Darkling

You want to help them. You do it. Leave me out of it.

The other day in New York, a Jewish women committed suicide. She was in a dreadful marriage forced on her by her cult, a marriage to her first cousin. Her sister had previously committed suicide, also. The Hassidic did not leave their disgusting and misogynistic cultural beliefs behind when they came to America. They cling to it to his day. The idea that just because a religious person flies across the ocean they're going to abandon cultural beliefs which are taught them at birth and reinforced during every visit to temple or mosque is the kind of wishful thinking which discredits liberalism. I have encountered young Muslim men born in Canada whose beliefs about girls and women are no different than you would find in Egypt or Somalia or Afghanistan. The larger the community, the more reinforcement they receive. That they have a different language, different race, different religion and different beliefs helps them maintain their separateness and values.

What difference rape and terrorism when there are bright colours and spicy smells for you...

The ones we need are the ones to export oil so we can make money so we can pay for bridges and roads and people who don't work, like all those incoming refugees. We need pipelines to take oil to customers outside Canada. We need to sell stuff abroad, and if is sheer idiocy to have it going by train instead of pipeline. People who fight tooth and nail against pipelines knowing the oil will still go on trains ought to be shipped to gulags in the north to make their living building snow houses.

Is it? When someone says the era of fossil fuels is over and no more pipelines should be built and no more resources developed that says something else again, something almost painfully naive. I like my electricity and I like my car. If others want to walk, they can feel free, but don't walk in my path or I'll run them over.

The problem is this should not be an all or nothing approach. Successfully exploiting economic resources is a necessary component of creating jobs and paying for the social services and infrastructure we need. If that means an occasional little oil spill, so be it. The alternative is poverty which brings death and despair. Only the unimaginative would focus strictly on the well-being of some rural ecosystem to the exclusion of society's needs.

Your pronouncement is premature, to say the least. Eventually, other energy sources will be capable of economically producing and reliably storing large amounts of energy in Canada. That is not now the case. Unless you wish to walk everywhere you go, and heat your home with some other more expensive fuel, you too will be using fossil fuels for many, many years to come.

Muhammed, peace be upon Him.

I am far from certain it is legal to hold people against their will under the constitution. Fairly soon after their arrival these people will be given lawyers, and the lawyers will sue the government, demanding they be immediately released into the population. The courts are quite likely to agree with this demand.

Maybe someone should tell the Americans how this is done since they plan to take two years to screen 10,000 Syrian refugees.

Not if you are a Jew, or a woman.

This does not suggest it is a sensible commitment.