Canuckistani

Why did they have to occupy the whole country if they were only after BL and Al Qaeda? They did have a large force in the country, just didn't use it properly. During my Googling I found comments by American commanders saying just that.

Suicide bombing was invented by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

We should clothe them. Give them shoes without holes, winter coats, etc. We should do what it takes to have them grow up healthy both mentally and physically. If the parents can't or won't do it, the kids should not suffer for it. It will save us a lot of money down the road.

I Googled this after your post. Just look up Tora Bora Bin Laden. The US committed far too few resources and left it mostly to the locals to do the fighting. The Taliban negotiated a truce with the locals to allow some of them to flee, then resumed fighting. If the US was serious about getting BL, I would have assumed they would go in full force themselves. Better to have Bin Laden to kick around and scare the rubes for a few more years I guess. I always figured Bush had BL stashed somewhere and would pull him out for an "October surprise."

Thumbs up. The only question is what could have been done differently about Pakistan. I think they were trying to make the best out of a bad situation there, and the stupidity was ignoring the role Pstan would play in our trying to nation build in Afghanistan. But, even with no outside influence, I wonder how well nation building would have succeeded in Afghanistan. Were we ever prepared to stay there for a generation or two to make it happen?

There were two Afghanistans. Kabul was sophisticated, most of the country was as it is now, except the warlords weren't nearly as powerful and the Taliban didn't hold sway. With the overthrow of the monarchy, the slide began.

And yet you quote him What is it that changed the Dickensian situation but the very things Dalrymple decries? I think this idea of the noble poor is a sham - things were even more brutish and mean for the poor in Dickens' time.Just throwing money at a situation may not do much. As you say, on remote Indian reserves where there isn't a hope in hell of most people having a job, we've just facilitated an exchange for the traditional way of life to welfare dependency. OTOH, something like this food program, that addresses a specific need and supports kids to learn and have the better possibility of a future is money well spent. We've relegated people to welfare and underemployment, because our technological society doesn't really need so many people to function. The idea was they would be consumers and drive industry, but with ever widening wage inequality, they can't even participate in that very well. Some people will always need welfare, they are so damaged no matter what we do they won't be able to work. But most people will do much better given meaningful work and a decent pay check to go with it. Since we don't have private enterprise jobs for all of them, we should be creating jobs that don't have a profit attached to it, but still have value. Ie a high level form of workfare. Those few who really refuse to work but are able to would get the bare minimum or even nothing. But those people on workfare should be earning enough for a decent life and be able to save enough to educate or otherwise upgrade themselves if they can. The place to start with that is creating emotionally and physically healthy children, and this program has a part to play there.

The US hired locals to go after Bin Laden. My guess is they took the money, got some more from BL to not find him.

You should read the link I provided. It is about the US tho, and I admit I don't know that much about the Canadian system. But good point - the company should not be involved in the plan. So I guess you're right - negotiate for higher wages then make union member pay into a union plan. Comes to the same thing as far as cost to the employer/employee.

Why. All it is is trading off one part of a wage package with another. If the employees want the employer to pay for all or part of a DB plan, that is part of the overall negotiations. I don't understand why DB plans are not sustainable if they are sufficiently well funded and the employers don't play silly buggers with them and withdraw the "surplus" as so often happens. There's a book about all this chicanery, unfortunately I can't remember the title. But it's basically massive theft of these plans by employers or corporate raiders. Here's a link about it tho: Retirement Heist

Sounds good. Except Astan is in no shape to defeat the terrorists, no matter how much we train them. The people's will isn't there, because the Taliban were preferable to the warlords, and there seems to be no other option at the moment for the country. And as long as Pstan remains a refuge for the Taliban, there isn't much we can do about it. We should have defeated Al Qaeda there, captured Bin Laden ourselves instead of contracting that job out, and gone home.

