Hugo

Oooh, boy. That converts to about $1bn. This balanced against $150-200bn of debt and $10bn per year - I wouldn't be looking to the EU to rebuild Iraq any time soon.

I doubt this will happen. I think one of the problems that Canadians have is that their liberty was handed to them on a silver platter, and they take it for granted. England overthrew her would-be despot in the English Civil War. France fought the French Revolution to be rid of their autocratic king. America fought the War of Independence to throw of the shackles of the British. The Russians overthrew the Tsar in 1917, and then had to overthrow the Communists that replaced them in 1991. However, in Canada liberty was bought cheap, and like anything cheap it's valued little. The fact is that if these trends continue, it's not inconceivable that Canadians, like other democratic nations, will actually have to buy their liberty in the standard coin of blood, suffering, death and misery. It seems remote now, but if Canadians continue to applaud while their freedoms and values are trampled upon there will come a point where they realise that they have none left.

72% of women who procured an abortion would not have done so had it been illegal, according to David C. Reardon in Aborted Women: Silent No More. That's not an absolute, but it represents hundreds of thousands of lives. Furthermore, just because something happens anyway is no reason to decriminalise it. Murder and robbery happen whether they are punishable under law or not. Should they be legalised? In 1960, even according to Planned Parenthood, 90% of illegal abortions were performed by licensed physicians in good standing, in their offices. In 1972, the year before abortion was legalised, 39 women died in illegal abortions. Since that time, Dawn Stover has found that 300 women died in legal abortions in Cause of Death: Legal Abortion, August 1991. Legal abortion has not greatly decreased the risks for women, and it certainly hasn't decreased the risks for the unborn - they still die, and now in far greater numbers. Abandonment and starvation of children are crimes, and the answer to those crimes is not to pre-empt them by killing the children before they can be abandoned or starved. Not only does that punish the victim instead of the criminal, it punishes the victim before the act has occurred or before there is any conclusive evidence that the act will ever occur.

As I have said, the Israelis are willing to give in to pretty much all Palestinian demands except the right of return, in order to have peace. The Palestinians refuse to accept those terms, but they should realise that demographically, Israel can never concede right of return without ceasing to exist. They probably do, of course, but this is just great for Arafat because as long as war rages he gets to make a personal profit and appear a saviour to his people, so a war that cannot be ended is in his interests. That's why Arafat won't accept Israeli terms. The Palestinians do have a homeland - Jordan. Jordan will not grant them right of return, even though the Palestinians are actually Jordanian citizens by right, but nobody is pushing for a Palestinian right of return to Jordan, even though that demographic change would not be terribly upsetting. The Palestinian physical home is Palestine, but by this point the Israeli physical home is also Palestine, so we have a problem. However, the national Palestinian home is Jordan, so we do have a potential solution there as well. Basically, the Palestinians want Israel to grant what they are unable to grant and to grant what another nation should grant, and as they won't, they are committed to a path of violence and terrorism thanks to the myopia and corruption of their leadership and the violent nature of their religious belief. This path, unfortunately, can only lead to their own destruction.

The interests of the US are freedom and prosperity for its people. This is as opposed to those regimes whose interests are the personal power and wealth of their leaders at the expense of the freedom and prosperity of their citizens. That is why so many millions want to emigrate to the US.

Do unto others. If Palestinian civilians are killed in the crossfire of the war that their leaders started, then the blame lies with their leaders for deliberately killing Israeli civilians and refusing all their peace offers. These were genuine offers and were fair. The fact is that Palestinian leaders are personally profiting from this war and thus are not about to end it, even if Israel concedes 95% of their demands (which they have). I don't believe for a split second that these Palestinian "civilians" being killed are anything other than 1) genuine collateral damage or 2) terrorists posing as civilians, paramilitaries preparing to commit acts of violence or "innocent" women and children who just so happen to be toting AK-47s. Israeli soldiers aren't mercenaries, they aren't even career soldiers, they are mostly conscripts from a free and democratic society who serve for a short time before going back to work or college or whatever they were about to do. I don't believe that student conscripts who are about to go back into the "real world" in a few months are just itching to blow away some Palestinian children. If they engage a target, you can bet that they have at least a reasonable perception of a threat. Regarding the collateral damage, it's an unfortunate fact of modern warfare and not even laser-guided weapons can completely eliminate it. It's even harder to avoid when your targets are hiding in groups of civilians. If the Palestinian leadership is so outraged by collateral damage, perhaps they should have hesitated to initiate a war in which collateral damage was inevitable. For that matter, they should have hesitated to deliberately target civilians themselves. Now that the Cold War is over, the US is no longer fostering terror and oppression. They ended Saddam's evil regime in Iraq and the Taliban's evil regime in Afghanistan, and are probably setting up to end evil regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere - but you complain about that! There's just no pleasing some people.

