I am Groot

They also rely on Australia to keep any nasty people away from them.

I'm looking to see if it is mentioned. It should be. The Liberals' disgraceful lack of interest in any kind of national security issues, from public security to cyber security, to the security of people living here to not be harassed and intimidated by foreigners to the military itself ought to be an election issue. They're very vulnerable on it. The problem is most of those who care are already voting Conservative, so there's no real need for the Tories to raise it. Besides, if Poilievre does raise it the immediate response will be to ask what his plan is. And as far as I'm aware he doesn't have one.

It won't even cover inflation.

The UN future forecasts I've seen have the results of warming measured in economic terms. And even in a century the economic difference to Canada will be plus or minus about 1% of GDP. Same for most of the more northerly countries. The difference to the US could be 2-3% at most. I think they'll survive. As will Europe. As for the developing world, well, they should maybe stop building coal plants. How many coal plants did the US build last year compared to China? Using facts for decades? Even Al Gore admitted he made stuff up to scare people in order to get action. How long ago was that, again?

Saaayyy, wait a second there, junior. According to you and the other climate alarmists renewable energy is now CHEAPER than fossil fuel energy! Why should the third world need our money to switch over? Why are they building coal plants instead of solar farms?

India is about to undergo another Russian-style sham election whose results are already foreordained. With no free press, and opponents routinely jailed on trumped-up charges Modi is certain to win another big majority. The wonder of it is that most Indians don't seem to mind. Always a rather grubby affair, as if put together by minimally competent quiet quitters, Indian democracy is now in serious trouble. To be sure, its formalistic trappings remain in place. Nearly a billion Indians will file into polling stations starting on 19 April. The world’s biggest election to date will take place in seven phases staggered over a Trussly span of 44 days. Results will be announced on 4 June. Yet what will transpire will not be, in any meaningful sense, an electoral contest. Narendra Modi, India’s ruler since 2014, will trounce his rivals for a third time. And if the cards appear stacked in his favour, it’s because he owns the pack. Cobbled together at the eleventh hour, the hapless, heteroclite alliance ranged against him, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance — INDIA for short — has had to suspend campaigning for want of funds; its bank accounts have been frozen by Modi’s government ostensibly on account of tax evasion. Smaller parties, too, don’t stand a chance. Arvind Kejriwal, locally in power in devolved Delhi, has recently joined some of his party mates in prison. Kickbacks on liquor contracts are alleged, though everyone sees the ruse for what it is: a means to destroy the Common Man’s Party, which has for long been a burr in the ruling BJP’s saddle. https://unherd.com/2024/04/inside-indias-potemkin-election/

Stupid is the better term. For example, no one was more supportive of mass immigration than the Jewish community, strong liberals that they were. No one defended Muslims more. Now they see how they've been repaid by Canada's Muslim community. Which was COMPLETELY predictable. So, like I said, stupid. Like most liberals. They lie to themselves constantly. They tell themselves that others from wildly different groups are "just like us", but they're not. They think if they treat others with respect the others will return the favour. But they don't. They think because they're mostly secular that people of other religions will be too, but they aren't.

Israel has lived with terrorism for most of its existence. It knows how to handle it. What happened on October 7 was not the act of a terrorist group. No terrorist group can gather up 3,000 heavily armed gunmen for an attack. Only a government that controls a large territory and population can do that. It's not indiscriminate. According to Hamas. According to Hamas. What so you imagine would be worse terrorism than Oct 7? And don't think for an instant that if Hamas had been able to carry on deeper into Israel, if it had the strength it would not have done the same to every single man, woman and child in Israel. Because it most definitely would, and has said so. Nor would it have difficulty recruiting men to do it. The West has done it in every single war. So has every other country. What makes Israel different aside from them being Jews?

There is no corroborating source for Hamas statistics on deaths. Don't you understand that there is no way to actually verify the numbers? Do you imagine the World Health Organization has inspectors going around to hospitals and morgues counting bodies? I doubt they have anyone in Gaza at all. And if they do it's a Palestinian working for them who is subject to being shot out of hand by Hamas if he says anything to contradict their figures. That's assuming he would even want to, which he likely would not.

And that is all you WILL see on TV. If it bleeds it leads. Boring stuff doesn't get on the TV. Aren't they? I would say from all I've seen that Palestinian residents are far, far more supportive of exterminating Jews than the population of Germany ever was in WW2. Now not every resident of Gaza supports Hamas, but not every German supported the Nazis, either. They still had to suffer so that the West could defeat the Nazis. 10% of the German population died in WW2.

