From: owner-can-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca (Cdn-Firearms Digest) To: cdn-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Subject: Cdn-Firearms Digest V9 #773 Reply-To: cdn-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Sender: owner-can-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Errors-To: owner-can-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Precedence: normal Cdn-Firearms Digest Sunday, September 3 2006 Volume 09 : Number 773 In this issue: Re: Licensing Removes Your Right to Own Firearms Snowbird flypast reinstated following outcry 52% think polls are just useless Precisely False vs. Approximately Right: A Reader’s Guide to You can't fix an old dog with a new dictionary ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 08:16:56 -0600 (CST) From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Robert=A9LaCasse?= Subject: Re: Licensing Removes Your Right to Own Firearms On Sun, 3 Sep 2006 07:55:25 -0600 (CST), you wrote: |> |>------------------------------ |> |>Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 17:49:03 -0600 (CST) |>From: Edward Hudson |>Subject: Licensing Removes Your Right to Own Firearms |> |>Licensing Removes Your Right to Own Firearms |> |>Writing in the September/October 2006 The Outdoor Edge (Vol. 16/Issue |>5) Greg Illerbrun, Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation Firearms Chairman, |>states: |> |>"Some folks think licensing is OK, but they are wrong. Licensing is |>what removes your right to own firearms and ultimately makes it |>possible for government to outright ban firearm ownership ... Technically under the highest interpretation of the English *language of laws*, but when I talked to my lawyers and law machines, they all said...I didn't know that...I don't believe that...well that is were it should all make sense..none...sorry Bruce... |>The U.N. held an international conference in July in an attempt to move |>forward with their agenda to ban civilian firearm ownership. Thanks |>mainly to the United States they were not successful. On the downside, |>Canada was there promoting further gun control ... We are going to have |>to address Canada's position at the U.N. with our respective M.P.'s" The UN/Iansa will do and say anything to make a fast buck to pay of their fines to the NWO Systems......reasons???Overdrawn accounts, Sex Court crimes....all kinds of exotic practices owed to upper systems The MP's are small time in comparison and have less of a burden to the NWO, but also they want in with mucho access' to the hierarchal NWO Power.. but as defined they are not as indebted as the UN. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 08:17:22 -0600 (CST) From: Bruce Mills Subject: Snowbird flypast reinstated following outcry http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20060902/snowbirds_cancelled_060902/20060902/?hub=TorontoHome Snowbird flypast reinstated following outcry CTV.ca News Staff Sat. Sep. 2 2006 11:29 PM ET An annual flypast by the Snowbirds precision flying team over a Toronto-area public school, which had been cancelled following noise complaints from residents, will go ahead, CTV News has learned. Second Lieutenant Petra Smith, a spokeswoman for the Snowbirds, told CTV Toronto Saturday night students at the Whitby school named after a fallen Snowbirds pilot will see the dazzling jets once again. "The flypast is on for the first day of school, so the students from the Captain Michael VandenBos Public School will be able to look up in the sky, and the tradition and honour will continue for this community and his family," MairiAnna Bachynsky reported. The decision came following complaints and a petition from local residents calling for the spectacle to be reinstated. The thundering rumble that excites so many prompted some residents to write a letter to Ottawa. One unidentified farmer said every time the planes fly overhead, one of his cows dies. A hero and former resident, VandenBos died when his jet clipped the wings of another in 1998 during a practice at CFB Moose Jaw. Since 2001, the Snowbirds have treated schoolchildren with the flypast. "And that's what makes it their school, having the Snowbirds every single year," said an upset Stephanie Wood, whose has two children attending VandenBos. A letter was circulated at the end of July, notifying parents of the decision to cancel the event. Smith said no one was more upset than the Snowbirds members themselves, but the decision was made because they had received several noise complaints submitted in writing. No one at the school or at the Durham District School Board, however, received any complaints. School board trustee John Dolstra could not believe the spectacle was cancelled because one cow supposedly died on a farm. "Well, I said I have 73,000 complaints, and they're called kids, and they're going to be awful disappointed," he said. Whitby mayor Marcel Brunelle had vowed to bring back the Snowbirds to honour their fallen colleague. The Snowbirds perform in Whitby following shows at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto each year. Their highly skilled manoeuvres make them a favourite for many. With a report from CTV Toronto's MairiAnna Bachynsky ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 08:33:44 -0600 (CST) From: Bruce Mills Subject: 52% think polls are just useless http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157198468504&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795 52% think polls are just useless Next time you're asked to take part in a survey, ask why, advises Anna Morgan ANNA MORGAN Sep. 3, 2006. 