Well, I'm glad you can admit to that error. Anyway, to answer your new point, no, but they can be held responsible for their own, which includes bombing buses, schools and cafes, killing innocent and (relatively) unsuspecting men, women and children, noncombatants all. Whatever. The fact is that I know a lot more about this situation than you because I've been there and I know a lot of people who are still there, and if you can't or won't see that, that basically means that you were sleeping in history class when they taught you about primary and secondary sources. I learnt that when I was 11. Apparently, you still haven't. Possibly because they are not as well informed. Usually, the big picture is only known to one or a few men at the top of the command structure. That's how the military operates. Also, these quotes are not particularly scathing of Israel - most of them speak of the threat from the Arabs not being as huge as thought at the time, not that there was no threat, or that war was not imminent - there was, and it was. Lilienthal puts an extreme spin on anything he encounters and is a very unreliable source. My beef is that the messenger plays up one part of the message while disregarding another. Yes, it is. You are basically saying that despots can be excused despotic behaviour. Rubbish. Tell that to the Dalai Lama, in exile in India. Tell it to the prosecution for Slobodan Milosevic. Tell it to those who tried Nicolai Caucescu. It was an analogy. A nation that gives its citizens freedom and equality before the law, like the USA or Israel, is a nation of better moral character than one that denies its citizens freedom and equality and refuses to respect their human rights, like Iraq or the Palestinian government. A nation can have a moral character, which generally refers to the governing regime.

No, Blackdog, in politics and history "who started it" is crucially important. If what you say is true, that means that Germany and Belgium were equally to blame for Germany's unprovoked and surprise attack on neutral Belgium in 1940. Clearly, this is not the case. No, it is not, because unlike you I have personal experience of what is going on in that region. All your information is second or third-hand, however, which means you are subjected to any bias in the interpretation of that information. What about "ultra-Zionist nationalist agenda for a Greater Israel." Reminds me of: "The word "ZOG" is commonly used by Revolutionary Nationalist Socialists today but for the uninitiated, ZOG is an acronym for Zionist Occupation Government. " Taken from an article on Combat 18's website. Combat 18 is a British Neo-Nazi movement, committed to extreme white supremacist ideology, violence and murder against racial minorities, and eulogy of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP. You mention a bunch of quotes about the Six Day War, but I find it very interesting that you haven't got a single one from Moshe Dayan, who was then Defence Minister and in the best position of anyone in government to know what was going on. You have basically tried and condemned Israel without even examining the main witness. The fact remains that the blockading of the Gulf of Eilat was a belligerant act according to existing treaties. Even after the Egyptian Navy did this, the Israeli Government did allow them around a fortnight to withdraw, despite the fact that Egypt had already committed an internationally recognised act of war against Israel. I'm also not interested in any quotes from Alfred Lilienthal. This guy is a nut who accuses the "Zionists" of being as racist as Hitler and sees Zionist conspiracies everywhere from the Truman Administration and the American mainstream press to the Atomic Energy Commission. On the contrary. It seems to me that you are greatly concerned with the "injustices" of free and democratic nations such as Israel and the USA while you are willing to overlook the actions of evil and despotic regimes such as China or Saddamite Iraq. You argue that there is no comparison of moral scales - which is really moral-relativist nonsense, by the way, and is basically an ethically void excuse for overlooking egregious behaviour - but maybe you have something. Let me make an analogy. My neighbour is a decent guy, who I've known for a long time, with a wife and kids and generally an upstanding citizen. I learn that he hit somebody in the street. A little later, I learn that a lifelong criminal just released on parole after doing time for aggravated assault also just hit somebody in the street. I'm going to be a lot more forgiving of my neighbour's behaviour, because I believe that he's basically a man of good character and if he did something like that, he was probably justified in doing so. I'm not going to be so forgiving of a career criminal with a history of violence, though, because I find it hard to believe that this was not a malicious act against an innocent party, given his track record.

