SpankyMcFarland

You discuss a serious problem for our planet, the only known home of life in the universe, in the same breath as increased taxes. In the greater scheme of things they are hardly comparable. Adaptation is a different issue and we are all going to have to do a whole lot more of that. It will be forced upon us. Our country is on fire and that fire generates country-sized plumes of smoke in the summer. Lord knows what awaits us in the next decade. You better start praying to the lad upstairs because we’re not getting much done down here.

What did I just say? 1+1+1+1…= 50. We can’t wiggle out of our responsibilities just because we are one of those ones. It all adds up. In addition, our output PER PERSON is far greater than the vast majority of people in the world. Do you honestly think they’re going to let that go? This is a small planet and we are all stuck here. Like shingles in the ad, nature doesn’t care. If we humans all bury our heads, nature will bury us. So all the science on this is wrong? Are you following what is happening in Antarctica right now? Unprecedented temperatures? Huge ice shelves breaking up? There’s no joy for me in being correct on this issue. What do I get for that? A ruined planet is what.

Assuming those figures are accurate, half of the greenhouse gases come from somewhere other than China, the US and India and every one of those countries is going to come out with the same lines as we do about not making a difference even though together we produce half the output. Two other things to consider. Most countries have contributed less than the West has to the excess gases up there already and Canada’s per capita production is enormous.

Leon Panetta has some harsh words for Israel: https://www.aol.com/israelis-usually-fire-then-ask-155158452.html Israel investigated the WCK killings because nearly all the victims were Westerners. Does anyone believe it does the same for Palestinians killed under similar circumstances. As I understand it, the two main objectives of this invasion were to bring all the hostages safely home and to eliminate Hamas. Objective one is already only partially successful and I don’t see how objective two can be achieved by Israel alone. Many of the children watching Gaza being levelled and their relatives slaughtered will be highly vulnerable to Hamas’s message. The pictures from Gaza are also having a woeful effect on Biden voters in swing states. Words alone are not going to save Joe: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/04/wisconsin-democrats-biden-stop-gaza-war Israel would be far better off not sending either Netanyahu or Dermer back to Washington again. They are poison for their side’s interests.

Starting in 1947 is way too late. You have to cover events from 1900 at the latest. That’s when migrants born in Europe began to flood into Palestine without any consultation with the majority population there. Imagine if 20 million Chinese arrived in Canada over the few decades and then they said, ‘let’s be reasonable, we only want BC and the Prairies for our new country’. Would you be keen to compromise and agree? If you say they weren’t indigenous and that’s important to you then imagine if a world-dominant China gave the same land as a new country to First Nations people in 2060. Fair?

I did. There’s lots of blame to go round.

At long last I have some good news to report on this thread. Richard Slayman, the man who received a pig kidney last month, was discharged from hospital today. https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/04/03/the-massachusetts-man-who-received-a-pig-kidney-transplant-discharged-from-mgh-one-of-the-happiest-moments-of-my-life/ Of course it is early days yet. Let’s hope this brave man does well.

I don’t advocate panic but we need to be concerned enough to deal with the problem which we are not at the moment. Our fire season doesn’t stop now. I can see a day coming when the number one request from the US to Canada will be to stop our smoke choking their cities.

Putin could be killed or overthrown tomorrow. It’s why he spends so much of his time hiding these days. I suspect that happy event would end the war. And he could choose to end it tomorrow if he was a normal human being.

Throughout history, statements like ‘we are good - they are evil’ are followed by ‘we deserve their land’ in short order.

Violence or threats of violence against other Canadians for any reason are not excusable so that is easy enough to condemn whenever it happens. Also demonstrating outside places of worship, schools or hospitals should be punished by criminal charges. I am a secular social democrat. Theocracy in any form, indeed anything less than complete separation of religion and state, is anathema to me. However, as someone who came here from a part of the world with its own troubles, I would caution anyone who talks about one side being the good guys. If you’re willing to look back into the history of any such situation that is virtually never true. For starters, there are often more than two sides. In the current conflict, yes, Hamas are to blame. However, the Palestinians didn’t drive Jews out of Russia after 1881, or block their entry into Britain in 1905, or slaughter them by the millions in Europe after 1933. On top of all that, the British saw fit to or open the borders to Jewish immigration to Palestine after 1917 without consulting the majority population at all, setting two nations on a collision path, and then ruthlessly crushed the Arab revolts that resulted. Anybody complaining about the effect that immigration is currently having in Canada should ponder that for a second. Even words to the effect of ‘from the river to the sea’ were used by Likud long before they became a slogan for confused millennials. Furthermore, Likud relentlessly turned those words into ‘facts on the ground’ in the West Bank which is surely far more offensive than just saying them?

I don’t speak for the state and these are genuine questions. For men 20-40, can you compare the risk of getting the vaccine with the risk of getting Covid in Canada? How many men have died from Covid vaccine-induced myocarditis in this country?

I don’t dispute there is an increased risk of myocarditis after the vaccine, esp. in young males who have received particular types of vaccines. Properly conducted studies have shown this. Many other adverse events have also been detected in the largest international studies too BTW. The questions I would ask include: how many people are affected in Canada and how severely - what is the mortality and morbidity associated with this, in other words the clinical significance? For example, how many of them were classed as mild myocarditis, a typically self-limiting condition? Is what is happening enough to restrict the vaccine in certain cohorts? I don’t think the final answers are in but some suggestions have already been made on the type of vaccine to be given and the timing of them in younger males. Why don’t you contact the local experts in Vancouver if you have such concerns? Yes, McCullough’s article is valid for now (valid should be enough - perfectly valid sounds like something completely legal a dodgy accountant would come up with) but I still think it was a bad one to pick at the start of this thread. VAERS data was never meant to be used this way. It’s a screening tool that can easily overstate the numbers if misused. He has had to retract at least one paper already on Covid, a serious embarrassment for any researcher, and has had numerous other issues in his work. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10897748/ The magnitude of the problem matters a great deal. If these vaccines are damaging a significant number of young peoples’ hearts then something should be done. And just to clarify lest anybody else reading this might have any doubt - I know nothing about this subject.

The fact one person chose to receive a particular treatment proves nothing by itself.

OK, I’ll keep my mongering to myself in future.

For sure, especially with easier-to-transplant organs like kidney. I believe a pig kidney has already survived in a monkey for two years. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/pig-organs-1.6993364 One alternative to an animal donor, creating a kidney from the recipient’s own stem cells, seems like a long way from becoming a reality at the moment. There are certainly many thousands of patients whose lives would be prolonged and immeasurably improved if this form of animal-to-human transplantation works out. With the current epidemic of obesity in the young we are facing a massive increase in diabetic kidney failure. What a coup for South Africa that first transplant was!

There has been an expression of concern issued about the article in question: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20420986241239903

Incredibly, the medical team is talking about discharging the patient ‘soon’, a very different situation from the cardiac recipients above. The pig breed used in the Maryland heart cases was a fairly standard size bigger than humans which had to be genetically modified to make it smaller whereas the kidney came from a ‘mini pig’. However, there is a particular potential risk with this type of pig:

Things change. In 1917 there was no Hamas and Palestine was just an obscure backwater of the Ottoman Empire with a Jewish minority. Then the invading British had the bright idea to send the Eastern European Jews they and the rest of Europe didn’t want to another continent. These days, I hear a lot about the problems immigration can bring. Well that’s what happened. The Arabs revolted and the British put the revolts down brutally which greatly strengthened the position of Zionists in the territory. It takes a while to accept one has lost one’s land. Remember Churchill’s speech about fighting the Germans on the beaches and landing grounds and so on until ‘we shall never surrender’? Turns out most people on the planet think that way. There were always people looking for a solution on both sides but they had opponents on their side too. Barak and Olmert had to deal with Likud and we know what happened to Rabin. On the other side, things were naturally even more chaotic partly because Palestine isn’t a state and also because exiles can become marinated in the most extreme positions and were poisoned by Islamicist ideology. Abbas was once reasonable. The offer from Olmert was a good place to start but neither side had enough time to press it home before Bibi was facing off against Obama and the moment was lost. If you look at any tribal conflict that has been peacefully resolved you will usually see a long catalogue of failure before the deal. Peace in Ireland took 800 years. Obviously, the clock has been put way back now with the atrocities committed by Hamas but it is still ticking. Humans can change. Peace is possible. BTW I also believe that one day a mini-Iran will be something for any developing country to aspire to. I remember when it was a great place to visit - my school used to organize trips there. That can happen again.

The rhetorical question in the title of this thread represents a classic example of projection. Republicans know the claim that their party has become a cult around one odious man, Trump, and many have left because they feel it has. So what to do: claim the other party is doing what you are doing.

It’s on life support at this stage. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4544660-newsmax-host-jim-jordan-biden-impeachment/

So Trump just happened to change his mind after talking to this guy with a big stake in TikTok, making his political followers in the Republican Party look silly?

On March 16, Rick Slayman, a 62 year old man with terminal kidney failure and multiple other serious medical problems, received a pig kidney. The pig donor was genetically altered in a similar way to the pigs used in the two Maryland heart transplants above but was a different type of pig. Recently, a pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead human patient survived for a month. So far, Mr. Slayman is doing well. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/health/pig-kidney-transplant-living-person/index.html https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/worlds-first-genetically-edited-pig-kidney-transplant-into-living-recipient

Obviously, the war matters more to Putin than it does to us in the West and in North America especially. We are a long way from the current front line. 40% of Russian spending is now on the military. We certainly have the capacity to prevail but do we have the stamina to wait Putin out? He’s banking on us giving up or a Trump presidency.

I have no idea how much money Joe Biden and his spouse or Hunter Biden have invested or made in a China. I do know the matter is hotly contested. Notice in my post that I said that Tesla and Apple have bigger ties there. Actually, much bigger. This is not a partisan issue nor is it confined to politicians. Any large investment in China, by a company or an individual, is a potential vulnerability for Western governments.