ScottSA

I'm usually a contrarian, but this is a no brainer. I'm moving significant money into USD interest bearing accounts, and leaning into metals quite a bit heavier, especially those like Harmony Gold, which are in a slump for reasons unrelated to the price of gold. Yes, as a disclaimer...I do have HMY stock lol...

Buffy's been reading the protocals again...

Neither. Not enough "u"s.

Not to be picky, but I think it would read better as "morally bankrupt," for a couple picky reasons involving attribution and tense.

Excellent post.

I think it's safe to say he could have got up and walked to a shelter, probably within a couple of blocks. I think it's safe to say that they'd feed him and shower him and send him out dressed warmly. If the police venture by, they will likely force him to take shelter if the temperatures are cold. In India no such conditions apply. I think it's safe to say the man in India was a death sentence poorer than the man in Toronto.

That is absolutely correct. In fact it's if anything an understatement.

Normally, I'd rather have people direct their own finances. The trouble of course is that far too many people will access their pensions, blow it in a year or two, and then look askance at the government (read taxpayer) to bail out the rest of their lives. If one would be willing to sign away Canadian government services to a degree equal to the previous amortized LIF payments, I'd be more than in favor of relaxing the rules and putting them in the same category as a RIF

Very simple. Take them off the street, thereby eliminating the social cost they are causing, including property and personal damage, and throw then in the tank, where the cost of incarceration is quantified. Cold turkey works just as well as anything else I can think of, considering that the recidivism rate is in the 70 - 90 percentile no matter what method is used. If they do it again after they get let out, throw them in again. I don't know for a fact, but I strongly suspect that most drug addicts are not in jail just because they got caught with a syringe in their arm.

Well, it don't think most religions have an explicit position on man being alone in the universe, although I suppose I could be wrong. Simply because Christianity, for example, claims we are made in the image of God, doesn't imply that we are the only image He made. But your assumptions are unproven. The same arguments can be used against your supposition that other life exists as against the existence of God. One of our lesser thinkers calls God a "sky-pixie" - a description that might as easily describe the 'life-out-there' thesis. I happen to agree with you on the probability that life exists elswhere, but can no more provide proof of my belief than I can of God. The probability arguiment works both ways too, and to my mind makes a better case for God than for alien life. I'm not sure what you mean by "an accident with reason." You seem to be at once presupposing and denying God with that statement. I think the root of this issue is attribution. I don't think "religion," per se, claims what you're attributing to it. Certainly Buddhists could happily be in accord with both our beliefs.

Partly because we encourage them to do so, but mostly because there are a critical mass of them, which allows them to do so.

I don't think you quite get what this discussion is about.

Perhaps you should take this up with the Sun, rather than the Conservatives, no? This sort of scapegoating is only going to get worse, you know. The failure to adopt common sense approaches to immigration and to immigrant absorption guarantees it.

The "education" as panacea mantra is one so ingrained that it has become a truism. Almost all revolutionary leaders are "educated," and most of the leaders of barbaric countries are educated [insert snide response from the self-hating left here]. In fact, I'd say there are so many holes and exception to the rule that education has very little effect at all as an equalizer. And then there's the thorny question of what is meant by "education." It used to mean, once upon a time in the west, a "classical" education, where one learned the threads of social evolution of the west, and celebrated its accomplishments in the rise to the highest socio-political-economic state yet achieved by humans. It then graduated to mean a 'liberal' education, in which the free play of ideas sought after truth, in the Grecian philosophical tradition. The 60s turned things completely on their head, substituting student driven rebellion and 'rights' for knowledge. What was once a celebration of western accomplishment became a mournful dirge for the past sins of the west, Greek and Roman classics were thrown out in favor of "Black Studies", as if tribal barbarism had more to teach us than the High Empire or the Greek city states. Somewhere along the line, out of the wreckage of the 60s, crawled the present notion of what "education" means: pure Platonic indoctrination. When a feminist or homosexual activist uses the term 'education' today, as in "more education is required to change opinions," the very last thing they want is a free play of ideas. What they want is the orthodoxies of their respective belief systems enforced and planted firmly in the minds of everyone. It's sad to see the results of such an educational system...people, many of them here, pandering to slogans and meaningless heuristic devices and imagining it to be higher thought. The almost complete rejection of critical thinking in favor of wishful thinking, the dismissal of stoic self-denial in favor of what "feels good," and the abandonment of discrimination in favor of moral equivalency. Hell, some of the recent visitors to this board don't even have basic writing skills, like periods and sentence capitalization, and can't even make themselves understood even if they did have something cogent to say. We have, I'm afraid, much to learn from the decline of Rome...even its art catalogued its slow decline, as does ours.

