SpankyMcFarland

It’s hard to tell if Trump is lying at this stage, ie that he knows what he is saying is untrue, but the false claims just don’t stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump

You seem to be confusing the word spending with the word speaking. I’m afraid I can’t help you there.

Thank goodness we have sensible limits on campaign spending in Canada. Most advanced democracies do. Once again, America is falling behind.

OK. I don’t agree with Bush’s ideas but her candidacy should have been decided on the basis of her policies, not on how much money could be spent in attack ads against her. If America doesn’t do something about this, its political candidates will be decided and controlled by an oligarchy of billionaires.

The US Supreme Court seems deeply confused on the issue, possibly because some of its members are being bribed on a regular basis by the same type of people who contribute massively to political campaigns. I just found out yesterday that Clarence Thomas’s special friend Harlan Crow was a big donor to the swiftboat campaign that destroyed John Kerry’s run for president.

75 is a reasonable cut-off for any public post - political, judicial, you name it. The former UK PM was 42 and the last two Irish PMs started at ages 37 and 38. That’s the right age for a senior executive post.

The money spent in these recent Democratic primary campaigns by AIPAC et al. is literally unprecedented in US history. Numbers matter at that scale. As the ads piled on, Bush saw her numbers falling. Democracy should not be for sale.

I can think of three arguments in favour of accepting the monarchy apart from stability. 1. Distinctiveness. It distinguishes us from the US. For anglophones this is a serious problem. We look and sound like Americans and are often mistaken for them. Had it not been for their Civil War I suspect they would have completed their conquest of North America. An eccentric arrangement with a European country gives us some reassurance we are not them yet. 2. Authenticity. A related issue. We are a young country, from all over the world, with shallow roots in our land. Our nationalism is decidedly civic rather than ethnic, the opposite of China or Iran. Monarchy connects us to a solid, tribal past. 3. Inevitability. We’re stuck with it. Barring a foreign invasion or the arrival of a decently sized asteroid, our constitutional arrangements are frozen for the foreseeable future. So what to do to freshen things up a bit? On the British side, I’d like to see some (probably obscure) relative of the monarch, preferably a young person, given ‘Prince of Canada’ duties, unofficially at first. The prime requirement would be a willingness to visit here frequently for extended periods of time to do lots of openings and general royal malarkey. Over here, we should make the GG more independent, a de facto head of state. Make it an elected post. The committee choosing the GG could ask the opinion of parliament on a candidate. After all the vetting etc. ten candidates are voted on in secret ballot by both chambers until a candidate is selected. We know what we are looking for - a safe pair of hands, a more independent version of David Johnston, willing to stand up to the PM if absolutely necessary and yet not looking for a constitutional crisis at the same time.

It should be up to any political party to choose its own representatives. That’s a basic principle of democracy. AIPAC’s spending in this election continues a disturbing pattern where critics of Israel are being purged from the Democratic Party by campaigns supported by unprecedented amounts of money, some of which originated with enemies of the party. Bush’s views are out there but AIPAC and its affiliates have no business interfering in these nomination contests. You can tell what they think of their own campaign when you look at the ads they financed. Israel is rarely mentioned. Let such contests be determined by debate, not money.

If we had the economic problems of Venezuela niceties like oaths of allegiance wouldn’t bind us the way people seem to think, and if we have to keep a monarchy we should have our own rather than someone else’s - our head of state hasn’t been here in over a decade, an absurd situation. Also, the GG should be appointed at arm’s length from the PM so that they have the appearance of being properly independent from them. We have the trappings of a constitutional monarchy but it is really rather threadbare.

We’ve been openly debating the origin of Covid for years. If convincing evidence emerges either way then I’ll be happy to believe it. Neither of the two leading theories reflects well on the PRC. They have failed to co-operate fully with outside agencies.

I think most of them do. Let’s not forget that young Russian men are fleeing from their country in droves.

I’m amazed Ukraine has managed to hang on this long against a former superpower. However, given that we know what happens to Ukrainians in territory taken by the Russians, we should support them as long as they want to fight for their freedom even though the odds are stacked against them.

There are 124 million of them. But it is a very poor country. In Britain there are stark regional differences of wealth across the country but nobody speaks of doing away with some of the provinces, aka non-sovereign countries, there. I suppose Canada’s size and newness make things feel more provisional. The way things are going the rest of us could end up in shanty towns around Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

A different set of skills was required in NL. I’ve never met so many people who are handy. Many build their own cabins from scratch and some of these places look like luxury houses. Planes too.

