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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1986-10-22, Page 4PAGE 4. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1986. It takes all kinds It takes all kinds to make a world even if sometimes we wish we could do without a few kinds and have a less “interesting” world. Among the kinds we would like to get rid of is the weird individual who seems to get a perverted pleasure out of destroying things. The rash of vandalism in Huron county has been mounting in recent weeks. In Blyth recently the flags were again stolen from the decorative planter on main street supplied by Radford Construction. A block away someone smashed a prize pumpkin belonging to a homeowner. Gardens have been wrecked. The County of Huron is considering moving the tomb of Tiger Dunlop because of vandalism. This wasn’t spur of the moment kind of violence. In one case sledge hammers seemed to have been used to smash concrete park benches and in another case a flag was taken from a 40-foot flag pole which must have required someone to haul a ladder up the long, winding staircase to the tomb. We’re never going to rid our society of vandalism as long as there are demented individuals around. All we can do is make a concerted effort to cut down on the amount of violence. First, parents can keep track of their children to make sure they aren ’t given the opportunity to get in trouble hanging around with little to do. Secondly, the community can be on the lookout to try to prevent damage to property in the neighbourhood. And thirdly, police can be more vigilant. Most of the smaller communities are completely without concentrated police protection. Ontario provincial police protection is often spotty and is threatened even more by police government funding cutbacks. It will take a lot of effort from all these areas to curb the problem. Let’s all play our part. Who's insulting now? Even his true-blue Tory audience must have winced at some of the statements in the speech of Larry Grossman, Provincial Progressive Conservative leader Friday night in Brussels. First of all there was the matter of proportion in his speech. Given the nature of the affair, a fundraising dinner, a certain amount of bashing of the government and the sitting government member is to be expected. But Mr. Grossman dedicated 18 pages of his 25-page prepared speech to ridiculing Jack Riddell, who will represent the Liberals in the new Huron riding in the next election. Given the fact that Huron county residents seem to show real loyalty to incumbent members, whether P.C. or Liberal, Mr. Grossman may have misjudged his audience. Like the parent who is quite willing to criticize his children but becomes irate when someone outside the family does so, Huron county residents may get a little upset with a downtown Toronto lawyer going so overboard in his political rhetoric against a local boy. Mr. Grossman, quitefairly, broughtupthe topic of Mr. Riddell’s foot-in-the-mouth statement about rural Ontario being resistent to theTory leader because hewasaJew. He said Mr. Riddell was insulting rural people calling them racist and he was right. But Mr. Grossman couldn’t leave it at that. He went on to state, in one of his many departures from his text, that he knew there wasn’t one voter in Huron county who would change his vote because of religion. Come off it! Who’s insulting the intelligence of Huron county voters now? Trade washed up The ancient King Canute is reputed to have tried to demonstrate his power by bidding the waves of the ocean to turn back. Free Trade advocates seem to think that the power of positive thinking will do the same thing with the tide of United States protectionism. Faced with a ruling that would impose a 15-per-cent duty on Canadian softwood products entering the U.S. last week, and a surtax on all imports two days later, free traders say that these exactly demonstrate why we need a free trade agreement. They are right, of course. We do need some mechanism to shield our trade from the whims of American political opinion. They’re wrong though if they think that any free trade agreement can protect us when American paranoia becomes as strong as it is today. The Auto Pact, for instance, is held up as an example of the good things that flow from free trade but that didn’t stop the U.S. from slapping its import surtax on Canadian auto exports to the U.S. U.S. President Ronald Reagan has admitted the surtax is probably illegal under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade but he is going to sign the bill anyway. The Americans, whether dealing with the GATT or the World Court, have showed they have little interest in listening to international bodies if they think it is against the American interests. It’s also interesting that those who most admire Ronald Reagan’s tough dealings with the Soviet Union in the arms race should also be, generally, those who most support free trade negotiations. They don’t seem to recognize the ground rules the U.S. plays under. Mr. Reagan has showed he does not deal from weakness in arms control. He wants to deal from strength. The U.S. went into the negotiations on trade with a chip on its shoulder and a massive trade deficit. Canada could only expect a tough time. Canada, however, went into the negotiations in a position where it was far more liable to get hurt and has shown itself pathetically anxious to get an agreement no matter how mcuh the Americans turn against us. The Americans must be laughing at