SpankyMcFarland
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Posts posted by SpankyMcFarland
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Chaos, confusion, uncertainty - welcome to the new normal. Not good for business.
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This ain't 1945 any more. Other countries will respond. It's great news for isolationists and anti-capitalists everywhere.
Can you imagine how cocky the US Border boys will be now?
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2 minutes ago, kimmy said:
I'm all for better working conditions in China and Bangladesh and India and wherever it is that they're making cheap clothing nowadays. But the notion that putting heavy tariffs on everything is going to put large numbers of Canada or US workers to work seems incredibly optimistic.
The cost of everything is rising a lot faster than my salary. Tariffs aren't going to help.
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Tariffs are a tax on consumers.
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Hurting the Mexican economy through punitive tariffs will increase the number of people who want to immigrate to the US and, surely to God, one of the best ways to discourage such illegal immigration would be to prosecute the biggest employers of illegals.
So Trump is doing something that will tend to increase the supply of illegal immigrants while failing to take an obvious and relatively simple step to fight this flow at the demand end. That wall better be big.
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On 2016-11-26 at 4:22 AM, Moonlight Graham said:
On a side note, I find it ridiculous that we highly subsidize virtually every university and professor salaries, yet their research is locked away from the public in journals that are inaccessible without a fee payment. We have all of this amazing knowledge being produced by the most educated people in the country (that we're funding) but we can't even access that knowledge!
We are not funding the journals which examine the research and attempt to filter out the dross. Good journals have a lot of moving parts.
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1 hour ago, Army Guy said:
I said you make it sound that way.
Afghanistan considered him a terrorist because he was one, and terrorist don't last long in afghan prison....another fact why he is in Canada.....leaving him there would result in his death....and that does not play well on TV....
Lets establish a couple of pionts before we get into another topic already discussed. At the time of Omars capture, AFghan had already had a free election , which established an elected government, by the people of Afghanistan.......unless your saying that election did not count or was illegal, or for some reason unknown to the rest of us bogus......this elected government had asked the western coalition to help in the securing all of their country.......which is legal..... Now if this is true according to written history. Then how can a Canadian boy to young to be in any army legally...., just happen to stand up and take up arms again'st a lawful government ? sounds like a terrorist already.....Next question is how an under aged canadian boy be recruited into fighting for what exactly......how can he take up arms again'st his own country of birth, as Canada was part of the coalition.....sounds like he has chosen to draw the line in the sand....
You're going to have to explain that timeline to me there because I am not that familiar with it. On the date of the crime, had there already been a democratic election in Afghanistan turfing the Taliban?
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25 minutes ago, Argus said:
I think CEOs are overpaid, too, but they're overpaid by the private sector. Hospital administrators and University/college heads are public sector workers. I don't for a moment believe that if you have no difficulty finding people willing to work as deputy minister or assistant deputy minister of health for half to a third the price as we're paying hospital administrators, you can find hospital administrators for the same or less. The same goes for university and college heads.
I would not equate universities and hospitals.
Your proposal would mean that the boss of the hospital would earn a lot less than some of the doctors he or she is in charge of managing.
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27 minutes ago, Army Guy said:
You make it sound that he was participating in all of this again'st his will, because he was not.....in fact he took part in planting IED's and gloated about perhaps collecting the bounty paid out for killing coalition service personal, not the actions of someone acting again'st his will....He was a terrorist end of story.....and nobody knew what type of intel he had, what they did know is he had ties that were close to OSBL, and the US intel service thought that was enough to question him......
1. I did not say against his will.
2. It is a fact that he was taken to Pakistan and Afghanistan by his family, isn't it? He did not travel there on his own. At what point should Omar Khadr have left his family and come back to Canada? And whom would he have stayed with here if he had?
3. I understand how actions can be taken against persons deemed terrorists in other countries but if you invade a country, that country has the right to call on all residents, citizens or otherwise, to defend it. It is hard to see how actions taken in Afghanistan, sanctioned by the government, against an invading foreign power, can be deemed to be terrorism. There is no pure and simple about it unless we think 'we right, they wrong'.
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36 minutes ago, Army Guy said:
Sure he would have moved on, that much is a fact he was good at his craft , are you saying that info on old hide outs would not be useful, or perhaps who was his driver, is closest advisor, where they live etc etc all of this info is used to build a bigger picture.....and maybe your right maybe omar had no good intel but getting an asset that had close ties to OSBL would be worth checking out would they not be ?
I just feel (right or wrongly, no idea) that a young guy like that (not a volunteer, brought to Afghanistan by his family) could more usefully be coaxed to give up intel, given that he might have some trivial detail about somebody in the leadership that nobody would even think of asking. Many of his family WERE fanatics so who knows.
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4 minutes ago, Army Guy said:
Khadr was an example of a person that may have been privy to other intel they wanted, such as his fathers dealings, bin ladins where abouts etc etc....
I do not believe that torture would be the best way to get that kind of info. Khadr was not a hardened fanatic by any stretch of the imagination. You'd want him talking freely, giving up details of OBL's preferences in coffee and other apparent trivia. And do you not think OBL would have moved on by then?
