charter.rights

"The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to bad end." Max Beerbohm

Nothing wrong with my grammar. Maybe you should get your gaelic out of your ear.

It isn't just the wild one needs to depend upon. There is much more available - much of it might be unappetizing but sustenance anyway - which people can eat. Anyway the majority of people who live in major cities would die first - either from gun battles and knife fights over the last McDonald's french fries in the garbage, or by starvation. Yet I would give most no more than 30 days if food were the only problem. However, most without water would be delirious after the second day and likely dead by the fifth. Greed would leave only a few wanders left. There is more than enough food to feed the remaining people, and agriculture can be started up and producing food within a month. What would fail would be the transportation networks, so only those with the skills, the tools, the seed and the know-how would be able to succeed. Life isn't about a computer simulation. It is real and potentially fatal.

Not true. I don't even look down on you and you are an amateur. Rather you add buffoonery entertainment value to you otherwise dull personality.

I've taken a dozen or so people from the city to the country and asked them what they would eat if they had to leave their homes. THE BEST answer out of any of them was "~grass~". If they do make it out of the city in a pandemic, I hope their deaths are short and painless...although starvation rarely is either.

Hmmm.... it sounded more to me like a 55 year old Conservative....

"Be Prepared" Boy Scout motto.

No doubt before you are dead you will have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on " just in case" insurance that you will never need, hoping that it will save you from a disaster that is just waiting around the corner. Yet, your main insurance you will never collect. The fear industry is a consumer product as well. Taking down a major power station near where you live, and having a river take out one of the major transportation networks is all that is needed to realize you don't have much time to live. Tell me Kimmy. Do you have enough water, food and winter heat to provide for you in the event that the power should go out for a week? And if you leave your house unheated (as many abandoned their homes during the ice storm of 1998, your house - its contents and structure will be unfit for human occupation.

Shut off the internet, or shut down the power. How many millions of people would starve to death because they don't know what a shovel is for? A PC is a tool that uses people everyday. People have careers and livelihoods locked into "the system" and would die without them. At least I have a trade, and survival skills, and farming skills, and hunting skills. Try to take "Deer Hunter Three" or "Guitar Hero" and eat your rewards!

Two things: Todays society has become an "anything goes" culture where pop culture and materialism starting in the 1960's continue to replace real culture... That might have been true in the 90's. However, now pop culture is being replaced by corporate culture and the traditional family is replaced by the corporate family to a degree that it is even more important than spouses and children. Those who are responsible are mocked by the irresponsible modern generation and are casually dismissed as "old fashioned" and told to "get with the new times". Baby boomers are anything but responsible people. They were the "me" generation and in turn created the "instant gratification" generation. Their irresponsibility left their spouses and children on their own while they themselves took anything they wanted or needed without consideration of the consequences. No doubt they inherited their selfishness from absent fathers and working mothers. However, none of them were responsible enough to stop and think long enough to see the harm they were doing in the long run.

Ah but you don't get it, do you....? The point of the $30 mil prize means that the winner will spend foolishly (I remember reading that winners usually spend their gain in about 7 years) and spread that money around, thereby reinforcing the consumerism frenzy. In turn those consumed funds spur others on to consume and improve the economy. And then it all goes back to government in taxes. That's the goal. Not for someone to win $millions and hoard it under some mattress. If all the winners just buried the money, or sunk it into the black market the government would quickly put an end to lotteries.

Yes I see that is important to you and many others. NO doubt you will take advantage of this: Walmart to open 24 hours This ultra modern PC that I am on is a tool, just like my table saw and my shovel. I use it. It doesn't use me, nor does the advertising or the corporate jingle capture me into slavery. We are regressing into a state that in 20 or 30 years may very well be like the late Soviet Union. You think you have free choice, but in reality, you are programmed from birth to obey the masters, buy their goods and live a life prescribed by your employer. Our society no longer lives to love and enjoy life. We are programmed to live to work. Do you have a Blackberry or a cell phone that your employer gave you?

