I can't help but think they might have found another way to meet. Given the blowback that resulted from those deaths, it would have to be one spectacularly successful meeting to be worth it.

What does it mean when it switches from counterclockwise to clockwise to counterclockwise and back again? Am I going to die?

Sounds like you stayed at the main campground in Lake Louise? Sorry, I should have warned you about that. There are alternatives available that don't necessitate pitching your tent directly between the rails of the transcontinental mainline. Takakkaw, in the Yoho Valley, is by far my favourite, or Mosquito Creek and Protection Mountain are good options too.

I'm not sure about specific retailers, but as I recall Evolv will sell mis-matched shoes by mail-order, and I think Five Ten does also, but only within the US.

I dunno, as long as they skate hard, finish their checks, and keep their sticks on the ice, I'm OK with it.

Dean may have been front-runner, but he didn't have "majority support" (ie 50%+1).

In reading this, I was immediately reminded of that scene in Apocalypse Now where the entire boat crew are firing wildly into the jungle and they don't even know what they're shooting at or why but they're so freaked out they can't stop firing even after they realize they're firing at nothing for no reason. And then it occurred to me that at least one good thing will come out of this Iraq War thing. Some day it's going to provide the setting for a great re-telling of Apocalypse Now. Blackwater will play the part of Kurtz's band of renegades up the river. Martin Sheen's character will start the movie staring up at a ceiling fan in his hotel room in... "Baghdad. Shit. I'm still only in Baghdad. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the desert..." Are there any good surf beaches in the Persian Gulf?

My mother was a HUGE fan of the Master and Margarita - couldn't get her to shut up about it for around 5 years in the late 90s. I tried reading it once, but I clearly wasn't in the right headspace for it at the time and gave up about 2/3 of the way through. But I could tell it was something I could probably get into, just not then. Maybe I'll try it again this winter. First off, though, I want to re-read Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August", then plow into the rest of the bookshelf. The collection has been piling up for a few years now, as self-employment doesn't allow much time to just read for pleasure. It still allows for buying books, alright, just not reading them.

There does seem to be something different about Blackwater though. This is a company that gets paid by the US government to train people to do a job that the US government, by it's own statements, does not perform. It's a job, in fact, that the US government pays the private company to perform. So the government pays a private company to train personnel so they can work for the private company fulfilling contracts for the government. There's a peculiar closed-loop aspect to this thing that just looks... bad. Blackwater has hooked onto a perpetual-motion gravy train, and the US taxpayer is funding it.

You're presupposing that abortion is equivalent to murder - not everyone agrees with that position.

Well, if it doesn't, and if you and the wife decide to hit Whistler again, there's a spare room at my place you're welcome to use.

I like Burns' work, especially his Civil War series. He does a good job of personalizing what is, on the face of it, an utterly impersonal phenomenon. By choosing to focus solely on the American involvement, I think he's losing some of the greater context (it was, after all, a "World" war, not just an American one), but that's an understandable editorial decision given the magnitude of the task of trying to cover the entire conflict. Besides, the "World at War" series from the 70s, narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier, already did a pretty good job of that. So far, thumbs up.

Pfftt!! Telemarking is only a handicap or disadvantage for people who can't telemark. By your logic, top-roping is superior to lead climbing. After all, lead climbing is harder and slower, so why bother? Hell, there's a perfectly good trail to the top - why don't you just walk up?

"Regional" is also referred to as "rubber-tire" traffic. In other words, people who live close enough to drive rather than flying. So regional would loosely include BC, Washington, and maybe a good portion of Oregon. "Local" refers to people who live close enough to drive up for the day and then return home, so Lower Mainland for sure, and possibly the very northern communities of Puget Sound.

For the average traveller, it's already passed par. 98.64 is the wholesale rate, but that's not the rate you receive when you exchange your money. Remember that the banks or exchange houses charge a premium of 1.5 - 2% for changing your money. So if you go to the bank today, and exchange greenbacks into loonies, you're going to get CDN$.9975 per US$ (according to Scotiabank on-line's current exchange rates), and the greenback is continuing to weaken, so you can expect that rate to keep dropping. JayB is correct that a rapid appreciation in any currency will cause some dislocation. Even on a small scale like my shop, it makes it difficult to plan inventory buys for next summer, it makes it difficult to maintain margin on imported retail goods, and it deters US tourists from visiting, staying, and spending. But it also reduces overall consumer prices, which may result in increased spending by locals. On the larger scale, it makes our exports more expensive in the US, so the automotive sector in Ontario is feeling this very keenly. And the BC forestry sector is hurting, and the tourism industry as well. But, those effects are largely limited to our US trading relationship. The Loonie has been gaining against the Greenback, but so have the Euro and most other G8 currencies, so our exports to / tourism from those countries will be less affected, and may even go up. And much of our export base is commodities, which have been enjoying strong price increases recently, and which are less price-sensitive, such as oil, so those shouldn't be greatly impacted. So psychologically people like to see their currency gaining strength, but in economic terms they may want to be careful what they wish for. A loonie at or above par is going to cause very real pain for a lot of people, at least in the short term until the economy can adjust to the new dynamic.

