Springer

Well, so far, as seen on CTV... President of Dairy Farmers of Canada pretty much endorses the deal, noting that they recognize that Canada was under extreme pressure from other nations over supply management, but still managed to preserve most of it. Also noted that there are huge benefits for the rest of our agricultural industries. Representative for pork producers very supportive. Representative for CD Howe Inst. very supportive, noting lots of potential for aerospace and technology sectors. Perin Beatty, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, very supportive. And no doubt there will be many more endorsements. Game changer. Good for CPC, yet again proven their acumen at getting the job done, and most voters can easily understand why this is an essential deal for Canada. And Harper knows this file inside out. Not so good for NDP, albeit it might suck some support from the Liberals. The NDP's isolationist and backwards, if not archaic, approach to free trade persists, and yet again leaves them on the outside looking in. Of course, Mulcair has no choice; his core support is at stake. Loser in this is Trudeau and the Liberals, which will bleed support in both directions. Listening to him this morning, it's patently obvious that he doesn't have a clue in hell, and will have to be spoon fed talking points for the balance of the election. The contrast with Harper is stark, and not lost on very many. CPC majority on the way.

The core support of the NDP believe in this nonsense! Mulcair wins, he doesn't have a hope in hell of running away from half of his party! The unions will have their way in this country like never, ever seen before in our history! The climate change fanatics will think they're in charge of the whole damned economy...just like they're proving to be in Alberta! He will have no choices on the table but to succumb to the incredible and unrelenting pressure these two elements of the NDP's core support will heap on him. And out will come the national credit card, and up will go taxes, to pay for it all! The NDP will stick it to industry, to everyone they consider wealthy, to the working stiff that all of it will ultimately fall upon to pick up the tab for. Corporations will start looking for greener pastures, and more friendly business environments in which profit ain't a four letter word. And those can easily afford it will move their wealth accordingly. The NDP win this thing, you can stick a fork in Canada's prosperity for the next four years, and then for some years to come after they're kicked the hell out of office to clean up the mess they'll leave behind. That's the long and the short of it.

I don't give a damn about what any of those clowns have to say about climate change! Clearly, none of them are qualified...certainly by your own professed standards! And if you actually took the time to watch the Suzuki interview, you'd know exactly that! Hey, I'm not presenting others' opinion of the guy; I'm providing you the hard, cold evidence straight from his own mouth.

69cat... Do take a break to watch the Suzuki interview. Shocking hardly describes it! Scientists in the audience were too obviously dumbfounded by what they were hearing from this supposed icon of their profession.

Classic fallacious appeal to authority. I assume that excludes the likes of, hmmm, let me see now... Al Gore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore Your guess as to his field of scientific expertise is as good as mine, I suppose. David Suzuki? Geneticist? James Hansen? The guy who told the world circa 1978 that the Ice Age cometh, stock your larders now for the big one! The same guy who told us a mere handful of years ago that the world would be fried to a crisp by now? Now there's an "authority" to behold, ya think? Jane Fonda? Neil Young? Can I toss in Bozo the Clown, you know, just because? Hey, just for the sake of comparison, if not just some ***** and giggles, watch this interview with David Suzuki on Australia's ABC network. I detest the man's politics and ideological bent, and even I was embarrassed for him... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hKdmQMVJ70

Wip... Go back to page 5 of this topic, and watch the video interview with Freeman Dyson. His scientific credentials are impeccable, and clearly he has no ideological axes to grind. The pre-amble in the vid will tell you everything you need to know about him. Fascinating thing has been happening over the last several decades, established by satellite imagery: Global flora, and the bio-mass thereof, has increased an estimated 15%. The reason? CO2 levels. Fact is, at 150 ppm, plant life ceases to exist. At 250 ppm, it's borderline starvation for plants. The levels of the last century, if not millennia, are among the lowest of the last several hundred million years, over same that time of which CO2 levels have been at orders of magnitude higher than today. Indeed, during times when the largest creatures ever to inhabit the planet thrived. It takes a lot of vegetation to feed 30 tons of dinosaur every day, eh? I watched an interview a while back with the head of the EU's committee on climate change. She said that they plan to spend $7,000,000,000,000 - that's trillions - on climate change by the year 2100. Someone then put it to her that it had been concluded that such an expenditure would result in lowering global temperatures by one tenth of one percent. She replied that, yes, she was aware of this...but it is still the right thing to do. Frankly, you can't even make up unowhat like this. Carbon credits, created out of thin air by people in far away places, traded by people in far away towers, tracked on computers nobody will ever see, and accounted for by people (UN?) accountable to nobody. You want to talk about a capitalist broker's wet dream come true, or what? 3% in and 3% out, talk about a license to print money! The first attempt at this in Europe several years ago saw $5 billion out of a total of $7 billion worth of activity disappear forever into the hands of organized crime. And to what end? The school boards here in BC a couple years ago were forced by the BC government to take money out of their budgets to buy carbon offset credits...millions of dollars worth from already cash strapped schools. So much for hiring teachers for our children, right? Done so that the government could claim that it had reduced BC's CO2 output levels. We've had a carbon tax on fuels here for most of a decade now...and you know what? The climate around here hasn't changed one millionth of an iota, and of course it never will. But, as the above video puts it so acutely: Think of the moral superiority liberals bought for themselves. As always, with taxpayers' hard earned coin. I loathe, passionately, any ideology that props up, if not mandates, utter and morally bereft crap like this.