It isn't irrelevent according to Christ. James 2 24 Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. If their works is idle then so is their faith. THAT represents the Catholic Church. And while the issue of penance was supposed to be in retribution for one's sins, it merely set up a cycle whereby Catholics would confess their sins, and receive absolution, only to go out and sin again, confess etc. If a Church condemns homosexuality, yet fills the Church every Sunday with gay an lesbian people, it defines the church as a homosexual church. It is not only by one's faith that they are judged by by their works.

That the biggest crock of bogus crap I have heard yet! WalMart Profit Per Minute WalMart pays $8.23 per hour. There is nothing fair market about a McJob wage. It is dictated by the company and in cases like big manufacturing, jobs will be exported if workers don't toe the line.

World poverty has NOT decrease. Only the median wage has increased, which is not a true measure of poverty. AND the richest country in the world - the US - is increasing in poverty by the hour. Take the example of a farmer, who finds a 5% increase in the goods he sells, only top find the cost of seed, fuel and fertilizer has increase 8-10%. The government is quick to point out his improved wage but fails to identify where it all goes, while the farmer slips further into bankruptcy. There is no increase available anywhere. There is just a redistribution of the lower income class.

So are people who work at WalMart and McDonalds as full time employees. We're all part of the problem. Rampant consumerism and wasteful consumption doesn't improve our lives or the lives of the poor. It merely maintains the status quo to the benefit of the rich owners and investors of the corporation. Oil has gone from $25 a barrel to over $100 in less than 10 years. Who do you think is getting rich from that? And gas prices are rising again, predicted to be $1.50 or higher per liter by summer. Are the gas station attendants getting raises? Are the processing plant employees benefiting? No. They get what they have always gotten, even less as companies try to find cheaper exported employment, and cheaper extraction from poorer countries. When profits are realized in a company they cannot be created or destroyed. The money comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. When manufacturing, and employees don't realize increases, then that money must come from the bottom of the pile - the poor consumer - who becomes poorer. As the price of goods and materials increases it costs us more and middle income earners become low income earners, while the rich take it off the top and distribute it to their investors. There is a whole lot of usury going on in the market place and people are taking money out of the system without really earning it or deserving it. We're part of the problem. Your RRSPs you pensions, even your oil and gas companies that fuel your cars and homes are dependent on the take from the poor pay the rich investment scheme. They artificially raise the price of stocks by forcing price increases or by making products smaller and less reliable, or they export the manufacturing jobs out of country. Unless we stop the madness, we contribute to the dwindling employment and increased poverty and eventually IT MUST come to an end. It can't be sustained because eventually we run out of source at the bottom too fast to make up the glut at the top of the heap. It is our thinking that is the problem. We believe the corporate lingo and jingle. If we just work a little harder, and little faster, or get the latest time-saving products we can "get ahead" (notice the whole point of our existence is to get a head) There is no American Pie. There is only an American Dream that 33% of Americans have finally realized is nothing more than hopeless, boring nightmare where they are the slaves, chained by their dependence on cheap goods and leaving their kids the legacy of lies and disillusionment.

Those paychecks are consumed by imported goods, thereby keeping the miners in a poor state. Sheesh what a narrow line.

For years the Catholic Church taught that penance was all that was needed when one sinned. It got to the point where there was such a cycle of sin and penance that the Church finally gave up. Yes, the Crucifixion was the violence that Christianity was born from. As well, the Crucifixion is celebrated each year and ritualized. Christian is a violent and spiritually corrupt system of religious dogma, designed to oppress and condemn those that don't agree with the backward and simplistic views of the Church and its followers. Your skepticism is not important.

There you go again. Trying to minimize the issue with weak comparisons. Let's do look at the mining industry for example. African mining of diamonds is often performed by people stuck in low waged jobs and unbearable health and safety conditions. There are often criminal elements as well involved in profiting from them. By the time that the diamond reaches a black American market someone has jumped the actual cost from a few dollars to hundreds if not thousands.

