ScottSA

No, no, it can't be! It's spiralling into civil war! It's Vietnam! It must be a bank holiday! The US is beaten, remember? This can't be happening!

How ethnocentric of you. Most serial killers in North America and possibly Europe are white males, to be sure, but I suspect that most serial killers in Africa or India or China are not. Perhaps, if you wrack your brain hard enough, the reason most serial killers in predominantly caucasian countries are white, the answer will come to you. Mind you, I may be overly optimistic...

That's not what the article says at all. You're claiming the numbers are actually dropping.

I don't know who your brother is, but I suspect he's wrong. Especially since you prefaced it with "the USA is in trouble like it has never seen before..." No it's not. It's in a bind, but a temporary one. Any ex-CEO of a bank knows very well that both China an the EU, and anyone else that sold off great quantities of USD would completely destroy their own economies. That leaves one, and only one option: prop it back up by buying while there's a fire sale. China simply doesn't have the capacity to outride a collapse or even a significant decline in the USD, so all they're doing is making noise so the US takes inflationary pressure more seriously than the sub-prime crisis. The USD certainly isn't going to continue declining very much more than 1.10, if it even gets that far. All things being equal and remaining the same, that is...

Right. There were more moderate Nazis than extremists. In fact, most Nazis didn't have anything to do with killing people. By your criteria, then, National Socialism is a fine ideology. PS: The Koran and the New Testament are at opposing ends of the spectrum.

Perhaps you've stumbled on a solution! We could open a slave market in Madison Square. Of course selling the females would be problematic, given the bagged aspect; sort of like selling a pig in a poke, so to speak. And it would open up whole new industries, what with chain makers and slave feed manufacturers, although I suppose it would depress the price of porkbellies, since feeding pork to Muslims has resulting in a few unfortunate incidents, as the British will attest to. And we could install a rating system, similar to the early roman law requiring anyone selling a slave to attach warnings on the slave's propensity to bolt. Things like "Prone to explode 3 weeks into Ramadan," "Easily provoked by cartoons," "May lick face, but generally harmless..."

Then I'm not a smart investor, because I moved a lot of CND into USD between 1.05 and 1.09, and I'm keeping much of my USD pay in USD. 1.10 is in all probability the ceiling before it recedes and settles at .90 again. This is a temporary state of affairs, even though the hopeful left will be yowling that this is, again, the "inevitable crisis of capitalism," yada yada.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand this sophistry. I suppose, if a great majority, or even most, pedophiles swung back and forth from boys to girls indiscriminantly, then one might make a case that the sex of the victim is irrelevant, and it is the age of the child that is the overriding factor. The trouble is that most, if not all pedophiles seem to go after the same sex of victim. This fact, it seems to me, makes it quite clear that while age is a factor of attraction, so is the sex. Given that, the statistical relationship between homosexual pedophilia and heterosexual pedophilia is relevant, leading to the very uncomfortable fact that 33% -+ of pedophiles are homosexual. That is a huge elephant in the living room, and one that cannot simply be brushed under the rug.

There is much more wrong with a kneejerk defence of Islam. Do you know anything about it? Have you taken the time to read the historical life of Mohammed, or the actual Koran? Because if you had, you'd know that Islam, whether or not it is a "twisted" religion, is a damned vicious, intolerant, violent, and wholly unsavory religion from any civilized standpoint. It began with the psychotic musings of a spoiled pretty boy, evolved into a militant sect, whereupon the founder practiced rape, murder, highway robbery, and pedophilia, whilst claiming his actions were sanctioned by God. Before he was finished his proto acid trip, he managed to slaughter 2 tribes of Jews, enslave a third, sack Medina, and bring a large area in the middle east under the heel of tyranny...setting the stage for several centuries of terror and rapine throughout the east, and several jaunts into Europe, just stopped in the nick of time. But you don't know any of this, do you? The extent of your knowledge is Cair's ramblings about it all being a misinterpretation, and Islam really being a religion of peace. You can call me "bigoted," but bigoted or not, that's the truth.

