Black Dog

Israel's nuclear arsenal Also look up Morechai Vannu, who, in 1986, revealed that the Israelis' Dimona nuclear power plant, where he worked, has churned out hundreds of warheads. On that we can agree.

That's the sum total of your analysis? A little thin, I'd say.

I'd just like to point out the Canadian government has been taking in (and spending) about $160 billion a year since 1996. That makes the $7.25-million Celebrate Canada budget a drop in a large bucket. That said, I don't see the point of spending anything on celebrating Canada Day in Quebec or anywhere else.

There's a good reason why devotees of "Islamism" resort to acts of terror: they are not a dominant ideology even in their own sphere and thus don't have the ability to meet the west on even terms. Remember one of OBL's goals is to overthrow what he see's as corrupt western backed regimes. So far, he's succedded exactly zero times. And this is the new Red Menace that's set to sweep the west aside? My God, all our wimmin foklk will be wearing hijab by next Tuesday if we don't act now!! As horrific and shocking as the acts of 9-11, Bali et al are, they don't constitute a threat to our way of life, culture religion or what have you. they strike the way they do because they are powerless. This same powerlessness is what feed their fanaticism. But, to paraphrase David Byrne, there's no harm in asking "How did they get there?" You mean the autonomy they unilateraly declared and won concessions for after repelling Moscow's first attempt to crush the Chechyan state? Could it also be that Chechnya's not-inconsiderable oil reserved plays a role in Putin's determination to keep "Russia's territorial integrity"? So you concede that you've no facts to add, no insights to make your rather garbled logic a little clearer? Nothing beyond "them bad, us good"? Worst. Debater. Ever. Moving on, then. Oh yes, I forgot: examining the socio-political and economic factors contributing to the rise of radicalism is strictly taboo. No narrative shall be accepted that does not follow the accepted line: "They hate our freedoms/wealth/kittens/SUVs." It is as I already pointed out in my first post to this topic: No evidence of backing "the terrorist's" goals, or making excuses for their actions. Simply a call for a rational, clear-eyed assessment of the threat, its causes and a suggesstion that current methods don't seem to be working. Al of which sails right over the collected heads of the "y'all either wit us or yer agin us" crowd. You are a joke.

Not a very effective debating tactic, is it? You've lost this one before you even started. Again: Chechnya's struggle for autonomy dates back almost two hundred years. To categorize it as a product of a very modern school of Islamic thought is to be ignorant of all that has come before. Yet Russia has allowed other former Soviet republics to become autonomous without much of a fight. Why make such a brutal example of Chenchnya? (By the way, I already know the answer. Do you?) Your ignorance of the region is becoming more and more pronounced. Seperatist political parties are barred from participating in the process, so it's impossible for the issue to even be addressed through a popular vote. Stop with the French Socialist/nazi rigamaroll. It's completely irrelevant to the situation at hand and only highlights your compete unwillingness to learn anything that's not served to you in a easily digested soundbite. Ad hominems galore. Another point against you. You're very bad at this. So, since you don't actually have a position, let alone an infomed one, you choose to take shots at a left that exists only in your mind. I aslo notice you abandoned the ploy whereby you claim to have stood up for Chechnya years ago while the left was silent. Caught in a lie, I see. Propaganda is propaganda and knows know specific idealogical standpoint. Arguments? What arguments are those? "Islamism is bad"? Wow: deep and groundbreaking, to be sure. ??? I assume you mean OWNED! As in "Holy cow, Black Dog OWNED takeanumber in that Chchnya thread." I eagerly await your next collection of slogans.

So, just to be clear: what's your stance on Israel's stock of nuclear weapons. If it's okay for Israel to have nukes to deter places like Iran, would it not be okay for Iran to have nukes to deter Israel?

Unfair and Unbalanced How is it "stifling" poor, billionaire Rupert Murdoch to drop the obviously false "Fair and Balanced" Fox News isn't "banned". It's applications was rejected based on the fact that they don't offer naything we don't already have. Al Jazeera's approval, meanwhile, was laden with conditions that are so onerous that no cable or satellite operator will be able to meet them. Get the facts straight. No: slanted views, portrayed (falsely) as "fair and balanced" is the issue. If Fox were to brand themselves: "America's number one source for partisan conservative rhetoric", I'd have less of a problem with them. At least they'd be honest. Yeah, because Colmes is a feeble, useless sop. Give us a good, fearless leftist rep and we'll see how things go. I'd love to see Chomsky rip Hannity a new one. You know, I don't mind conservatives, as long as they are able to use facts to debate. Unfortunately that includes, FOXNews, O'reilly Hannity and, yes, you too Mr. Burns.

