cannuck

Those of us who are old enough to remember can appreciate how much the Vietnam war changed the politics of the USA forever. Now that WV deaths have surpassed those of Vietnam, it should be some kind of benchmark to denote the changes that are sure to come. I was a conscientious objector who passed on a great scholarship because I did not want to study in the US. While both of these events are horrible inasmuch as they resulted in a lot of people dying, I think the country will come out of it a better place as it did post Vietnam. While we all enjoy taking pot shots at our friends and neighbours just across the 49th, their resilience and capacity for introspect is something I admire. I expect this disaster will have the whole nation look more carefully at how international relations and trade directly impacts the economy and security of the nation.

Obama and Klinton doubled down on Wall Street (i.e. Casino Capitalists) at the express expense of Main Street (actual Capitalists). Seems that when you have key cabinet members responsible for economic and monetary that come from the Street, and usually Goldman SUCKS, the legislative and regulatory tilt of the country tends to favour those who own the government lock, stock and barrel. (had to use a firearms analogy so you, and an American, could understand).

The US government already made two attempts to wipe out its own people. One was the British government of the day attacking its citizens in the "war of independence" and later the new government openly declaring genocide on its aboriginal population. The former is the very reason for the 2nd amendment and the latter is simply swept under the carpet with a red face.

One HELL of a lot more credible than CBC. For that matter, so is the National Enquirer.

Oh...I didn't realize we were going to discuss Huawei getting our G5 business.

Hitler could not even imagine how effective and thorough contact tracing was done with cell phones. I did a little project for a Chinese province in the early '90s and found while doing the research, at that time fewer than 6% of the population that lived along rail lines had access to copper wire. The rest of the country had no telecom. As you can imagine, all of China pretty much figured this out and went fiber to hub and wireless to client. So, pretty much EVERYONE in China has a cell phone, and they are all tracked (talk about Big Brother that would make Hitler green with envy). They also had a LOT of fast turnaround serological testing that could identify someone as positive, negative or needs more testing. At the moment you were tested (required at several checkpoints) an algorithm located everyone who had been near you in the max incubation period and informed both them and authorities that they had to go immediately to isolation, and of course determined who THEIR contacts were, etc. All in less time than it would take Hitler's guys to hand someone a bar of soap. Sometimes totalitarian power works against the people, and sometimes it works for them.

What I can't understand is if Sikhs need to wear their headgear, and we need them to have a smash-hat, some entrepreneurial Indian should make and get CSA approval for a brain bucket that will fit over their rag. After all, people make special safety goggles that fit over eyeglass frames, gloves big enough to fit my ape palms, etc.

Sorry if you missed my implied sarcasm. It is ridiculous to not include the largest economy in the world (especially since they seem to set all of the rules today - and where "going viral" has taken on a new meaning), thus G8. I wish I could find the citation but I think it was based on combined public and private debt, not just federal accumulated deficit. But: thanks for catching it anyway.

and the answer was to your question of anything else needed.

Yes: to be economically productive and not a drain on our already wildly indebted nation. You do realize that we are in worse per capita debt than any other G8 nation except Japan - and Japan has the one thing we do NOT: business that adds value and creates a tremendous amount of wealth - whereas we just rob the piggy bank of debt and resource depletion from our grandchildren - all to buy Liberal votes.

It is not THEIR culture, it is OUR culture that should stand as what dominates in this country. If you come here and don't like it here, for crying out loud, WHY ARE YOU HERE???? GTF out to where you feel welcome and comfortable, don't expect us (except of course for the virtue signalling Liberal/liberals among us) to go out of our way to accommodate what YOU like/think/feel. Try walking down the street in Riyadh with a bottle of Johnny Walker and see what conservative Islam thinks about accommodating OUR culture within theirs. Note: I am actually more comfortable in Riyadh than many parts of Canada - mostly for the booze and drug reasons. BUT I would NEVER insult my Saudi friends or hosts by even suggesting they should bend to my cultural predilections when I am in their country.

I must let my normal disgust with lawyers and courts stand aside to give the Supreme Court kudos for actually making a good decision (rare as that is). The Port of Montreal requires hard hats for all workers on its property. Three Sikh truck drivers who perform regular pickups at the port say that forcing them to wear hard hats is religious discrimination. MONTREAL – The Supreme Court of Canada (SCOC) has refused to hear an appeal from Sikh truckers who wanted to be exempt from having to wear a protective helmet when travelling in the terminals of the Port of Montreal. The men, who wear turbans, had challenged – on religious grounds – the obligation to wear a helmet when travelling outside their trucks in the Port. The port’s helmet safety measures were put in place in 2005. In a case dating back to 2006, Sikh men had argued that they were victims of religious discrimination after they were no longer allowed to enter the port’s terminals without protective headgear. Canada highest court announced its decision on Thursday morning. As always, it did not provide a reason for its decision. The SCOC’s decision maintains the judgement of the Quebec Court of Appeal, the province’s highest court. The latter had decided that in the case of the Sigh truckers, workplace safety must take precedence over the harm caused to their freedom of religion. This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 30, 2020.

