Right To Left

You're late! It's the everyone-who has any wood products is the same as a clear-cutter argument. Even if most of us would rather pay more and go sparingly than be deluged with the cheapest crap available. It's a simple distinction between taking what we need from nature and indiscriminate exploitation of forests and natural wetlands. Which we are getting an overdose of here in Ontario, as if Libs aren't bad enough, our fat, gluttonous Conservative Premier and his advisers have keyed in on "development" as the only means to even make a theoretical case that Ontario will be able to pay back its ever-growing deficit spending --- so give every real estate and commercial developer a blank cheque to build whatever they want wherever they want to, and assume Mother Nature will somehow fix this mess (without finding new ways to kill us all).

And who might "these guys" be? I mean besides flimsy excuses for you Neocons to justify invading/occupying/and exploiting more and more of the "developing" world.

Not that weird! Someone should have expected blowback of some kind by now. This has been a motivator for so called green-on-blue attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq before. That's why there are fewer American and western contractors working as trainers and advisers over there now. I guess the first thing a nation that wants to go stomping with bloody boots all over the world needs to do is to prevent or limit the likelihood of domestic 'terrorism' on the home front.

That is the reason (or excuse to you and other detractors) for the excessively high fine slapped against his business. We're going more and more the American way, where everyone's got a lawyer and filing lawsuits. Now, in the case of the big business, they would have a few rentacops standing at the front door with a list of questions, and city officials would just take it at that. As for public health, that is exactly what this asshole is a threat to! He's willing to let his business run as a superspreader event at a time when new Covid variants are quickly spreading and becoming more and more lethal to younger people because of assholes like him and the ones who frequent his business! In other words: fuckim! Just one more example of good old fashioned god-fearing capitalism and selfish thinking being the wrong type of public virtues for any stable society to have!

Looks like his point went totally right over your head! Krishnamurti came from a very poor Indian family at a time when much of India was subject to extreme colonial deprivation under the umbrella of British colonial rule. So, he was one of many who for a variety of reasons was put up for adoption, and in his case as fate would happen, he was adopted by a late 19th century spiritualist/and charlatan who named herself "Madam Blavatsky" .... no doubt to sound eastern and mysterious and better able to relieve gullible middle and upper class women of excess money doing spiritual readings and seances etc.. Anyway, Blavatsky struck paydirt with the young boy she renamed Krishnamurti, because of his intelligence, calm and inquisitive nature and ability to learn fast and communicate with people. BUT Krishnamurti had no desire to get rich by conning others by making false claims, so as he grew older, he broke with the Theosophical Movement of Madam Blavatsky and decided to really study and learn psychology and philosophy. And he had no desire to get rich from teaching or writing books. He remained in the service of helping others until he died at 90 years of age. It was no doubt because of his experiences with the early 'self-help' movements that led him to want to do more than help people individually to conquer their neuroses and related illnesses and troubles. He was never impressed by wealth or material accumulation, or new invention, which during his youth, was a time of extreme humanistic hubris, because of all of the new inventions that were being rapidly developed and 'modernizing' the world. He was not seeing all of this new modernity as doing much to actually improve people's lives, and almost 100 years later in our time of dot.com hype and little more, his message is one that needs to be underlined, not cast away by the super-rich tech bosses and their idiot slavish devotees today, who think some new invention will solve all of our problems!

Right!! Our system is set up to privilege those who have the greatest wealth, whether inherited or earned by way of the more generous taxation rules accorded to investment income than earned income (The Job Creators....blah blah blah) above those with their noses to the grindstone, slaving away 8 to 10 hours a day doing jobs they endure or totally hate, for 30 or 40 years until ..... hopefully these days, they can afford to retire. And retire before they are broken down and used up wrecks waiting for the Grim Reaper to show up and take them off to the morgue! It's the rent seekers, the rentier class who feel a sense of entitlement to other people's property, because they either own it or have a lien on it. After decades of being marinated in anti-communist bullshit in the west, it wasn't until a few started arriving from former communist countries on our shores, that we discovered that the collapse was caused internally mostly because of opportunistic subversives in the communist parties, who used the party to advance their own positions and be ready to take advantage once the leaders started 'privatizing' everything in sight. Those who bought up state industries and production facilities were the first generation of ruthless oligarchs, who hired blackmarket traders and gangsters to enforce their competitive advantages. After some of the bastards started dying off or imprisoned by those who had a leg up on them and took institutional power, a calmer, more structured form of capitalism..similar to the west, took over, but maintained the same mafia system of kicking up most of the profits to the top bosses that goes on in western capitalism at an ever-increasing frenzied pace today! For those who make up the working classes anywhere behind the former Iron Curtain, only those with money and power have freedom today. And those who complain or try to push back against the bosses get shot as traitors and dissidents, like the former union workers in Nazified Ukraine today, that will remain the Haiti of Europe -- an economic basket case that will remain the poorest nation in Europe for a very long time....essentially when the other Euros have declined to their level of depravity and deprivation. As for your Bible bullshit, if you actually read most of the Bible, you would find socialist principles like sharing the wealth equally to be rigidly enforced in Acts Ch. 5, and the rich subject to suspicion and condemnation throughout the Old Testament books. What America started doing a hundred years ago...and where you get your religious principles from, is an upside down version of Christianity that worships the rich and scorns the poor / exactly the opposite of what all of the Psalms and Proverbs and New Testament lessons tell their followers to do! It will be you and your kind in the Lake of Fire mentioned in Revelation... not the downtrodden who have suffered in this world! But, even those of us who don't follow this line of mythology find value in the principles of sharing and giving aid to the poor/and giving the rich a good kick in the ass whenever possible!

