WIP

Are you descending to the level of sharkman's idea of debate? Maybe I should join Rabble, because I don't see anything as objectionable as some of the posts on this forum. yeah, and so is George Bush! Oh for Christs sake! You may be the only one who believed Bush's "extremists have hijacked a great religion" speech. The neocons and the theocons didn't believe it, but at least George II was able to fool someone. How do you propose 'unhijacking' Islam then? If you believe that foreign, non-Muslims can step in and fix their religion for them? In light of recent history, reformers or attempted reformers in the Muslim World are easy to paint as collaborators with the U.S. If there is a pervasive sense of cultural inferiority with the West driving Muslim animosity of Western culture, the best advice is still to back off and end the wars and get the military bases and carrier fleets out of there....let BP pay for their own convoys, they've still got plenty of money. The problem with looking at Islam and Muslim World problems with your Neoconservative ideology, is that you are expecting them to act in America's and the West's interests. They may have interests of their own which do not include keeping us supplied with cheap oil. Are their criticisms of Western culture and global capitalism totally without merit? Maybe they are if you have a vested interest in the way the present system is running; but there are growing numbers of us here who are looking at the increasing income gaps, growing poverty, loss of manufacturing jobs, glorification of rampant, unbridled consumption, and wondering if we really have the best system, or whether we could do better. I think some of their criticisms of Western Civilization are on target, whether or not they are advanced with the best of intentions is another matter. And how typical is the Khadr family as an example of Canadian Muslims? The exception does not prove the rule. The Ba'athist parties in the Arab World were socialist republicans, who dreamed of coalescing as one Arab state. They were not Islamists, and if you check your history, Sayid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and ideological father of movements like Al Qaeda, was executed in Egypt by Nasser.

Has it ever occurred to you that Islamofascism could be fueled by Islamophobia? Any Muslim who takes a look at who is fighting Islamofascism is going to conclude that they will not accept them unless they abandon their religion entirely. And has it ever occurred to you that Islam is not a monolithic religion? But, many times the voices for reform have stated that U.S. foreign policy, Israel's ethnic cleansing policies in Jerusalem and occupied territories, make it more difficult to advance reform. As long as extremist enemies are shouting on the other side, anyone on their side calling for reform can be labelled as a sellout or a collaborator with their enemies. It should be an easy concept to grasp, that turning down the heat is necessary before moderates in the Muslim communities can have their voices heard, but I don't think the loudest voices screaming about Islamofascism want peaceful solutions anyway. There are too many Neoconservatives who believe in foreign domination, and too many Christian Nationalists who want to push their own extremist religious agendas on us. In Canada and the U.S. we have more to fear from the growing militancy of the Christian Right, than we do from the competing religion.

If he can play for Limbaugh, he would have been willing to do the same for his WWII equivalent -- Joseph Goebbels back then. It's his decision who he takes money from, but if he can take a million from someone who disparages all of his social causes, it tells me that they may be not much more than vanity projects. There are some entertainers who have been willing to walk the talk, and those are the ones I have any respect for. Take Sean Penn for example, in spite of the fact that he generally acts like an asshole, he has been toiling away with his group down in Haiti, trying to get rubble and debris cleared away, and new homes and permanent shelters built before a hurricane blows through the Island. For his troubles, he has been pretty much ignored by the MSM, except that they noticed recently that he was still working there on the six month anniversary of the Earthquake! Needless to say that he is not able to make movies or do other stuff to make money while he is down there. Most celebs just want to show up for charity photo-ops and concerts, and once the cameras are gone, so are they. Could be that Rush's new bride wanted Elton, so he felt obliged to spend a week's salary on the entertainment at the wedding. It also could be that Rush is a fan...and it could also be true that this is just another sham wedding, and that those rumours of Rush being among the pantheon of secretly gay conservatives is true! He has never commented about the public indecency charge he got many years ago when he was still an unknown DJ, or the reasons for his little jaunts to the Dominican Republic with a supply of viagra pills.

It's not a simple question, it's a stupid question! You want to know how an issue that affects the entire planet has affected our lives! It affects your life as well, you either don't care, or you are too blinded by ideology to take an honest look at the world we are living in today.