Yes, by Western standards. I've already posted the account by Newsweek which lists all the efforts Israel has been making to avoid civilian casualties. These are not efforts Americans or other Western allies went to when they were in Iraq or Afghanistan, never mind earlier wars. First, Israel makes no claims. Second, they are not 'somewhat' better. Third, you avoid the point that all this 'horror' over what Israel is doing in Gaza was nowhere to be found as the death toll mounted into the hundreds of thousands in other such conflicts. Why? Do you have any idea how many civilians died in the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq? 1% of the population after six months of brutal war is not an enormous number. If you look at the casualty figures for the last huge war we had, which was WW2, even the comparatively small nations with fewer battles like Finland suffered as much or more. Finland's population at the time was 3.7m but 96,000 people died. France was 41m and casualties were 600k or about 1.5% of the population. Germany, on the other hand, lost more than 10% of their population. In Poland about 17% of the population died.

Uhm, yeah, okay. Sure.

No, they've just been largely accepted and regurgitated by others. According to these statistics, hospital-registered deaths contain substantially fewer women and children than implied by the 70 per cent figure. For instance, an MoH report released on the 3 March showed that since the start of the war only 58 per cent of the hospital-registered deaths are women and children (see bar-chart reproduced in Appendix 3 of this article). If we restrict analysis to 2024 deaths alone, this figure drops all the way down to 42 per cent. This is still a large proportion, but it should be remembered that women and children (the latter defined as persons under 18 years of age) make up of 75 per cent of Gaza’s population. As such, this 42 per cent figure actually reflects a significant avoidance of civilian casualties on the part of the IDF. https://fathomjournal.org/statistically-impossible-a-critical-analysis-of-hamass-women-and-children-casualty-figures/

Experts? A couple of college professors at a university in Oregon using low-resolution, publicly available satellite pictures and feeding them into a computer using an experimental algorithm whose accuracy they never bothered to evaluate? And whose numbers have been contradicted by the UN more than once. The UN's numbers, using high-resolution satellite imagery is less than half that produced by these two clowns. My initial doubts about those estimates arose back in December, when I found out that the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) had published their own damage estimate that was about half of the one produced by our “experts”. UNOSAT’s estimate, based on satellite imagery from Nov 26, was about 37k, while Van Den Hoek&Scher estimated it to be in the 67.7k-88.1k range. https://unosat.org/products/3769 https://twitter.com/JamonVDH/status/1729295868711649319… When I asked them about the reason for such a huge difference between their estimates and the official UN agency numbers, none of them responded to my question. Few days ago I tried to reach them once again and asked the same question about the last UNOSAT estimate - 69k damaged buildings - which, once again, was half of what the “experts” claimed (138k-172k range) around the same time when UNOSAT images were taken. https://unosat.org/products/3793 https://twitter.com/JamonVDH/status/1746291096387539427… This time I did receive a response and the picture began to clarify. It turned out that unlike UNOSAT who base their counts on high-resolution satellite optic imagery, Van Den Hoek & Scher rely on publicly available satellite radar data based on inSAR technology. And this brings us to a first major limitation of their method - the “images” their analysis is based on have a much lower resolution - 40m - unlike the 0.3m resolution of the optical images used by UNOSAT. This means that if their algorithm detects some damage within a 40x40m “pixel”, all the buildings within the same “pixel” are labeled as “likely damaged”. Moreover, because the calculations employed in inSAR typically use a 5x5 window, this means that the “color” of a pixel is affected by the changes in the 200x200m windows around it. In other words, any building within a 100m radius around actual damage can be potentially also labeled as “likely damaged”. I have contacted them once again to make sure that my understanding of their method is correct, and asked them whether they found a way to circumvent these limitations and to make sure that the algorithm doesn’t generate a massive quantity of “false positives” (i.e., intact buildings that are mistakenly tagged as “damaged”). https://x.com/MarkZlochin/status/1764746557872545895?s=20… https://x.com/MarkZlochin/status/1764771718445314305?s=20… The response I got from Van Den Hoek was nothing short of amazing. It turned out that they never bothered to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm. The only verification they did was to check that it doesn’t generate any spurious signals in a completely “clean” environment, with zero damage. That’s all. This is the basis on which the dramatic comparisons to carpet bombings in WWII Germany were based on - an experimental algorithm whose accuracy has never been tested, consistently giving damage estimates that were at least twice as large as the official UN Satelite Center numbers. Official numbers that Van Den Hoek & Scher, as well as some of the “journalists” who used their estimates, were aware of, but still continued as if it’s nothing. Bad science meeting poor journalism. A deadly combination.

