SpankyMcFarland

Mental health services should have had their spending ring-fenced when the old asylums were closing and community care, along with the new antipsychotic drugs, were supposed to replace many of those beds. Across the West, this advance, which should have led to better care, was used to cut the mental health budget and leave seriously ill psychotic patients with nowhere to go.

And don’t believe my Maxwell in Israel story unless it’s confirmed. So far, I can only see multiple reports based on anonymous allegations which could be just made up.

No, they shouldn’t do that if they ever want to run the country again. Such a libertarian platform is way outside the Canadian political mainstream.

I recall somebody saying the endless wars must end. The IRGC has been a disaster for Iran and the region.

The left? Love? Enemy combatants?

We’re in a briefing vacuum at the moment. Senior Democrats have yet to be briefed and allies were taken by surprise. A speech by the President immediately after the event would have been the usual route to take. It’s hard to see how this will make Iraq more stable or America’s presence there more secure. I see US citizens are advised to leave Iraq ASAP. Trump is getting sucked in to the ME.

The Daily Mail claims that Maxwell may be in Israel: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7843659/Ghislaine-Maxwell-reportedly-foreign-spy-hiding-Israel.html

The failings of the UN are grotesque and many but we need supranational organizations to confront the world’s problems. The UN represents one halting step in that direction.

The resolution was anodyne which is why the vast majority of countries in the world supported it, although you wouldn’t necessarily know that from all the reports in our media. I presume supporting a two-state solution is still OK?

My money’s on the robots.

There may well be decent Canadian wheat beers and saisons out there but very few of them make their way to Newfoundland.

There are some children who genuinely can’t be vaccinated, e.g. with a history of post-vaccine anaphylaxis, and others who are vulnerable to infection because of immunodeficiency syndromes or during chemotherapy for cancer. If vaccination rates decline, they are at risk.

John Baird is not someone I considered, more famous for his cat pics than anything else these days: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/john-bairds-post-politics-twitter-feed-is-a-bizarre-menagerie-of-cat-photos-simpsons-references

A major win for Boris, no doubt. As has been noted many times here, FPTP magnifies vote swings. We heard a lot about the popular vote in the last Canadian election and there were some interesting results in the UK too. The Conservative share of the vote increased by just 1.2% and the parties pushing for a second referendum actually got a majority of the votes. The big story of the night was the fall in Labour’s vote, down 7.8%, despite which Corbyn refuses to leave immediately and has the gall to say he won the arguments in the election! https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/5-election-result-stats-paint-21089581 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/14/we-won-the-argument-but-i-regret-we-didnt-convert-that-into-a-majority-for-change The SNP in Scotland got 45% of the vote and way more than that of the seats, of course - FPTP loves regional parties like the SNP or BQ. They are already calling for a new referendum on Scottish independence but that 45% figure suggests they would lose again. In Northern Ireland, the pro-Brexit Protestant party, the DUP, lost 2 seats and over 5% of its vote share, ending up with just 30% of the vote, and SF lost an even bigger share, with the SDLP getting 2 seats and Alliance 1. Thus pro-United Ireland parties now have the same number of seats as pro-Union, 9 each, and that includes Alliance on the Unionist side. It’s a strong message to SF and the DUP to get back to negotiations to open the Assembly again, and it would appear to show frustration among some Catholic voters in Belfast and Derry about SF’s policy of abstention from Westminster. Boris’s big majority ends any influence the DUP had on the Brexit process. They probably should have taken May’s deal. The new Conservative coalition of working-class ex-Labourites, interested in good jobs and social services, and the Singapore-on-Thames no-tax crowd will be one heck of a challenge to hold together.

India is going Pakistan, becoming a theocracy. The Indian northeast has been in a state of low-level revolt for decades and any significant inward migration from Bangladesh will result in chaos. Of course, the new law doesn’t cover Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka fleeing persecution by Buddhists, who have been in Tamil Nadu (where many of their ancestors came from) for nearly three decades now and, incredibly, are still living in refugee camps without citizenship.

But should other people, e.g. schoolchildren, have to bear the risk of that choice?

Apathy, ignorance and anti-vaxxers are real and will kill people. I’m a big fan of Bill Maher’s show Real Time but he has had multiple guests on, often seemingly knowledgeable physicians, who push the anti-vaxxer message. If any parents absorb this fake news and fail to vaccinate kids who subsequently die as a result, Maher and HBO should be held liable.

Measles remains a deadly scourge across the world:

I presume a slew of charges will hit Maxwell at some point. A great thing about America is the plea bargain and we should find out a lot more about other perps if she avails of it.

Chrétien was better than either.

Five countries, five, voted against this resolution: Israel, the United States, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Nauru. It sounds fairly anodyne. Not much to get excited about.

Well NAFTA got done so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Since 2003, it could be a very big deal to do what Giuffre has alleged to a 17 year old in the UK. The relevant sections are 47-50: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/contents

BoJo must be delighted Trump left in a huff. The last thing he needed for his election campaign was any more compliments from that guy.

In the medical schools I know, the international students subsidize the locals. If the fees are too low to do that then the school is doing it wrong.