Well, we can all claim it's prejudicial and so on, but in fact Cair and the Imams some months ago did exactly the same thing. It's a common tactic among social activists...continue pushing the envelope and then retreating to a safe position and hurl abuse from behind it. Homosexual activists do it all the time; put forward some ridiculous demand and then claim that all they ever wanted was to be like everyone else. Feminists, when feminism was still a viable interest group, used to do it all the time...demand special laws or tax breaks or status for women, and when called on it, simply retreat, look innocent, and ask why men don't want to allow them equality. The Imams went on a plane, acted intimidating, got kicked off, and Cair immediately spent gobs of Saudi money launching lawsuits hither and yon in an effort to break the public's ability to practise vigilance. Retreating, of course, to the argument that the Imams were innocent victims of whitey abuse. You see, one thing that few seem to realize is that it's not just the terrorists who are against the west, but so called "moderates" themselves. Anyone who has taken the time to wander through CIC or Cair, or Cair-Can or check out the websites of various madrassas here in the west, can see for themselves that these folks are out to change the way we govern ourselves. The useful fool brigade always jumps on the bandwagon in defence of them, which is why they have such success using the tactics. I don't believe very many of the useful fool brigade has taken the time to look at the situation in any real depth, preferring instead to adopt a kneejerk defence of the poor down trodden "moderates," who are, pound for pound, much more dangerous to our way of life than the terrorists.

Hear hear.

The US is in a bit of a bind at the moment. The subprime crisis (along with associated class action suits) is hitting the banks' sharevalues, and the only way to mitigate the subprime crisis is for the Fed to lower interest rates, which in turn devalues the USD. That in itself has a spiral effect, as we're seeing with Chinese threats, further devaluing the dollar. The spiral effect is worsened at the same time by inflationary pressure (mostly energy). Yet the US can't start raising interest rates again or it'll wreck the banks; maybe even some of the major banks, and it can't do that or we'll revisit 1929, and not long after that, 1933. If small banks and mortgage institutions fall, as many already have, it's no big deal, but if the majors start tumbling, they'll drag down every valuation in sight across all sectors, making 2001-02 look tame. The DOW will drop to 8000, and the smaller indexes will crash around our ears. The US export economy won't benefit that much, really, because it has long since shed its manufacturing sectors and turned to service. The effect on the Canadian dollar is just a mirror effect, and there's not really much Harper can do about it, short of dropping interest rates and running into the same problems as the US. He'll eventually have to do that, just to keep from wrecking the Canadian manufacturing and exported goods sector, but hopefully he can manage to bring on an election before that happens. Given, he doesn't directly have the subprime crisis to worry about, but he certainly has the aftershocks to deal with, and they'll be substantial. If the US gets hit with a major terrorist attack right now...

Stick to mumbling about the virtues of being stoned all day dude. You're completely incoherent on this subject...do you imagine that Harper somehow had some impact on the sub-prime loan crisis, the monetary crisis, and the markets? Do you even know the difference between those three? What does "infrastructure" have to do with anything? I'm willing to bet you don't have a clue...not a clue.

Y'know, I always heard that someone ought to be smart, and not dumb, if they want to mock other folks. No names mentioned, of course, but it's just that dumb people are soooo tedious when they try to be smart, don't you agree? Now of course a dumb person would see that last question as an opening, and gleefully rush in with the baton "yeah, you're dumb!" held proudly aloft, and imagine that they scored a point... But anyway, Jerry is actually right. Japan and germany are what they are today precisely because they were destroyed and then rebuilt. Not just defeated, but utterly destroyed. Had they not been, had the sovs not raped Berlin, and had both the sovs and allies not slaughtered a good part of the Wehrmacht and all of the SS out of hand, and bombed both Germany and Japan into a state of civil collapse, they would not be where they are today. In all likelyhood they would be troublesome world powers. Had the US been as ruthless in Iraq as it was in WW II, there simply wouldn't have ben a problem. The reason seems to be that societies are malleable if they are severely traumatized, but not so malleable if they're not. That seems to be true throughout history, perhaps first with the Alexandrian campaigns, but the Carthaginian wars are probably the starkest example in ancient history. It may not be a pleasant fact, but it's a fact nonetheless.

I'm not a lawyer, and all I know well is intl law; a very different animal than domestic law. However, it seems to me that your question is framed in Sophistry. One would, according to your question's premise, have to define "rule of law" as any relevant body of domestic law that existed prior to the legislation, effectively rendering anything passed afterwards that negates the original, as "outside" the rule of law. In actual fact, one would introduce legislation to bypass the law, but not "rule of law", per se. In any event, the legislation was introduced to counter a clear and present danger and, given 911, a danger which simply can't wait to be dealt with by staid due process. Since the legislation overrides the law, it seems to me that a judge has no more business reviewing a case under the legislation than does a plumber. As I said, I'm not a lawyer, so no doubt you can squirm in true lawyerly fashion and befuddle me with Latin polysyllabisms, but am I not right? If not, why not?

