BHS

Excellent post. Kinda shows the twisted mentality of the Bush administration. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Congress isn't the Bush adminstration.

Toro, check his posting history. All of his posts are like that.

Let me get this straight: millions of people live, of their own free will, in a bowl surrounded by water. Which is stupid, but not George Bush's fault. They have a municipal, state and finally federal government government, layers and layers of governmental oversight comprised of thousands upon thousands of people overseeing this situation, not just George Bush. The situation has been in need of improvement for decades, not just since 2000. So you decide to blame it all on Bush anyway, and use the opportunity to surmise that he's a racist on top of it all. Just freakin' ridiculous. Get a life.

No one has ever proven that CO2 has ever caused a change in climate, in the entire history of the Earth. In fact, when the geological record is compared to the composition of gases trapped in ice, CO2 fluctuations tend to follow climate change rather than proceed it.

Which is irrelevant to my argument. I could point out (again) that the UN has been administering the refugee camps without Israeli interference, and how this resembles the Berlin Airlift. I guess that it won't be a problem after the settlements are evacuated and the wall is finished. Until people who don't live with suicide bombings want to complain about Israel's solutions. Nonsense. Got me there. I'm not particularly in favour of state religions, though to be fair Israel isn't the only country in the world, or even the Middle East, to have one. Rhetorical. Yummy. Then you are also aware that the entire point of the exercise was to give European Jews a homeland to move to, and that the population at the time of the partition was therefore irrelevant.

You say "their brother Arabs" as if they were homogenous, as if one were exactly the same as the other. "They all look the same", "I can't tell them apart", etc. We are more likely in North America to recognize differences between Ireland and Scotland than differences between Palestine and Saudi Arabia, for example (or between Morocco and Mozambique, but that is for another thread). You are passing judgment while completely ignoring the social and economic implications of any one nation simply absorbing that many displaced people all at once. Which "brothers" does Canada have an obligation to rescue, if they were all displaced at once? Anyone who is Christian? Anyone who is white? What are your criteria for other Arab nations having an obligation to take in the Palestinian refugees? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Can you really tell the difference between Irish and Scots? Just by a look? My heritage is English/Scots, and I can't tell the difference. I didn't mean to suggest that all Arabs are the same, and I'm a little surprised and taken aback by your statement that I'm passing judgement. You seem to be passing some judgements yourself. I did not suggest that any one nation absorb all of the refugees. When 911 struck in the US Canadians responded with open and genuine generosity and an innate sense of kinship. Since then we've fallen back into our old habits of exaggerating the minor differences, but if a nuclear bomb went off in a major American city we'd be there with everything we had. Indeed, we in Canada have overcome (for the most part) the racism and ethnicism that mark the vast majority of human history. We have done, do and will do good acts to help people of all races and religions around the world. So forgive me if it's a little foreign (no pun intended) to me to think that Arabs would turn their backs on other Arabs for political gain and refuse to take in refugees, while using their plight as a political tool in global politics. If refusing to lay all of the blame on the Jews while ignoring Arab complicity in the plight of the Palestinian Arabs, then I guess I am passing judgement.

I didn't say climate change was unproven. I said the "greenhouse effect" is an unproven cause of climate change.