OK, more anecdotal evidence. It doesn't prove anything. Even if your portrayel is accurate, it doesn't mean that the program will work in the US. We are not Canada or France - we are a much larger country with much different demographics and structures (business and government), not to mention the cultural differences. I am interested in the history of Canadian health care, however. Do you know when your health care was nationalized, why this was done, and how? I'm assuming of course that at one time you had privatized health care like we do in the states. What precipitated the change up there? Did costs decrease and quality of care go up? I realize my personal experiences are nowhere near representative of the whole. They do, however, conform with the findings of the many Johns Hopkins studies. If my anecdotes were seriously at variance with those studies, you could rightly view them with some suspicion. But from my perspective, the Johns Hpkins studies indicate that my experience is well within the norm, so I take that to indicate the system seems to be working reasonably well. Are there exceptions, cases where people have had to wait far too long, or cases where people have received substandard care? Of course there are, and it sounds like this ABC show went out looking for them, and found them. But is that representative of the Canadian health care system overall? I doubt it. If we were to reciprocate, sending a Canadian tv crew down to travel the States looking for medical horror stories, don't you think they could find some? Hell, it could probably sustain a weekly program that could run for years and never run out of fresh horror stories to report on. But I wouldn't consider it to be an accurate representation of the US health care system. There are problems with both systems, but there is a great deal more that works very well - in both systems. I don't think anyone is suggesting the US should simply implement a carbon-copy of the Canada Health Act. But you also shouldn't dismiss the entire structure simply because some parts are imperfect. As for the history, it's a fairly complicated story, but Wiki seems to have got the major bits about right, although the way it's written makes it a bit hard to follow. You could also google "Tommy Douglas" and find a few fairly evenhanded biographies in amongst the hagiographies from the NDP and various labour organisations (Tommy is the founding father and patron saint of the Canadian social-democratic movement). And I don't know whether overall costs went up or down at the time, but there seems to be no serious debate that the quality of care improved significantly. We're currently involved in a debate of our own, on how to re-structure our system to account for changes in demographics, economics, and medical advances in the four or five decades since the present structure was put in place. And I think it likely that, despite the ideological objections of those on the far left, part of the restructuring will involve some sort of private or semi-private system running in parallel to the public system. There are some concerns that such a "two-tier" system would detract from the public system, but we'll probaly end up moving in that direction provided there are safegaurds to ensure it isn't detrimental to the public system.

Long waits and shitty care? I wish I'd seen that program. I've never experienced either long waits or shitty care. Over the past 20 years or so I've had three rounds of abdominal surgery, two of which could probably be called "elective". No long waits, good care, good outcomes each time. My father was diagnosed with an agressively malignant brain tumour 6 years ago. He was through surgery in a couple of days, and received excellent follow-up care, through chemo and radiation and a subsequent year-and-a-half battle that he eventually lost. But as a 75-year-old at the outset, even though his chances weren't good, they threw everything they could at him in an effort to save him. Do I wish he was still alive? Absolutely - every day. Do I attribute his eventual death to "long waits and shitty care" due to our "utterly horrible" health care system? Not for a second. My sister just blew her knee apart dirt-biking a few weeks ago, and had her surgery earlier this week. She could have had it sooner if she'd chosen to stay in Vernon where it happened, but she wanted to have it done here in Squamish so it was delayed while she made arrangements to come back to the coast for the operation. All indications are the procedure was completely successful and she should be skiing again by springtime. (Oh, and no additional "risky behaviour" premium charged by our rapacious, grasping government health care rationers, either. Maybe they forgot.) I can't say I've heard anything about a private clinic owned by "Canada's own version of the Surgeon General". We don't really have a version of the Surgeon-General, just Ministers of Health at the federal and provincial levels, and they're generally not doctors themselves. I do recall something in the news earlier this year about the federal Minister of Health. I don't know what it was about, but maybe that had something to do with it. Or the ABC program may have been referring to the recently-elected head of the Canadian Medical Association - he does indeed own a private clinic in Vancouver, but he's nothing like the Surgeon-General, just the head of the doctors' professional association. His clinic has gone through a couple of variations since it was first proposed, and the last I heard it was in fact operating within the bounds of the Health Act, but I haven't heard much about it in a few months now, so maybe he's gone all renegade on us in the interim. Just so you know, there are in fact clinics of various kinds all over the country, and have been for years. My present doctor practices out of one. The vast majority are perfectly in keeping with the Canada Health Act, but as different clinics start offering different services, or try different methods of delivering existing services, it's inevitable that they sometimes run afoul of the regulations. When that happens, sometimes they are penalized, sometimes they modify their practices to bring them into compliance, and sometimes the rules are adapted to allow for the new methods. It's no more perfect a system than what currently exists in the US. But "utterly horrible"? That's a tad hyberbolic, even for you, Fairweather. And I won't even ask you to take my word for it, Fairweather. You ever heard of an outfit back east called "Johns Hopkins University"? They've been studying comparative outcomes under various different countries' health care systems for a few years now. Their basic findings are that, among the countries studied (generally the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, although some of their research has cast a much broader net), overall health care outcomes are comparable - the countries each do better in some areas, and worse in others, and no one country can be definitively stated to be "better" or "worse" when measuring those outcomes. The one clear differentiating factor they found between those five countries is that the US is spending far more money than the others to achieve basically the same results. They didn't find that any of the systems studied were "utterly horrible" or that any could be summarised as "long waits and shitty care". 2004 2005 2007 "Commonwealth Foundation" (they're probably commies or something) If I can find a re-broadcast of the ABC program you cite, I'd be interested in watching it. I just took a quick look for an on-line copy, but couldn't fnd it. Do you recall the name of the program?