Angelus, I can see you've put a lot of work into this, but I'm going to have to shoot you down, and I hope you will take it as constructive criticism. Taken from the website: Which, of course, is not true or even valid. Science is a tool, and while it has been the case that science has been used to do good, it has also been used to do great evil. To say that science has been the most effective improver of humanity is like saying that hammers are the most effective builders of houses, which is, of course, nonsense. People build houses. Hammers build nothing. Furthermore, you ignore religion as a driver of improvement of humanity, forgetting that religious movements ended slavery and segregation, founded the first hospitals, ran the first charities and so forth. This won't work. Intelligence is independent of morality, and Hitler, Mao and others of their ilk were all arguably geniuses or at the very least, extremely intelligent. Unfortunately, your very political philosophy makes this impossible by dint of the fact that you have stated that you will be prejudiced by level of intelligence. Now, I haven't read through the rest of your documents, which I shall try to take the time to do, but it seems to me that this is basically an exercise in secular humanism which is in complete denial of any aspect or concept of morality or ethics. Not to mention the self-contradictions. Keep working on it. Passive income generators are an important incentive because they reward hard work with the possibility of freedom from work. People can achieve this because they worked hard, or because their parents did, which brings me on to your second point, inheritance. Obviously, one of the reasons people try to do well in life is to provide a better existence for their children and it is not fair to deny them this. It is entirely right that a man should be able to become wealthy in order to bequeath that wealth to his children so that they will be spared hard work. If your parents did not achieve that for you, that's unfortunate, but if your parents did not have blue eyes, you might find that unfortunate too, but what is done is done. Furthermore, you do have the chance to work hard and bequeath to your own children in turn.

Black Dog, I must stress something here: the Israelis have never initiated violence. Every war that has happened, the Arabs have begun. Israel has only occupied Palestinian lands in response to terrorism and violence. If the Palestinians want to cry "foul" now that things aren't going their way, might I suggest that they should have thought of that before they started bombing buses, schools and cafes? Furthermore, I think this whole "settler violence" thing is bullshit. I personally know Israeli settlers and they are peaceful people who I'm happy to have as friends. I've been to the country. My sister, as I said, was there as little as a month ago. These people are under threat of attack. Your complaint that Israeli settlers are starting violence has as much validity as your complaint that Israel started the Six Day War - basically, complete ignorance of the facts to prove a false point. What personal experience do you have of this region, Black Dog? As regards your accusation of "racist imagery", you might want to consider dropping your use of language that comes straight from Mein Kampf. And if you are so upset about illegally occupied land, I would remind you that: 1) China has illegally occupied Tibet and brutally oppressed its people for decades 2) India illegally occupies most of Jammu and Kashmir and has broken all promises for referenda, and continues to exercise arbitrary martial law there 3) Russia illegally occupied and waged war on Chechnya and destroyed the city of Grozny as the Chechens wished to separate from the CIS What percentage of your posts have concerned these issues, BlackDog? None. Which just illustrates your ignorance - you choose to pick on the only democratic and free country in the Middle East, knowing nothing about the situation, while closing your eyes to gross human rights abuses and unjust, illegal and unilateral wars fought elsewhere. I'm glad you support the Palestinian side - it reassures me that I'm in the right.

Then you need to change your name to "USConstitutionMustGo", because George W Bush was elected fairly according to the US Constitution and if you don't agree, then your beef is not with him, it's with the US electoral system. Why? Because Edward Jayne, a retired English professor talking way outside his field of expertise, and a "former 60s activist" (read: hippie trying to relive glory days protesting against Vietnam) told you to, with a bunch of misinformation, extremely biased and incorrect misinterpretations of history, and outright hysterical nonsense? Any man who seriously compares Bush to Hitler is a complete moron, frankly, and was probably asleep when they tried to teach him world history between 1933 and 1945. You don't have any credible evidence for what you are saying, unfortunately. You are making comparisons to historical events that you don't understand and have never studied. I'm sorry, I must have missed that. Perhaps you can provide a properly-cited quote from Bush, Rumsfeld or Powell stating that Gulf II is a favor for Kuwait?