Sorry, but what does all this blather about "Radical Islamist totalitarianism" have to do with Beslan? What does Chechnya's fight for independence have to do with some global "clash of civilizations"? You've swallowed the propaganda whole. (Still no evidence of "foreign fighters" involvement in the school tragedy, by the way.) So this is about your sour grapes? Based on your comments, I have a hard time believing you ever advocated for the Checyhan cause. Furthermore, I find it even more difficult to believe that anyone on the left supported Putin's war. So, sorry, but your plea to authority dosn't work. Given the work of humanitarian and human rights organizations like Amnesty to bring the atrocities in Chechnya to light, your accussations of opportunism are false and do these individuals a great disservice. Give us some evidence of your claims (first, that you, personally and alone, advocated for the Chechyan cause, and second, that the Chechyan cause had been rejected by the left until last week.) Nice to see all the imminently logical statements to the contrary have whizzed right over your head. Again, I must point out it is the left that is morally consistent: war, terror is wrong whether perpetrated by russia on chechnya, or by atrmed gunmen against schoolkids; by suicide bomber on a bus, or by Apache helicopter gunship. WTF? TS, it is that kind of moral reasoning that I find objectionable and apparently, you are oblivious. "If I had just given my car to the thief, he never would have had to steal it from me." What are your objections to an idependent Chechnya? Who is this bogeyman you are invoking? What power does it have? What conditions exist that allow radical ideaologies to prosper and becoem bona fide movements? Is "Islamism" monolithic, or are their differing interpretations? Oh sorry: I forgot that asking questions is "diminishing terror". WTF? Most telling of all, is the leftyist propensity (on this thread) to analysise the situation, discuss causes and asks questions. What do we get from the other side? Slogans: "we gotta fight to keep our freedoms". Inaappropriate and irrelevant historical parallels. No depth. No intellectual vigour. Just empty rhetoric.Yawn.

Oh giosh! Not private conversations! Why I bet they are probably scheming right now to build gulags and give workers control of the means of production!! Basically, you have no basis for your paranoid red-bating. Ahem. And certainly a mullah would never use hyperbole to whip up a crowd, would he? Citation please. No: against the U.S. Iran's neocons poised to take charge Iran's far more likely to use nukes if threatened than it would otherwise. Uh...Israel has nukes, and has displayed a predilication to launching pre-emptive strikes at whim. The U.S has threatened Iran and has invaded neighbouring Iraq with th eintention of establishinga permenant military presecenc ein the region. A nuclear detrrent looks like a wise startegic move by the Iranians. Unfortunatley, your hypothesis falls apart onc eyou realize that he peole who perform suicide missions are seldom people of authority. face it: like all men, be they religious fanatics or just secularlly corrupt, the hardliners crave power and control. Prestige and wealth. They wouldn't jeapordize their position of social privilege by performing random acts of destruction that would guarantee their own demise. You said before that "Those wretched, cruel, evil old religious wackos aren't about to give up power without a fight." Why assume, then, given their desire for power above all else, that they would throw it away? What about Israel? i would add teh caveat "anytime soon."

Absolutely. North Korea's nuclear program is not at astage where it can be considered a threat. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative: So I don't think that the DPRK's nukes were a consideration was a consideration. Secondly, your logic is faulty in that "regime change" in Iraq was a Bush administration priority from Day One. It wasn't as though they weighed the two and decided on Iraq. More importantly though: why would they undertake such a venture? It would be costly, it would be inefficient and it would be pretty much pointless, given that Canada has been on good terms with most of these countries since Confederation. Better to be smart. Nukes don't really guarantee anything. Certainly, Canada doesn't need a nuclear deterrent agnst rogue states, simply because our relationships with our allies would be sufficient. Anyone who nukes us would undoubtely face serious reprisals from the U.S., England and the rest of our NATO allies. That's why we have alliances in the first place. But there's nothing stopping anyone else from applying the same logic. That's why we have a NPT: to stop the dangerous spread of WMD.

That's another thing about Calgary. The urban sprawl is unreal. It's pretty gross driving in and seeing what was recently rolling foothills now turned into grotesque generic, cookie-cutter suburban developments. You seems like you'd be more at home in Edmonton. It's a University town, with a thriving arts and cultural community, lots of good festivals and its also the last bastion of liberalism in Alberta. It's a beautiful city too, though the winters are hard.

A U.S. invasion is a miniscule possibility. I'd be more concerened with gradual economic and political convergence. Even so, it's pretty specious comparing Canada's relationship with the U.S. to the American policy vis a vis Iraq and North Korea. There's too many factors at work to boil it down to a simplistic "one has nukes, one didn't." explanation. What territory? Baffin Island? How would they get here. I'm talking realistic threats, (you know, actual enemies)not just any country that can muster up a decent military force. So encourgaing more states to get nukes seems a little counterproductive. You're using the same logic as people who advocate mandatory gun ownership: if everyone's armed, then no one will step out of line. But that's not the way it works in the real world. India and Pakistan, two rouge nuclear states, have come to the brink many times. As more nations arm themselves with nukes, the probability of a nuclear exchange will eventually equal one.

If you want to get away from American attitudes, Calgary is not the place to go. It's practically the 51st state. there's Vancouver, which is gorgeous, or, if you really want to experience culture shock, Montreal, the best city in Canada.

And would nukes deter that? No. Not to mention that, if the U.S. really wanted to get their hands on Canada's resources, there's easier ways then invading and occupying a country this size , full of 30 million future Democrats. Like who? We gots nukes. They gots nukes. All god's chillun gots nukes. Hey, why don't we just concentrate on making sure "rogue states" don't aquir enuke sin the first place?

