cannuck

Been there, done that, lost the T shirt. My Chinese/Canadian business partner (now sadly deceased) and I got the rights to a product, registered the IP and trade names in China and started building prototypes for testing. We needed to be a corporate entity, so our "friends" gave us some "trusted friends" of theirs as officers/incorporators and a foreign national could not own a company then ('90s). l When it became apparent from testing we had a winner on our hands, we came to the shop one day and found the materials, the equipment and the prototypes gone along with our "trusted partners". I suspect they are millionaires today, but just try to FIND someone in China who doesn't want to be found. What Westerners do NOT understand about many Asian cultures is it only the results that they respect. Any talk about fairness, integrity, etc. is purely talk...and BS at that. This is why it is hard to get a Chinese candidate into grad school. EVERY applicant has 100% marks, glowing references and a long list of experience - almost all pure BS. Smart grad schools are missing the genuine smart and good students because they can't trust any communications or documentation out of China. You will not get to read what I have to say about the Liberals, China and Uigurs. The language would be far too vile for delicate eyes.

You have asked an extremely good question, and please let me apologize for not responding earlier, nor completely now (on an emergency callout for last week). The short answer that I will be glad to elaborate on later is that the general public KNOWS there is something very wrong. To me, it is a parallel to the "1%" protests. Again, people KNOW/knew there is something drastically wrong with wealth distribution, but since they have come to rely on the media to deliver information, they are getting pure, unadulterated bullshit and they know that, but they never understood what was behind it. Just that something is really wrong. In the case of politics, the competing messages are once again so very different, they aren't quite sure what to believe, but the DO know the system of politics as we know it is deeply flawed.

Politicians don't write laws, lawyers do. BUT: they do so at the direction of the politicos. You are quite right, though: neither seems to know diddly squat about weapons -nor care diddly squat about the personal rights and freedoms of law-abiding citizens...including those who own rifles and handguns.

The answer to the question of the thread is that we are a stupid, stupid people and we demand a stupid, stupid and incredibly corrupt government to measure down to our standards.

Nothing to get upset about here. The criminals will all just rush to the Little Turd...uh...er...TRUdeau's front porch and lay down their arms because they like his hair and want to have his babies. BTW: just to remind you that it was the Communist Party card carrying Big Turd..oh yeah TRUdeau and his fellow traveller Roy Romanow who are responsible for property rights being very intentionally left out of the "constitution" as it were.

That IMHO is a fairly simple thing: when their choice costs the life of another genetically distinctly different and viable human being. Choosing to off yourself and/or getting some help to do so is a profoundly individual right that people are denied. I agree, they should be required to undergo a psychiatric analysis before being given a green light, but this is something that painfully SHOULD be the only person who has every right to choose - that individual. Conversely, when it comes to offing and unwanted child, I don't hear ANY of this deep concern for loving thy neighbour and protecting their life. That we DO need is an extremely simple definition of exactly what you ask: when is a person a person (thus their life must be protected by the state) and when can the state (or worse yet another individual) have the right to take that life. No politician we have ever had possesses the brains and balls to tackle that one.

In WWI Canada had 68,000 deaths over 4 years = 17,000 deaths per year. In WWII, Canada had 47,000 deaths over nearly 6 years = 8,000 deaths per year. In Covid 19 Canada has had about 21,000 deaths in one year in spite of desperate measures to try to prevent spread.. It is not "just like" the flu - that claimed about 3,500 deaths in Canada for 2019 with nearly no preventative measures employed (save some vaccination).

I know this might be hard for you to follow, but please try. Capitalism does NOT rely on endless growth. What we have now is NOT capitalism per se, so I use the term "Casino Capitalism" that is a very different thing. Capitalism just means using capital to fund business for the purpose of placing accountable quantities of resources in the hands of a business, hopefully then creating wealth. It doesn't even have to be private money to be capitalistic, it just has to be a quantifiable amount in an environment where profit and loss is once again accountable to relate to the shareholders what has happened with their money. What has happened in most of the world today is that we no longer use the mechanisms of invested capital to create wealth (that is incremental related exactly and ONLY to wealth that has been created by adding value to a resource or delivering service in support of same), but instead we have granted the very special privilege for the value established by the investment of capital to be traded by betting on the perceived value of such equities, or even worse than that, gambling on purely imagined financial instruments ("synthetic" instruments derived from some other market activity - thus called "derivatives") that do nothing but re-distribute wealth by simply inflating values artificially. THAT is what requires constant growth and worships not the work and product of capitalism, but just the capital itself. You are very right in calling it madness, but not capitalism.

