On 2022-08-03 1:07 AM, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 19:21:00 -0400, Rhino
> <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
>
>> If a man can be a woman just by wishing for it, then surely crops can
>> grow fine without fertilizer.
>>
> By that stsandard I could have a perfectly healthy diet consuming
> nothing but beer!

Exactly.

Mind you, you shouldn't forget to have at least your daily intake of
chocolate. Chocolate is one of the most congenial of vegetables and we
all know you need vegetables in your diet! After all, beans are
vegetables and chocolate comes from cocoa beans so chocolate must also
be a vegetable.

--
Rhino

On 2022-08-03 1:04 AM, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 19:09:08 -0400, Rhino
> <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
>
>>>> We have plenty of our own virtue-signalling nonsense here since Trudeau
>>>> became PM. He's actually trying to phase out fertilizer now, just like
>>>> the Dutch PM has done, even though it will clearly reduce crop yields
>>>> (and exports) dramatically.
>
> I'd be astonished if we hear any more of that come the election -
> after all he does want to win seats in Saskatchewan + Manitoba.
>
Trudeau may not talk about it but you can bet the farmer's will be
talking about it! Then again, that's only a problem if the media covers
it so I'm sure they will take the initiative to ignore any farmer
protests in those provinces or, at most, minimize them as being from a
few disaffected racists. (The Liberals will probably hire a couple of
actors with white supremacist flags to stand among the farmers and then
focus on the actors in their coverage of the protests.)

>>> Yes, I saw someone on Twitter quoting Trudeau telling the nation's farmers to
>>> "just grow the same amount of food with 1/3rd the fertilizer".
>
>> In the last two elections, he got minorities which made it a bit
>> trickier for him to govern but each time he had a contentious bill, he
>> got one of the *other* "progressive" parties to vote with the Liberals
>> and got the bill through Parliament. (*Four* out of five of our parties
>> in Parliament are "progressive" and even the Conservatives have a strong
>> "progressive" wing. That one sentence explains why the entire country is
>> fucked for the foreseeable future.) After the Freedom Convoy, he
>> actually got a formal agreement with the NDP to prop him up until 2025.
>> The NDP *could* bail out of the deal if they're really unhappy with
>> something Trudeau does but most of us doubt that such a thing will
>> happen; people think the NDP leader is determined to stick it out until
>> 2025 so that he gets his gold-plated pension. If ol' Jugmeat (the proper
>> pronunciation of his first name) defeats the government, it is reckoned
>> that his own party will oust him for being an unprincipled careerist.
>> Mind you, they can't take his seat away from him so his pension will
>> still be fine but they could boot him out of the leadership.
>
> Two points: (1) NO prime minister has ever won 4 consecutive elections
> and Justin's on #3

His own father had a majority government, then two minorities, and got
replaced by Joe Clark but only for a few short months, then he came back
with a MAJORITY for another four years. So even if you are sure Trudeau
can't get a 4th consecutive term because of precedent, precedent itself
suggests that he wouldn't be out of office long. Personally, I'm not as
convinced that we can rely on precedent to ensure that Trudeau's current
term is his final consecutive one. Precedents get broken all the time.

(2) I totally fail to see why you spell Singh's
> name "Jugmeat" since "Jagmeet" (the correct spelling) would be
> pronounced correctly by most Americans using regular phonetic
> pronunciation - besides most educated Americans have met at least one
> Sikh...
>
Knowing a Sikh does not mean you know how to pronounce every Sikh first
name. Our media pronounced the man's name as "Jag-Meat" initially and it
was only after someone corrected them that they started saying "Jug-Meat".

> As for the 6 years before a pension, I'm pleased to report that while
> our present MP was first elected in 2015, the previous two each served
> FIVE years each (one Liberal, one Conservative). I agree parliamentary
> pensions are at obscene levels and given our current MP is now a 2nd
> tier cabinet minister he'll be at the trough in due time I'm sure. The
> present Liberal has no appreciable skills I know of

.... just like Trudeau!!....