Yeah, it always starts out as a measely billion or so, but once the Liberals get their hands into our back pocket, billions more pour into yet another totally useless bureaucracy just to buy some more votes. Remember that self-funding gun registry that was going to save us all from death and destruction? How many billions that that "freebie" cost us?

I think you (and of course the entire Liberal/liberal movement) live in la-la land. YOU WILL NEVER "take away the tools". What they do for a living and what they do with handguns and long guns is ALREADY ILLEGAL - and you can and will no do SFA about THEM - just attack the easy targets of law-abiding citizens. What you suggest is equivalent to the drug problem - all illegal as all hell but that has been no impediment to the phenomenal growth of illegal drugs that CAUSE most of the problems that relate to gun violence. Yes, many of the problem players now have Canadian citizenship - as a result of the total failure of our immigration policies across many governments of every political stripe. I was being polite compared with what I would LIKE to see - that is the return of death sentence for violent crime. Since we only lock them up in a well equipped University of Crime long enough to improve their criminal skills and associated networking for a few short years (far less if you are an aboriginal murderer) the cheapest and only permanent protection of society. I have been a life long opponent of the death penalty, but I can see now where it can be justified. Other option is to make jail a place nobody wants to go, but THAT will never happen

I am no expert on this subject, but I have to ask: since "assault weapons" (and legally, that means nothing) are not the main source of gun violence in Canada, why would you be so bound and determined to even give a damn about them??? Agree, they are in now way "necessary" in some ways, but let me take you down another road that is a lesson learned from our Southern neighbours: the Liberal/liberal growth in Canadian government since Turd.....geez TRUdeau Sr. has been focused on destroying Canada's armed forces and turning them into a social engineering project - seriously compromising our ability to defend ourselves and contribute to the defensive obligations we have to the world and particularly our allies. With the defense of Canadian soil being so highly compromised, taking the basic tools of national defense out of the hands of the public only works for me by returning the DND to a fully funded, non-socially-engineered MILITARY defense force. Until I see that, I am in no mood to tolerate ANY reduction in my personal freedoms whatsoever and ceding them to a national government that has clearly demonstrated it works only to dispense special privilege to its friends - at the expense of its citizens. Now, if we are prepared to be extremely and brutally honest: take a look at WHO commits the bulk of gun crime in Canada. If you want to fix the problem, stop bringing Asian and Caribbean drug dealers and gangs into the country - and send the offenders the FCK BACK to where they came. Our problem is not guns, it is drugs and gang violence that the government seems to cultivate instead of police.

As you are no doubt aware, part of the problem is how long it takes police to investigate and gather evidence. I could not agree more that there is little reason for ANYTHING in justice to take two years, except, of course for jail terms. Also you are spot on that the whole system is there to serve the lawyers, police, courts, etc. I once had a good friend who did undercover criminal work for various agencies, and he told me one time he was having trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys - largely for the very reasons you cite.

It was the long procession of flights arriving from Egypt, Iran, etc. with NO QUESTIONS ASKED at customs that marks the standard of total incompetence in dealing with this issue at a time that was already several weeks behind when there was good reason to start protecting our population. Just because a bunch of useless bureaucrats at the WHO had not yet declared a pandemic is no excuse.

I imagine you make money by somehow drinking and regurgitating the Koolaid from the Street. Reality is actually very, very simple. Yes, speculation happens, but market forces determine the cost of goods and services. THAT is all that should ever be a factor in the cost of a home in Ft. McMurray, Toronto or Moose Jaw. Speculation happens because we (the royal we) give privilege to those who make speculative gains a free ride on the tax system. You can kill off speculative transactions in a flash by simply taxing speculative gains heavily. That will drive investment money out of the speculative market and into the real capitalist economy that EARNS money by doing useful, productive work. Main Street. If we were having this disussion in the '30s, EVERYONE understood this very well.

In SK we have an emergency alarm phone system that blares a signal into your cell phone and television and dials your land line. Does NS not have such???? If it exists and was not used, IMHO that is a serious breach of responsibility. On the other hand, I can see the police reticence to do this, makes every cop an untrusted entity and potential target.