The motivating premise of this manifesto obviously is AGW/Climate Change. Time for some biting satirical comic relief. This vid - whomever put it together was brilliant - has generated no end of laughter among those to whom I've shown it...

WIP... I've been listening to capitalists-will-cause-the end-of-the world rants of socialists since junior high, some 45 years ago. The main ones threatening to crash and burn these days are countries that have been economically and financially run into the dirt by socialism. ...which, no doubt, in your mind is still all the fault of nasty capitalists that won't play by your archaic rules.

A current travesty inflicted upon hundreds of millions in this world has to do with "Golden Rice". Every year an estimated 5,000,000 children go blind due to a lack of beta-carotene in their diet. Genetically modifying rice with three genes enables it to produce this precursor to vitamin A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice Nevertheless, the advancement in health this basic food offers to hundreds of millions, the prevention of unspeakable suffering, and the massive savings in healthcare costs, remains a distant dream due to the efforts of anti-GMO activism. Activists operating from within the security of their own little safe havens here in the west, where such challenges to every day life are beyond the scope of their imagination. I'm so sick of fad driven activist causes, I can't speak. Now we're even out to inflict this crap upon our own children with this imbecilic campaign against vaccinations, driven by wannabe do-gooder entertainers or the like, whom have decided they somehow are qualified - presumably because they've gotten rich off of some one hit wonder song or movie - to provide medical council to the world.

Cyber, you're wasting my time. And you've offered up exactly nothing in return for it. Clearly, your avatar resembles your attitude towards debate better than you know.

Another example comes to mind... In my early days, circa '60s, the ongoing crisis was all about feeding the starving millions in India. A new strain of wheat had been developed by then, but the Indian government...due to pressures from all the (same) usual suspects of the day...refused to allow it to be utilized in their own agriculture. Then they finally relented. The almost immediate result was a six-fold increase in crop yields in India, and that nation went on to become a net exporter of its crops. And mass starvation of its peoples ended.

Cyber... You have no idea of what you speak. We have a free enterprise economy. The governments we have, provincial or federal, to one degree or another, facilitate this. There is a vast difference between "manage" and "facilitate". To affect the kind of utopian world envisioned in this manifesto would require massive and direct manipulation of just about every single facet of society. And you know what goes wrong with that? Some people have different ideas about how they want to live their lives. So, what do you do with them??? We know all too well what Communism...essentially the same form of governance advocated by this paper...did with those would not conform, do we not? This is the root problem of "ideologies", and certainly with "religions": Both ultimately require twisting the world into neat little knots in order to get it to fit within the narrow confines of doctrine. And everything that doesn't fit...or refuses to fit, ends up on the waste heap. Or, more to the point, in concentration camps, or just dead. Free enterprise is, by far, the least manipulative and interfering premise by which societies are enabled to thrive, while still providing the most freedom and liberty, opportunities for self expression, and personal development. Perfect? No...but kicks the hell out of everything else tried so far. Read "The Rational Optimist". He makes several points... a ) Show me a self-contained economy, self-sufficient community, and I will show you people living in poverty, and conditions one would not wish on anyone. b ) Nothing is static in this world. The underlying operating assumption of just about every hysterical and alarmist claim by, f'rinstance, AGW activists is that their assertions are based on the status quo of the day. This is NEVER the reality. For example, and in approximate numbers because I haven't the text available at the moment: In 1915, of all the arable land under the plow in the US, roughly one third was dedicated to feeding the 15,000,000 horses required to work said land and harvest crops thereof. If that situation had remained static...i.e., technological progress ceased...today it would require 80% of all arable land available in the US just to feed Americans, forget about anyone else. Instead, we currently exploit about 27% of arable land, both to feed America and a large part of the rest of the world as well. The implications go further, for were 80% the current reality, how much land would thus be afforded to wildlife conservation, and the parks that preserve their habitats? Therein is demonstrated the absolute fallacy, if not outright myth, of this ideological manifesto, which used words like "iron clad" to enforce its methods to attain its goals. A description the likes of which Stalin and Mao would have used to justify their means to an end.