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I would concede there is a case to be made for torture in the ticking bomb scenario (which is why Dershowitz makes it) but I don't see any awareness of the slippery slope here that would give the green light to all sorts of cases. The punishment for breaking the rules would have to be severe.
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5 minutes ago, Army Guy said:
Canada has done the same thing, remember the Omar Kadr incident where RCMP let US government officials question omar with out a lawyer present, or a canadian offical for that matter......so stop pointing fingers....when our government has not exactly been the angel here .
The Khadr case is a good example of stupid torture. There was no possibility of a ticking bomb there.
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14 minutes ago, sharkman said:
Well, it is a big step, actually a chasm. Totalitarianism is what you're talking about, places like North Korea, China, Iran and several other mid east countries as well as Isis. The US has banned waterboarding, and is now reconsidering. I outlined a scenario in which its known that a terrorist has the goods on a mass murder attack(this could easily happen with intercepting cell phone calls or old fashioned surveillance). No one wants to even consider it because it forces them to say it's okay to save thousands of lives by waterboarding.
Unscrupulous interrogators will jump this chasm as often as they can. Once you open up that crack, it will widen rapidly.
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15 minutes ago, Argus said:
Fine. The deputy minister of health, then, ie, the actual expert with decades of experience who runs the whole department. They make a lot less than hospital administrators.
And by the way 'apparently you don't have to pay people that much to run the country'? What makes you think you have to pay people so much to run a hospital? What makes you think you need to pay people so much to run a university?
You could ask that about CEOs as well. The pool of people willing and able to run a large hospital is small. You're handling bad news publicly all the time. In my own province, we had to recruit from Ontario in at least one instance and offer a better package than the person was already getting.
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On 1/26/2017 at 0:34 PM, sharkman said:
Your link has the same quotes from Trump that mine does, I guess it was just the one interview.
No one has refuted the scenario I outlined. If a terrorist is detained, and he knows the particulars of an upcoming attack with a jetliner, the CIA or whomever is obligated to try and save the thousands of lives that are at stake. Waterboarding? Here's the bucket, have at it.
One problem there is that you don't know what a suspect knows, so torture could be justified against many suspects that have an exceedingly low probability of being involved in such a plot. It would not be a big step from there to torture every terrorist suspect until he signs the confession and then send him to court to be sentenced.
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Canada is doing very well with its treatment of cystic fibrosis. Our patients have among the world's highest life expectancy.
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1 hour ago, Argus said:
Isn't running the country even harder? With more media pressure? Should the guy who runs a hospital make two or three times more than the Prime Minister?
It is harder but a lot more fun. Apparently, you don't have to pay people that much to run a country. The old vanity kicks in there.
BTW the guy who runs the big city hospital often earns a lot less than some of the specialists in that city.
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How religious does this girl sound?:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/paniz-khosroshahy/mcgill-cycle-sexual-violence_b_9778676.html
Most of that could have been written by any 'old stock' young Canadian Anglo female.
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This is a remarkable tale, apparently a world first, about a woman with cystic fibrosis whose lungs were so infected they were going to kill her. The doctors removed her lungs and kept her going for six days on an artificial lung before doing a double lung transplant.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/25/canada-doctors-remove-lungs-transplant
She is recovering well and may soon get a kidney transplant from her mother.
Artificial organs seem to be making big strides. The lungs would be fairly simple compared to some but, still, this is quite the leap forward.
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Credit to Trump for using the word 'torture':
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Sharkman, have you tried it yourself?
This talk of 'enhanced techniques' is creepy, like 'enhanced screaming'. There's no need for Orwellian euphemisms.
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I think the town halls are a great idea that other leaders should copy. Robust feedback is good for them and democracy.
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1 hour ago, taxme said:
I am pretty sure that you can find plenty of interesting news stories to talk about that goes on in America besides Trump. Chicago would be a great place to start. Even Trump is concerned about Chicago and all the killings going on in that city. Trump has even said that if mayor Rahm Emanueal doesn't do something soon about crime Trump says that he will do something about it, and will send in the National guard if need be. How is that for a news story?
That would be a local news story. I am aware of the problems there. Some of my family live outside Detroit.
This is a thread about one aspect of Mr. Trump. I spend much of my internet time on other websites in other countries so my attention span on the US is limited, frankly.
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2 minutes ago, taxme said:
From all the talk here one would swear that America and Trump is all that there is to talk about. If the Canadian media would stop talking about Trump, no Canadian would than care less what Trump does. It is this fake and phony liberal media that keeps the constant bull and lies about Trump going. The Canadian liberal media despise him. Canada has nothing to fear from Trump, and what he is going to do. All it means for Canadians is that there will be a slight adjustment as to how things are going to be done in the near future now that Trump is in.
Well, this is the US politics section of a political website. We are here to express our opinions about such things.
It will take years to know whether Trump succeeds or not, obviously. Can he get that 4% annual growth that washes away all sins? No idea. What is clear is that he has just started off at a sprightly pace but a grueling marathon awaits.
I heard some expert say we are now running a trade deficit with the US which is good news in the Age of Trump.
America under President Trump
in Federal Politics in the United States
Posted
Those jobs are good jobs in Bangladesh. Granted we should monitor the safety of sub-contractors there better than we have but clothes can be made far more cheaply there than here. Industries come and go.