Sociology is a much derided line of work but it would be nice to know why so few Torontonians are being seen via the Internet by, say, doctors in Sudbury, ie, why are young doctors crowding into places that are both full of doctors already, a nightmare to drive around and highly expensive to live in? We’re not getting grown-up answers to these questions.

GPs, now called family practitioners, would point out that they are trained specialists themselves but the distinction persists in common speech. The issue is, why are they paid less than people with easier jobs? In my opinion, being a GP in a rural location is much tougher than running a dermatology clinic in a city from the call viewpoint alone and you’ll make a third of the income if you are lucky. We need to pay them a lot more if we want to attract them there. If not, we need to be honest about it and tell patients it’s going to be foreign doctors, nurse practitioners and zoom for them from now on. I am in NL.

Do you believe that’s an imminent risk in, say, France, Germany, Austria or Finland?

I don’t deny things are looking tough for Ukraine but it’s up to the citizens of that country to decide when they might negotiate with Putin and whether he, or indeed the West, can be trusted to honour any treaty.

We can be part of the Commonwealth and still be an independent republic. This rule changed in 1949 to accommodate India. There are many examples of it. The Irish Free State became Ireland in 1937 and, like many small nations in Europe, decided to stay neutral in WWII after the horrible carnage of WWI. In 1949 Ireland became the Republic of Ireland just before republics could remain members of the Commonwealth. Its neutrality is of far less concern than its very low military spending. WWI was a horrible, pointless slaughter with no good guys - the Russian Empire, the Belgian Empire? - and it’s time we got beyond the simplistic jingoism of In Flanders Fields to tell the truth about that. We would have been better off staying out of it.

When you write it like that, it looks mad, doesn’t it? At some point we will probably have a serious falling out with the UK. These things happen. Does anybody doubt whose side our head of state will be obliged to take under such circumstances?

When people, mostly doctors, say that nurse practitioners are a poor alternative, I have to ask, alternative to what? One quarter of people in my province have no GPs. The alternative to NPs for them is no care at all, ie, suffering, and possibly dying, quietly at home or braving the tedious chaos of the emergency rooms where they don’t belong. We have a third possibility called health hubs here which are a complete joke. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that a larger private sector is needed in our health care system. For me, the opportunity to be able to access a nurse practitioner in my town is preferable to talking to some random medico by zoom or having a GP who is plotting to leave as soon as they arrive. At this stage I would be willing to pay for a local NP. In terms of reform on the public side, I would favour the Dutch model of compulsory insurance. How that would be reconciled with our provincial/federal ‘system’, Lord only knows. One issue we have been unwilling to explore: why are Canadian medical grads turning away from towns in favour of the large cities? This is not a simple economic matter because towns of my size are crying out for them in many regions. When I arrived in my town we must have had at least 10 Canadian GPs under 50. Now we have none. There is something going on there that the sociologists and psychologists should investigate. It won’t be easy - the replies given by physicians on this matter are misleading and I’m not sure physicians themselves know the answers. One possible and controversial issue is assortative mating. I’ll leave it for others to discuss. And a small hack for rural Canada - a one year program in dermatology for GPs. In Britain they have the Dip Derm for this purpose. We need it far more than they do. Many people in my province can’t travel to see the dermatologists who are all in one place now. GPs see all the skin conditions - pay a few of them to treat them.

The US and many other countries in the Americas have amply demonstrated that such patriotism doesn’t require an unelected foreigner as head of state. Our arrangement with Britain is out of date for many reasons.

Many stable democracies have elected heads of state to perform the duties of a monarch and get on perfectly well. In fact, more countries in Europe are parliamentary republics with a ceremonial president than anything else. We are close to that already with our GG as de facto head of state and a monarch who hasn’t turned up in well over a decade.

A second patient in the US has just received a pig kidney. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/24/new-jersey-woman-pig-kidney-transplant The patient was also a given a cardiac pump, and a thymus transplant to reduce the possibility of organ rejection. This kidney story could be very big news, who knows even for a reader of this forum. It’s possible that pig kidney transplants could become routine for kidney failure. The potential demand is colossal. And our first kidney recipient is said to be doing well although I wish there were more update about him. A recent kidney biopsy was apparently normal.