That's interesting. I wrote the portion of text you quoted in your response, though you didn't attribute it to me. Correction. The majority of Palestinians can trace their roots to the land the British referred to as the Mandate of Palestine, consisting of present day Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan. 70% of the population of Jordan are "Palestinian" Arabs. That very few of the Jews currently inhabiting Israel are directly related to the Jews who lived in the Mandate of Palestine is irrelevant. None of the European descended peoples living in North America can trace their ancestry here to before colonial times, but it doesn't make their claim on the land any less valid. If you'd care to argue that point you'd better start another thread though. As to Israel having "direct control" over the lives of Palestinians living in the occupied territories: the Palestinian authority has been the official governing body overseeing the territories since 1996. Furthermore, the UN has been running the "refugee" camps (small, permanent cities, actually) since 1949. True, Israel physically controls the international borders of the occupied territories for security reasons, and it therefore controls the airspace and international borders of the Palestinian Authority. But it has never had political or economic control over the Palestinians in general (except to curtail their participation in the Israeli economy during the intifadas). After the war in 1991, Kuwait expelled 450 000 "Palestinian" Arabs who had been living and working in the country on visas. Somehow the Kuwaitis could afford to have half a million Palestinians living and working in country before the war, but refused to grant them citizenship. The same story repeats itself across the Middle East. The countries that you say "don't have the resources" to absorb the refugee Palestinians absolutely do have the resources, but refuse to do so because that would solve the Palestinian dilemma without the destruction of the hated Zionist entity. If there is any intransigence regarding the "one state" solution it is on the part of Hamas et al. There is today such a thing as an Israeli Arab. There is no longer such a thing as a Palestinian Jew. The British/League of Nations created and partitioned the Mandate of Palestine, with the intention of reserving Transjordan for the Palestinian Arabs and the remainder for Palestinian Jews. (Originally the entire Mandate was to be used for the creation of a Jewish homeland. You can feel free to look all of this up.) The ensuing dogs breakfast of conflicting rights and interests was resolved by the 1948 UN declaration creating the modern nation of Israel. Blame the Jews for all of this if you wish. I blame the British for not forcefully carrying out their original plan.

Good work, Tokyo. Spot on and a comprehensive rebuttal to the counter argument.

Without government assistance small farming would have disappeared half a century ago in the developed world.

Typical hysterical and ahistorical claptrap. Given that Israeli was founded by the Jews' driving tens of thousands of Arabs out of their homes and off of their land (the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which left between 700,000 and 800,000 Arabs refugees), and the subsequent colonization of the West Bank and Gaza which has left millions politically disenfranchised and economically destitute, the Zionist experiment has been anything but "restrained". <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm not hysterical. I'm perfectly serene. So, where are the refugees now? What country took them in? What are the Palestinians disenfranchised from? Why have their brother Arabs not come to their rescue?

I was talking about reloadable cash cards, similar like what are used for long distance calling. Limited use and finacial liability, to replace the small quantities of cash that I carry for use in place of my debit or credit cards. FYI I personally dislike point-of-purchase businesses (I don't know if that's you) that don't have debit available and generally avoid them, even if I intend to use another method of payment. They kind of have a fly-by-night feel. It's like not having a webpage. My take is, if a business can't be bothered to make the little steps to join the information age, there's something wrong there. Just my opinion.

It is only disputed by the lunatic fringe.<{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's interesting - using one fringe site as a foil for the other. Doesn't really prove much though.

Because they'll be dumping 1.3 million Palestinans into what amounts to a giant internment camp controlled by Israel. Not a recipe for good will. In the meantime, Israel's voracious apppetetie for land in the West Bank will ensure continued friction between Palestinians and settlers. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I thought the 1.3 million were already there of their own accord, with the "support" of their fellow Arabs. (Support, as in "Stay off of our land".) My mistake. The Palestinians, as you would call them, would drive the Jews into the sea if they could and take all of Israel. It's interesting that you characterize Jewish restraint againts doing the same as a "voracious appetite for land".

It's difficult to see how that could come to pass, given the fact Israel will retain control of Gaza's borders, airspace, sea access, and economy. By giving up gaza, Sharon wasn't giving up much. Only 7,300 settlers lived there, while the West Bank settlements that Israel would keep “in exchange” for its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza house tens of thousands of colonists and stretch many miles into Occupied Palestinian Territory. The withdrawl from Gaza will allow Israel to demographically, and permanently, entrench its presence in the West Bank. Therefore, the Gaza withdrawal plan has less to do with what Israel is giving up in Gaza and more to do with what Israel plans on taking from the West Bank. What Israel is doing is ensuring that the conflict will continue and perhaps intensify, which is precisely what the religious zealots and Zionist idealogues running the show have planned. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How do you figure it will intensify?