Because the original borders of Israel are very difficult to defend. Expansion thus far has been chiefly to make Israel defensible. Land gained in Arab-initiated wars that was not of value for defensive purposes was returned after hostilities ceased. Israel continues to build colonies in Occupied Territories because it wishes to use the land that it has for decent and productive purposes. These settlements are made of ordinary, decent people. They just want to work, raise their children and lead a normal life. My sister was in just one such kibbutz around a month ago. The people there are not nutcases or soldiers, they are ordinary people, telecommuters, businessmen, teachers, lawyers etc. They all have military training because every adult Israeli does, and they have fences around their communities and rifles because roving bands of Arabs tend to attack them on a sporadic basis. Or do you believe that warlike and fanatical network administrators and day-traders are launching attacks on innocent Arabs? So you think that Israel has expansionist ambitions but no territorial ambitions? How does that make sense? They certainly aren't spreading political, cultural, commercial or religious influence throughout the Middle East, are they? To call Israel "expansionist" illustrates that you don't know what expansionism is. The British Empire was expansionist. The Soviet Union was expansionist. Red China is expansionist. Israel has taken some extremely small parcels of land - smaller than the Niagara Region - which were won in wars that they did not initiate and are retained for the purpose of defence in case of more wars that they do not initiate.

Thanks for reminding me of that, Debo. After the Arab nations launched several attacks on Israel - often without formal declaration of war - Israel humiliated their armies and was able to actually make territorial gains. Most of those gains were returned to their original owners (e.g. the Sinai peninsula), some were retained for their strategic value (e.g. the Golan Heights, to prevent Syrian artillery from shelling Israeli settlements as they had in the past). If Israel truly had expansionist ambitions they could command the Middle East from Suez to Teheran by now. The only ones in the Middle East who have expansionist ambitions are the Arabs, who chiefly want to expand into Israel (and each other, when they're not fighting Israel).

Yes, Gugsy, this is a good site you have made and hopefully its message will be heard. I sincerely hope that a united Conservative Party will give the Liberals the sound thrashing they deserve at the next election.

I read the first seven, and they were all wrong, so I have to say I didn't bother reading the rest. I know when my time is being wasted. Here are the first three, for an example: How many states did Bush win? 30. How many did Gore win? 21. So, according to US law, President Bush is the legitimate President of the United States, whereas Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg without popular mandate. Except, of course, that Hitler's cronies started the Reichstag fire and framed a half-witted Dutchman who couldn't have even worked out how to sneak into the building, whereas 9-11 was committed by Al-Queda terrorists who publicly claimed responsibility for it. Except that Bush invaded a state that was known to be harbouring terrorists by their own admission and refused to allow those terrorists to be tried for their crimes with the approval of over 70% of the American people, whereas Hitler attacked neutral states without prior declaration of war, warning or negotiation. And it goes on like this. Suffice it to say that this page, by Edward Jayne, is childish and shows an extremely biased interpetation of history. If you read crap like this, it's not surprising you are wrong on so many issues. Furthermore, if you wish to contend that Gulf II is like Vietnam, my response is "so what?" I don't think either was "cooked up" by advisers, both were responses to perceived threats. Vietnam was a just war, but one that was badly fought and therefore lost.

Explain North Korea? What kind of request is that? You can only explain verbs, not nouns. By all means. Justify your bluster. If that will help stablise the Middle East and stop an atom bomb going off in New York City or Washington DC, or will stop the spread of Islamo-Fascism, pretty much any price would be worth it. How much do you think it would have been worth to prevent WWII from happening? $10 billion? $100 billion? What accusations were made against Nazi Germany in the 1930s, please, and by whom? The "accusation" from Chamberlain that Hitler was a trustworthy man, that each of his "territorial demands in Europe" was the last, and was reasonable? The "accusation" that we would have peace in our time? Yeah, those were really borne out.

A lot of the founders of America were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. People such as the Puritans and Quakers are prime examples, but English Catholics or French Protestants would be equally valid. They fled to America in order to be able to worship freely, in public, which they could not do in their own countries. Now their descendants are being told, or are about to be told, that they may not worship freely, in public, and despite the fact that well over 80% of Americans are religious, religion and religious overtures are being banned from schools, courthouses and other public places. Good job. If Dr. Newdow feels the need to mock and abase the principles of his country so badly, one might suggest that he go live in a nice, atheist country such as China, Cuba or North Korea and see how he likes it.