I hear from my WY office the simple (and probably true) that someone trying to pull of the NS deal in WY would have been taken down by someone packing a handgun at first opportunity. The idea that we should live in a police state where only the authorities have weapons is repulsive to say the least. The concept that it would have made any difference to the murderous bastard in NS is idiotic. He planned and executed his bizarre scheme with great care and attention to detail. Do you think an "assault weapon" (WTF that is supposed to mean) ban would have made any difference at all???? It just shows how devoid of logic the virtue signalling, politically correct world of Liberalism/liberalism must be.

Two comments. First: the map on the first page is wildly wrong. It shows Japan somewhere in the middle, and I can tell you from what I have learned about Japanese culture, there needs to be a special colour for them WAY more racially discriminating than any other country. Speak with anyone who survived Japanese occupation in WWII and you will get a clear picture of just HOW they expressed their racism. Second: EVERY country and every person is to some extent racist. To deny so is either to be lying or foolish. The EXTENT of racism, and how it plays out in daily life is what matters. One of the most racist people I know (in his beliefs) is also one of the most generous in donating his time and money to less fortunate people - even though he may not agree with their beliefs based on race or background culture. THAT is what makes Canada the greatest nation to live in on this planet. BTW: I don't want to take anything away from our good friends to the South who led the charge to eliminate slavery, but just remember where much of the underground railway ended....

You are missing the entire point, I think. Speculation is a distortion within the economy, not the economy itself (you can be forgiven, after all, it was Ronny Raygun who told the US population not to count on SS but to put their money into their 401K). You are using semantics of speculation to infer that business is all about speculating. Speculating on your possibilities of success is doing business in a manner that YOU can control by adding value and CREATING wealth. Financial speculation is the exact opposite: you gamble on the value of an asset or transaction that you can NOT control in any way, and which through its speculative change in value creates NO wealth, but merely redistributes. The economy is a productive thing that uses capital to create wealth. The mere existence of same is essential for surplus to be available for others to take advantage of speculating with the money they can skim or manipulate from the actual economy (the capitalist one). It isn't that difficult to understand. You just have to learn to observe and think logically instead of regurgitating the total BS from The Street and those who worship at the alter of greed and privilege.

Of course, I will respectfully disagree with you. The mere fact we are running our economy into the ground by doing nothing but speculative investing is absolute evidence that what is conventionally understood (note: pretty much ever chair in economics worldwide seems to be sponsored by banks) and taught. I happen to have spent a LOT of time with a few genuinely intelligent economists who's views I share - and are dramatically different from classic models. I am also old enough to have known many people who lived through the '30s and I am more than a little aware of the history and facts of what was right, what was wrong, what was good, what was bad, etc. Where I think you do have a grasp on reality is realizing government's role in screwing up royally. What you may not understand is that government is a short term thing, owned and operated by financial interests, who very directly affect what government does. GOOD government we don't have (pretty much anywhere these days). What we do have is institutions that spend their days granting privilege to those who would benefit financially and /or politically from said activity. Pretty much defines what BAD government is and does. What NONE of them can do is understand the fundamentals of how wealth is created and how wealth is re-distributed. I take it from you tenor, you live by the world of free rides in Casino Capitalism - that is dramatically different from the capitalism that built and builds economies that are then sucked dry by finance.

It is not just real estate, but equities and anything else done by finance that has shifted what is happening within the economy (of the world). What governments are far too inept to appreciate is that ANY speculative gain of any kind creates NO wealth - it merely re-distributes it. Problem is: if you have such a change in value, it happens by having a winner on one hand and a loser on the other - a zero sum game it would seem. Not quite so. When you rack up a bunch of specualtive gains, you need money to feed the increase, so it makes government expand the money supply to cover what is ultimately an inflationary force. What that does is heap the actual cost of Chinese real estate speculators or Wall Street and Bay Street financial manipulators right back on the taxpayer and general public. Until we as a species recognize that wealth can be created in only two ways: adding value to a resource, or deliver a service required to support the value added process and that ANYTHING else you do is merely wealth re-distribution we will not correct the inequities that come from government granting the privilege to manipulate and exploit the situation to a small cadre of financiers - that happens to include real estate speculators of any stripe. While a healthy economy can tolerate a little bit of speculative shit, we have essentially handed over our ENTIRE economy to the world of finance and will all be "shocked and surprised" when it once more goes down the drain (as it DID in 1929 and SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO DO in 2008). Instead, the Sheeple bought into "too big to fail" and "quantitative easing".

I would be happy to see that money spent on such a project: once we have a balanced budget and no deficit. Before we start trying to save the world, we need to save ourselves and our grandchildren.