> though the
> previous one served as a mayor of a city of 90000 for 10+ years before
> parliament so at least he had a clue.
>
>> If the NDP somehow bolted from the deal, Trudeau could still potentially
>> make a similar deal with the Bloc Quebecois and stay alive that way. Or
>> he could just go back to the old approach and seduce different parties
>> to support each bill.
>
> I dunno - both Chretien and Harper felt allying with the Separatist
> Bloc Quebecois would be suicidal elsewhere in the country and I think
> they were right.
>
Politics are like prostitutes: they will sleep with anyone given the
right incentives. I wouldn't put it past Trudeau to get in bed with the
Bloc, especially if he can trump up some dire threat to the nation posed
by the Conservatives. I'm sure he'd see ANY move away from his
"progressive" policies like that. For example, let's say Poilievre wins
the next election with only a minority but tries to govern like he has a
majority. One of his moves is to dial back one of Trudeau's policies,
like accepting 87 genders unequestioningly. Trudeau, who is Opposition
Leader while looking for another gig, goes ballistic at this "assault"
on the LGBT crowd and makes a deal with the Bloc to force a confidence
vote on the controversy. I feel sure he would defend such a move as
essential to preserve a "progressive" Canada.

>> The problem is that he's still young and has no observable skills so
>> there's not much incentive for him to move on to some other job. He's
>> such a narcissist that the only way to get rid of him might be to
>> promote him to a more prestigious position, like Secretary-General of
>> the UN (assuming he would find that job prestigious).
>
> Well at least in that role he'd be off the Canadian payroll.....unlike
> an ambassador.

Paying his salary, while grating, is nowhere as big a problem for me as
having to endure his goofball policies!

> I did talk to some Brits and they seemed to like Mark
> Carney (who after 5 years as Chair of the Bank of Canada went on to
> the same role at the Bank of England but is now back in Toronto doing
> heaven only knows what - his children are still school age so
> presumably he's doing something with a paycheque)
>
I don't really CARE about Mark Carney. I know he's being touted as
Trudeau's potential heir. I am also satisfied that Trudeau is the ONLY
Liberal currently in Parliament that could potentially win an election;
the rest of the cabinet (and backbenchers) are nobodies without any mass
appeal. They all rode in on Trudeau's coat tails and they'd be lost
without him or someone from outside the Parliamentary caucus leading the
circus. So Carney might well be the White Knight that saves them but I
know nothing about Carney's views on anything. He did a stint as
Governor of the Bank of Canada and the equivalent in the UK and didn't
piss off too many people but so what? What are his policies on every
OTHER issue that a PM would have to deal with? I haven't any idea. Heck,
I can't even recall what great moves he made as Governor of the Bank of
Canada. What was his monetary policy? What did he do about interest rates?

This whole Mark Carney thing reminds me of years of occasional newspaper
stories in the Pierre Trudeau era - particularly when the bloom was off
the rose and the whole country was pretty sick of him - in which John
Turner was touted as The Guy Who Would Save the Liberal Party. Once
Trudeau finally resigned (the second time), Turner did indeed succeed
him as PM for a few short months but by that point people were so sick
of the Liberals that Mulroney had the biggest landslide ever seen to
that point.

>> We could be stuck with him for many years to come unless his base
>> finally tires of him. Since they haven't written him off yet, despite
>> the many MANY reasons for doing so, I'm not holding my breath on them
>> getting weary of him.
>
> If his numerous scandals (black face, WE Charity, Aga Khan, the
> bribery scandal that caused Wilson-Reybould to resign over his
> non-action) just for starters) haven't ruined him in the media I
> don't know what would - certainly Harper or Mulroney would have been
> laid low
>
I think the problem is that the media is clearly in the tank for the
Liberals and has been as long as I can remember. Trudeau's $600 million
dollar annual grant to the vast majority of the media and his $1.5
billion annual gift to the CBC biases the media irresistibly towards the
Liberals/"progressives". Other points of view tend to be demonized and
people are still too timid to ignore that and vote for parties that
stand for sensible policies.

