It reminds you of the old joke about two friends who meet on main street and one says to the other, “Did I see you go into that gambling hall yesterday?”

“Yep,” the other replies.

“Don’t you know that the games are all crooked in that place?” the first guy asked.

“Yep,” the other replies.

“So why did you go in there?” the first guy asks.

“Cus it’s the only game in town,” is the reply.

Welcome to Ontarriarrio and Ontario Lottery and Gaming. It is the only legal game in town. Take, leave it or take your chances at one of the many hundreds of illegal games.

What is even worse, you might live in Babel, less than a half hour away from Casino Rama. That casino is controlled by Ontario Lottery and Gaming. If it was not the only game in town or rather in that part of Ontario, nobody would go there. It is a perfect example of why government should never be in the gaming business.

Penn National Gaming, the American company that runs Casino Rama for the aboriginal community that owns the facility, specializes in slot machines. Anyone with some marketing background would look around Casino Rama and quickly come to the conclusion that the money is in the slots. If you go for the casino games, you get poor treatment from Casino Rama—or did, until the casino decided to play to the race card.

When it comes to table games at Casino Rama, the preferred patron is ethnically Chinese. That is not a complaint or a racist statement. The Chinese love for gambling is just something that is known and acknowledged among gamblers. And as that love passes through generations, we are seeing much more knowledgeable gamblers emerge. In fact, one of the best cheats I have ever seen at a blackjack table was a young Chinese guy who looked like an innocent 15-year old. Mind you, the very fact of my catching on to what he was doing did not auger well for him having a lengthy career as a cheat.

But what is causing problems for Casino Rama is that the dominance of slots means that catering to the race card is squeezing out the games that do not appeal as much to Chinese gamblers. Games such as pai gow tiles and mini-baccarat that appeal to the Chinese are taking over. At the other end of the floor, blackjack, craps and Caribbean stud poker, that do not appeal as much, are losing out with fewer tables.

Mind you, call it smart marketing, call it a simple business decision, the casino can cater to any group it wants to. That is its choice. It just seems like a long drive to Niagara Falls to find a good craps game or to play a little blackjack. And, after all, pai gow is not all that complex.

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Liberal Ignatieff’s tour spreads discontent,

Getting rid of Stephen Harper is the intent.

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What are the Harper Conservatives doing? What in God’s name would a country with the land mass of Canada want with a short-range stealth fighter aircraft like the F-35? Who does National Defence Minister Peter MacKay think we are going to attack now?

A stealth fighter has only one purpose. It is designed to escape most forms of detection to enable it to go to an enemy target and let loose with shells, rockets or bombs and otherwise cause trouble. The only people we might want to do that to are the American Air Force generals and navy admirals who want us to help pay for the development of their favourite aircraft. That would mean attacking them in the Pentagon. With how Americans feel about their Pentagon, our only problem might be arranging for in-flight refuelling so that the planes could come back to Canada.

How many billions are we wasting this time, Mr. Harper? This is the guy who spent a billion of our tax dollars to tell the G20 to be frugal.

Do the Conservatives know that Canada has a huge land mass in the Arctic? To patrol and maintain our sovereignty in the Arctic, we should have big, noisy, long-range patrol aircraft that people would notice. Where is the AVRO Arrow now that we really need it?

Did Peter MacKay know that the F-35 is ideal for use on aircraft carriers? It is designed for short take off and landing needs. Since the Americans are great believers in aircraft carriers, that makes sense for them. Canada has not had an aircraft carrier since we got rid of the HMCS Bonaventure 40 years ago. It proves we knew that aircraft carriers are used to take aircraft across bodies of water so that you might attack another country. We do not even know who we are supposed to be mad at!

Mr. Harper keeps spending our money to win our approval so that we might give him a majority government. Then we could find out what a real bastard he can be.

This started out as a comment for the day.  It got a bit carried away.

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Today, Mrs. Ignatieff said ‘Hello’ to me,

I think: What a fine first lady she will be.

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It is deeply saddening to see people gathering on the overpasses of Highway 401, The Macdonald-Cartier Freeway. They bring their flags. They gather quietly. The cavalcade from Armed Forces Base Trenton passes quickly on its way to the Toronto morgue. They could drive slower, the dead are in no hurry.

But is this the tribute our soldiers deserve? The question is not ‘do we support our troops?’ Of course we do. The question is why are we letting them die so needlessly? Do we believe in what they are doing?

Why would Canadians want to protect opium poppy farmers and their warlords from religious zealots who want the poppy profits to pay for their holy war against the infidel. Why should our soldiers be cannon fodder in a war we cannot win, in a place where our soldiers do not belong, a backward, corrupted land of hardship and suffering.

It was 200 years ago that the first British soldiers scrambled up the Khyber Pass to pacify the Pashtun and other tribes of Afghanistan. The tribes have eaten the rations of foreign soldiers ever since. There is no Highway of Heroes for the British, Russians, CIA operatives and the many thousands of others who tried so hard to bring peace and lost their lives there. The country is like a caged war zone, where you never know whom you are fighting or why they want to kill you.

Even the original Taliban warriors were Sunni fundamentalists from the Madras’s (religious seminaries) of Pakistan who armed their students and seized power from the Afghan warlords in the vacuum after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Today’s Taliban are an endless stream of jihadists from throughout the Islamist world, there to fight and kill the infidels from NATO. For everyone of those fighters killed by our troops, three more are born in the desperation of a war between the east and the west, between Allah and God, between rich and poor and between the 21^st and 17^th centuries.

