More Comments on various issues

Did the City of Toronto do something right for this biker?
I'm a rare Torontonian. I own a car and two bicycles. I prefer to ride my bikes when I can. It is relatively stress free, cheaper and healthy.
More amazingly I don't live below bloor. In fact I'm on Sheppard in the West end. You don't see a lot of bikers up here, but I'm seeing more and more though.

The point is that I don't dare go on many of the main streets in this city. The side streets are fine but still risky.. but many of the main streets in this city now would qualify almost anywhere else as highways. The speeds are high, the traffic dense and the motorists are not interested nor used to giving access to anybody else. I am a wimp, I ride on the sidewalk.

Most other people ride on the sidewalk. When they rebuilt the curbs and sidewalks in this area last year they did one smart thing.. they paved all of the medians and curbside property between sidewalks and the main roads. It makes sort of a crude bike path. People are using them too. Saves cutting grass errr, I mean weeds. Yeah it's more concrete and pavement but it helps to move people around. Once in awhile, somebody in the government gets something intelligent done. Sadly not often enough.


Ontario Liberals starting to show their support for private healthcare.
In today's Toronto Star online edition I saw this editorial at this link:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1117577411661&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
To make a long story short, Ontario health minister Smitherman hires old provincial liberal war horse Elinor Caplan to study the contentious home care, health program started by the Michael Harris Tories several years ago.

The Harris home care system had private for profit companies competing for contracts on home care with long established and large non-profits like the Victorian Order of Nurses. Caplan surprising some (but not me since I know that Liberals are desperate to bring in a dual health care system but are afraid to admit to it..), but not some critics, gave her stamp of approval to the system. Caplan's conclusion is that competition is good for the consumer and that other countries that she had observed with similar systems operated efficiently. Thus why should we be any different.

My point is this from the perspective of a conservative: When will the CPC try to pull the mask off the LPC's asperations of private/public healthcare which they so carefully hide from the public?


Another Scientist Concurs - There Is Life After Death
From Michael Roll
mike@mroll.freeserve.co.uk5-29-5
http://www.rense.com/general65/life.htm

The Scientific Proof of Survival After Death

"I completely agree with Michael Roll's arguments about the reality of paranormal phenomena and the existence of a normally unseen world... Quantum Physics: the presence of a wave nature in subatomic particles. The vital difference between a wave and a solid particle is the wave properties of superposition and modulation. Put simply, these properties allow waves of different frequencies to occupy the same space without direct interaction. Therefore it is quite possible for parallel universes to exist separated by a difference in some fundamental wave characteristic. This theory springs directly from wave mechanics which unfortunately was not available to the Victorian researchers when the greatest breakthroughs with mediumship were made."

Maybe those Christians and other people of faith are not so crazy after all?


The Scourge of Nationalism
http://www.progressive.org/june05/zinn0605.php
Howard Zinn

"Is not nationalism--that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder--one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking--cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on--have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power."

-- Most people I know love their country. The only people I know that don't are those that have cultural, political, or economic asperations that conflict with their nation's related views. You would be an example of that conflict yourself if your political views were part of the dialectic of capitalistic democracy vs global socialism. Because I prefer a politican sentiment seemingly rare in Canada (conservatism), I often criticise my country and in some ways I do believe it is inferior to other countries. Yet overall I have no problem with the idea of nationalism and I do not see where it has come close to running its course of usefulness for people of the world.

"National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica, and many more). But in a nation like ours--huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction--what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves. "

-- In this case the author ignores small imperialistic states (at least they have projectionist tendencies in the minimum), such as North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, and increasingly Venezuela? The author goes on and on... you can read it for yourself... then finally he hints at the very end what he would replace this scourage called nationalism with: socialism!

"There have always been men and women in this country who have insisted that universal standards of decent human conduct apply to our nation as to others. That insistence continues today and reaches out to people all over the world. It lets them know, like the balloons sent over the countryside by the Paris Commune in 1871, that "our interests are the same." "

-- See how suble the true communist is? hiding behind words like progressive (gee is that like Progressive Conservative by chance?), and commune. Such words used to confuse the uninitiated by their softer and more obscure meaning and carefully placed in a context that is not readily noticeable for significance.