SpankyMcFarland

The Balfour Declaration in 1917 was a response primarily to Europe’s antagonism towards Jews and their desire to migrate westward, not least to Britain which Balfour himself blocked. You may want to consider editing that last post. There’s a whole lot about Pakistan when there didn’t need to be much, if any. BTW I am aware of atrocities committed by humans of every creed and colour.

But why did European Jews need a place like Palestine to flee to in the first place? I don’t think Muslims were involved there.

Hong Kong under Xi lacks error control. What company there is going to criticize how the place is run any more? Which gives Singapore a massive advantage.

Unfortunately, like many populists, Modi has a strong basis of support among Hindus esp. from the upper castes or those who like to think they’re from those castes. I have to listen to praise of this guy from my own in-laws. He’s a nasty bit of work but sadly a lot of India is cheering him on at the moment. Elections there have always been a murky affair with oodles of dodgy dealing going on. That regrettable aspect hasn’t changed much under the new man.

Russia and China are existential threats to the West, Russia in the short-term, China for much longer. Iran is not that kind of threat. It’s a local problem.

I know nothing about this topic. Based on my own ignorance, I’d like to suggest that politicians should not make major military purchases into political issues at election time. We civilians just don’t know enough to decide which helicopters, boats or fighter aircraft should be bought. The main thing is buy SOMETHING in a timely fashion, based on the collective expertise of our military, before the older equipment becomes useless and or dangerous.

China just made a big leap forward in the field of pig kidney to human transplantation. BTW they transplanted a pig liver too. https://www.wionews.com/science/doctors-in-china-successfully-transplant-pig-kidney-into-brain-dead-human-patient-709688

Agreed but our problems with military spending and a coherent long-term military policy precede this particular government by a fair few decades. It seems difficult to change this in a democracy unless we have an imminent military threat on our doorstep. At least Putin has managed to wake Europe up a bit.

Some of which belong to Newfoundland and Labrador… I’m glad I’m only a Come From Away when I think about the Churchill Falls deal as otherwise green slime would be shooting out of my head on a regular basis. If Hydro Quebec had negotiated something so inequitable and nakedly colonial with a developing country it would have been shamed into walking away decades ago.

Other countries have number crunchers too and let me assure you they are looking carefully at Canada’s sky high per capita production of greenhouse gases. The notion that we can hide our profligacy just because we are few in number and it’s cold up here is childishly naive.

Oh no, something I didn’t hear of until today. While in hospital, the patient had an episode of acute cellular rejection. Apparently it has been treated. They had to advise him he couldn’t go back to work for at least two months. You wouldn’t have to tell me that. https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/08/xenotransplantation-pig-kidney-rejection-richard-slayman/

You discuss a serious problem for our planet, the only known home of life in the universe, in the same breath as increased taxes. In the greater scheme of things they are hardly comparable. Adaptation is a different issue and we are all going to have to do a whole lot more of that. It will be forced upon us. Our country is on fire and that fire generates country-sized plumes of smoke in the summer. Lord knows what awaits us in the next decade. You better start praying to the lad upstairs because we’re not getting much done down here.

What did I just say? 1+1+1+1…= 50. We can’t wiggle out of our responsibilities just because we are one of those ones. It all adds up. In addition, our output PER PERSON is far greater than the vast majority of people in the world. Do you honestly think they’re going to let that go? This is a small planet and we are all stuck here. Like shingles in the ad, nature doesn’t care. If we humans all bury our heads, nature will bury us. So all the science on this is wrong? Are you following what is happening in Antarctica right now? Unprecedented temperatures? Huge ice shelves breaking up? There’s no joy for me in being correct on this issue. What do I get for that? A ruined planet is what.

Assuming those figures are accurate, half of the greenhouse gases come from somewhere other than China, the US and India and every one of those countries is going to come out with the same lines as we do about not making a difference even though together we produce half the output. Two other things to consider. Most countries have contributed less than the West has to the excess gases up there already and Canada’s per capita production is enormous.

Leon Panetta has some harsh words for Israel: https://www.aol.com/israelis-usually-fire-then-ask-155158452.html Israel investigated the WCK killings because nearly all the victims were Westerners. Does anyone believe it does the same for Palestinians killed under similar circumstances. As I understand it, the two main objectives of this invasion were to bring all the hostages safely home and to eliminate Hamas. Objective one is already only partially successful and I don’t see how objective two can be achieved by Israel alone. Many of the children watching Gaza being levelled and their relatives slaughtered will be highly vulnerable to Hamas’s message. The pictures from Gaza are also having a woeful effect on Biden voters in swing states. Words alone are not going to save Joe: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/04/wisconsin-democrats-biden-stop-gaza-war Israel would be far better off not sending either Netanyahu or Dermer back to Washington again. They are poison for their side’s interests.