And maybe the majority of the Canadian population has been sufficiently
indoctrinated over the last several decades by schools, media, and
politicians, to think that the "progressive" path is the ONLY moral
path, not matter how bizarre the turns on that path.

On 2022-08-03 1:08 AM, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 23:48:56 -0400, Rhino
> <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2022-08-01 11:46 PM, The Horny Goat wrote:
>>> On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 10:10:27 -0400, Rhino
>>> <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The enviro-zealots are at it again.
>>>>
>>>> https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-the-crazy-directions-canadas-plastics-ban-is-taking-us
>>>
>>> Which is highly surprising to me since the Toronto Sun was always a
>>> somewhat rightist tabloid known for its 'models' on page 3 (although
>>> my wife's cousin had been a "Sunshine Boy" and I heard his friends
>>> crashed the bridal shower with a life sized cardboard reproduction of
>>> his Sun picture for her)
>>
>> What is surprising to you about the Sun criticizing overzealous
>> environmentalists?
>
> Sorry I misread you - thought you meant they had gone over to the dark
> side

After giving that a few seconds of thought, I think I understand what
happened: When I said "the enviro-zealots are at it again", you thought
I was referring to the Sun, rather than the Sun's reporting of what the
enviro-zealots are doing.

I've never been a frequent reader of the Sun for any sustained period
but as far as I know they are still oriented towards common sense. Call
that small 'c' conservative if you like. They don't seem to take much of
a stance on issues deemed to be "social conservative", like opposing gay
marriage or trans-rights in the times I've read them.

I find Lorne Gunter a sensible guy in the pieces I've seen which feature
him - like the one in the link - but I don't know his views on
everything so we might disagree profoundly on some things.

--
Rhino

On 2022-08-03 1:13 AM, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Aug 2022 09:02:53 -0400, Rhino
> <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
>
>> patriotic regardless of your health. Eventually, there will be immense
>> social pressure on people to end their lives voluntarily by a certain
>> age or be demonized as selfish monsters who don't care about the planet.
>> Of course, there will be exceptions for the elites in some form. Maybe
>> they'll just retreat out of public view and leave the rest of the world
>> to assume that they've ended their lives but somehow, THEY won't be
>> making that sacrifice until every possible penny has been spent to
>> preserve THEIR lives.
>>
> My kids have heard me say numerous times that if I were healthy even
> if feeble as hell I'd love to live till 300 - obviously not gonna
> happen but I'm pretty sure that if I were not living on dog food and a
> leaky roof I'd find enough interesting and exciting about life to want
> to go on much longer than I expect to.

My life plan is simple: "Live forever or die trying!" :-)

Mind you, I'm assuming that I continue to feel that a curious person can
never be so bored that he sees no point in living any longer; if that
changes - or I develop medical conditions that are unendurable, which
seems more likely - I can imagine not wanting to keep living.

> ]Though right now I just have to get through this week - my wife
> passed in early March this week and earlier today I donated nearly all
> her clothing to a charity she and I supported and our anniversary is
> in two days and am taking our dog for a general anaesthetic type
> procedure in three days so I'm not expecting so I'm not expecting a
> 'shits and giggles' week]

The experts say there's nothing more stressful than losing a spouse
(assuming you cared for her as is obviously the case) so that will hurt
for a long time to come. But I think you'll get past the clothes
donation in less time and the dog is probably going to be back to normal
in a few days and then you can put that behind you.

Speaking of experts, I saw an interesting video yesterday about what
makes an expert and immediately thought of you, for reasons that will
become obvious if you watch it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA [18 minutes]

--
Rhino

On Wed, 3 Aug 2022 09:05:03 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