I think you win the internets this month with that statement. But, what you said about the wonderful world of socialism is simply not in any way true. What you would like to BELIEVE, maybe, but reality is that leaders in socialist countries are no different from leaders in Casino Capitalist societies where those who are in power give themselves through privilege things that NO ordinary citizen can get...and it is in the thousands or millions of times more, not 3:1. To give you one example: your personal hero of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela once tried to sell PDVSA's Citgo in USA by having the payment sent to him PERSONALLY offshore. Meanwhile his citizens were as they are now destitute and starving. Stand up to him and you get a bullet in the brain. Even Bill Gates isn't that big an asshole. Capitalism is NOT a political "system", it merely means that the means of production are funded privately OR PUBLICLY in an open and accountable way. In a truly socialist system, government simply orders things to be done and there is no accounting system (as these are not financial transactions) to manage the costs or benefits. EVERY government that has tried to do so has failed. Is North Korea your idea of heaven??????

BTW: my US office sent this up today: https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/a-cure-for-covid-israeli-team-claims-new-drug-has-96-success-rate/ while we have been busy giving China the inside track on vaccine sales to Canada, the UK started from same place and has full scale production rolling along just fine. Meanwhile Israel has been doing the work to develop treaments - one that appears to be effective. Instead of locking down our borders, we have spent our time and money importing as much infectious agent as our porous borders could handle. Instead of putting money into vaccine research and production or treatment, we seem to be happy just to pay everyone to stay home and watch Ms. Meng wander around from mansion to mansion. Meanwhile our fearless leaders watch from their comfy, warm vacation hideaways.

hardly unique to Lebanon. ANYWHERE you give bureaucrats authority greed will raise its ugly head and they will take advantage of the situation as they have the privilege to do so with no consequence.

I will gladly risk the wrath of my fellow maple leaf webbers to agree with you. IMHO (and I wish I had some GOOD numbers to back this up) this massive second wave is partly or greatly the result of the mask-protection-fantasy. I just happen to do a lot of work with filtration, and as a result of medical friends and associates, have been exposed (that's a viral joke) to the whole mask stuff a fair bit. Reality is a mask DOES NOT protect any from aerosolized micro particles (i.e. virus) attached to micro droplets - in fact it is a tool to spread them far more effectively. Let me qualify that for you: a mask that is NOT fully sealed and fit tested, i.e. what 99% of people are wearing. Yes, they will stop a massive gob of snot from projecting - BUT, the constant leakage of the smaller gaps around the nose bridge in particular, coupled with the high flow restriction of random pieces of rag over your face (note that decent paper masks have DESIGNED low restriction, high filtration media, DIY cloth masks do NOT!!!) results in a high velocity jet of air being expelled every time you exhale. If you wear glasses in our cool climate, you have more than adequate experience with how dramatic this is. The kick is, when you double the air velocity, it is 4x as effective at aspirating droplets. I believe the average leak velocity is more like 3x exhale from open nose and/or mouth, and is thus 9x more effective at aspirating and projecting droplets into the surrounding environment, where these small droplets and particles can stay airborne for HOURS. This may well explain why this second wave spiked so high because the false security of the masks puts a LOT more people into close proximity indoors within a perfect transmission environment - created by the masks. Now, the inoculation thing is where the knee-jerk reaction would be to tell you it is not about you, but protecting the greater population. In the short term, it is important to realize that ALL of the vaccines that are so far proposed do NOT prevent one from being infected and infectious, they simply (it's not really that simple, but) reduce the severity when the ultimate infection strikes. While there is some expectation of "herd immunity" being reached IMHO that will never happen. As with influenza, it will be more like herd tolerance - and that will be augmented by vaccines for those most at risk. On those grounds, I can support some smaller percentage of the population choosing to stay on the "wrong side" of vaccination.

It is possible that those making innoculations are using the right guage needle and/or are being very careful with how far into the vial they insert it and getting 6 doses instead of the nominal 5 that each one carries. That has become common in SK and I assume in many other places. You can't count on exactly 6 as I understand it, so you can't book 6 x # of vials for delivery.

My wife just read Rex Murphy calling the Little Tur....uh,,,geezz TRUdeau the most incompetent PM and government ever. When the left starts turning on him, things are starting to look better already.

For that to work, you would have to find one that actually understands how an economy works. Have only ever met one such unicorn (Sir Roger Douglas - who as it happens saved his country from the brink of bankruptcy by doing thigs that were needed to put it back on its feet).

Easy to define exactly why Canadians vote for the LPC: $2.5 Bn cash to keep the media nodding their empty heads in approval and several hundred Bn handed out to the sheeple.

there, fixed that for you.

The whole purpose of basing education on STEM is that people become aware of and adept at the discipline of seeking the absolute truth - as that is the foundation of good science and theoretically ALL science. We learn to identify good science and we can then accept it. An example is the Canada Food Guide. THAT is health care at its best, and as Canadians we do a fairly good job of disseminating such information and accepting it as trustworthy. Not so South of the 49th where distrust of government is deeply engrained, and somewhat earned. I have a kid who is a food scientist (among four degrees) and to listen to her explain the real science and truth behind foods is quite an eye opener. From her vantage point, pretty easy to identify that almost every food/nutrition fad is wildly inaccurate or even opportunistic lies. Give more kids a really good education that DEMANDS proof of understanding to be graduated, and you have a much larger body public that can smell the BS. Gotta run: deep in the middle some Capitalist Pigging to pay the bills.