Like I said, we have slightly better numbers on issues like income gap than the U.S. has, but we are headed in the same direction. All of those things you mentioned above were put there because of the horrible situations that demanded reform decades ago. Now, conservatives with collective amnesia want to take us back to the days of the soup kitchens and hobos riding boxcars! Waste on any of those programs hardly concerns me as much as waste on tax incentives for oil exploration and military spending on jet fighters that are of no value patrolling our long coastlines, and only seem to be useful in our continuing role as assistant to the U.S. war machine. If you want to know why minimum wage laws can't stop the general decline in wages, take a look at Free Trade, and how free trade strategies that started almost 30 years ago were pushed on us under the claim that it would increase overall prosperity. What free trade has done is exactly what most of us feared it would do 30 years ago -- it has led to a hollowing out of manufacturing in Canada and the United States because so much manufacturing can be done by people working for less than a dollar an hour. Free trade was supposed to raise Third World living standards up to acceptable levels (especially Mexico's), but those nations that get rewarded with transplanted manufacturing invariably have anti-union and other labour-busting governments that want to keep factory workers toiling away for peanuts. The only country where it looks like this system may break is China. There has been reports of growing unrest over the last couple of years, but even in a best case scenario of Chinese workers successfully gaining higher wages, there will be a stream of multinationals moving out and setting up shop in the next country with no wage laws, or health and safety laws. Free trade and globalization have made multinational corporations more powerful than political governments.

It's too bad Eisenhower didn't mention his unease about the growth of the Military Industrial Complex before he was on his way out the door at the Whitehouse, because the growth continued under successive Republican and Democratic administrations. All of the conservatives running around today yammering on about the Constitution seem to ignore the fact that the Framers did not want the new nation to have a standing army. They seen the examples of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Prussia, and how devotion to military created the need for more wars, to fight for more colonial expansion, to keep feeding large armies and navies. The U.S. is energy intensive because they plotted a course of depending on cheap oil from the Middle East....and a major part of keeping that oil flowing from the ME, means spending vast sums of money on foreign bases and carrier fleets. If they had any sense, they would have off-loaded those costs onto the oil companies, who are the only major beneficiaries of this policy. The modern gunboat diplomacy, along with the economic leverage of the World Band and IMF, is colonialism short of the actual colonial political regime. Dependence on oil, especially the political dependence on funding from oil companies, is the major stumbling block to ending oil addiction today. If we had any sense, we would be making the shift now, instead of digging up the dirtiest sources in Alberta, and the most ecologically dangerous sources deep under the oceans. And they can afford to pay more! There have been several psychological studies done over the last 40 years or so, which demonstrate that happiness derived from economic improvement stops at a certain point in modern, first world nations. We have enough money for the essentials, but still feel pressured to buy more. Most of the pressure is subtle and unrecognizable. I never felt like I had enough money when I lived in a new subdivision, because there were neighbours with a three-car garage instead of mine that only accommodated two cars....and everyone else had better cars, and better home furnishings. When I decided to sell out and move to an older northend neighbourhood, I realized that I was not gaining anything that would make me happier by trying to keep up with the Jones's, yet that same dynamic of trying to achieve the lifestyle of those immediately above us on the economic ladder, is what fuels consumption for the sake of consumption. Billionaires don't feel like they have enough either, because the guy with more billions has a bigger yacht, or a mansion with more bedrooms. At one time, religion was the cultural force that acted as a brake on unbridled greed and materialism; but nowadays religion may often be another factor fueling the demand for more crap -- non-denominational churches that teach the prosperity gospel for example. So, if nothing else acts as a brake on increasing the gaps in income and living standards, then the tax man has to step in and do it for us. The results of extreme income stratification are bad for society as a whole, since it decreases social cohesion and the general sense of community in all levels of economic income. When everybody is just in it for themselves, we don't have libertarian paradise....we get pretty much what we're getting now: decaying cities, extreme poverty, and lack of interest in voting and participating in the democratic process.