Exactly. Which is why the "support the troops" chant is so insidious when used to silence dissent against sending the troops on futile missions. Unfortunately a lot of military fall into that trap, where speaking out against sending our troops is seen as military bashing, instead of what it often is - trying to save lives wasted on futile efforts. All that "Taliban Jack" and "No cut and run" when here we are, negotiating with the Taliban and cutting and running. Our initial mission in Afghanistan made complete sense. Our ally had been attacked, and we owed them our support. Defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and capture Bin Laden. Once the US took it's eye off the ball for other adventures and the mission became nation building, we should have withdrawn.

No doubt. If they knew the bomber referred to in the OP was going to suicide bomb, they would have taken steps to prevent it. My point has been that to say misses the point - can't use drones or any other means to stop somebody you don't know what they plan to do. Who are we eliminating, and how? I thought we were doing our best to do just that in Astan, but it hasn't worked out all that well. And it won't unless we're willing to "destroy Afghanistan in order to save it." (What was that about Nam all over again?)

Ah, the old less inequality = total equality red herring, all the while singing the praises of the far lesser inequality we have since Dickensian Times. I don't know about England, but as the OP shows, in Canada we do have hunger. And I doubt if all those morally shiftless poor would just quit smoking it would solve the problem. In a modern, complex, interdependent society, we understand that that sins of the fathers are not just visited on the children, but on us all. From a pure objectivist standpoint, it makes sense for the state to support children to grow into adults who contribute to the common weal and draw less on our social supports. Less inequality (within limits) makes us all richer, not poorer.

I think to be fair, we have to add Harper's infamous "If we were going to have a recession we would have had it by now."

Exactly. Are you saying they had intel on this bomber and could have taken him out with a drone? That wa my point, for bombers like this drones are useless.

A fair point - the key is to find the right balance. We often don't. In BC, for instance, the effect of a tanker spill would be catastrophic, so for the Enbridge pipeline to proceed, they should have to put up a bond to compensate for any foreseeable damage - ie for billions of dollars. If that makes the project uneconomic, so be it.

What then is your definition of religion? Most organized religions have at one time or another been about power. With Christianity that happened as soon as the Roman Empire adopted Christianity. All of a sudden being a bishop meant having power and wealth - no more women allowed, lots of infighting to get that position. Protestantism was used in colonization. Etc.

They would, but then people would pay less taxes. Most recyclable products have a fee you pay at purchase to pay for the recycling. But I think we need to go a long way to set a price on the environment, and charge polluters that true cost. That was Mulcair's point in part - air and water and land ain't free, somebody has to pay at some time - it should be the people making a profit from it.

The consumer wants the cheapest goods possible because they're getting squeezed by no real rise in income in the last twenty thirty years. Doesn't seem to happen in Germany, for instance. They want high quality, durable stuff, so buy much more homemade product. I guess they never developed the throwaway society we did to the same extent.

Absolutely. Saves a lot of money down the road in lost productivity, criminal justice and health care. But we have to do more than just feed the kids, we also have to provide the kind of support and educational enrichment that poor parents can't provide, so the kids can do well in school. Or, maybe it would be better to provide the support to the parents so they can feed and properly parent the kids. Have homecare workers that help manage finances, ensure they're not spent on drugs, etc. Again, I think it would save a bundle down the road, just as having homecare workers for seniors saves money when they don't have to go to a nursing home or hospital.

To use a drone, you have to know who they are and where they are. To get a guy like this you'd basically have to carpet bomb the whole lot, and all the innocents along with them. Then you'd be just as evil as this guy and his ilk is.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/oecd-better-life-index-suggests-canada-income-equality-170330413.html I didn't actually write any of that. Not sure where you got if from, but not from me.

Same is true for the US. And, when those multinationals find countries with lower labor costs, they also gut their best markets. It's a short term strategy that will collapse in the end.

I agree with both points. Maybe change whine to hand wringing - ie not very helpful. But we shouldn't make Keystone the focus and then sit back and think we're golden. The IEPP report that found some Dutch disease in Canada said the way to deal with it is for govt to use some of the extra tax income from resource sales to support Canadian Manufacturing (not subsidize). But maybe a real good use of some of that money would be to build that eastern pipeline.