An Indian wise man - Jiddu Krishnamurti once said of our modern dilemma: "becoming well adjusted to a sick society should not be considered a sign of good mental health!"

Poor by whose standards? From what I've read of the last remaining hunter-gatherers living in forests and deserts, the last remaining wild tribes existed closely and interacted with farmers, and although they tried to maintain pleasant relations with outsiders, they had no intentions of going beyond trading and/or exchanging a few items, and adopting the "modern" lifestyles. If they're 'poor' by modern standards, they are/or were happy to be poor and just live off of what their local environments could provide for them.

I'm reminded now that the best example of how poorly capitalism identifies wealth is that a forest has no value under our system until someone chops down trees to make wood products or cuts them all down to sell as farmland. From that, it's not hard to figure out how our world has gotten to such a dismal place so quickly.

When central banks are free to just create trillions in new dollars whenever fear an economic downturn and to keep their brokerage firm buddies employed and making big returns, then the system is broken. And the hotshots on Wall Street and other market hq's will realize it when there finally is a run on the USD and all other paper fiat currencies. It's bound to happen sometime this year according to bears who are in the know. Bubbles can't go on forever and will eventually pop. The bigger they get, the harder the fall, and no QE money creation will be able to stop it! So, anyone trying to protect their little nest eggs (or big nest eggs in some cases) needs to park some of their money into gold or bitcoin. Other crypto's don't have a high level of trust from the people who are looking for exits of the Dollar Expressway.

When I see a title like "Trampling of Small Businesses", I am wondering why this is just another bleating by someone who doesn't want to follow public health rules, BUT no doubt would expect full care if he ended up in the ICU because of a Covid-19 infection! The "trampling of small businesses" I want to see addressed is being done every day by the big elephants - Costco, Walmart and other retailers who are able to pack their stores because they have a couple of food aisles in the store. With a third wave of Covid-19 variants coming at us, and warmer weather, nobody is going to want to eat indoors except for idiots with no sense!

And "paying our own way" should include setting up matching "Buy Canadian" provisions that favor our own industries and businesses over Americans! If, after 30 years of this NAFTA garbage, the US is still free to slap on tariffs and duties whenever they feel like it, we need to do likewise...and favor countries that will actually trade fairly if we do "free trade" at all!

Okay, so why does anyone need a gun that can fire off enough rounds to kill 10 people in succession? You're ignoring the obvious fact that if the gun wasn't available in the store, Alissa wouldn't have been able to walk in and buy it in the first place! As for "shouldn't have been able to purchase it," maybe he walked in with a lot of extra money for the clerk to just okay the sale and look the other way without doing a careful check for criminal records. I doubt this is the first time such a thing has happened. After all, where do all the guns come from that end up on the black market?

You're satisfied with capitalist dictatorship! Enjoy your poverty.

Just tell us why or how "The Right To Bear Arms" means someone can just walk in to a gun store and walk out with an assault rifle and enough ammo to kill dozens if he can't be stopped in time? You seriously don't see a difference between someone trying to defend themselves with a gun and someone with a rapid fire weapon and a 30 clip magazine.

He's not going to provide any links, cause he was already shown the truth before -- it was under Con-servative - Brian Mulroney thoughtful leadership when Canada sold off its vaccine development labs -- Connaught Labs to a private US company...who quickly shut it down and packed up all its equipment to ship to the US. People who repeat the same old bullshit don't want to look at alternative evidence.

If your massage parlor killer had chopped off his dick, maybe he wouldn't have been a murderer.

Yes, though I would say that it's cause he checks all the necessary boxes: 1. white male 2. non-Muslim 3. not a cop-killer * 6 of his 8 victims were Asian women, but nobody has mentioned the other two yet! Apparently that's not important in ID Politics world. So, he got to be "a young man having a bad day" instead.