New poll question: Under what circumstances does this board need two threads obsessed with banning burqas? In Europe, where this is the hot story, the reporting sidesteps issues of racism that have always been pervasive in European thinking. Most European nations no longer have any idea what it means to be English, German, French or Spanish; but rather than let the old nationalisms fade away, they are trying to redefine them. Politically correct forces that try to claim that foreigners, especially foreigners with different religions, can take part in their nationalism aren't fooling anyone, except themselves perhaps! A recent poll of 12 EU countries, shows majorities in all in favour of banning burqas in schools and other places, yet between 50 and 80% insist that crucifixes, and other Christian religious symbols be allowed. There's no way to square that circle without admitting favouring one religion over another. Over here, we are more affected by the growing Islamophobia, which is wafting over our borders from U.S. rightwing squawkers. The paranoia on the right is worse than it was during the months after 9/11. I suspect that economic uncertainty and lack of confidence in "regime change" is part of it.

The U.S. is in a decline that they are not going to spin their way out of this time. The big reasons are an energy-intensive economy that's largely dependent on foreign oil, and an out of control military industrial complex that, along with the two foreign wars they spawned, consumes so much of federal tax dollars, that Social Security and Medicare are going broke. But let's not forget that there is a major distribution of wealth problem that is destroying the middle class -- 22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America Some of the highlights: 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one. As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets. The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth. More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying. This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.....how do you like free trade now? Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years. Despite the 2008 financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose 16% to 7.8 million in 2009. The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of national income. Too bad the same thing is happening here in Canada. We just have a little catching up to do before our middle class has also disappeared. I think this was the conservative strategy all along! Conservatives are defenders of aristocracy, who have viewed the middle class as a source of social instability since the time of Edmund Burke.

And what happened at Copenhagen Jerry? They couldn't even get the major offenders to bring emission targets to meet a 2% increase in CO2....a level that will still lead to continuing catastrophic climate change. What happened to cap and trade? In case you haven't heard, the U.S. Senate pulled it off the table because Harry Reid says he doesn't have the votes to pass it. And up here, does anyone know what happened to Harper's cap and trade program that he campaigned on in the last election? It seems to have got lost somewhere under all those favours he has to do for his oil executive friends. Not that I care about cap and trade anyway! The only plan that works is to shift the tax burden to carbon...but after what happened to Stephan Dion, no politician will have the guts to take that up again, even as we find our borders swamped with millions of Americans, Mexicans and other refugees from the tropics over the next 20 to 40 years. And, you forgot to mention one of the big losers with cap and trade's demise -- Wall Street...Goldman Sachs in particular, had been in the process of setting up derivatives and hedge funds based on the trade of carbon credits. And now we know that big oil is even more powerful than Wall Street That's an idiotic statement to make in a year where 7 of the world's 10 biggest corporations are oil companies; and Exxon/Mobil announced a 46 billion dollar profit for last year. "warm-mongering" is pocket change in comparison to that! Go on Sourcewatch and have a look at how oil and coal companies are buying the kind of science they want. The so called climate change skeptics get their money from oil and coal front organiations, as do the conservative "think tanks." They fund the building of research facilities in many universities as another way to buy influence, and of course they also buy off politicians....that's why an idiot like U.S. Congressman Joe Barton would get up to the podium and apologize to BP because the government demanded they put 20 billion in an escrow account to cover some of the damages of the disaster they caused through their own criminal negligence. Unless you have a source to prove that, I'm going to assume you got this from a story out last year that Al Gore had positioned himself to capitalize bigtime on the carbon trade market once a cap and trade bill was passed....and where is that cap and trade bill again?

If your taxes don't support green energy strategies, I don't want my taxes to go to support your dirty oil industry any longer! What other industry gets to claim depreciation allowances on something they didn't make? Something that comes out of the ground, produced over long stretches of time by decayed organic material. The oil industry gets to treat that damn oil pocket like its a piece of factory machinery that will have to be replaced every 20 years! And we, the taxpayers, collectively subsidize their exploration and development....but for some reason, giving tax incentives to other competing energy sources is cheating! Canada was giving away almost 1.5 billion in tax breaks to the oil companies four years ago -- I wonder what the latest numbers are, if they're available! It's not hard to figure out who's running this country!