Canadians need to ask: “Why should our soldiers die for this?” Does anybody really believe that American President George W. Bush was right when he ordered American soldiers to invade Afghanistan? His motive was revenge for the World Trade Center. Was it worth it? Was it worth it in American lives? How could it possibly be worth it in Canadian lives?

And yet, on the Highway of Heroes, we honour soldiers on their journey to autopsy.

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Mr. Harper, the PM Canada should never have had,

An egocentric ideologue without feelings, he’s bad.

_____________________________________

Why’s the Toronto Star so surprised

That the golf courses are subsidized?

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Dan McTeague MP, we don’t care if your web site makes money,

It’s your possible ties to the oil companies cartel that look funny.

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This is personal. As a past president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada and former head of public education for the International Federation of MS Societies, I have some knowledge of multiple sclerosis. Even more important, I have lived with someone with MS for the past 48 years. That tends to make you better aware of the disease, its ramifications and what is being done about it.

Despite the ties to the “officialdom” of the Canadian MS society, I am hardly immune to the desperation often shown by MS patients and those who care for them. As I explained to a House of Commons committee in Ottawa more than 30 years ago, those of us who support health agencies in their quest for cures are not necessarily doing it from a charitable viewpoint. We can also have deep personal concerns.

The current controversy over the treatment of MS, proposed by Italian vascular surgeon Paolo Zamboni, is a case that cuts both ways. Some patient advocates claim that MS society officials are suppressing the theory. This is absolutely ludicrous. At the same time, the suggestion by any supposed expert that Zamboni’s work is ‘junk science’ would be ignorant. The truth is that nobody knows whether Zamboni is right or wrong.

But if you are as desperate for a cure as those living with multiple sclerosis, you grasp hungrily at those straws. There is no blame for that. How could you care and not want that sudden, all-revealing, miracle cure. Zamboni’s ‘cure’ appears to be so simple, so low in risk, so oddly logical and so quick a solution that you cannot resist it. The only problem is that people are building a business out of Zamboni’s solution in jurisdictions where there are not the controls on medicine such as we have in this country.

If we did not have the controls such as we enjoy in Canada, there would currently be as many as 12 so-called cures for MS being actively promoted and sold. Whether Medicare could support those ‘cures’ is doubtful. The reason is that MS can have its own patterns of exacerbation and welcomed remission in each individual. Doctors have endlessly demonstrated that there are some patients who can be temporarily cured with sugar pills. The simple facts are that if a person wants desperately to be cured and believes strongly in the proposed cure, the cure can work—for a while.

That is why MS societies in many parts of the world are working furiously to test and evaluate Dr. Zamboni’s proposals. The encouraging anecdotal results, we are told about, are interesting but reports of a lasting and provable cure are yet to be validated.

When CTV news first broadcast, rather breathlessly, last November, the claims for Zamboni’s cure, my wife and I were keenly interested. At the same time, there was that nagging thought: “Oh damn, here we go again.”

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Is there a driver testing centre in Babel? There probably is not. It is inconceivable that there could be so many bad drivers in an area where people have to prove they can drive before getting a driver’s license.

This is the only city in the world, in personal experience, where people simply drive badly. There are cities where people drive fast. Paris, Rome, Tokyo come to mind as places where the drivers are routinely driving too fast. What you have to do is blend in with them and enjoy the race. It’s harrowing and also exhilarating.

There are also the cities that will never give another driver a break. New York and Toronto come to mind. If there is a spare inch in the traffic jam in those cities three cars will fight for it. “Never give a sucker a break” is the motto in those cities.

But in Babel, they just drive badly. They even park badly. Traffic stopped on Dunlop Street the other day so that everyone could watch a Babelite try to parallel park. This guy is driving a very new and very expensive Mercedes and he is trying something that very few people in Babel have ever mastered. Finally, he gave up and the normal lurch, stop and go of Dunlop was restored.

They cannot even park between the lines. We bought a new car last year and the other day the dealer gave us an estimate of about $2000 to remove all the dings, cracks and bangs it has had done to it in shopping plaza parking lots. Maybe that is why most Babelites park diagonally across two parking spaces. Bet they still get dinged!

Part of the blame has to be placed on the city and its so-called traffic engineers. This is the only city in Ontario where we seem to hate visitors. A tourist is a driver who is lost. No street has the same name for more than two blocks, No provincial highways are marked. Major roads go from two lane to four lane and back to two lane quite indiscriminately. (This seems to cater to the Babel drivers who all seem to hate driving in any curb lane—but, for goodness sake, do not pass them on the right or left: they will think you want to race.)

As this is written, the author is looking out his den window onto the intersections of Lakeshore and Tiffin and the intersection of Bradford, Essa, Lakeshore and Tiffin (yes, it is two different intersections). After getting a detailed explanation for the design of these intersections and how the engineers believe they have solved all the problems, I can state from daily observation of the intersections that they might not be functioning as planned. The combination of dreadful Babel drivers and lost tourists will trump a highly trained engineer any day.

For example, the engineers posited that if you make it difficult to make a right turn from the two-lane Lakeshore to the Lakeshore, drivers will use the wide four lanes of Bradford to go from south to north in the city. It is sad to report that despite the engineers’ planning, the traffic is still clogged on the Lakeshore and you can have a tea party in the middle of Bradford and nobody will notice.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]