How did the same European Union that recognized Slovenia and Croatia, and later a Kosovar breakaway state from Serbia immediately after they declared independence? While refusing to recognize an independent Catalonia in more recent times? They even arrested escaping Catalonian politicians who held an "illegal" referendum and returned them to Spain for incarceration and trial on sedition charges. Just sayin, no matter which part of the world you're looking at, some peoples are declared to have a right to independence and autonomy, while others are not! Is that based on any other reasons besides sheer power, and who does and who does not have it?

I admit that I am not following the whining and complaining from out west very closely after my brief stay in the oil patch (back when oil meant oil/not diluted bitumen). I went out there at a bad time...oil prices had climbed as high as they would ever go, and even in the 70's, it was understood that real oil was running in short supply before it cratered a few years later. But, back when prices were high, Alberta (and their little brothers across the border in Saskatchewan) wanted to collect all the profits from foreign sales, which was mostly to the US back then. And we are arguing about the same damn issue today! Federalists....who believe that the federal government should have priority when necessary, over provincial governments, and the provincialists....who dream of their own independent little fiefdoms. Feds don't have a stellar record on dealing with resource management....especially the way they try to favour mining and oil interests over those of natives who live on indigenous lands where resource company geologists find them living on top of, and want to relieve them of their burden with a little cash to help with polluted land and water afterwards. As for your slap at "egg and dairy cartels", my opinion is biased by having first cousins who own dairy farms in the Georgian Bay/Owen Sound area of Ontario. And their greatest concern isn't that the dairy marketing board will ruin their profit margins, it's the threat of cheap, subsidized dairy imports that Wisconsin and the US gov. wants to force Canada to accept by their interpretation of NAFTA rules. If it wasn't for the bureaucratic marketing boards that nobody really likes/but enough people .... including consumers and farmers consider essential, we would be stuck with the cheap, subsidized crap that Wisconsin wants to ship across the border at us, instead of producing our own by our own rules! All of your 'let the market decide' horseshit is why conservatives are playing a losing game today! Most people are nauseated by your non-stop anti-government rants, and know full well that we need government that is controlled by the people and works in the people's interests. And not the interests of the rich, ruling oligarchies who want MONEY to rule, so that those with the most money get to make the rules that everyone else has to live by. Dollaraucracy is coming to an end, and it can't come soon enough! Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the ushering in of the New World Order in a Unipolar world, the US has often been perfectly comfortable busting up difficult and intransigent foreign states that don't follow the orders of various kinds.....mostly trade and economic orders. This is why the US/NATO allowed Croatian nationalists of all kinds (including former Nazis) to rise up and fight a bloody civil war with the remaining Serbian-dominated Yugoslav Government, and then stood by after Croatia ethnically cleansed all Serbians and other minorities from the eastern region of their new Croatian ethno-state. Then, it was on to Bosnia-Herzegovina ..... where everyone declared that an inability to work out some sort of three party arrangement between Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks (Muslims) would lead to a chaotic, bloody genocide...because of their were so many rural regions with mixed populations and no clear battle lines. But, nothing was done...except for all the bleating and bellyaching afterwards that, along with allowing a genocide in Rwanda was used as the main excuse to justify today's "humanitarian" interventions that have been even worse than doing nothing! But, all of the regions where the US and its allies (including Canada btw) have sowed discord and division, are not on our borders! There's a difference between sowing chaos halfway around the world and welcoming it at home. So, don't expect the US response to Quebec separatism or Western separatism to sound any different from Washington than it did a few decades ago! They're going to say 'get your shit together, we don't care what your government looks like, as long as it doesn't change our trade and economic agreements, or allow divisions that foreign actors (always Russians or Chinese) may be able to take advantage of. Maybe Canada isn't the kind of nation those of us in the middle - here in Ontario think it is! Ever since the first separatists started gaining attention 50 years ago, it's been noted that Ontario is the only province with no distinct provincial identity. While Quebecois are Quebec first and Albertans are only Canadian until they don't get everything they want, and then they threaten to leave and file for divorce.

Before his name was released/but after the video of cops leading him away in handcuffs, black twitter and other social media even a few black commentators on supposedly "real" news platforms were going off about ANOTHER white man committing mass murder. And rightwing media had headed back to the trenches again and weren't saying anything! Except for angry responses against Dems demanding gun control. Of course this was based on his appearance....you got to wonder is this guy really just 21 years old? He looks at least twice that, and was being described as a 40 year old white man with a beard based solely on the rules and procedures of identity politics. If he was a member of some Christian denomination, black social media would still be playing the race card, and rightwing social media would be yacking about persecution of 'law-abiding' gun owners again. Once the name was released, black social media has been struck with confusion and disarray/ while the rightwing gun nuts have dusted off the #terrorist playbook, where only killers who are Muslim, or were formerly Muslim, or have Muslim-sounding names are identified as terrorists. But if Colorado killer is a terrorist, WHY isn't this goofball who was out to kill Asian women that turn him on, also identified as a terrorist?