Okay, so maybe I'm not a big Elton John fan! I liked his early work before he really sold out about 75 or 76; but what I really found offensive about the story of him doing the Rush gig for a million -- is that he has made a name for himself being an activist in the fight against AIDS and for gay rights -- both issues that Rush trashes on a regular basis. If an issue is really that important, why sell out to your ideological doppelganger when you're already a multimillionaire?

Elton John is a whore! He took a million dollars to play at Rush Limbaugh's umpteenth wedding, so there's nothing he wouldn't do for money!

If anyone can make billions creating alternatives to fossil fuels, more power to them!

Seriously! You're going to compare whatever donations the WWF got from the EU (something I'll have to take your word on) and the bags of money the oil companies have to buy influence far and wide. Like I said before, if you're carrying water for Big Oil free of charge, you're a fool...there's big money to be made doing their bidding. And I wasn't talking just about AGW either; take the BP situation in the Gulf for example: no BP executives have been charged for criminal malfeasance, and as far as we know, none of them are being investigated by the feds. The U.S. Senate is so heavily in the tank of Big Oil, that they can't even pass the most modest cap and trade bill...not that it would do much good! Cap and Trade would be a bureaucratic mess and taxing carbon should have been the option if corporate lobbyists didn't have their hand at the wheel of government. There have been Republican hacks embarrassing themselves on camera by bemoaning the unfair treatment of this poor megacorporation. They have destroyed the ecology of one third of the Gulf of Mexico, and yet hard right media and politicians try to shift the blame for the disaster on to the federal government! The feds are at fault for being in Big Oil's hip pocket...aside from that this is a disaster created by an industry that has engineered government and tax policy to benefit themselves, and try to hamper the introduction of all alternatives to coal, oil and gas. Cap and Trade is a rival corporate scam that is enthusiastically endorsed by the big banks, including the major player in investment banking -- Goldman Sachs; and yet, this modest, do-nothing strategy to reduce carbon emissions has been effectively neutered by the oil industry, because it would take a modest portion away from their profit margins. All we learn from this is that the oil industry is even more powerful, and owns more politicians than the banks -- and that is a scary thought to have to digest! A real solution to reducing carbon emissions was tried during the last federal election cycle, when the Libs borrowed or stole the Carbon Tax from the Green Party. Shifting taxation from income and other sales, to taxing carbon, works on a very simple, fundamental premise that fiscal conservatives are supposed to understand: you get less of what you tax, and more of what you subsidize. So why not tax the industry that befouls the air that we all have to breathe? Because the industry that wants to use the environment as its free waste dump wants to continue making environmental costs a burden on the public, and not on themselves.

Except that there is no other way to bust up nepotism and entrenched cliques in both government and large private corporations. A few years ago my company was faced with its own hiring scandal when the Human Resources manager sent out a private email from her office computer in which she bragged that no "pakis" had been hired since she took charge of HR five years previously. There were complaints from South Asians and other minorities that something reeked in our company's hiring practice, but there was no tangible evidence of foul play. Everyone who had been turned down for a job was given a reason that could be cited from policy guidelines. And of course someone became suspicious, which was why her communications were being monitored. That example of how easy it is for management to discriminate while leaving no trail of evidence, showed me that claims that targeted hirings and quotas etc. are not necessary in our modern post-racial age, are a fraud. Harper is latching on to the reverse discrimination meme because he is trying to appeal to us older white voters with the same subtle race-baiting themes that are now an active part of America's Republican Party politics. If they can keep us focused on kicking down minorities and others we consider outsiders; they can continue rewarding their corporate donors and robbing us all blind with an agenda that only benefits the rich and powerful. Are you conservatives giving us a stark choice between corporate fascism and marxism? If so, sign me up for a hammer and sickle flag! All the faux outrage over "big government" is a diversion from the real story that our politicians are bought and payed for by large corporations (oil companies in particular). We're supposed to jump and run every time some corporate lackey uses communism to fend off criticism. This ruse is starting to wear thin among those of us who are wising up to being divided by race and other tactics.