I'm going to type this slowly for you... Because it is all about government micro-managing every facet of the economy, and the lives of the citizenry therein. You give government that much power, I guarantee you corruption to the nth degree, and ultimately and inevitably disaster and ruin. The one thing the left has struggled with since forever is the fact of human nature...which in the end is irrepressible, and will not be herded like sheep. Evolution is the natural law of the universe; it cannot be guided, nor contained, nor restrained...certainly not by mere ideology. It will find its own path every time, always upwards.

The Saudis crushed the price of oil, aimed at directly undermining N. America energy independence, and specifically at the oil sands and shale production, which had its inevitable effect on our economy. How that somehow becomes Harper's fault remains a mystery to all but those challenged by HDS.

Cyber... You show me the government micro-managed economy envisioned in this manifesto, and I'll show you the failed examples of the USSR, N. Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, the Warsaw Pact nations prior to emancipation from Soviet control, Maoist China, etc., etc., etc. Along with the litany of human tragedy that ended a hundred million lives along with them, either through mass starvation, indescribably poverty, or just outright murder at the hands of ideological inspired tyranny.

Here's a novel idea, cybercoma... Try reading the stuff first. Then you might have at least half a clue about something before beaking off. And just for clarity, I've edited and inserted "IMHO" in the first line...albeit the article implies pretty much the same conclusion.

Peter Foster shreds this "manifesto" for, IMHO, the quasi-communist tripe that it is... http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/peter-foster-naomi-kleins-great-leap-backwards It illustrates, in spades, the dripping hypocrisy of the "do as I say, not as I do" crowd, few, if any, of whom would diminish their own relatively lavish lifestyles. It's arguably the ugliest form of elitism that preaches the righteousness of austerity to the ignorant masses that they themselves have no intention of indulging in their own lives, and indeed enjoy to the hilt the advantages their own accumulated wealth provides. Which is to say, they sense no threat from their prescribed ideology to their own status, for they are above and beyond its reach. And the fact that the same capitalism/free enterprise they rail against, is exactly what affords them their own wealth and status, and thus protection from their own idealistic, utopian drivel, completely escapes them. Spend just a few minutes with Google, and search out the homes of the likes of Damon, Fonda, Gore, Decaprio, etc., etc., etc., to see how each of them exemplify austerity. Suzuki, a multi-millionaire, has three homes, including "... a sprawling mansion in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver, worth approximately $8.2 million". http://www.ottawasun.com/2013/10/10/david-suzuki-a-man-of-property As much as anything else, this astonishingly shameless and hypocritical double standard exemplified by far too many of the Bible of AGW/Climate Change Thumpers' Society, serves up cause to stand back and question their motives, their ideological premises, and their assertions. As the old adage puts it: Follow the money. One of the most singularly informative books I have ever read is, "The Rational Optimist", by Matt Ridley. This should be required reading before every student leaves high school! For it dispels, brilliantly, so much nonsense about how the world arrived at this moment in time, and sheds boundless light upon the evolution of economics, trade, societal interdependence and interaction, and specialization of skills that drives such. And, on the matter of AGW, I offer this fascinating interview with Freeman Dyson, now in his 90s, and acknowledged as one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century. He wonderfully demonstrates in his own demeanor and words, the fine line between brilliance and common sense.

Today's decision will not play well with the majority of Canadians, most of whom, IMHO, would offer that showing one's face while taking the oath of citizenship and allegiance to Canada is not too much to ask of anyone, regardless of religion or customs, or whatever, doesn't matter. Indeed, I suspect a lot of people are getting a little more than tired of rulings like this.

