SpankyMcFarland

Because Trump is the US president. He has to take the blame now. Biden wasn’t tough enough either but at least he didn’t keep on making ridiculous statements about Putin or humiliate one of the great men of our time in the White House.

I did not cover for Biden in that regard even though I still much preferred him to the alternative. I thought he looked terrible right from the primary debates. Both of these men were too way old for an incredibly difficult job. The ideal age would be between 30 and 60 and that upper limit is pushing it for a head of government as I said about both Carney and Starmer. There’s no question Trump is in decline but he was always so casual with the facts and staying on topic that it’s quite difficult to assess how much sharpness he has lost in the word salads he comes out with. Nearly every day he makes serious blunders with the facts that he doesn’t feel obliged to correct, a worrying situation for any chief executive but quite appalling for what used to be called the leader of the free world.. There’s another problem here. The actions of any person must be judged on their own merits and cannot be excused by pointing to the errors or wrongs of others. Anybody raised in the Christian tradition would be expected agree with that. We also hold professionals to such external standards or try to. If I went to one incompetent surgeon I would hardly be impressed by the next guy admitting that he screwed my bowel up too but less so than the first guy. So talking about Biden’s intellectual failings is no excuse for Trump’s. Furthermore, what happened to all those righties who went on and on and on about ‘the Biden crime family’ but have nothing to say about the most brazen profiteeering by a president in American history?

Trump rants on about limiting China’s access to advanced US chips and then personally profits from a deal that may lead to some of them ending up in China.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a politician threaten a country before when asked a question they didn’t like: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/donald-trump-clashes-with-australian-abc-journalist-and-hints-at-albanese-meeting

She certainly knows the subject.

The Liberal slogan ‘Real energy, real momentum, real leadership’ is a bit of a mouthful. The PCs are promising a referendum on the Hydro MOU which is always a gamble.

A provincial election has just been called in Newfoundland and Labrador. Usually these aren’t about much but this time we have the proposed Hydro deal with Quebec for the two parties to debate. The Opposition are vehemently opposed to the deal and claim it’s more of the same foolishness that we signed up to with the Upper Churchill deal that caused us so much grief. Naturally, Mr. Hogan’s government dispute that and say we’ll receive hundreds of billions this time round and keep the province solvent. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-2025-election-1.7624820 Some background in the Churchill Falls deal. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-election-mou-critics-1.7633931

I don’t think alliances are taken as seriously as they were by the six European empires which got dragged down together into the abyss in 1914. These days those ropes would snap more quickly.

Putin doesn’t fear Trump. That’s one of the basic problems here. He gets away with ignoring him.

Yes, the larger Muslim world has a crazy obsession with Jews no question and Islamic extremism has become a major factor in the feud. By contrast, one thing the local Jewish people had to learn under the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders and Turks is that one should not take one’s holy book too literally if one wanted to keep a head on one’s shoulders. Surviving as a minority is good preparation for modern urban life as the Parsees, Baha’i, Ahmadiyya and Ismaili sects have shown. However, I’d submit a moment from Netanyahu this very week to bolster my claim about the importance of the land in this row:

Was Charest the most bilingual politician in Canada? We certainly don’t have too many outside Quebec approaching his level of fluency. I thought he was an Anglophone when I first heard him.

You want a country to change in minutes, days, weeks? This is not a video game. Also our country’s economy is under an unprecedented assault. I will review in a year post-election and give him one more before I give up and look for a possible alternative.

Not rambling aimlessly. The scale of casualties was disputed for a long time as Hamas propaganda in this war. Now at least the grand total is being accepted as over 60,000 killed and it looks like the total casualty figure is around 200,000 so far. It will take a while for us to agree on the breakdown of those numbers in terms of who they were of course ie civilian vs militant.

From what I can see a broad consensus is beginning to emerge, firstly on the number of Gazans killed or injured so far. Who they were will take a lot longer to agree on.

Countries, like oil tankers, are difficult to turn around. It takes more than days or weeks for anybody to do it even in these impatient times. If we agree that our problems have taken years to be caused we should not be surprised they will take years to solve.

Humans seen to have come very late to monotheism - most religions were not monotheistic if you go back before 1000 BC. Before then people saw spirits all around them and followed what we now call animistic faiths. It was only when societies became urbanized that monotheism began to appear, eg Atenism briefly in Egypt, as a reflection of a more organized and specialized social life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atenism

I’d go simpler than that. It is at heart a tribal conflict over land similar to countless other wars. The British made things worse by opening Palestine’s borders to European refugees after passing legislation to keep them out of Britain.

How a monotheistic religion arose in the region must be speculative but it is reasonable to assume it did so from a polytheistic predecessor, a belief in one deity alone being very much the exception in human history. I’d be more interested in the DNA.

One counts both in wars.

Like most Jews, Palestinians are partly of Canaanite origin.

He broke the law. Bigly. Now he does the time.

I wouldn’t use the word genocide because that is not how I understand it myself but let’s see if we can have a go at guessing, roughly, how many Palestinians have been killed or injured. It looks like a big number, yes?

Sorry, can you explain what forum you are talking about here? Maybe a link to this forum so we can experience the horrific (radical lunatic Marxist) leftness/leftiness of it all for, like, ourselves?

Just curious. How many people have been killed or injured in Gaza, ie, what percentage of the population? I presume you might know why I’m asking. An Israeli gentleman who had a fair role in causing those casualties has just provided an estimate of his own.

For those without access to the NP here’s a wee taste: