BHS

It won't come as a surprise to them at all. They're there. They know who's killing them from personal experience. And unlike you, they don't have the luxury of sitting back and pondering the intricacies of how American foreign policy is the real boogey behind all of the trouble in the world. A side question: The Hells Angels and the Rock Machine were attacking each other with bombs and bullets in Quebec throughout the 90's. Is the Quebec government criminally responsible for that? It seems that under your reasoning they should be held accountable. There's no end to how far that reasoning can go. Should the Prime Minister be held criminally responsible for every murder that happens in the country? The United States will never have as many civilians die under it's watch as have died under the watchful, tear-flecked eyes of the UN because unlike the latter they are actually doing everything they can to prevent the murderous scum from winning. The worst possible scenario for the world would be an isolationist America that leaves solving global security concerns up to the UN. I ask you to name one crisis where UN participation made the situation better, where the actual heavy lifting wasn't done by the US. (And even then, the US pays 25% of the UN's operating budget.) Furthermore, you've set the bar pretty low for what constitutes "horrible". True, there are the inevitable disgruntled soldiers crying "quagmire" on returning home, but they are vastly outnumbered by troops who believe in the cause and and re-enlisting to prove it. It's not the safest place in the world. It's not North America. But it's safer than a dozen places you would never worry about, and it surely is growing safer still on a daily basis. Casualty numbers and the frequency of insurgent attacks are falling. Citizens, including Sunnis, are turning against foreign insurgents. Ask me in five years where all the insurgents went. The answer will be either "back to where they came from" or "into the ground".

Why the scare quotes around MBA? Don't tell me - Harvard, the most prestigious business school in the world, "gave" an MBA to junior because senior was head of the scary CIA. Remind me to laugh out loud next time one of you guys refers to Castro as "doctor".

This is the craziest non-sequitur I've ever seen in the forum, bar none.

Not your best analogy. Is the city water department giving you access to my bathroom? The phone companies have already created the databases in question for their own purposes (which no one seems to be bothered by). Unlike peeping, there's nothing illegal at all about handing these records over to the government. So, because none of the bombers had "I'm with Al Qaeda" tattooed on his forehead for a post hoc committee to ponder there's no connection? The point of Steyn's article is that there may be a buried link (through degrees of seperation) between these bombings and and a greater Al Qaeda conspiracy, but since the requisite data mining hasn't or can't be performed there is no way of knowing. Perhaps it frightens you that there are people in places of authority and responsibility who aren't willing to gloss over the preliminary findings and leave it at that. His description of the two memes - blaming the government for not preventing a terrorist attack, and accusing the government of nefarious motives when take the most basic steps towards achieving said prevention, is exactly what I'm seeing with this. A funny thing - The New York times, one of the papers that was shocked, SHOCKED, when this story broke late last week, actually wrote about this story last December. I remember it well. It's pretty pathetic when the biggest daily in the US is feigning surprise about a story that it itself broke months ago in order to capitalize on anti-Bush hysteria.

Um, where do you get your information from? Were you in on the plotting? Since when is using a phone an act of dissent? Also, please illustrate how examining a normal person's calling patterns might be used for nefarious purposes other than marketing.

In every job I've taken as an adult I've chosen to move to a new area if it meant an improvement in my prospects. If $9.00 an hour jobs were all I was qualified for and the only jobs available were 50 miles away I'd move. But my answer here is moot, because I live in an area of the country where the economy hasn't been made stagnant by EI molly-coddling.

If you were laid off, would you take $9/hr to move 50 miles ? Sorry, but seeing as I have about 6 months to find a job, I'm going to hold out for something better. That's within the rules, and that's what I'm going to do. Fine. Don't blame me for wanting to end equalization payments then. Being paid to be unproductive invariably ruins economies. The only reason the East Coast requires equalization is because of this sort of bulls**t attitude. Why the hell should my 2080 hours of productivity be tapped to keep a bunch of EI moochers from sinking into the Atlantic? I'm supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy about unemployed fish plant workers just because of their cute accents and picturesque villages? Bah.

Betsy started a different thread on this topic, which is how I got involved in the argument at all. In that thread I made a couple of statements that have been lost due to everyone shifting back to this thread. I'm not anti-abortion as a matter of public policy preference. As a matter of fact, I more or less agree that the status quo should be maintained. My entire reason for arguing here at all has been to counter the line that opposition to abortion is based strictly on religious belief. I think it's pretty funny that you feel it necessary to point out that people who come to a politcal web forum and get involved in contentious issues don't necessarily want to reach a compromise, and prefer to stick to their guns (or ideology). If everyone came and posted their opinion, shook hands and agreed to disagree without further rebutal this site would be dead in a week. What fun would that be?

Well, let me consider your four quotes BHS. Let me try these differently: "Murder is wrong because somebody has their life taken from them." "Two-lane highways are wrong because they increase the likelihood of fatal accidents." "Medical waiting lists are wrong because they mean people have their lives taken from them." "Flying in airplanes is wrong because sometimes somebody has their life taken from them." BHS, I think it is you who misses the point. This is not a black and white question. So where do we draw the line? Well, it seems to me that any attempt to forbid abortion in Canada would lead to more evil, grief and harm than not forbidding abortion. This is turning into more trouble than it's worth. My post was not intended to express statements of my opinion, but to compare opinions based on provable facts with opinions based strictly on faith, as a means of countering the argument that believing unborn children are human beings is strictly religious. Maybe I should go back and add a cautionary note.

You forgot to mention Kosovo.

Good for you.

And so I'm supposed to pay for your intransigence? Come on!

This article by Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun Times is more or less definitive for the arguments in favour of the NSA wiretapping program.

I was going to point out this typo myself, but with the change made (mentally), it is a very good point. The question then becomes, "Is altruism a valid (and lucid) reason to choose an option?" From my limited knowledge of economics theory, no. Altruism is irrational, and part of the reason that economics is such a complicated academic pursuit is because it has to try to take irrational behaviour into account. From a real world perspective altruism is perfectly acceptable. Whether or not you can qualify literally icing old people for the good of the tribe as altruism is a stretch though. I'd say it's more an example of harsh pragmatism. I don't believe that they stayed behind because of a sense of self-sacrifice. Probably more like "if you have to be carried...well, you won't be."

Do you even know what a red herring is? Because this isn't an example of one. Go ahead and look it up. And, I didn't make any statements qualified with "might have been". Rumsfeld believed what he believed. By the same logic, all of the people in the world who KNOW that global warming is caused by human activity and share this information are liars. (In case you are one of these people: average yearly global atmospheric temperature fluctuations have been happening without human intervention for billions of years. This hasn't prevented multitudes of gullible people from being mislead to believe that the entire "fault" for this "calamity" lies solely with human beings.) (Oh, and this paragraph is much closer to being a red herring than anything else I've written in this thread. If I hadn't prefaced my first sentence with "By the same logic" it absolutely would be a red herring.) Rumsfeld was given contradictory intel. He chose the intel he thought best, he believed it, and he shared his belief. That doesn't make him a liar. No, that's not about it. I've patiently explained to you that telling a lie is in part a matter of intent. If, per your example, you say something with the intent to deceive then you are a liar, regardless of any later declarations. You clearly believe that Rumsfeld intended to deceive, and I do not. The given facts of this situation can be read either way. What I'm getting from you "RUMSFELD IS A LIAR" people is cheap desperation. You're really just quibbling about a missing qualifier in a single sentence. If Rumsfeld had said 'We believe we know where the weapons are" you wouldn't have an argument at all. Pretty weak, people.

Make that five-way circle-jerk, apparently.

The person here who appears to have problems wrapping their head around ideas is you. In a previous post you completely missed the point I was trying to make. I gave four sample opinions, in quotation marks no less, intended to illustrate that there are opinions in this world that are informed by provable facts, and that these are different from opinions which are informed solely on faith. I thought that this was made pretty obvious by the question I posed at the end of the post. I even threw in an opinion that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. It went right over your head, as you replied by taking the sample opinions completely out of their given context, quibbling over the semantical differences between "murder" and "killing" as if the sample opinion were some sort of point that I was trying to make. (By the way, in that statement, if you replace "murder" with "killing" my point is proven, as your reply merely illustrates your own factually informed opinion of the sample subject.)(Oh, and among certain societies, the mafia for instance, murder is an acceptable practice. So your conjecture that "murder=wrong" is analogous to "bad=wrong" doesn't hold water.) You've made a repeated habit of writing off people with contrary views as religious zealots when that isn't the case. I've clearly argued that if the legal definition of "human life" were changed to include those humans who still rely physically on a direct connection to their mother's body, then abortion would be murder. No religious opining required. An embryo has it's own beating heart long before it's features are recognizably human, and left to its own devices that heartbeat will continue for about 75 years after it leaves the womb. This is simply fact. You can't just right off the mechanics of millions of years of mammalian reproductive continuity as a worthless religious opinion. Passage through the birth canal is not an supernatural event that magically confers life on an otherwise lifeless clump of tissue. If that is what you believe, perhap's your the one with a religious hangup.

If "human life" has be legally redefined to include fetuses, you put women who have illegal abortions in prison by charging them with murder. If the "doctor" who performed the abortion is a woman, maybe they can be cellmates.

I notice you qualify your statement with "most". Let me flesh out some of the reasons why. Under your logic, laws designed to protect the environment can all be chucked, since they don't have anything to do with the peaceful co-existence of people. The idea that animals should have rights and should be protected from abuse is no more logical than any religious belief. Chuck those laws too. Insider trading doesn't hurt anybody, at least not directly. It just makes the market unfair for small investors. But the universe is inherently unfair. Out the window. Soliciting prostitution is merely a financial transaction pertaining to an act which isn't a crime. Defenestrate. Selling kilos of heroin to willing adults within sight of a schoolyard only riles up parents because they don't realize that the junkies are only hurting themselves. They need some anger management skills, so that we can all just get along. Do you want me to find other examples?

"Murder is wrong because somebody has their life taken from them." "Abortion is wrong because someone who would have been alive has that life taken from them." "Adding sugar to a diabetic's food is wrong because it increases his the likelihood of him suffering from poor health." "Satanism is wrong because it offends God." Which of these opinions doesn't fit in with the others? (Hint: it's the one that doesn't have any factual basis.)

That's a valid point, but do the benefits outweigh the costs ? Any large system has anomalies that cause grief for individuals here and there. Look at banking, credit ratings, the justice system for examples. I agree with BHS. I think that we could greatly increase our collective security if we weren't so touchy about privacy issues. If security cameras were more prevalent in public places, there would be less crime. This amounts to the automation of policing, no less than manufacturing or software construction has been automated in recent times. The Oregon man was a former lawyer for a convicted jihadist conspirator. The lawyer was arrested on a material witness warrant because what were believed to be his fingerprints were found at a terrorist bombing site. There was no accident in his arrest. I posit that if everyone's DNA were on record it would necessarily mean that criminal investigations of crimes and crime scenes would uncover trace from many innocent people, and that this would necessarily need to be factored into the investigation and that more caution would be taken in regard to arrests and accusations. But arrests like the one you mentioned would probably still happen in cases of international terrorist conspiracy, because it's less important to build a super solid pre-arrest case than it is to get a potential terrorist cell member off the streets. I disagree about the idea of cameras making the world a safer place, based on the fact that London has one of the biggest security camera networks in the world and it's still a high-crime cesspool. (Read the article. True, it's from 2002 but the security network predates that. I just think it's interesting that Finland has one of the world's highest crime rates. Who would'a thunk it?) Also, it's believed that the trend of English teens wearing black hoodies everywhere is specifically to shield their identities from the cameras. They all look the same on film. So you spend a bjillion dollars on cameras and you still can't tell the genuine soccer hooligans from the wannabes.

Law is 100% opinion. That murder is wrong and should be punished is an opinion. What constitutes excessive speed in an automobile is an opinion. How close you should build your house to the road is an opinion. You seem to be trying to close down this debate, which is about creating law, by pointing out that the law will be based on an opinion. Which is silly.

In broad terms this is true. But for the purposes of creating a useful abortion law this is not so. The term "insane" has a broader meaning in it's vernacular use than what the legal definition of insanity entails. Any law passed about abortion would necessarily involve developing a hard and specific legal definition for "human life". Actually, to avoid the inevitable SCOC challenge it would probably require a Charter amendment, which isn't going to happen. And yet everyone agrees that Scott Peterson killed his own "baby". Interesting, no? Since California is at the forefront of pro-abortion activity in the US, and Roe v Wade is based in part on the idea that unborn children aren't human, it wouldn't surprise me if Scott's conviction for the murder of his unborn son is eventually overturned, with quiet support from the choice crowd. What an absurd comparison. The whole point of abortion on demand is to prevent a human life from occurring. Regardless of whatever linguistic or legalistic hoops you prefer to jump through, a fetus will develop into a human being (barring it's death or removal ). That is an undeniable fact. You can't compare it to arbitrary religious opinion. So, animal rights people imitate pro-lifers but pro-lifers don't imitate animal rights people. What's your point? I have yet to hear pro-lifers claim that humanity is a plague upon Gaia. You'd think that would apply more to their counterparts.

Whether or not someone qualifies depends on the box checked off by the employer the ROE. I suspect companies many companies are forced to promise lay offs in order to get the workers to sign on in the first place. This kind of abuse could be stopped by a system of escalating premiums for companies that frequently lay off workers. Laying off workers is a legitimate business tactic, especially in a seasonal industry. What would make a real difference would be government investigations of insurance fraud that lead to real fines or jail time. Some how I get the picture that this doesn't happen too often the way things currently stand. It serves the industry right that they can't keep it's labour supply if it's employers are willing to perpetrate fraud on the employees behalf.

It made my blood boil when I heard this story. I heard an representative from the company that said the problem was not finding the workers: the problem was stopping them from quiting as soon as they qualified for EI. He said he hoped the Russian workers would stay on the job year round.Clearly, the EI system is completely broken in Atlantic Canada. Correct me if I'm wrong here - but the last time I checked an employee who voluntarily quits his/her job doesn't qualify for EI. Is this some sort of fishing industry loophole? Or am I just too far removed from the intricacies of government slush funds posing as manditory insurance (aka a tax)?