I think you have to do better than that. Trying to dismiss consumerism by comparing access to beef tenderloin is pretty weak. Try to us the same argument with say, African diamonds (or Canadian diamonds where deBeers just happen to find a mine in Kasetchewan First Nation territory, while their drinking water system was in crisis). Then you can tackle mid-eastern oil, China's vast clothing market (the west being one of the major importers) and even East Indian call centres and electronics. The point is that behind all of these world peoples marginalization are big corporation profits searching for cheaper goods and services at any cost. We often forget too that in the west there are examples of poverty - in the US that means nearly 33% are at or near the poverty level - while jobs are being exported to poorer countries and cheap goods are imported here displace "home-spun" as Ghandi used to like to say. The fact is that your beef is and greedy need to keep it on the tables of the rich, is not untouched by those cheap goods either. And if you track that meat from farm to supermarket, the farmers get very little of the final slice it is purchased for. Making third world countries like us complete with infrastructure and a farmed beef down the road isn't the goal of those corporations. Keeping the people in a low income caste system is desirable to mass western profits. Consumerism is just about wanting the newest and the best and discarding perfectly adequate working models anyway. This comes about from mass conditioning and advertisers being able to convince the masses that their lives will be better, or faster, or smarter if we only buy their products. We have gone way beyond need in the west and are quickly turning consumption into a greed market. We're not to blame totally for poverty in the world. However, because of our uncontrolled consumerism we are not only maintaining it , but increasing it. We have removed self-sufficiency - as meager and sufficient as it once was - and replaced it with dependence on foreign goods and products. Now instead of being able to sew a shirt for ourselves we must depend on cheap China mass production (often populated in unbearable conditions) to supply our WalMart low waged employees. Controlling consumerism is a personal thing. We have to take responsibility for our own mania and wasteful consumption of disposable goods. How long did it take for us to wake up to the knowledge that plastic grocery bags and excess plastic packaging are not only a waste, but their production is totally unnecessary. We have nearly wiped out (or sold) our timber industry to big oil by being sucked into buying everything from plastic sticked q-tips to disposable plastic wraps to poorly recycled bubble wrap packaging that goes straight into landfill. We're doing the same thing to farmers with mega-hog production, imported fruits and vegetables at a fraction of the cost, plastic building products and 7 year lifespan cars and trucks that cost 5 times as much to repair as to buy new. And as profits become the main focus of big corporation, they ignore both environmental and human poverty in order to satisfy it. It cannot be sustained without someone taking a hit for it. As long as we refuse to hold a conscience over our wasteful and rampant consumerism, we remain a major part of the problem. That isn't beef tenderloin. That beans that would feed the world and can be grown in their own back yards.

Rampant and uncontrolled consumerism, unregulated resource and mineral extraction and marginalized wages - all created and maintained to keep our standard of living....

Forgiveness is the mainstay theory of the New Testament. Christians are taught that forgiveness for sins is a must - that WE are to forgive. Yet for years the Church taught that penance freed us from those sins, so we could go back and sin again, and again. The first violent act of Christianity was the Crucifixion, yes. And many more violent acts follow Christianity right through history into the 21st century. I wasn't raised Christian, and am not a Christian. I did however at various times attend different churches of various denominations in order to gain a perspective of what each was offering. In the end I recognized the hypocrisy and often perversion of the Bible. I can see how people can need the church - even some stuck there for their whole lives. However, for me the Church was but a stepping stone to spiritual freedom, and communion with the Christ. I've met many people like Kengs333 (and maybe even met him personally) and would note that they while they spew the Bible verse by verse they really have no clue what the real meaning is. These are spiritually corrupt people, and perhaps many of them were psychopaths.

Ah, but it raised the question: How can such an evil person be raised in a Christian household UNLESS evil, violence and abhorrent behavior are components of Christianity? Remember that Christianity contains and forgives sinners and its beginning started in a God-approved violent act.

Actually he was born and brought up a Christian. And the conflict that caused him to kill was between his gay preferences and his strict upbringing. Jeffrey Dahmer is the son of a Born Again Fundamentalist (Church of Christ) father. From the article. Christianity cause him to kill and cannibalize his victims.

I understand the Christ very well....and I also understand where your dependence on dogma comes from....Since you can't experience Christ, you must invent a version of it to satisfy your false sense of superiority. And the point of indigenous cannibalism are nothing but stories - even from the anthropologists who have guessed at the meaning of Mayan hieroglyphics. As far as Iroquois there was only one cannibal story, and again it was mostly metaphoric.