>On 2022-08-03 1:04 AM, The Horny Goat wrote:
>> On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 19:09:08 -0400, Rhino
>> <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>> We have plenty of our own virtue-signalling nonsense here since Trudeau
>>>>> became PM. He's actually trying to phase out fertilizer now, just like
>>>>> the Dutch PM has done, even though it will clearly reduce crop yields
>>>>> (and exports) dramatically.
>>
>> I'd be astonished if we hear any more of that come the election -
>> after all he does want to win seats in Saskatchewan + Manitoba.
>>
>Trudeau may not talk about it but you can bet the farmer's will be
>talking about it! Then again, that's only a problem if the media covers
>it so I'm sure they will take the initiative to ignore any farmer
>protests in those provinces or, at most, minimize them as being from a
>few disaffected racists. (The Liberals will probably hire a couple of
>actors with white supremacist flags to stand among the farmers and then
>focus on the actors in their coverage of the protests.)
>
>>>> Yes, I saw someone on Twitter quoting Trudeau telling the nation's farmers to
>>>> "just grow the same amount of food with 1/3rd the fertilizer".

I agree this is likely to be an issue at least on the praries.
>>> In the last two elections, he got minorities which made it a bit
>>> trickier for him to govern but each time he had a contentious bill, he
>>> got one of the *other* "progressive" parties to vote with the Liberals
>>> and got the bill through Parliament. (*Four* out of five of our parties
>>> in Parliament are "progressive" and even the Conservatives have a strong
>>> "progressive" wing. That one sentence explains why the entire country is
>>> fucked for the foreseeable future.) After the Freedom Convoy, he
>>> actually got a formal agreement with the NDP to prop him up until 2025.
>>> The NDP *could* bail out of the deal if they're really unhappy with
>>> something Trudeau does but most of us doubt that such a thing will
>>> happen; people think the NDP leader is determined to stick it out until
>>> 2025 so that he gets his gold-plated pension. If ol' Jugmeat (the proper
>>> pronunciation of his first name) defeats the government, it is reckoned
>>> that his own party will oust him for being an unprincipled careerist.
>>> Mind you, they can't take his seat away from him so his pension will
>>> still be fine but they could boot him out of the leadership.
>>
>> Two points: (1) NO prime minister has ever won 4 consecutive elections
>> and Justin's on #3
>
>His own father had a majority government, then two minorities, and got
>replaced by Joe Clark but only for a few short months, then he came back
>with a MAJORITY for another four years. So even if you are sure Trudeau
>can't get a 4th consecutive term because of precedent, precedent itself
>suggests that he wouldn't be out of office long. Personally, I'm not as
>convinced that we can rely on precedent to ensure that Trudeau's current
>term is his final consecutive one. Precedents get broken all the time.

I agree precedents aren't forever and plenty of people get re-elected
who shouldn't be and vice versa.

> (2) I totally fail to see why you spell Singh's
>> name "Jugmeat" since "Jagmeet" (the correct spelling) would be
>> pronounced correctly by most Americans using regular phonetic
>> pronunciation - besides most educated Americans have met at least one
>> Sikh...
>>
>Knowing a Sikh does not mean you know how to pronounce every Sikh first
>name. Our media pronounced the man's name as "Jag-Meat" initially and it
>was only after someone corrected them that they started saying "Jug-Meat".

Fair enough. At the very least you would expect his party's press
liaison would have set them straight early on.

>> As for the 6 years before a pension, I'm pleased to report that while
>> our present MP was first elected in 2015, the previous two each served
>> FIVE years each (one Liberal, one Conservative). I agree parliamentary
>> pensions are at obscene levels and given our current MP is now a 2nd
>> tier cabinet minister he'll be at the trough in due time I'm sure. The
>> present Liberal has no appreciable skills I know of
>
>... just like Trudeau!!....

Our MP had a better resume than Trudeau when each of them were first
elected. (For what it's worth Ilive about 3 miles from where Pierre
and Maggie were married and drive by that church on a regular basis
since it's my usual route to the highway when I'm going eastbound.)