Well, according to that, the "biggest moron" as you put it was Mohammed himself, who claimed to be a prophet of the same God as Moses and Jesus but proceeded to defecate all over their spiritual messages and legacies, instead electing to whip up the Arabs into a frenzy of aggression in the name of a God whom he claimed to speak for but never actually believed in, in order to fulfill a personal vendetta. The root problem is that Mohammed was a liar and a petty warmonger and the religion that he founded, unsurprisingly, continues to lie to its faithful and to wage war on "unbelievers."

Well, first off, Germany drove away or murdered a lot of her scientific and engineering greats (such as Einstein) and second, the fact was that the US and Britain were leagues ahead of her technologically. Furthermore, you should also note that since the collapse of the Soviet Union there is no shortage of former Soviet scientists and engineers who now can't make a living wage. It wouldn't be too hard for Iraq to buy their skills. Nor is it particularly necessary for the Iraqis to design their own weapons and military machines when firstly, the greatest threat to world peace is no longer the blitzkreig, but the phial of anthrax or the atom bomb in a shipping crate, and secondly, the Russians, French and Germans are willing to sell the Iraqis as much military hardware as they could want. I don't believe that comparisons of Iraq to 30s Germany are that invalid, and furthermore, I don't see how the removal of Saddam from power could be else than a Good Thing.

Neither was Nazi Germany, in the mid 30s. A broken country, economically ruinous, not only without a credible military but actually forbidden to ever have a credible military - stop me if this sounds familiar - but still went on to unleash the most destructive war in human history. Had Chamberlain and Daladier been as "trigger-happy" as President Bush, 50 million deaths and untold property damage would never have happened.

Pastor Niemoller was heard to say much the same thing. Regardless, the fact is that these things have already started happening. Early in 2000, a group of feminist thugs attacked, robbed, vandalized and desecrated with a burning cross Mary Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal. The demonstrators yelled anti-religious slurs to protest in favour of abortion and against Catholicism's "patriarchal" doctrines. From the National Post's coverage of the same event: "Secretary of State Hedy Fry, who elsewhere sees two Klansmen in every home and a burning cross on every lawn, did not decry the Montreal desecration. Far from it. The only news release issued by her Status of Women Canada secretariat near the date of the Montreal defilement (March 8, 2000) came two days later and it blew sunshine up Finance Minister Paul Martin's kilt: Women and their families stand to gain in Budget 2000. An actual, egregious example of hateful, anti-Catholic, anti-Christian bigotry had just taken place, and the federal minister responsible for ending prejudice didn't even take notice. She was too busy writing news releases extolling the virtues of her party's government." So there you go, Black Dog. Not only are the things you claim will never happen already happening, but the politicians you say will never allow them to happen, are allowing them to happen.

Given that we know that the biological purpose of sexuality is reproduction, that would mean that the above information shows that homosexuality and other deviancies are basically genetic disorders like hemophilia, Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis - errors in the genetic composition that cause the malfunction of the organism they manifest in, if that extrapolation were true.

What this study does, if I read it right, is to show that genes alone play a part in determining secondary sexual characteristics, rather than gonadal hormones, as previously thought. These are physical in nature - height, build, hair distribution, brain size, etc. I fail to see how you could extrapolate this study to claim that genes alone can determine behaviour.

You know what's funny? When I click on that link, at the top of the page I see an advert for UNICEF, a children's charity. UNICEF is a big donator of funds to Planned Parenthood, the world's largest profit-making abortion organisation. The left hand helps the children, the right stabs them in the back of their skulls with scissors. For a handsome profit, of course. What kind of sick, twisted and disgusting perversion of morality do we have when people praise this two-faced and positively diabolical behaviour, while calling for hospitals to ban the Bible?

The age-old voices of morality have been mostly crushed by secular humanism and by proponents of religion who seek to make it "popular" by being "progressive." Hand-in-hand with that, it has become the case that the question "is it moral?" has been largely replaced by "is it legal?" in our society, and legality has become de facto moral approval. Therefore, I cannot applaud while the secular state and bleeding-heart liberals decide that good morals are henceforward to include drug abuse, pornography, pedophilia, incest, infanticide, sexual deviancy, prostitution and all kinds of profiteering from human misery, suffering and death. If the Separation Party of Alberta wants to ban porn, and terminate Trudeau's myopic, egregious and thoroughly wrongheaded notions of human rights, great! Where can I pledge money?