us. '• / T^/NK /T'S SO h/EATuP ft G, s\J / The International Scene Now you see it... Well maybe you do BY RAYMOND CANON My loyal readers will have accepted by now that airplanes fascinate me; having learned to fly them relatively early in life, I have had a long love affair with them; I swear that they recognize me at the air museums at Ottawa, Dayton and Washington as well as a few others. The story that I am about to tell you is one which has me uncertain whether I should laugh or cry over it but perhaps the best thing is to leave that up to you. I will assure you that everything that I report in this article is as accurate as I can make it. If you ever go into a hobby shop and look at the models of jet aircraft, you may see one looking extremely like something out of Buck Rogers and bearing the title F-19. Wait a minute, you will say, I don’t know about any F-19.1 know that the Canadian Armed Forces have a CF-18 but that is as far as the numbering of American aircraft goes. What is it with this F-19? A fair question. The model is very real and there is no misprint. It does say F-19 and it does purport to be a copy of an American aircraft but where did it come from? As a matter of fact you may be interested to know that the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Air Force and the Lockheed Corpora­ tion, who is reported to be making the plane, have been trying for years to deny its existence. There is no such thing as a F-19 they say. What do we know of the thing that doesn’t exist. Well, for one thing it is called the Stealth Fighter (alias F-19) which means it has been designed to give a very low impression on any radar screen. It has sometimes been called the Covert Survivable In-Weather Reconnaissance Strike Aircraft, with the nickname of “The Flying Hedgehog.’’ Earlier this year something that doesn’t exist crashed in the Sequoia National Forest in Cali­ fornia. It started a bush fire and killed the pilot. For something that doesn’t exist, the Air Force took the trouble to seal off the entire area, forbid civilian planes to fly lower than 8,500 feet over the Forest and refused to give any information whatsoever to the pressaboutthecrash.Since the F-19 doesn’t exist, why bother to confirm that it is or isn ’ t one and the matter was left at that. At about the same time Con­ gress initiated a series of hearings about the loss of more than 1,000 documents pertaining to this un­ mentionable fighter, documents which apparently had been taken from the above-mentioned Lock­ heed Corporation. Everybody seemed to know about these documents, descriptions of it were given freely to Congress and even models of the plane, to which we alluded above, were presented to the hearings. Nonsense, said the Pentagon, the fighter simply does not exist. That is like waving the prover­ bial red flag in front of the bull and so it was not long before the Washington Post printed an article which claimed that there were no less than 50 of the aircraft sitting in hangars at the airbase near Tenopah, Nevada. The Air Force originally wanted 100 of the planes but, at $100 million a copy, they were simply too expensive. The Air Force’s reply to all this? You guessed it! What air base? There’s no air base there. Sure enough, when you look at the air maps for the area, there is no indication whatsoever that there are any runways there. Back to square one! Well, I do know that there have been bits of information about stealth technology released in journals for quite some time and I have some of those journals to prove it. Having seen a copy of the model kit, I would hazard to guess that it is based for the most part on thedetailsthat have been made public in the above mentioned journals; the producers of the model claim that it is 80-90% accurate which, iftrue, issome- thing to consider. I don ’ t care how often the United States Air Force or the Pentagon claims that there is no such thing as aStealthfighter. Thisgame has been played before with the most prominent example being during the period when Lyndon Johnson was president. For all I know, they have been reported as U.F.O.’s since a look at the model gives every indication that they are not your normal type of aircraft. I have heard of the little engine that could, we now have the aircraft that isn’t. It won’t be long until the Air Force is telling people that what they saw in the sky they really didn’t see. Who said that the Russians are secretive! Letter policy The Citizen encourages the free exchange of ideas through thecolumnsof the “Letter to the editor’’ section. While experience shows that signed letters have most credibility and impact, we do realize that there are times writers may need to protect their iden­ tity. However, all letters, even those which will appear in the paper under a pseudonym, must be sign­ ed. While the name of the writer will be withheld from print if requested, the name is available to those directly involved in the issuestated in the paper on a personal visit to The Citizen office. [640523Ontario Inc.] Serving Brussels, Blyth, Auburn, Belgrave, Ethel, Londesborough, Walton and surrounding townships. Published weekly in Brussels, Ontario P.O. Box 152 P.O. Box429, Brussels, Ont. Blyth, Ont. NOG 1 HO N0M1H0 887-9114 523-4792 Subscription price: $15.00; $35.00foreign. Advertising and news deadline: Monday 2p.m. in Brussels; 4p.m. in Blyth Editor and Publisher: Keith Roulston Advertising Manager: Beverley A. Brown Production and Office Manager: Jill Roulston Second Class Mail Registration No. 6968