>>> If the NDP somehow bolted from the deal, Trudeau could still potentially
>>> make a similar deal with the Bloc Quebecois and stay alive that way. Or
>>> he could just go back to the old approach and seduce different parties
>>> to support each bill.
>>
>> I dunno - both Chretien and Harper felt allying with the Separatist
>> Bloc Quebecois would be suicidal elsewhere in the country and I think
>> they were right.
>>
>Politics are like prostitutes: they will sleep with anyone given the
>right incentives. I wouldn't put it past Trudeau to get in bed with the
>Bloc, especially if he can trump up some dire threat to the nation posed
>by the Conservatives. I'm sure he'd see ANY move away from his
>"progressive" policies like that. For example, let's say Poilievre wins
>the next election with only a minority but tries to govern like he has a
>majority. One of his moves is to dial back one of Trudeau's policies,
>like accepting 87 genders unequestioningly. Trudeau, who is Opposition
>Leader while looking for another gig, goes ballistic at this "assault"
>on the LGBT crowd and makes a deal with the Bloc to force a confidence
>vote on the controversy. I feel sure he would defend such a move as
>essential to preserve a "progressive" Canada.

While I agree with you on your first point I don't think "the 905" is
quite as "progressive" as you imply - they WERE after all the core of
Ford's re-election provincially after all. And yes I very much do know
of Ontario's tendency to vote opposite ways federally and
provincially!

>>> The problem is that he's still young and has no observable skills so
>>> there's not much incentive for him to move on to some other job. He's
>>> such a narcissist that the only way to get rid of him might be to
>>> promote him to a more prestigious position, like Secretary-General of
>>> the UN (assuming he would find that job prestigious).
>>
>> Well at least in that role he'd be off the Canadian payroll.....unlike
>> an ambassador.
>
>Paying his salary, while grating, is nowhere as big a problem for me as
>having to endure his goofball policies!

No objection there. No doubt lots of US Democrat supporters felt the
same way 2016-20 and vice versa 2020-present

>> I did talk to some Brits and they seemed to like Mark
>> Carney (who after 5 years as Chair of the Bank of Canada went on to
>> the same role at the Bank of England but is now back in Toronto doing
>> heaven only knows what - his children are still school age so
>> presumably he's doing something with a paycheque)
>>
>I don't really CARE about Mark Carney. I know he's being touted as
>Trudeau's potential heir. I am also satisfied that Trudeau is the ONLY
>Liberal currently in Parliament that could potentially win an election;
>the rest of the cabinet (and backbenchers) are nobodies without any mass
>appeal. They all rode in on Trudeau's coat tails and they'd be lost
>without him or someone from outside the Parliamentary caucus leading the
>circus. So Carney might well be the White Knight that saves them but I
>know nothing about Carney's views on anything. He did a stint as
>Governor of the Bank of Canada and the equivalent in the UK and didn't
>piss off too many people but so what? What are his policies on every
>OTHER issue that a PM would have to deal with? I haven't any idea. Heck,
>I can't even recall what great moves he made as Governor of the Bank of
>Canada. What was his monetary policy? What did he do about interest rates?

He's definitely more qualified than Trudeau whether he's "in touch" is
anybody's guess and barring a Trudeau wipeout next election I doubt
we're going to get to find out. With Trudeau's immigration policies
that's increasingly less likely though.

On Wed, 3 Aug 2022 10:37:02 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

>The experts say there's nothing more stressful than losing a spouse
>(assuming you cared for her as is obviously the case) so that will hurt
>for a long time to come. But I think you'll get past the clothes
>donation in less time and the dog is probably going to be back to normal
>in a few days and then you can put that behind you.
>
>Speaking of experts, I saw an interesting video yesterday about what
>makes an expert and immediately thought of you, for reasons that will
>become obvious if you watch it:
>
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA [18 minutes]

Will have to listen to it - hopefully that's a compliment :)

As for grieving I've heard 2 years is common for a spouse - hope
they're wrong. As for the dog's root canal on Thursday, I'm in on
Friday for one so it goes from bad to worse.

Tonight would have been our 38th anniversary - and I've got too much
on my plate tomorrow and Friday to do what I want to do which is drink
that whole bottle of sherry tonight. Well it's her birthday in two
weeks.....

(As I recall 38 years ago at our reception I was starting to count
down the time to when I could reasonable take her away from our
reception and get her all by ourselves....and how it was a wet night
in Ontario and how I managed to stall the car twice before
successfully getting away the third time!)