HisSelf

It was not pronounced illegal because the judgment was rendered immediately after the case was presented to the UN. The case may very well have been perjured. Another case is warranted.

I agree. The Tories have tried to make too much hay on something that happened in Quebec. Quebec is a BQ/PQ/Lib fight. Harper is a protest vote, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was second to the Greens in that category...

How so? Because you need oil? What exactly is your legitimate stake? And what exactly is the threat that radical Islam presents? TVO's (who would've thunk) Steve Paikin has featured a guy who managed to interview some 50 Talibans in Afghanistan and their biggest issues were: you killed my poppies and source of livelihood, you killed my family, and oh yeah, that Mohammed thing... So let's say we had a foreign invader who bombed the auto, mining and forestry inducstries and then crucified a religious figure and said it was all his fault....

Only because you do not respect the framework that makes war illegal and the forum in which that framework is adjudicated. Louise Arbour. My heroine. Quelle ... Well just quelle! You go girl.

Check out the evidence. Even Fox is reporting it.... http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,341428,00.html The disintegration of the Wilkins ice shelf...

This whole thing is turning into a disaster for the Conservatives. Even the business channel is wondering if Flaherty has lost his marbles. They're actually making McGuinty look good. Why? Because the first thing Ontarians are thinking about when the see Flhaerty mouthing off is what he and his buddies did to Ontario when they were in power. It wasn't pretty. And now it's happening again at the Federal level. Keep your eye on the national debt. "Captain. She can't take any more!" "Never mind that Scottie, just put your pedal to the metal!" Beam me up. Please.

Duh. OK. Let's talk issues. The Tibetans have a number of issues on which they diverge from their Chinese rulers, and they no say on those issues. Mining of the Sacred Mountain. Constant (hours a week) manadatory indoctrination lectures - imagine the public response here were we all to suddenly be forced to attend a 3 hour lecture every week about the Conservative Party (All other parties having been outlawed). Sinofication of Tibet by the import of Chinese national immigrants in huge numbers. Exile of the Dalai Lama and large number of Tibetans. You have to be amused at the latest developments though. The Chinese invited a busfull of foreign correspondents to Tibet to see for themselves that Tibet had been returned to "harmony". They toured various sites and at a temple, a sudden demonstration of Buddhist monks broke out. The monks were kicked and beaten in front of the foreign journalists. It's all on CNN as I write. The Chinese might have gotten away with this had they restricted their invitations to "favoured" journalists - say the Singapore Straits Times, Le Kinshasa Potentiel, the Nova Srpska Politicka Misao, but they actually had the balls to invite the Wall Street Journal! Good heavens. Even Wall Street is afraid of the Wall Street Journal! Put this in the d'Oh! column, guys. And now it's featured front page all over the world. You gotta love it.

Denying the Holocaust can be brought before the courts because those who are offended by such can claim it as an act of hate. That is Canadian law. Personally I think that it is a good law because it forces such issues into the courts. Whether or not I agree with it is immaterial. The importat thing is to bring these issues before the courts. Legislation is imperfect. Our best defences against it are currently the courts and the the press. Both are imperfect too, but it is better than being subjected to the political machine on its own. This, such as it is, is how our 'constitution' is presently defined. It isn't perfect, but it is a bloody lot better than totalitarianism.

What? Have you never heard of PETA?

In other words, wake up and smell the roses, Bubba. China and the Arabs own your ass and George Bush is the guy who sold it to them. As Murrow once said, 'Good night and good luck.'

Well at least at last we know what killed Bill.

The equation of poutine with feces is compelling on a physiological level but I think that the risk of eating the occasional poutine is nowhere near the risk of eating the occasional morsel of shit, no matter how much piss you manage to sprinkle it with. But good luck with that line of thought. No doubt if you advertise it enough, you'll be able to sell it to sometbody.

Thousand of years of observation? Are you joking? Observation by whom? A single guy who went up the mount and came down shaking his jowels? A guy who said his wife turned into a pillar of salt? The monkey god? Kali? The Sun God? Jim Jones? Sentience existed when we were single celled? Well sure if you call simple chemical response sentience. Take a block of pure sodium and drop it into pure water, is that sentience?

You discount minorities and you call yourself charter.rights. Hmmm...

If you think protesting is not a human right, then clearly you've never been married and had children. Protest is fundamental to the human condition. It is probably one of the most basic reasons that our species developed speech. Even chimpanzees are capable of expressing protest.