From Ipsos... http://ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=6989 Quote: "Four in ten (38%) Canadians believe that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives would ‘make the best decision for Canada on the Syrian refugee situation’, placing the Tories significantly ahead of the one in three who believe that Thomas Mulcair and the NDP (32%) or Justin Trudeau and the Liberals (30%) would be best to manage this file. Interestingly, even two in ten Liberal (18%) and NDP (15%) voters believe that the Conservatives would make the best decision for Canada. The decision about how many refugees Canada should take in and through what process has largely been centered on the idea of security and whether the process of accepting refugees should be fast-tracked despite security concerns. On this debate, seven in ten (71%) voters more closely believe that ‘we can’t compromise Canada’s security, and individual Syrian refugees should go through proper screening to make sure they aren’t terrorists even if this slows down their admission to Canada’, including a majority of Tory (87%), Liberal (66%) and NDP voters (61%)." Clearly, the majority of Canadians are on side with the CPC on this issue, including Liberal and NDP supporters. As I've said repeatedly, security is a front and center issue with Canadians, and one not to be taken lightly. Meanwhile, the situation in Europe continues to deteriorate. And the worse it gets over there, the more prominent the issue becomes in voters' minds over here.

Most reputable nations - Canada 1st http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/07/15/the-worlds-most-reputable-countries-2015/

Does it work better with Fire Fox? Can't post links, here, either, without a lot of mucking about. Used it in the past, but it had issues, too.

"know nothing denier". Thanks for making my point that much more clear, pal.

And WTF are you going to chat about when you sit down with the likes of people motivated by whatever evil crap you want to call it that drives them to the unspeakable horrors we have been witness to at the hands of Al Qaida and ISIS??? Isn't that what exactly what Chamberlin tried with Hitler? And how did that work out??? How did it work out with Stalin??? How is it working out with that psycho in N. Korea? How about the cadre of Imams hell bent on wiping Israel off the face of the earth controlling Iran? Do you honestly think they give a good GD what any of us ever thought about anything??? These are people on a mission, buddy! They see lack of determination as weakness to be exploited at every opportunity. (...keep your eyes on Putin, too.) That is the nature of evil, and history is a litany of testament to the fact of it. Indeed, the CCF were opposed to involvement in WW2, as were the left in America that ultimately delayed Roosevelt from stepping up to the plate and help Britain defeat Hitler. And how many more millions died because of this delay??? How many tens of millions died because nobody wanted to stand up to Hitler right from the get-go??? And how many tens of millions died in Soviet purges and gulags? Or Chairman Mao's cleansings of the proletariat hordes? How many millions starved or executed in N. Korea??? Read up on 20th century history, my friend.

Did I mention AGW/Climate Change? That's the new religion, also steeped in ideology. And, by God, there's the millions of adherents blinded by the light to march along in step with it, too. Even has its own cadre of Inquisitors, ready to burn all heretics to the faith on the stake of public opinion. Which is yet another reason I would never vote NDP or Liberal. Even a hint of rationality on this subject is beyond them! Far more interested in milking it for every last vote and dime in their collection plates they can squeeze out it. No, Waldo, not interested in going there. It's pointless. Been there, done that. Nothing makes a lefty's day like another imagined crisis they can wrap themselves around, and make themselves feel good by trying to save the world from the human species of which far too many of them have nothing but contempt in the first place. The essence of most religions, certainly Christianity and Islam, is that all human beings are, at their core, sinners and unworthy. Only through the collectivism of organized religion - strategically inserted between man and his/her God - can the human race be saved from itself...kindly drop a shekel in the collection plate on your way out the door, thank you very much. Should sound pretty familiar to those of left wing persuasion.

Huxley... I'm not afraid of C-51. You are. Why are the left so afraid of everything. Waldo... Tarsands sludge? Really??? Pffft! Prime Number... Ideology or religion; pretty fine line separates the two. In this instance, it's ideology steeped in religion. And, yes, very difficult to defeat. In fact, I have little time for either. Never read a single book on "conservatism" in my life. Lots about religions, and other ideologies and their effects on the course of human history. People "blinded by the light", I'm wont to describe it. How many hundreds of millions have been slaughtered in the name of Christianity? Islam? Judaism? Nazism? Communism? Fascism? Maoism? Marxism? Most often by their own governments! The best defense against all of it is democracy...which is precisely why those absorbed with Islamism are waging war against us. Tyranny cannot stand the light of day and truth shone upon itself. The assumption here is that, because I'm opposed to left wing ideology, thus I must be right wing. No. I'm neither. However, I find modern Conservatism incredibly more tolerant than left wing doctrine, and Conservatives much more tolerant than the Liberal Left. (...as evidenced by the intolerant venom spewed on forums like this one that has become so typical of any conversation involving ideologically obsessed leftists. Just sayin', eh?) An aside: For some reason the "Quote" feature doesn't work on my computer. Windows 7 and latest version of IE. Indeed, this is the most difficult forum set up I've ever posted on. No idea why...??? Suggestions would be appreciated.