It's disgusting the way you and your nazi friend try to keep this phony issue going. This whole fraud from Breitbart was spawned, metastasized, and died while I was away, and yet you guys are pretending that there is a story here...besides the obvious one that Andrew Breitbart posted his 2nd fraudulent video which he should be sued off the internet for. Now, if you do find an actual example of black racism, there still is no equivalency since institutional racism has moved in one direction discriminating against blacks and other minorities. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had earlier this year agreed to a class action lawsuit to pay more than a billion dollars to 70000 black farmers who were victimized by the Ag Dept. and other federal and state agencies that tried to force black farmers off their land (which Congress has refused to appropriate); and yet you think we should be focusing our attention on whether Shirley Sherrod discriminated against white farmers....who testified on their behalf on CNN in case you missed it. Also, Shirley Sherrod's father was murdered by klansmen who were known in the community and never brought to justice for their crime; and that was the focus of her speech at the NAACP about her own battle to overcome racial prejudice. And the NAACP is not guilty of racism; they are guilty of caving in as soon as charge of reverse racism was thrown at them. How stupid is Benjamin Jealous, when, if he was not actually listening to her speech, certainly had access to the full video, if he cared to check the tape. If there is a silver lining in this sordid story, it will come if the Obama Administration, the mainstream media, and liberal leaders grow a backbone and refuse to cave in to rightwing race-baiting in the future!

Harper's main agenda besides trying to entrench himself in the PMO, is to do whatever is in the interests of the big oil companies. They didn't like the Kyoto Treaty....not a problem! It's as good as dead since digging up those foul tar sands and cooking them for oil is the primary cause of Canada's growing carbon footprint. And full speed ahead on our offshore drilling rigs in the North Atlantic and up in the Arctic, where a spill will create a much bigger disaster than in warm waters like the Gulf of Mexico.....oh well, it's all part of doing what's best for Big Oil -- which is the evil Harper agenda that we should be worried about.

Cato and the conservative "think" tanks are getting the bulk of their funding from oil and coal companies. They spread money for propaganda far and wide, even funding a number of high traffic right wing bloggers to write pro-oil propaganda. But at least they have a motive! Anyone who is working on Exxon, BP, Chevron or Shell's behalf for free is a fool!

Yet another stupid example of attacking any attempts to challenge the suicidal course that the mega-oil companies have put the world in. One year after Exxon/Mobil sets another record profit of 45 billion, and we're supposed to take their side against movements that want to find ways of curing the oil addiction. The drug dealers have lots of money to buy hacks like Steve Milloy to write propaganda against any and all perceived enemies of oil addiction.

I would say that twice as many record highs as record lows is significant of a larger trend. I believe that any issue that is highly technical places it at a level where the layman has to consult with the consensus of expert opinion in an attempt to understand what is going on -- and not with the oddball heretic scientist who says he knows more than all of his colleagues on the other side. To me, this is similar to the evolution/creation debates, in that there have been a number of creationist mathematicians, such as William Dembske, who can produce complex information theories to prove intelligent design -- which are more designed to muddle up the debate with arguments around math and statistics....much as what's going on here with Tim G, and Shady, who can access statistical data designed to baffle everyone who doesn't understand statistics, but cannot explain why CO2 levels are rising ever faster; how rising CO2 can have no effect on climate or why they think increasing ocean acidification is a problem; why the entire world has undergone the warmest first six months of any year in recorded history; why polar ice and land-based glaciers are shrinking; why tropical glaciers are disappearing...the last one in Indonesia is about to disappear entirely in the next few years....I could go on if I had some notes in front of me; the point is that there is a convergence of evidence from all sides that indicate climate change and global warming. The critics pick apart at specific aspects of data they think are weak, and try to sow confusion, just as the critics of evolution could pick at specific aspects of fossil evidence, but had no over-arching creation theory to explain the fossil, DNA, and morphological evidence in favour of evolution. The strategy of the oil-funded global warming skeptics is a mirror image of the evolution critics: they offer no alternative theories to explain the evidence, and make an assortment of contradictory arguments....some like Bjorn Lomborg, are even arguing against action, rather than against evidence for climate change.