What is legitimate speech? Canadian legislation does not define a hate offense in absolute terms, but in terms of the perception of the offended party. I'm sure you are a very good person, but this is the sort of defense that the white supremcists have been trying to raise for some time.

It's beside the pojnt raised by the OP but I'm not sure I have a lot of sympathy for Levant. Muslims find this sort of thing objectionable and they have a right to prosecute their case just as Levant (a Jew) would have a right to prosecute a case against somebody who might deny the Holocaust. Levant is a publisher. He must have known what he was getting into.

You have scientists who constantly work to build evidence based on repeatable and verifiable observation and who are perfectly willing to change their theories in light of new evidence. And you have religion based on ancient unverifiable reports of things that often happened when there were no witnesses, which are unverifiable and unrepeatable, and which rely heavily on faith generated by the words of other members of a species with a somewhat naughty reputation for telling whoppers. Tough call.

Charter.rights, I get a kick out of that Buckley quote. Funny how nobody ever seems to want to face us down at election time.

When was the last time you got to vote for God?

I'm curious why you seem to have an axe to grind against the Tibetans.

The argument that Stieglitz et al are making is that the number depends on how you work the accounting system. What you say might be true if you accept the acconting system of the guys who are supposed to be accountable - the government. This is not always the best way to arrive at the truth and it is an old Wall Street issue. There are my accountant's numbers and then there are your accountant's numbers... I'd say, given the history of the Bush administration, a good audit would be in order. I sure as hell wouldn't by a used car from the guy. Would you?

I thought the US was the world's champion of Human Rights. As a Canadian citizen, I am very happy that the government took its time on this issue. It tells me that there was consultation. I like that.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I was referring to August1991, who uses the byline "Voltaire's Offspring". I'm certainly not calling you a liar. If there are CIA agents in Tibet, it will be a long time before any of us hears what they might have to say. The Globe and Mail reporter Geoffrey York, an old China hand, is reporting from Delhi and says that pictures of Tibetans with bullet holes in them are showing up with great regularity while even the Chinese are not claiming that the Tibetan protestors are using guns. Guess who is doing the shooting? Yes Bush did control the press during his invasion of Iraq. He completely controlled the media message around the entire Iraq invasion and the press let him get away with it. Most famously, CBS reporter Dan Rather said publicly that when it came to a choice between being a reporter and being an American, he was an American first. Dan forgot what makes an American, I suppose. If you were to take a poll of the present American sentiment towards this, I doubt you would find much support. There has to be an independent source of information that can either confirm or provide counterpoint to whatever the government might be saying. Not only in Tibet but everywhere. The press isn't perfect but I believe that we need to hear what they have to say and that anybody who tries to exclude them should be viewed with great suspicion. Well maybe but I don't see a lot of shooting. No argument there. The behaviour of CNN, CBS, etc. during the Iraq invasion are a case in point. The Hearst newspaper chain was founded on this kind of yellow journalism and produced its own shre of wars (Teddy Roosevelt etc..). When PBS tried to get more objective, there funding was attacked. Attitudes towards China in the west are better than they have been for many decades. I don't think there is a ground-swell in the west to block the Oolympics. Most people are generally up for a good Olympics games, but I have no doubt Tibet will have some effect. However, the Tibetans mis-timed it. They should have started when Olympics tickets first started to go on sale.

It is interesting to look at how the Iraq war has been funded - by selling debt to foreign interests, most particularly to China, and the Middle East. Tibet watchers take note. This is in fact the first time that the US has funded a war in this manner since it borrowed from the French to pay for the revolution (yes folks, enjoy those Freedom Fries). The result has been a progressive devaluation of the US dollar. Imagine the extraordinary amount of debt it would take to devalue the US dollar as much as it has. Not to say that this has an altogether bad outcome for the US. It certainly makes US producers more competitive in the world marketplace - as long as the world marketplace doesn't fall flat on its butt, of course. The upside of this of course is that when you have creditors as powerful as these, nobody is going to let your currency fail completely, and in fact nobody is going to be very happy to see it fall. A lot of US debt has been sold to fund this war, and the result has been a restructuring of the world's economy. The sub-prime market meltdown is indeed a dangerous development because it places a huge strain on confidence in debt, and debt is the oil that has greased the US economy for a long, long time. If the world banking community hads not acted, the odds are very good that a severe recession and perhaps a depression would have been close at hand. Coming as it does in the environment of massive international debt over the Iraq war, it would probably have completely broken the world economy, so I'd say depression would be more likely than recession.