Well the obvious question to ask is, who exatly are we suppossed to be deterring? What threats does Canada face that can be relaistically tempered with nukes? I'd posit: none.

Persoanlly, I'm against pretty much all religions. I'm also against pointless threads that take up space in the wrong forum section.

IMR, you'd swallow any turd the G.O.P. tells you is chocolate. Can you actually back that up? Or are you just parroting Bush's talking points? While Cheney was boasting of his cuts to th emilitary ("Congress has let me cancel a few programs. But you've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements. … You've directed me to buy more M-1s, F-14s, and F-16s—all great systems … but we have enough of them."), Kerry opposed an amendment to impose an arbitrary 2 percent cut in the military budget. In 1992, he opposed an amendment to cut Pentagon intelligence programs by $1 billion. In 1994, he voted against a motion to cut $30.5 billion from the defense budget over the next five years and to redistribute the money to programs for education and the disabled. That same year, he opposed an amendment to postpone construction of a new aircraft carrier. In 1996, he opposed a motion to cut six F-18 jet fighters from the budget. In 1999, he voted against a motion to terminate the Trident II missile. (Interestingly, the F-18 and Trident II are among the weapons systems that the RNC claims Kerry opposed.) It seems to me that he Republicans can campaign with doubletalk and fearmongering and get away with it because they have awilling and gullible population to believe them.

You talk like that's a bad thing. Certainly someone is going to have to do something about Iran or we're going to have crazed turbanheads with nukes - well, with nukes for about one day, which is all it'll take for them to use them. Nice: fear mongering with a dash of racial bigotry thrown in for good measure. It's highly unlikely Iran would use nukes. The program is a detrrent. Of course, Iran's hardliners have managed to get the upper hand after years of decline, thanks in large part to the fear of U.S. intervention. Iran was moving slowly towards popular reform then BAM!: the whoel "Axis of Evil" business came up and the hardliners clamped down and started hunkering down and prepping their nuke program. The only people who have to "do something" about Iran are Iranians looking for change.

Nope, quite a few of them left, esp in the left wing of the Liberal party and among the NDP, people who still believe and drone on about the great possibilities of Marxism. I don't recall seeing the word "Marxism" appearing in any NDP literature or in any candidate speeches in the last election. Why, I do believe this is, if not a lie, then a gross exaggeration. One of my favorite right-wing boilerplates. Unfortunately, neoconservative economic policies have bombed everytime. Reganomics was a dud, Thatcherism caused far more woes than it solved, the Common Sense Revolution fizzled. Of course, in these instances, the right never applies the virtue of "personal responsibility" that hey drone on about: their policy failures are always someone else's fault. "Free" markets can tangentially assist the common good through increase in economic prosperity. But it can also harm the common good through short-sightedness and rampant greed. The only true purpose of the market is to exchange goods and services and maximize profits. Because the market demanded it. It was also the State that ended slavery (here anyway: the market for slaves elsewhereis still thriving). Um...in case you haven't noticed, wealth in western countries is confined to a small group: the "10 per centers". The vast majority are at the whim of the market place and certainly have little or no impact on it. For instance: -approximately 50% of RRSPs are held by the top 20% of income earners. -A good 20% plus of Canadians have no net worth whatsoever -50% of Canadians are still not in the stock market, directly or indirectly. An informative look at Canadian income distribution

I always find the antipathy towards the civil service to be more the product of conservative anti "big" government rhetoric, which ends up creating a popular perception that government is bloated, its workers overpaid leeches flushing our tax dollars away. Of course the idea of a bloated civil service and a spendthrift government is not borne out in the real world. Here we can see that federal government spends just 11.6% of GDP in direct spending (which is all spending minus debt interest payments). You have to go a helluva long way back to find such a misery number. As for the civil service, between 1993 and 1997 alone, the Canadian federal government axed thirty-five thousand people from the rolls. The total civil service employment as of about 1999/2000 is 275,000 people, serving a country of over 30 millions. That's 0.92% of the Canadian population. To compare, in the 1960s, the civil service was 199,000 strong, serving 18 million. That's 1.1% of the Canadian population. Now, who thinks government is more efficient today versus government 30 years ago?

Canada has unique strategic position in that the only realistic threat could only come from the United States. Nuclear weapons would be little detrrent The responsible approach is for goivernments to minimize proliferation to prevent nukes from falling into the wrong hands. The more countries possess nuclear weapons, the greater the probability of them being used. We need fewer nukes, not more, and Canada should play a role in calling fro global nuclear disarmament. Heading into the other direction would be total folly.

What's your point, and what does it have to do with the expolitation of the American public's fear of terrorism for political gain? I would posit that stating that Al Q'Aeda favours a Democrat or that "if George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election" is, in fact, a far lower form of politicking than the Liberal attack ads. You might want to actually read the article above. It has plenty of examples of how the .O.P political machine has cynically exploited thememory of 9-11 and the threat of future terror attacks to bolster their image. Again:

Huh. Well, colour me educated. No, it's syrup is better than jelly.

The politics of fear.

We'll see! And DAC, fool's gold isn't a crystal. It's a mineral: iron pyrite.