No, it is NOT. What we saw on October 7th was the kind of barbarism and savagery the West has outgrown. Even the Germans didn't act like that in WW2. The glee that Hamas fighters took in murdering elderly people in their gardens, children in their rooms, women they could rape and torture before murdering, is just horrifying. All Israel is doing is standard urban warfare but taking much more care than other countries. Russia lined its artillery pieces up wheel to wheel to bombard Chechen cities without a care in the world about how many civilians they killed. Syria did the same in their own country. The Saudis have done the same in Yemen. The death tolls in these other wars are orders of magnitude larger than in Gaza. And those are just some of the more recent ones.

They're not carpet bombing. As for pulverizing buildings, the issue is you need to get at the enemy, who is often in tunnels that need to be got at. That means large bombs. And yet Israel has been fighting Hamas for six months and still haven't taken all the territory. To what do you attribute this?

The IDF can no more avoid harming civilians in an urban war than any other army has in the past. The US has done the same, even in more rural settings, like drones firing into wedding parties - or dumb pilots dropping bombs on Canadians training and practicing on the ground.

The Liberals have not changed that rule about non-citizens voting. And they have steadfastly refused to even discuss putting a foreign agent registry in place. Probably because most of their senior leaders would have to put themselves on it.

If Israel doesn't remove Hamas from power, Hamas has vowed to repeat the Oct 7 massacre as often as possible. Since you want Israel to stop attacking that suggests you want Hamas to remain in power. That will obviously lead to more massacres.

The national childcare system is a joke that costs too much for what it gives. And the Liberals have infested it with wokeness, just like they do everything else, insisting in their agreements with the provinces that they prioritize non-white parents. I wonder who the barbarians are, the conservatives who allegedly want to 'force' women back into the home, or the progressives who say instead "Go to work, you twat! Never mind your stinking children! Go and produce! Get into that factory! Get into that store! No, you can't stay home with your children! Screw them! Go and make money!" Gee, I wonder why that is.

When Pierre Trudeau took over Canada's debt was in the millions - not billions, millions. He quadrupled spending - but not taxes - and started the mountain of debt his son doubled. And as the debt load mounts the cost of servicing it does too, especially if we don't get inflation under control - which is harder as the government keeps borrowing. So no, they will, in fact, be shorter of cash than previous generations.

No, I'd call them ignorant and stupid.

Yeah, it's allies - Jews.

Israel's government is not in Canada. It's being directed against Jews. And I've never seen a more persistent group of demonstrations, all organized by the same time, virtually non-existent groups that up until six months ago had virtually no funds. Nothing in the last fifty years has resulted in such large demonstrations across the country for six straight months. No issue, from abortion to the death penalty to immigration, no issue, however divisive, however angering, has ever caused such continuous demonstrations, all with well-organized groups providing signs, meals, bathrooms, websites and organizational heft. Which suggests that the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas folks aren’t telling the truth about that, and quite a few other things, as well. Such as how truly “grassroots-y” they are. Because they aren’t. They are, in fact, one of the best-organized, best-run, best-funded propaganda efforts that many political people have seen in a long, long time. Ask James Carville, the guru who got Bill Clinton and many others elected: “America’s far-left, for which I hold a very low opinion, is mobilized by the war. And they’ll undoubtedly seek to exploit the unrest it creates — foolishly believing the turmoil advances their cause.” Former Republican strategist (and, full disclosure, friend) David Frum has said that “Iran, China and Russia have made large investments in anti-Israel, pro-Hamas messaging.” And that propaganda, Frum says, is too often working — particularly with young people. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/kinsella-many-anti-israel-initiatives-anything-but-grassroots-efforts If you can explain how dropping bombs on aid convoys helps Israel in any way given the certainty of an international blowback I'd certainly like to read your thoughts - as convoluted and conspiratorial an argument as that would no doubt be. If you can't, then I think we should just chalk this up to an error. They do happen in wartime, you know. Countries even wind up bombing their own troops by accident.

Of course, the trick is in redefining EVERYTHING as an 'essential service', isn't it? Because the real essential services have been provided for many decades now. The new ones being offered up were not essential last year or any time in the last eight years. Yet now they're essential. They weren't essential under his father in the 1970s ad 1980s. But now they're essential. Because the Liberals are way down in the polls and need to buy some votes. And they're using borrowed money to do it.