01:00 AM Should a pedophile be let out of jail? Is Al Qaeda planning another attack? Should Quebec separate from Canada? It's almost impossible to read or watch the news without being asked to participate in a poll. Over the past few weeks, Internet news readers were asked, "Do you think Hezbollah should be removed from Canada's terrorist list?" The results so far show a small majority saying no, but the numbers vary with each day's news. So, what should this tell our decision-makers? Frankly, it tells them nothing at all. They may surmise that those who choose to participate hold strong beliefs about the Middle East, but that's about all. Whether those views are well-informed or highly emotional is beyond the ability of the pollsters to measure. Polls are becoming so common that last Sunday's New York Times published an article advising readers how to interpret polls. The Times went out of its way to explain that some surveys are inaccurate or contain unfairly worded questions. What they failed to mention, however, is that sometimes the problem isn't how the questions are worded but that they're asked at all. It goes without saying that in a democracy, politicians should care about the views of their voters. But inappropriate polls often tell us more about our own shortcomings than about how decision-makers should formulate policy. In many cases, politicians should no more make policy based on polls than judges should arrive at verdicts based on the popularity of the accused. When polls simply capture the emotional and intense views of its participants, readers should question the usefulness of the polls themselves. Would anyone, for example, take seriously a poll taken in the 1950s asking the population of Mississippi whether blacks should vote? Some questions dealing with minorities should never be asked. Special land rights for aboriginal people might fare poorly in western Canada and special aboriginal fishing rights might fare equally poorly in the Maritimes. The courts have granted both because judges don't take a poll. Some things are intrinsically right and shouldn't depend on popularity contests. Indeed, polls often assume that respondents have information they don't have. For example, a recent CNN poll asked whether Al Qaeda is still a threat. I'm not even sure CSIS has the answer to that question, but clearly CNN's viewers do not. And then there are those issues on which people hold contradictory opinions, making any polling question close to useless. Quebecers are notorious for wanting both separation and continued Canadian citizenship and will answer yes to both questions. Last time I spoke with Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, he told me that when asked whether they want a two-state solution with an independent Palestine living alongside Israel, residents of the West Bank and Gaza answered yes; at the same time, when asked if they want the end of the State of Israel, they also answered yes. It seems that Quebecers and Palestinians want the same thing: one state and two states simultaneously. And they both have the polls to prove it. Some questions are downright dangerous. Suppose a group advocates violence only against Jews or some other minority group. The majority of Canadians might or might not care. Nevertheless, no one should take seriously a poll asking whether to keep Hezbollah, or any other terrorist group for that matter, on the banned terrorist list. It is for police and security officers to assess the threat posed by a potentially violent group, even one that targets a small minority who might lose in a popular opinion poll. So, the next time we open the computer, TV or newspaper, and are asked to respond to a poll, let's ask why. Does someone want to know our prejudices, or our knowledge about a topic we couldn't begin to really know? If so, let's give the pollsters a real piece of our mind and write to them with our objections. We want democracy but that doesn't mean we want politicians pandering to our every whim and bias. Anna Morgan is a Toronto writer. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 08:34:35 -0600 (CST) From: Bruce Mills Subject: Precisely False vs. Approximately Right: A Reader’s Guide to http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/opinion/27pubed.html Precisely False vs. Approximately Right: A Reader’s Guide to Polls By JACK ROSENTHAL The Public Editor The New York Times August 27, 2006 LAST March, the American Medical Association reported an alarming rate of binge drinking and unprotected sex among college women during spring break. The report was based on a survey of “a random sample” of 644 women and supplied a scientific-sounding “margin of error of +/– 4.00 percent.” Television, columnists and comedians embraced the racy report. The New York Times did not publish the story, but did include some of the data in a chart. The sample, it turned out, was not random. It included only women who volunteered to answer questions — and only a quarter of them had actually ever taken a spring break trip. They hardly constituted a reliable cross section, and there is no way to calculate a margin of sampling error for such a “sample.” The Times published a correction explaining the misrepresentation, and the news media that used the story would probably agree with what Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers authority on polls, told Mystery Pollster, a polling blog: how unfair it is to publish a story “suggesting that college students on spring break are largely drunken sluts.” The story also threatened larger harm. Its general point was indisputable; vacationing collegians often behave recklessly. But there was a larger recklessness in the misrepresentation of the survey. Now that everyone has a phone and calls are cheap, polling organizations have blossomed, and each such example of bad polls risks undermining public confidence in good ones. Another example surfaced last week in The Wall Street Journal. It examined a “landmark survey,” conducted for liquor retailers, claiming to show that “millions of kids” buy alcohol online. A random sample? The pollster paid the teenage respondents and included only Internet users. Such misrepresentations help explain why The Times recently issued a seven-page paper on polling standards for editors and reporters. “Keeping poorly done survey research out of the paper is just as important as getting good survey research into the paper,” the document said. These standards, coming just as the fall campaign heats up, provide a timely reminder of responsible journalism. But the best of intentions are not always met in practice, at The Times or in other media. The standards do not, for instance, discuss how even a punctilious poll story can be given inflated prominence. There is no reason, in any case, to limit such cautions to journalists. Readers, too, need to know something about polls — at least enough to sniff out good polls from bad. Here’s a brief guide. False Precision Beware of decimal places. When a polling story presents data down to tenths of a percentage point, what the pollster almost always demonstrates is not precision but pretension. A recent Zogby Interactive poll, for instance, showed that the candidates for the Senate in Missouri were separated by 3.8 percentage points. Yet the stated margin of sampling error meant the difference between the candidates could be seven points. The survey would have to interview unimaginably many thousands for that zero point eight to be useful. Experienced researchers offer a rule of thumb: rather than trust improbably precise numbers, round them off. Even better, look for whole fractions. Sampling Error The Times and other media accompany poll reports with a box explaining how the random sample was selected and stating the sampling error. Error is actually a misnomer. What this figure actually describes is a range of approximation. There’s also a formula for calculating the error in comparing one survey with another. For instance, last May, a Times/CBS News survey found that 31 percent of the public approved of President Bush’s performance; in the survey published last Wednesday, the number was 36 percent. Is that a real change? Yes. After adjustment for comparative error, the approval rating has gained by at least one point. For a typical election sample of 1,000, the error rate is plus or minus three percentage points for each candidate, meaning that a 50-50 race could actually differ by 53 to 47. But the three-point figure applies only to the entire sample. How many of those are likely voters? In the recent Connecticut primary, 40 percent of eligible Democrats voted. Even if a poll identified the likely voters perfectly, there still would be just 400 of them, and the error rate for that number would be plus or minus five points. So to win confidence, a finding would have to exceed 55 to 45. This caution applies forcefully to conclusions about other subgroups. What could a typical survey tell about, say, college-age women? Out of a random sample of 1,000, a little more than half would be women and only about 70 would be of college age. That’s too small a subsample to support any but the most general findings. Questions How questions are phrased can mean wide shifts, even with wholly neutral words. Men respond poorly, for instance, to questions asking if they are “worried” about something, so careful pollsters will ask if they are “concerned.” The classic “double negative” example came in July 1992, when a Roper poll asked, “Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?” The finding: one of every five Americans seemed to doubt that there was a Holocaust. How much did that startling finding result from the confusing question? In a follow-up survey, Roper asked a