1. Did you notice your father-in-law becoming angry and combative on his bad days....when his symptoms were most noticeable? During the almost 10 years my mother was living in an assisted living and nursing home before she died, it struck me that when my mother started showing symptoms of dementia in her final year or so, that neither she nor her elderly roommates were inclined to lash out at staff or get very angry. It was mostly confusion about names, days, time of day etc.. While I recall some of the old boys across the hall yelling and even trying to hit or throw things...prior to being locked down in some cooling off room by themselves and likely given sedatives to make them calm down. Not all of the guys were like this, but if they had shown any level of aggression, even talking loud or interrupting others, when they went down the road of dementia, everything got 10 times worse, and sometimes made staff unwilling to work with them if unassisted. 2. I've noticed since the 2nd half of the Biden Campaign last year (when questions started being asked about his mental fitness) that whenever they did let Joe out of the basement, there was always a reliable female aide right by his side, sticking to him like glue and telling him who and who not to respond to in a crowd. If it wasn't Jill, it was quite often - Kamala (maybe he thinks she's a nurse when his brain is slipping), and whenever they thought Joe was going off the rails, they would intervene .... make eye contact with him and give him new directions. It was also impossible not to notice how the MSM (except for Fox perhaps) would never say much about Biden's 'gaffes' except as damage control. For that latest one, NO media, even Fox, noted that the fool had started out trying to run up the stairs to his plane; and that he FELL/not stumbled...landing on his knees at least twice, possibly three times before he got to the top of the platform and waved goodbye. It really struck me that in all the video clips of this little disaster (that have been widely featured and laughed about in foreign media), Joe is all by himself going up those stairs. If there was any question about his health and safety, the logical thing to do would be to have someone walking at his side or close behind to prevent a fall. But someone didn't want the visual of American President needing someone to prevent him from falling....that's what I consider the most telling about what is starting to look like a complete disaster of an administration.....depending on what happens with the pandemic and the economy later this year! It looks like the forces around Biden don't really care about his state of mind.....or even if he has a mind! The real thinking is supposed to be done by the trusted 'experts' and outsiders don't have any access to information about who is really in charge of government and what they intend to do in the future. This may be a prime reason why Russia and China have surprised these career bureaucrats like Blinken and are no longer willing to take bullshit from his type, and are hitting back directly with full force, instead of responding with their usual caution expressing their "disappointment" with US statements and actions. I expect the Chinese response especially has been intended as a direct challenge to US hegemony, since China is also responding directly to Blinken's new sanctions with greater retaliatory sanctions of their own. Something seems to be telling them that...while nobody seems to be home at the White House, it's impossible to tell who is actually in charge and making decisions, so they are willing to raise the bar and shock the apparatchiks like Blink in a show of force of their own. This is a step beyond how the Chinese Gov reacted against Trump and way beyond how China responded to previous administrations, when they may have felt more at risk and less willing to engage in trade war with the US. Like they say:"may you live in interesting times!"

Don't know how I forgot to mention America's worst murderous barbaric ally - Saudi Arabia above.....but throw that one on the pile, along with the likeminded oil plutocracies called the UAE and Bahrain.

And, I bet you would just expect the Federal Gov. in Ottawa (Lib, Con, NDP even...doesn't matter which) to just lie down and accept the breakup of Canada that was refused 150 years ago! It's not going to happen easy unless our US overlords decide it is better for their interests to break Canada down into smaller, more easily controlled pieces. BUT, US geopolitical strategists only prefer this strategy against difficult enemies and potential economic rivals. And that's why American Neocons and their allied sycophants all of a sudden become concerned about human rights in Russia, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq, Crimea, but NOT in murderous narco-states like Columbia, Peru, Honduras, El Salvador etc., even when the bastards put in charge of these countries by the CIA are running cocaine-trafficking pipelines right into the US.! As for Canada, I can't recall any US leaders or top federal officials saying anything in favor of separatist movements in Quebec/ let alone the idiot greedy hicks out west, who start squawking about their taxes and transfer payments every time they think someone else is going to get a better deal! Unless Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes turns into an economic wasteland that the US doesn't see of any value, they will not allow/let alone want the nation they control on their quiet northern border to be destabilized and disrupted by idiot separatists out west or in Quebec!