What do you plan to do? Increase their allowances? Give mom and dad more beer money? Because quite frankly the "poverty level" is whatever someone wants to claim it is. As far back as 1993, the NDP poverty metric had anyone living on less than $35,000 a year under their chosen poverty level. Real poverty is a lack of shelter...not of a "home," but of shelter; and a lack of food. No one in Canada lacks those things if they take advantage of the state's benevolence. Runaways may live on the street, but it's by choice. Mental patients may live on the streets, but again it's by choice. No one has to lack the basics of survival in Canada. If they do, they do by choice.

Of course it is. It's a political BB. Did you miss that? It's not hard to see how a narrow minded and starry eyed leftist might become so boggled in theory that they allow themselves to dismiss praxis, which is, after all, the only practical manifestation of Marx's beard droolings. I remember a leftist professor (yes, leftist...maybe I'll explain that one to you some day too...) once, many years ago, bemoaning the fact that the holocaust had given such a bad name to national socialism, because after all NS was the perfect Platonic model of society. In any event, ideological communism is not, not was it ever meant to be "the extreme of humanitarian behaviour." It was meant to be, if one considers marx to be the father of it, to be rather a vicious revolution ending in a collectivist utopia in which the individual is subsumed by the collective. Hence the importation of the Hegelian dialectic and all that stuff that you've probably never heard of. This is of course the height of irony, but I doubt you see it. You can't tolerate intolerance, eh? Especially when it's an intolerance that disagrees with your intolerance. Do you know anything about Islam at all, or do you just buy into the standard "religion of peace" bumper sticker academics? This is of course the standard lowbrow leftist mantra, that those folks who holler "Allahu Akbar" just prior to detonating are fundamentalists, but the multitudes of Muslims who cheer them on and sanctify them as the Islamic version of saints, are "moderates." How silly. Really, where do these people come from? Why is it that leftists somehow imagine that they are more clever than other folks, simply by virtue of their astounding ability to stick their heads firmly in the sand and refuse to budge them?

Bk, I've been meaning to ask you...how much are they paying you anyway? I've had my application for paid government poster in for some time now, but they keep telling me there are no positions available right now. I heard rumours that it's because the queen and her black rood is giving all the posts to her chosen annointed, and whenever a new opening arrives, the corrupt posters grab it and pretend to be two people so they can collect two paychecks. Any truth to those rumours? Anyway, is it like a tenured position? Or do you have like an internship or something?

I'm sure you were as vocally opposed to the Liberal line of 'scary scary' over the past 15 years.

I would far rather a "bigot" be making decisions than a thoroughly cowed and emasculated moron indoctrinated in feminist and multicult theory. You seem to have forgotten that universities are supposed to be teaching the liberal exchange of ideas, not orthodoxies of the left.

And what a waste of time that exercize would be!

I take it you didn't notice that this thread was about not being allowed to call people bigots?

I'm not a cop, so I don't know one way or another, but I understand it used to be localized, and from the perspective of boots on the ground, it is far better to do it that way. One example is this: two towns in my friends detachment are 3 miles apart, as the crow flies. Unfortunately there's a lake and a ferry in between them, so while he can attend at one town within 15 minutes, it takes as much as 45 minutes to go to the other town. Leaving aside the ridiculous visual of a cruiser with its lights and siren blasting away on a ferry travelling at the sedate speed of whatever speed a ferry cruises along at, central dispatch can't seem to understand why one takes a tad longer than the other, or why the "disturbance" is usually resolved, with all parties sleeping, long before he gets there.

We spent the weekend at an RCMP officer's house (he's in charge of a similar small detachment), and I learned more than I need to about the problems they're having. All or most of the recent RCMP deaths occur in small back woods detachments...not where it's violent, but where almost nothing ever happens...until it happens. Apparently the communication system is shitty as hell and centralized in Ottawa, where they have no concept of the distances involved, the relative degree of danger from town to town, and where alerts and callins are often forgotten in favor of so-called "danger zones" in more urban areas. Single officer callouts to domestics, for example, are against policy, so the dispatchers have apparently taken to calling them "disturbances" when manpower is short so only one cop ends up going. Plus, when shift change comes, there's a real problem tagging info off to the new shift, so officers are left out in the cold with no checkin. Apparently just the other night in the small detachment my friend is in charge of, one of the young cops was in a fight for ten minutes with no call in...and ten minutes is a very long time when a cop is alone and fighting someone willing to fight a cop. Another annoying habit he told me about is dispatching police to the perp's place and leaving the impression that the callout is to the victim's location...which of course is embarrassing at the least and damned dangerous at worst.

That's quite good.