clearer question, and the number of doubters plunged from the original 22 percent to 1 percent. Extreme questions are fine if the poll asks questions at both extremes, says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll and author of “Polling Matters,” an authoritative 2004 book on this subject. The difference between the answers “can give us good insights into evolving social norms,” he says. “All data are interesting.” In any case, Warren Mitofsky, head of a leading international polling company, observes that “for political surveys, most of the questions have been asked for many years, have been tested and are not the source of error.” The order of questions is another source of potential error. That’s illustrated by questions asked by the Pew Research Center. Andrew Kohut, its president, says: “If you first ask people what they think about gay marriage, they are opposed. They vent. And if you then ask what they think about civil unions, a majority support that.” Answers People never wish to look uninformed and will often answer questions despite ignorance of the subject. Some 40 years into the cold war, many respondents were still saying yes, Russia is a member of NATO. That’s why, says Rob Daves, head of the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers, skillful pollsters will first ask, for new or sophisticated subjects, a scaling question like, How much do you know about this issue: a great deal, some, not at all? Respondents also want to appear to be good citizens. When the Times/CBS News Poll asks voters if they voted in the 2004 presidential election, 73 percent say yes. Shortly after the election, however, the Census Bureau reported that only 64 percent of the eligible voters actually voted. Jon Krosnick, an authority on polling and politics at Stanford, uses the term “satisficing” to describe behavior when a pollster calls. If people find the subject compelling, they become engaged. If not, they answer impatiently. Either way, says Kathy Frankovich, director of surveys for CBS News, “people grab the first thing that comes to mind.” Intensity How strongly people feel about an issue may be the most important source of poll misunderstanding. In survey after survey, half the respondents favor stronger gun controls — but don’t care nearly as much as the 10 percent who want them relaxed. Intensity can be measured by asking a scaled question: Is the issue of abortion so important that you will cast your vote because of a candidate’s position? One of several important issues? Not important? Each added question increases the interview length, testing the respondent’s patience and the pollster’s budget. Nevertheless, on divisive issues, responsible pollsters will ask four, five, even a dozen questions, probing for true feelings. Public opinion is not precise, and in any case it is constantly churning. Measuring it cannot hope to be precise. What readers can hope for, whether in an individual poll, a consensus from several polls or from the polling profession generally, is the truth — approximately right. Jack Rosenthal, president of The New York Times Company Foundation, was a senior editor of The Times for 26 years. Byron Calame, the public editor, is on vacation. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 09:13:20 -0600 (CST) From: Bruce Mills Subject: You can't fix an old dog with a new dictionary http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/columnists/article.jsp?content=20060828_132195_132195 August 23, 2006 You can't fix an old dog with a new dictionary Some linguists say the Republicans owe their success to their own form of Newspeak. But when it comes to the abuse of language for political ends, the left is as guilty as the right ANDREW POTTER If a couple of California linguists have it right, the Democrats will be out of power in the United States for the foreseeable future. In the middle of the 2004 presidential election, George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist and linguist at Berkeley, published a book called Don't Think of an Elephant! He argued that the success of the Republican party is due to its ability to dictate the meanings of the words used in political debate. In Republican hands, social conservatism becomes "family values," anti-abortionists are "pro-life," and the estate tax becomes a "death tax." Lakoff advised liberals to "reframe" these concepts to reflect their own agenda, by (for example) recasting big government as "effective government," and higher taxes as "investments." The book was a massive success. Democrats bought up bushels of copies to pass around Washington, and Lakoff became a bit of a guru, offering hope of brighter things to come for a party devastated by a second consecutive loss to the so-called monkey from Texas. Indeed, it did so well its central arguments have been restated by Stanford linguistics professor Geoffrey Nunberg in his new book Talking Right. Nunberg says the Republicans owe their success to their control of the public meanings of words like "liberal" and "elite." Following Lakoff, he claims the presidential campaign of 2008 will be a fight over the commanding heights of rhetoric, and he suggests Democrats adopt this two-step strategy: 1) Take back the dictionary. 