No, that's not all you said. You went on to solidify it with this statement: "Fearing for your life under nazi occupation must've been a terrible thing, I imagine he just did what he had to do to survive." You took a crap accusation and tried your best to give it substance. Only after you were called on it did you reveal the source, and then you backpedalled furiously from it. You did none of that in your original post.

WTF are you talking about? Are you suggesting the riots are not happening? And lets see if you can point to some "anti-gay," "anti-secular" and "creationist" stuff from that site. C'mon, let's see it.

Nothing and nothing at all. In that order. My understanding of the spiritual realm is that it exists quite apart from us, but not quite so apart that science and philosophy (two fields that are also not mutually exclusive) don't catch a glimpse of them from time to time, in the rather more esoteric and fog enshrouded corners of subfields of physics and alternate states. My understanding of religions, excluding 7th century barbaric religions, is that they are imperfect attempts to explain those elements of very real phenomena whose evidence lies deep in our racial subconsciousness (and no, for the rabid lefties, that's not a "racist" statement, it's a Jungian statement...look it up). But I believe in God, so strongly that I'd bet my life on it, which of course someday I will, and I think correctly, recognize that religions are not TRVTH, but rather imperfect attempts to fathom and describe God and ethereal existence. Just as science is an often imperfect attempt to discover rules and laws that govern our physical existence. Instead of gazing at the stars and imagining that it somehow negates God, gaze at the stars and ask yourself if all of that is just an accident without reason. That would be true craziness.

It's "well said?" It says nothing. It's a lot of polysyllabic hogswallop that boils down to: "Indians live in poverty." They live in poverty because they won't get jobs and their "chiefs" steal all the money that whitey pays them to help them live in the stoneage with all the comforts of home. They live in poverty in spite of the fact that more cash per capita, by several orders of magnitude, is fed into the maw of IA to try to solve the "socio-economic problems and failures" than to any other social segment of Canadians. The solution lies with Indians, not with the rest of us. And the irony is that Rue wouldn't accept this nonsense for a moment if it was directed at the condition of the Palestinians.

Alberta's best asset is the spirit of its people. I have never been in a province with a more get-up-and-go attitude. Almost like the states, without the Mexicans.

In Saudi Arabia they have fashion police who go around whipping women who aren't bagged. I suggest that here we ought to have fashion police with hemline torches...anyone with a bag on their bodies gets the torch treatment on the bottom of their hemlines. Might be a tad Pavlovian, but I bet we won't see many bagged women after one or two hem torchings...

Yes, the Taliban had that. AW should try wearing a miniskirt in Medina. Hell, try wearing anything other than a sack in Medina and you'll have stones bouncing off your skull before you can shout "a women's place is in the harem!"

I think, Higgles, that you owe it to yourself to do quite a bit of reading, and perhaps even take a trip or two, before setting out to pontificate of international relations.

You've never been to a Muslim country, have you? You wouldn't be saying that if you had

Better add a Vietnam dialectic too, what with all the palefaces running around that neck of the woods not too long ago. Course if we go back a few years past that, we can talk about paleface troops in downtown Peking as well.