Well done, MalCon. Murray is often fact-challenged. Except that none of what he cites contradicts my assertion that the UN was formed after the Second World War, with the aim of preventing a Third World War. There are a few no-sequiters strung together there, but my point stands. Were people talking about some sort of successor to the League of Nations as early as 1939? Yes, they were. Were the words "United Nations" used to describe the western allied powers? Yes, they were. Were the intial organisers of the UN all allies in the war against Germany and Japan? Yes, they were. Was the United Nations established to fight the Germans or the Japanese? No, it was not. It was established with the objective of avoiding further major wars between nations. Or, since you seem quite keen on cut-and-paste, it was established "as a successor to the League of Nations, which was widely considered to have been ineffective in its role as an international governing body, in that it had been unable to prevent World War II" (see Wikipedia if you feel you must, although you should have learned this stuff in high school). Was it established to combat the USSR? No, it was not. The USSR was in fact a founding member. Which part of that would you like to challenge, FW? I'd be interested in hearing the version of history they taught you. I'm always open to learning something new.

"Grossly mistaken"? See also Kennesaw Georgia, and apparently some "two dozen other" communities around the country. The town in upstate New York that prompted the news story had tied gun ownership to the franchise - no gun in the house, no ballot. That's why the news story - connecting it to the right to vote made it controversial. That was a few years ago now, so maybe they've repealed it, or watered it down. Maybe it got thrown out by one of those "activists" judges that have taken over your judiciary. Maybe it still stands.

There are a number of communities around the US with such ordinances (pun intended). There was one in the news a few years back somewhere in upstate New York, and in the course of reporting on that particular story it was pointed out that it wasn't an unusual regulation. It's not what I would describe as common or widespread, but it seems it's not unheard of, either.

Well, actually, that stuff about Canadians not being allowed to own guns is a myth. We can own guns but most of us simply choose not to. And we're allowed to decide that for ourselves, unlike some areas of the US where governments have chosen to impose mandatory gun-ownership requirements if you want to exercise your right to vote. Ultimately all spray is political, and all politics is spray.

The UN wasn't established to fight the USSR, or the Nazis, or the Japanese. The UN wasn't even formed until after Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire had been defeated. And the Soviet Union was a founding member. The UN wasn't established to combat any country or group of countries. The UN was formed in hopes of avoiding a third Great War involving large numbers of industrialized nations bombing one another into oblivion. And in that respect it has succeeded fairly well, given that the world has not seen another version of the first two Great Wars of the 20th century. Has the UN been very effective at combatting internal civil strife in such places as Darfur? No, but it was never designed for that. Has it been very effective at combatting tyrannical regimes brutalizing their own people? No, but again it was never designed for that. But in the area of avoiding major wars between states, which is what it was designed for, it's had a reasonable success rate. It's certainly succeeded better than anything else we've tried in the past. And the only people who talk seriously about the UN being intent on world government are Bill O'Reilly and his tin-foil-helmet-wearing fans.

"Progress is being made... stay the course... we can start withdrawing next summer maybe... complex and difficult challenges remain... but it's all good, really... oh, except for Iran - Iran is a big problem, we really need to do something about Iran... thanks, Congress, for all the money... Oh, did I mention Iran?" So, Iraq is still a mess, but the Surge is working to plan, which means that by next summer the extra troops can be withdrawn from Baghdad... and redeployed to Iran.