2) Take back the White House. Outside of a Paul Martin election campaign, it is hard to imagine worse political advice being seriously offered. The idea that elections are won and lost at the level of symbols only reinforces the worst tendencies of American liberal thinking, and will ultimately work in favour of the Republicans. Blame it all on George Orwell -- specifically on 1984, a book that has alerted generations of students to the manipulation of language for political ends. Today, the political left tends to spend as much energy objecting to the terms conservatives use to describe their policies as it does objecting to the policies themselves. In what is now a well-established ritual, conservatives introduce neologisms that portray their activities in a positive light -- "downsizing," "Operation Enduring Freedom," "compassionate conservatism" -- liberals get outraged, conservatives ignore them, and the cycle eventually repeats itself. It doesn't seem to matter how often their opponents complain about these "Orwellian" abuses; conservatives keep doing it, either not knowing or not caring about the violence they are inflicting upon the English language. No more, say the California linguists. It's time to take the rhetorical fight to the Republicans. Orwell would not approve. He knew that when it came to the abuse of language for political ends, the left was as guilty as the right. Implacably opposed to fascism, he was still irritated by the way the term had been rendered utterly meaningless by being used to describe, by the by, shopkeepers, fox-hunting, Kipling, Gandhi, homosexuality, women, dogs. A similar fate has befallen the formerly useful (and precise) term "war criminal," as well as the word "Orwellian" itself. The latter gets tossed around with careless regularity, to the point where it now means little more than "a use of language I don't like." What Orwell was most concerned with was clarity: precise use of words, freshness of imagery, simplicity of expression. Imprecise language leads to vagueness, while unthinking use of cliché numbs the brain. In his essay "Politics and the English Language," he wrote that political speech and writing are largely offered in the defence of the indefensible -- policies such as the Russian purges, or the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. This is why political language ends up being couched in euphemism. It is "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." The Lakoff/Nunberg project for a revitalized Democratic party gets the causal chain of American politics exactly backwards. The Republicans didn't get to control the levers of power because they came up with a favourable way of framing the debate. Rather, they are allowed to frame the debate because they control the levers of power. Or to put it in the terms of 1984: the Party does not get to rule because it invented Newspeak; it gets to impose Newspeak because it rules. The GOP's current domination of American politics is the result of a 40-year effort that involved a tremendous amount of grassroots politicking. Dedicated activists knocked on doors, licked envelopes, and built a powerful broad-based coalition. Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals worked at poorly funded think tanks and at small universities, slowly developing a coherent and robust political philosophy. If it wants to get back in the game, the Democratic party will have to do something similar. It has a lot of work to do, and the first item on the agenda should be to show the California linguists the door. For more Andrew Potter, visit his new blog at www.macleans.ca/andrewpotter To comment, email letters@macleans.ca ------------------------------ End of Cdn-Firearms Digest V9 #773 ********************************** Submissions: mailto:cdn-firearms-digest@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Mailing List Commands: mailto:majordomo@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca Moderator's e-mail address: mailto:akimoya@cogeco.ca List owner: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca FAQ list: http://www.magma.ca/~asd/cfd-faq1.html and http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Faq/cfd-faq1.html Web Site: http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/homepage.html FTP Site: ftp://teapot.usask.ca/pub/cdn-firearms/ CFDigest Archives: http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/~ab133/ or put the next command in an e-mail message and mailto:majordomo@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca get cdn-firearms-digest v04.n192 end (192 is the digest issue number and 04 is the volume) To unsubscribe from _all_ the lists, put the next five lines in a message and mailto:majordomo@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca unsubscribe cdn-firearms-digest unsubscribe cdn-firearms-alert unsubscribe cdn-firearms-chat unsubscribe cdn-firearms end (To subscribe, use "subscribe" instead of "unsubscribe".) 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