they still have baseball?

umm. is pedro martinez still playing?

let's go! ex-pos!

i somehow doubt kids in montreal are going to react very well to getting a blue jays sweater in the mail from...geez, kids aren't even going to know what eatons was...

point is: far less people care than is being suggested. i tuned out after the 1994 strike, and never tuned in. 'cause the fact is that it really is ridiculously boring. and, most of the country feels little, if any, connection to toronto.

maximum impact scenario is that it keeps some rob ford voters at home.

www.cbc.ca/sports/baseball/mlb/blue-jays-rangers-game-2-extra-innings-1.3264555

see, this is another example of tactics backfiring. look at that line. it's all seniors that decided they were going to vote conservative in 2015 some time around 1973. nothing's going to sway these cats, so they want to get their votes in early. it's the last minute voters that he wants to slow down, not the sure and steady card-carrying advance voters...

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/election-2015-toronto-voters-report-long-lines-at-advance-polls-1.3265731 

my name must be unique
actually, a lot of those people are voting early because they don't want to deal with improper de-registration on Oct. 19, they want to make sure their vote against harper actually counts 

jessica murray
mmmhmmm.

some polls are suggesting that harper may be pulling in as much as 50% of the senior vote right now.

Strategic Voter
my Strategic vote was in as of this afternoon

jessica murray
not very strategic, then. what if the data flips this week?

Me like Harper, Ugh!
Don't count on it being seniors, Jessica. I'm 65 next month and I despise the harperoid. In 1973 I was all idealistic and 'love conquers all'ish. I have never changed my value system and I'm pretty sure most of my fellow seniors think like me...unless they got stupid-rich in the meantime.

Strategic voting is riding based. Polls down to the riding level don't happen that often.

jessica murray
well, it's what the data says, and that's more valuable than your personal anecdote. i don't really understand it, either.

i've grown up with the understanding of the baby boomers not as the generation of the summer of love but as the generation of radical individualism, neo-liberal reform, randian objectivism and selfishness as a virtue. it's the nixon-thatcher-reagan generation. the "me generation". the overwhelming conservative bias in the baby boomer generation is not a new phenomenon, and not connected to passing through into retirement; it's been consistent since they were in their 20s. and, they've moved the center of society radically to their right as they've aged.

my guess is that they're more concerned about stock markets than social security. it may seem short-sighted, self-centered and irrational. but, that's fully consistent with their past decisions.

i'm speaking in aggregate, of course, and fully understand that trends don't necessarily apply to individuals.

there have been quite a few riding polls released, and it's often....well, *i* don't find it hard to reasonably interpolate data a day or two beforehand. but this is a red herring. regardless of how much data is or is not available, it never makes sense to vote strategically in advance polls.

pics or it didn't happen.

i'm just trying to piece together the chain of logic, and not really getting it. is he trying to make a fashion statement?

now, if he was trying to make a point, what he'd have to do is show up to a citizenship ceremony with a confederate flag wrapped around his face. would he be denied access to the ceremony? i somehow doubt it. they may ask him to make a little space for his mouth, so they can see he's saying the oath.

and, even then, what's his point?

that said.

and in fairness.

where does this "wearing a disguise with intent" law come from? is it a felony? does intent need to be proven, here? can he get off if mens rea is disproven? was this law written in the nineteenth century?

"while my client admits to wearing a disguise, we believe it is clear that there was no intent, and we request that the charges be reduced to wearing a disguise in the second degree."

ok. ok. it's wearing a disguise with intent...to commit a crime.

...and it seems to be the anti-mask protesting law that the conservatives brought in. i remember that.

but, this is neither a riot nor an unlawful assembly.

listen: it's obviously a goofy thing to do. i don't want to stand up for him, exactly. but, he's got a pretty good case that the law is unconstitutional.

lots of irony, here.

i'm a little bit wrong. the anti-mask bill was built on top of existing legislation. love the internet era.

Possession of break-in instrument

351. (1) Every one who, without lawful excuse, the proof of which lies on them, has in their possession any instrument suitable for the purpose of breaking into any place, motor vehicle, vault or safe under circumstances that give rise to a reasonable inference that the instrument has been used or is or was intended to be used for such a purpose,

(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years; or

(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

Disguise with intent

(2) Every one who, with intent to commit an indictable offence, has his face masked or coloured or is otherwise disguised is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years.

i sincerely hope this goes to the supreme court.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/confederate-flag-clad-man-disrupts-calgary-candidates-debate-1.3264849

"Despite what the NDP and Liberals says, we cannot borrow or tax our way to prosperity."

he says that like prosperity is a thing we may have some day, rather than something that we already have.

it's just another example of a statement that's really meaningless nonsense. i mean, consider it applied in other circumstances, and tell me how much sense you think it makes.