I think it depends on what you mean by "desert". I'm going to assume you mean a sandy sub tropical desert. (As opposed to a frozen polar desert). I am by no means an expert on weather or geothermal mechanics, but this is what I've gathered on the subject: sand isn't an effective absorber of heat but reflects it back into space. Air temperatures in a desert in daytime are higher because the air is receiving a double dosage of UV radiation. However, air temperature at night is very low due to lower IR radiation coming from the ground. Absorbing UV radiation in the daytime would lower the daytime air temperature and would bring down the average temperature, but not as much as you might expect because of the already low nightime temperature. Furthermore, it wouldn't likely affect precipitation. A desert is a desert to begin with not because of heat but because of a lack of moisture. Thousands of square miles of UV absorbant material in the desert would affect the local air temperature, which in turn *might* have an impact on cooling the surrounding non-desert ecosystem. But it wouldn't have much of an impact on global weather, which is driven more by ground and water temperatures. The "greenhouse effect" is based on the idea that "greenhouse gases" (primarily CO2) which reflect IR back to the surface have risen dramatically since the dawn of the Industrial Age, raising air temperature sufficiently to prevent cooling of the land and sea, which means increase IR, etc. But we're talking about a global phenonmenon (and one that has yet to be proven - there's not enough evidence to definitively link the "greenhouse effect" to any global warming we may be experiencing).

Indeed. I say replace all of the minted stuff with reloadable cash cards. The only reason for keeping hard currency is in case the electronic system breaks down, but at this point if the electronics break down we're all screwed anyway. Makes drug dealing and the rest of the black market economy that much harder to perpetrate as well (though I suppose that could be carried on in foreign currency).

Actually, it's apparently spelt "Barnardo".

English orphan boys were brought to Canada in the early part of the twentieth century to work on farms. I have a friend who's grandfather was a Bernardo boy.

Agreed. One does not necessarily lead to the other. But private citizens intent on keeping their government from becoming tyrannical have a much harder time of doing so if they're unarmed. I will admit that this won't be an issue in Canada for the foreseeable future. Our government has a hard enough time locking up people who've proven themselves to be a genuine threat to society, let alone bellicose citizens rights advocates (even be they unarmed).

Letting them keep the guns. Heavy-handed measures like firearms confiscation are unneccesary when propaganda and misdirection work even better. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It needn't be heavy handed, if you do it in stages: Step One: Register all firearms. This is just a safety precaution, and if you're a legit firearms owner, what's the harm? Step Two: Place a "reasonable" limit on the number of firearms a person should be able to own. (After all, who needs to own a hundred shotguns? You can't use them all at once.) We'll start with an arbitrary limit of 10. If you own more than 10 guns (and we know that you do, thanks to the handy dandy registry system) we're going to have to confiscate the excess. Don't worry, though, you still get to keep your ten favourites. And we'll even sweeten the deal by "buying" the excess from you at $10 a pop. Everybody's happy. Step Three (and onward): Reduce the arbitrary limit one or two guns at a time, with a simultaneous public education program increasingly emphasising that gun owners are kooks. By the time you get the number down to one gun per kook there's such as stigma attached that the majority of people will applaud when the government outlaws private gun ownership altogether and seizes the remainder. Coda: Start looking critically at steak knife ownership. (Not a joke. It's already happening in England.)

What's easier than passing laws to force people to turn their guns in?

I'm suggesting that a bolt action .303 can kill you just as dead as a semi-automatic. You're right. Jim Roszko is far from the norm. Most legitimate gun owners are responsible people who handle their firearms safely. So why are they always the first people targeted when the government decides to "do something" about gun crime? By far the easiest way for tyrants to confiscate weaponry is to start by requiring that everyone register their weapons. It's so much easier to confiscate them when you know where they are.

Well, given that Jim Roszko was one of those criminal types you were talking about, I don't see how he has any bearing on the discussion of taking guns away from law-abiding citizens. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hey, whatever. You say that a tyrannical government has nothing to fear from crochety duck hunters because a .303 is no match for a rocket launcher (or whatever sophisticated weaponry you were thinking of) and I'm merely pointing to an example that indicates you might be wrong.

This particular tack always cracks me up. Like a tyrrany-minded government, with its virtual monopoly on sophisticated weaponry, is going to worry about a bunch of crochety duck hunters with .303's. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Tell it to the four mounties who got shot in Alberta.