SpankyMcFarland

The new small-unit approach to attacking Russian trenches reminds me of German changes later on in WWI. Some experts in the West say this will only lead to heavy Ukrainian casualties. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that. Long-term, though, I can’t see how Russia wins here. What they have done is not acceptable to Ukraine and is a clear threat to any European country. Even if they occupied the entire territory they would still face a well-resourced insurgency whose capacity to harm would dwarf what they endured in Afghanistan.

Just to repeat my question: it was only NDP governments that added to the debt?

There’s no doubt DeSantis is a good debater. His problem lies in casual conversation. At the moment we’re seeing a candidate less likeable than Ted Cruz which was considered an impossible feat not long ago.

Rand Paul has no power to pursue his personal feud with Fauci in this fashion.

I think we are talking at cross-purposes here. You are concerned the government is favouring China. I am saying no evidence exists that our government has targeted Chinese citizens, esp. govt. officials, in the same way Michael Chong has been targeted.

To believe this allegation one would first have to assume our government was pursuing an aggressive PR strategy within China. I don’t see the evidence for that. If such evidence ever emerges I am willing to change my mind.

I would concede we’d have a hard time knowing such a thing. Until such evidence emerges, why not give our government the benefit of the doubt?

Not just during elections - any time. Let’s widen the net. Is there any Chinese citizen our government has targeted with a blizzard of false allegations?

Can you point to a similar campaign against a Chinese politician waged by the Canadian government?

A failure for these scientists but a success for science. A claim was rapidly tested and found to be false.

Michael Chong is surely one of our most respected MPs. We need to listen to what he is saying about foreign interference: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wechat-disinformation-operation-chong-1.6931377

Republicans could choose to compete for a majority of the popular vote in America by moderating their policies but instead they have decided they would rather pursue their minority agenda and suppress votes against them. Their stance on abortion, for example, is clearly outside the American mainstream and yet they plough on with ever more draconian tactics. It’s a very worrying development in the world’s most powerful democracy.

But how much warmer the world becomes depend on the actions of each person and country on earth. Unless we are all going to move to underground bunkers in the hills or to another planet the degree of warming matters a great deal, partly because the problem is not linear. Warming above a certain critical level may produce dramatic positive feedback loops that cause a huge further increase in warming. In every country outside the US, China and India there are people saying their country’s contribution doesn’t matter so let’s just forget about it. But together those countries produce a large fraction of the total.

In polls of this type there’s a fair bit of memory loss, buyer’s remorse and recency bias. The immediate predecessor looks more appealing than they were and anything more than twenty years ago is the dusty past. Unsurprisingly, Trudeau père bucks these trends. His contribution is too large for anyone to ignore. For good or ill, he was by far the most consequential PM on the list.

The Nigerian goalie was excellent in the games I saw her in.

I don’t think America’s problems can be segregated on blue state/red state basis.

Colombia beat Jamaica 1-0 and France walloped Morocco 4-0 today. The French are looking strong.

Oh dear me, LK-99 seems to be the opposite of a superconductor: https://www.iflscience.com/hopes-dashed-as-lk-99-confirmed-not-to-be-a-room-temperature-superconductor-70165 And that levitation video? https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lk-99-video-fraud-taken-down There’s a similar video from Wuhan university that is still up. As if that city needed any more bad publicity.

During the Syrian crisis, I distinctly recall our PM reassuring us that he was going to bring in the thousands of refugees he had promised to take and I wondered whom he was talking to exactly. How many of us were holding him to account on that? The debate on immigration has to be more integrated; those Canadians most affected in our large cities should have a much louder voice in determining numbers. For me in the boonies, immigrants are great - I’ve endless work for them - but that’s not the case if you’re young and trying to find a place to live in the likes of Toronto. I presume we all agree that the interests of Canadians must come first? If we ignore such competing priorities, we will be guilty of stoking the rise of racism and bitter division in our politics. BTW quite a few Canadians do not realize how difficult it is to immigrate to many of the countries that our immigrants come from these days.

The people who have looted Russia want to loot Ukraine too. That’s in the nature of criminal gangs. They’ll carry on happily through Poland and the rest until they are stopped.

I don’t keep in touch with BC politics much these days, so can you tell me was all that debt racked up by NDP governments?

Her shenanigans would have been a politician’s nightmare back then for anyone but PT.

I was disappointed when Campbell beat Charest. He sounded the better candidate in English, let alone French, tuned in to the obvious pitfalls for an intellectual to avoid. Sure enough, she came across as an elitist twit against Chrétien, talking about her love of Russian literature and the issues that are too complex to discuss with the commoners at voting time. Yes, really! The contrast was painful, much worse than Kerry-Bush; she was facing a genuinely everyday guy with a rumpled face from a humble background. I don’t know what the breakdown by gender was but I suspect Campbell turned women off at least as much as men.

Mulroney is often considered glib because he spoke so well. Even when he didn’t know he was being recorded by Peter Newman, he produced the same well-formed sentences and paragraphs in that mellifluous baritone we remember from his days in power. The GST and free trade speak for themselves, policies that have stood the test of time. On the downside of the ledger, of course, are the favours for friends, certainly a weakness. However, the grubby brown envelopes received are much harder to forgive. The downside of charisma for a politician is that voters can turn against you as strongly as they liked you once.

Do leaders really see every ad that goes out? You’d think you could trust someone as sensible as John Tory not to screw that up. The vagaries of first past the post and the split in the conservative vote played a huge role. Being provincially based can be a big asset in our system. Reform got 2.7% more of the vote than the PCs but ended up with 50 more seats. Libs 177, 41.2% BQ 54, 13.5% Reform 52, 18.7% NDP 9, 7% PC 2, 16% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Canadian_federal_election The PCs were in for a hammering no matter who led them there.