You make some really good points. I think a good part of the problem is that we have watched the power and influence of the media grow so great that it is difficult for people to separate fact from fiction. That IMHO happens for two reasons: education has shifted from STEM to basket weaving and everyone is expected to be graduated since it feeds the massive bureaucracy that sells substandard education in exchange for a paycheque. Secondly: we live in such an incredibly wealthy society people have a great deal of time to watch mindless media entertainment since there is so little need to get off their ass and learn a trade or profession and practice it. Of course, electing political leaders who's qualifications are basically what is politically correct by definition means we have zero credibility from THAT source.

I very much have to disagree with this. Socialism IN THEORY treats greed as a sin, but it is nothing but pure greed that inspires EVERY socialist leader to reward themselves and their friends far in excess of what every other citizen will ever see. That is why absolute socialism as demonstrated by such visionary leaders as Chairman Mao, the Kim dynasty, Maduro, Castro and let's be honest the USSR's great communist revolutions resulted in nothing but mass deprevation and death for the citizens while the leadership went on to live extremely comfortable lives. The only way socialism succeeds for its citizens is to operate under the much more transparent social democracies that can check dishonesty and greed. AND, you will note: every successful social democracy lives ONLY within a capitalist economy tempered by social POLICY, not ownership of ALL of the means of production. Similarly it is not capitalism that worships and rewards greed, it is Casino Capitalism that uses capital for speculative gain and CREATES NO WEALTH - which is also the Achilles heal of full bore socialism. Capitalism rewards productivity, not greed. Unfortunately, we have not learned to recognize the difference between endeavor that creates wealth vs. systems that do nothing but re-distribute wealth. The latter is easily identified by the common charactaristic that wealth is redistributed according to privilege granted to those who can exploit it from greed - be it within a so-called capitalist economy or a socialist/communist one.

Great link, thanks. I don't think it comes down to "left vs. right" politics, but the discipline missing from many people in science. Sorry to have to say: this is far more of a US problem than a Canadian one, mostly because the money behind most major brand names in food and medicine are US based. But: NEVER doubt that the $$$ commands more than anything else inside of most businesses. One of our family members is a retired medical researcher, and has spoken internationally on his specialty during his long career. He would be one of the very first to explain how he could clearly see the "sponsorship bias" in peer reviewed scientific research - which he, as a Canadian government employee never (or, I should comment SELDOM) felt, but NEVER accepted. And, yes, this plays very clearly into the "climate change" industry that does indeed thrive on tax dollars - but from an extremely narrow bias the reminds me of the anti-nuke days. The new villian of those who live off of scaring the public cow for the front seat sucking on the teat has become carbon in general, and petrochem in particular. Unfortunately, most don't seem to have the scientific discipline to be thorough and brutally honest. To me, the greatest injustice of all is ignoring, distorting or missrepresenting the science.

I will give you an example of just how ONE measley bad (and sponsored) bit of work changed the beliefs of the vast majority of academia. I can't recall the exact study, but it was commissioned by the early food processing business, and concluded that animal fat wasn't good for you. Entire generations of academics taught this in nutrition classes for decades. Of course, it was utter BS, but the "scientists" all jumped on the bandwagon and persisted until fairly recently. No different from the global warming...oops, well, climate change (as if nobody noticed it has NEVER been "unchanging") and demonizing carbon in the form of CO2. Here is what we now say about margarine vs. butter (which IIRC was the foundation of the original study, the change of margarine from animal fat to processed vegetable fats). https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/butter-vs-margarine

Don't know what YOU say, but I say someone who is willing to stake his valuable reputation pointing out the scientifically obvious that "established institutions" ignore for the privilege of scamming taxpayers, consumers and businesses over this CO2 nonsense. What I don't think they mention on the GOES website is that IF oceans have a massive dieoff the biota that normally fix CO2 will instead decay, releasing instead of much less harmful CO2 or O2 (depends on the organism) they will release methane - a FAR more damaging greenhouse gas.

Actually the billionaire academic (PhD) with endless accolades and awards from his academic, professional, philanthropic and business accomplishments and contributions. I thought there might have been better bio on the site, but when I looked it was pretty skimpy. But, I suppose to you...a crackpot for actually DOING something about things that matter to the planet.

I think a brief summary of his credentials are somewhere on that site. I agree, there are a lot of statements that need supporting data to make a better case. Will be asking about that. As far as his credibility is concerned: that is beyond reproach.