Like I said, even if we take those numbers at face value, the world population will double within 50 years. Since there are so many young people in the developing world just entering their reproductive years, and at a time when reactionary conservative religious forces have weakened birth control programs in many poor, overpopulated countries, will double the pressure on available land, water and other natural resources. I have tried to get the point across elsewhere that the Earth isn't growing larger to accommodate our desires for population and economic growth. The only question remaining is whether the human race finds a way to gradually reduce its impact on the environment, or whether the limits get hid hard, and are followed by a crash that has occurred to isolated populations that overconsumed available resources -- such as the natives of Easter Island. There are people trying to find a way, since the alternative of continual growth, is a disaster in waiting on a finite planet: Prosperity without growth? report pdf.

No, it isn't! Especially not when there is definite trend line heading in one direction. Here's another reason why you should worry more about record highs than record lows: US Record High Temperatures Double Record Lows Over Past Decade And as for the reporting of these stories -- what about all of the conservative media mouthpieces like FauxNews and Drudge, that were asking the question: "is global warming a myth?" every time there was a big snowstorm somewhere, last winter. Fox's "journalists" don't seem to want to go into much detail on the record high temperatures that are occurring all over the world. So far, this year has been the warmest on record: World simmers in hottest year so far even hotter than 1998, when the skeptics were saying it was because the Sun was at the peak of an active sunspot cycle....btw, how come we don't hear about the Sun causing global warming anymore? Perhaps because we should be heading into a mini ice age since the Sun has settled into a prolonged state of dormancy with little sunspot activity. It should be snowing now according to the believers in the solar cycle theory.

What didn't work most of all, was that they were never able to get control of atmospheric levels. Oxygen levels dropped dangerously low and had to be boosted so that the bionauts would survive, and carbon dioxide rose to dangerous levels before the closed experiments were scrapped. Sure, they had other problems with the crew, but they were never able to adequately explain why it was so much harder to maintain a stable atmosphere than originally envisioned. This was originally believed to be one of the easy problems...just add some plants and water, with a little sunlight, and voila! But it didn't quite work out that way. And this fundamental ignorance for how a biosphere functions is the most infuriating aspect of careless advocates of unbridled growth and plundering of resources on our biosphere.

What you don't get from just looking at some numbers on wiki page is context. Consider the fact that the present growth rates will double the world population in the next 50 years: The median projection of population size by the U.N. Population Division envisions that population growth rates will decline over the coming several decades. But even if that median projection is achieved, the number of people expected to be added to the world’s population in the next 50 years will be almost as large as the number added in the last 50 years. http://www.populationmedia.org/issues/ The other problem is population demographics. Most of the world does not have an aging population; in fact there almost half of world population (3 billion) are under 25. They are in, or will soon be in their prime reproductive years. And the fight against abortion and birth control carried out by the forces of conservatism, have caused a rebound in population growth rates in many developing nations. Nevertheless, the problem with becoming complacent of a decline in growth rates over the long term, as noted in the wiki article, is that they are still growing! It's like a reduction in the increase in deficits still increase the size of the debt. And all of this is coming at a time when many ecologists and biologists believe that world population levels are already unsustainable. It is not really possible to unlink population size from economic growth, since developed nations with smaller populations, are using many times more resources than poor nations. The U.S. alone uses over a quarter of the planet's natural resources, while many developing nations such as China, India and Brazil are rapidly increasing their plundering of the earth and leaving ever larger carbon footprints. The most under-reported issue going on right now in global politics is the largely behind the scenes struggle between the U.S., European Union, China, and India to secure sources of oil and precious metals such as lithium, that are needed for economic growth to be sustained. If the human race is to survive for more than the next 50 years, we need to return to the kind of economies we had before the last 150 years, when annual, year over year growth became a necessity.

I noticed that you didn't directly address the examples of minorities having their voting rights infringed on some examples were provided to you previously. Is your concern only for white voters? The fake outrage over this story was about a black president and his black attorney general denying the rights of white voters. Now white nationalists are just trying to spin whatever they can out of it to keep their phony outrage alive, until they find another excuse.