Starting in 1947 is way too late. You have to cover events from 1900 at the latest. That’s when migrants born in Europe began to flood into Palestine without any consultation with the majority population there. Imagine if 20 million Chinese arrived in Canada over the few decades and then they said, ‘let’s be reasonable, we only want BC and the Prairies for our new country’. Would you be keen to compromise and agree? If you say they weren’t indigenous and that’s important to you then imagine if a world-dominant China gave the same land as a new country to First Nations people in 2060. Fair?

I did. There’s lots of blame to go round.

At long last I have some good news to report on this thread. Richard Slayman, the man who received a pig kidney last month, was discharged from hospital today. https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/04/03/the-massachusetts-man-who-received-a-pig-kidney-transplant-discharged-from-mgh-one-of-the-happiest-moments-of-my-life/ Of course it is early days yet. Let’s hope this brave man does well.

I don’t advocate panic but we need to be concerned enough to deal with the problem which we are not at the moment. Our fire season doesn’t stop now. I can see a day coming when the number one request from the US to Canada will be to stop our smoke choking their cities.

Putin could be killed or overthrown tomorrow. It’s why he spends so much of his time hiding these days. I suspect that happy event would end the war. And he could choose to end it tomorrow if he was a normal human being.

Throughout history, statements like ‘we are good - they are evil’ are followed by ‘we deserve their land’ in short order.

Violence or threats of violence against other Canadians for any reason are not excusable so that is easy enough to condemn whenever it happens. Also demonstrating outside places of worship, schools or hospitals should be punished by criminal charges. I am a secular social democrat. Theocracy in any form, indeed anything less than complete separation of religion and state, is anathema to me. However, as someone who came here from a part of the world with its own troubles, I would caution anyone who talks about one side being the good guys. If you’re willing to look back into the history of any such situation that is virtually never true. For starters, there are often more than two sides. In the current conflict, yes, Hamas are to blame. However, the Palestinians didn’t drive Jews out of Russia after 1881, or block their entry into Britain in 1905, or slaughter them by the millions in Europe after 1933. On top of all that, the British saw fit to or open the borders to Jewish immigration to Palestine after 1917 without consulting the majority population at all, setting two nations on a collision path, and then ruthlessly crushed the Arab revolts that resulted. Anybody complaining about the effect that immigration is currently having in Canada should ponder that for a second. Even words to the effect of ‘from the river to the sea’ were used by Likud long before they became a slogan for confused millennials. Furthermore, Likud relentlessly turned those words into ‘facts on the ground’ in the West Bank which is surely far more offensive than just saying them?

I don’t speak for the state and these are genuine questions. For men 20-40, can you compare the risk of getting the vaccine with the risk of getting Covid in Canada? How many men have died from Covid vaccine-induced myocarditis in this country?

I don’t dispute there is an increased risk of myocarditis after the vaccine, esp. in young males who have received particular types of vaccines. Properly conducted studies have shown this. Many other adverse events have also been detected in the largest international studies too BTW. The questions I would ask include: how many people are affected in Canada and how severely - what is the mortality and morbidity associated with this, in other words the clinical significance? For example, how many of them were classed as mild myocarditis, a typically self-limiting condition? Is what is happening enough to restrict the vaccine in certain cohorts? I don’t think the final answers are in but some suggestions have already been made on the type of vaccine to be given and the timing of them in younger males. Why don’t you contact the local experts in Vancouver if you have such concerns? Yes, McCullough’s article is valid for now (valid should be enough - perfectly valid sounds like something completely legal a dodgy accountant would come up with) but I still think it was a bad one to pick at the start of this thread. VAERS data was never meant to be used this way. It’s a screening tool that can easily overstate the numbers if misused. He has had to retract at least one paper already on Covid, a serious embarrassment for any researcher, and has had numerous other issues in his work. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10897748/ The magnitude of the problem matters a great deal. If these vaccines are damaging a significant number of young peoples’ hearts then something should be done. And just to clarify lest anybody else reading this might have any doubt - I know nothing about this subject.

The fact one person chose to receive a particular treatment proves nothing by itself.