"we cannot cheer our way into being dominant at hockey."
"we cannot consume our way into having ample amounts of fresh water reserves."
"we cannot freeze our way into being cold."

it's hard to argue with him a lot of the time, because he's often not expressing anything resembling a coherent thought. if canada is not a prosperous country, what country is?

i think it should be clear to everybody that we have prosperity already. and, what a government should be doing in a prosperous country is finding ways to take advantage of that prosperity in ways that benefit actual people.

the reason we're in a deficit in the first place is that he cut taxes too far relative to revenues. and, then he grew himself out of it. there's huge amounts of untapped prosperity. you can throw a dart at a wall of policy proposals.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-conservative-party-platform-1.3264597

"protect our economy with a balanced budget"

????

you can't even make sense of what they're trying to say. and they suggest their opponents are clueless?

this is desperate, and if they think they're going to reverse weeks of ndp-->liberal momentum with a few cheap shots they're wrong, but it's at least nice to put the racism away.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-ad-hawk-conservative-target-trudeau-economy-1.3263482

the sucking it out part sounds like a good idea. the reusing it part doesn't. i'd rather see it pumped underground, where it came from. but, then, where's the business model?

and, fast-forward two-hundred years when we're dealing with dangerously low levels of greenhouse gasses, because we're sucking them all down to drive to work.

we can make this stop. we have better technologies - but they're less profitable. that's why we need to forget about the private sector and look towards government. the private sector has never been able to create any sort of real innovation; it's always comes from massive state investment into technology, and mostly through university research. from the manhatten project to the internet and beyond, the private sector has very little to show for itself in terms of true innovation. it just profits off of state-funded research.

yet, when faced with a serious crisis, we turn to the private sector for answers instead of government? that's completely irrational.

the private sector can do things like grow apples.

but, you can't expect it to succeed in achieving anything complicated, as the profit motive will interfere.

serious problems need to be solved by government.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/carbon-capture-squamish-1.3263855

KevinMcKinney
I don't think we'll ever see this process creating dangerously low levels of CO2; certainly in today's context, the risk is all the other way.

Should your scenario ever come to pass, it would be pretty simple to fix; just recycle less...

jessica murray
this creates a business model that is no less threatening to climate sustainability. you shouldn't be using the term "recycle"; it's not a valid comparison. but, scaling down production would decrease profits.

it'd be great if we could call up exxon, explain the crisis to them and have them scale down production. but, it's almost comically absurd.

again: we have better technology. but, it's less profitable. so, we need governments to develop it.

Commenter42
You get that the CO2 is returned to the atmosphere during that drive to work, don't you? It would be a cycle, where it's captured, turned into fuel, the fuel is burned, it's released again, the captured, and so on.

jessica murray
it'll never work like that. corporations are driven purely by profit motives.

there's absolutely no reason to hold on to obsolete technologies, other than an aversion to change.

to put it another way, you're putting faith in the corporate sector to regulate the carbon in the atmosphere. but, if that faith were well rooted, then we wouldn't be in this problem in the first place. it's not an answer. the answer is to stop polluting.

if you break it down, it's a technical question about demand. if you assume that demand keeps growing, it hits a point where we're sucking down more than we've emitted. that's why we need two hundred years to get there. but, it's inevitable.

in two hundred years, we might have anti-matter or something. fair enough. but, why bother? we have a plethora of other options.

Commenter42
I agree about the profit motives of corporations, but if the technology is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it to fuels whose consumption returns it to the atmosphere, how is the profit drive going to change that? That's what the technology is! I get that money can twist things along the way, but I don't get how this leads to too little CO2 in the atmosphere.

Demand for fuel means that fuel is being consumed. Consuming the fuel releases the CO2 back into the atmosphere. This is similar to trees sequestering CO2 until they die and decompose (or burn) and releasing it again. Unless someone is stockpiling such an enormous amount of fuel that it actually affects atmospheric concentrations (and the cost of this would be gigantic, with no purpose), then I don't see how your breakdown works. Even if this were to happen, there's a simple solution--burn it.

Somehow, you've managed to make me sound like a right-wing corporate shill, but that is not the case. I'm commenting only on the possibilities for such technology (I don't know whether it can even live up to these possibilities yet).

jessica murray
first, you always have to have more fuel available than is being consumed. second, pulling it in and out is not the same thing as letting it sit. i want to be clear that i understand your argument, but it's just sort of a naive understanding. if you envision the system as working as though you have a pipe from your car to the factory [a conceptual oversimplification that demonstrates the point], you can conceptualize how it breaks the greenhouse effect, even if emissions are continual.

where the serious potential problem arises is when the net pull begins to exceed the net output, since whatever year. let's say 1980. then, the net effect is actually a reversal of the greenhouse effect, and we should see global cooling.

and, if you assume rising demand and depleting carbon reserves, you can set the date on your calendar.

Commenter42
So you're saying that a simplified model of the system, a factory, a fuel pipe to a consuming device, a device that consume the fuel and releases the CO2 somehow leads to a breaking of the CO2 effect?? It's that simple model I'm using to say the opposite. Where is the break?

jessica murray
i'm sorry that you're not able to make sense of the points. i'll try a few different ways to present it.

you seem to be ignoring the fact that oil is a non-renewable resource, and that we're either very close to or past peak oil. if you set up a system like this, then the atmosphere eventually becomes the only remaining carbon reservoir, and the only way to continue to meet increasing demand is to pull an increasing net amount down. it's not and can't be carbon neutral, unless we halt all growth. and, as mentioned, that's in addition to the necessity of having fuel stores.

the "recycling" part of this [and there's energy in, so it's not really recycling, but let's ignore that] can only cycle around if we assume a stagnant economy. you can only get enough cycling to maintain existing demand. x out only allows for x in (under ideal technology). but x is consistently increasing. so, we will need to pull more and more down. and, the curve will eventually intersect, so long as demand continues to rise.

so, consider the pipe-to-factory conceptualization. that can meet existing net demand. but, as demand increases, we have to pull more and more down out of the atmospheric reservoir. the amount that we're cycling will continue to increase, as growth increases. but, we'll need to pull more and more down to meet new demand. then, we'll be looking at decreasing ppms and a threat of global cooling.

it's just putting off a transition we need to make, anyways. right now, we're hurdling towards venus; this will reverse the curve and send us hurdling towards mars. we need to find a way to maintain our middle point.