WIP

I was never in Alberta long enough to get a feel for the politics there years ago. In recent years, the opposition Wild Rose Party just came across as an even more extreme in-the- oil tank political collective than the PC's. It didn't look like there were any alternatives to the oil economy until now.

Welcome aboard, and I'd say we have to act fast because we have a government in Ottawa right now that wants to shift Canadian politics more and more to the pay-to-play system they have in the US.

Inflation and cost of living estimates are dubious over this length of time. The inflation numbers don't even include cost of food and gasoline because of the excuse that these numbers fluctuate too much....but it's not like people in the lower margins haven't noticed that they have less money left over to buy those $10.00 walmart shirts after they've paid for food and rent! I've mentioned before that when I left school and worked minimum wage jobs, I could afford an apartment and groceries and spending money. The only thing that was out of reach was having a car, and that was largely because of the high cost of car insurance for my age group. A lot of bullshit games can be played with numbers, but what can't be ignored is the basic theme from Thomas Picketty's book last year, that wealth increases faster for those who already have money and the system today is more and more geared to favour earning money through having money, than those earning money through their work....no matter what field or profession they are in! The game is rigged, and it's rigged by the assholes with the money to buy politicians and direct them to write the tax laws so they can hide their money from tax collectors by means unavailable to a wage earner with a social insurance number.

That would be my point! The studies on income and wealth inequality all show that widening the gaps increases the sense of materialism and consumption levels of all groups in the income hierarchy, while making them less satisfied and continually striving for more. All of which is bad for any environment issues.

This is going way off topic already, but yes I am aware that our single issue mass media focuses too much on climate change and not enough on the other less known aspects of human society that impact the natural world. It's totally disingenuous to toss off a comment about 99% of animals that have lived on Earth already have gone extinct, without noting that: a. there is a background rate of extinction that occurs naturally over long periods of time. and b. there are periods of major extinction and at least five of mass extinction caused by extraordinary events....most of them related to planetary tectonic activity. Up till we came along, the worse extinction: Permian-Triassic boundary event of about 250 million years ago, occurred in three distinct 'pulses' of extinction over 1000 to 10,000 years, and a number of paleontologists specializing in studying that extinction declare that it may have come close to destroying all non-microbial life on Earth....so don't try to pass off the naturally caused extinctions as just part of some earth process or grand design! It took more than 10 million years into the Triassic Era before diversity of life began to recover again from that extinction. It's not like a forest fire and everything just comes back next year! Up till the last century, most animals became extinct because we hunted them and infected them with diseases we carried that jumped species. In the last century, the huge increase in our populations and resource requirements has taken a large chunk out of the primary biological production that the rest of nature depends on....so there is less to go around for all of the other animals besides being less land to do it with. But in this century, climate change, combined with the increasing share of primary biological production we are taking, is causing the dramatic rates in biodiversity loss, increase in species put on the endangered list, and numbers disappearing and presumed extinct in recent decades. And the only connection it has with who does/who doesn't vote NDP, is that anti-NDP are uniformly tone deaf to science and common sense, while the NDP supporter is more likely to take heed...even if they don't give environment issues a high enough priority on their list!

That affair made me a complete cynic about politics in this Country! Dion did what everybody says they want from their politicians.....stand by their principles and decide policy on evidence....and he was rewarded in kind by the smear campaign from the Oil Party, stabbed in the back by the NDP...which latched on to the weak ineffectual cap™ scheme tossed up by Harper, and of course - stabbed in the back by his own Party as they began setting the table for the next Liberal leadership convention even before the Election was over! And they got their messiah...the Harvard professor who could hardly find Canada on a map...but wouldn't be stupid enough to mention something ahead of the political curve like a carbon tax.....and now they have their new messiah....I hope this one's better than the last one!

No, the Earth HAD a way of balancing itself out, as carbon sequestration from plant growth (on land and in the oceans) and rock-weathering absorbing CO2 from falling rain, was able to absorb the extra carbon that less than one billion humans were adding to the atmosphere through burning wood, charcoal, slash and burn agriculture, wars etc., and by the late 1880's...once we were well into the Industrial Revolution in England and the United States...that was it! And CO2 levels have been rising ever since. And what's even more notable and always ignored: methane...an unstable carbon molecule in an oxygenated atmosphere is also growing and at much faster rates....more than 2.5 times the amount of methane that was in the atmosphere back then. I guess once you're driving over a cliff, there's a large contingent of people who aren't going to turn back even if that's possible! And, we already know which political party in Canada they call home!

"Need" is the operative word here, because China was trying to make a mirror copy of western consumer capitalism and finally woke up to the realization that they do not have the ecological resources to allow the kind of high energy use that many of us have become accustomed to and take for granted. Our time will come too, but for China....when you risk death just breathing the air in major cities, that gets the message across real fast that coal-fired power stations, dirty manufacturing for export, and millions of cars on the roads etc. are making their growing cities unlivable really fast! I deleted the graph because it's pie-in-the-sky as Chinese Government officials started realizing that their Country will collapse in ecological disaster if they followed through on those crazy plans of building thousands of coal-fired generating stations etc.. One advantage that the Chinese Communist Government has over our politics is that although they made a full-on embrace of capitalism when the theories and strategies of Deng Tsiao Peng began to dominate, the Party leadership still has a high number of scientists and engineers in their governing assembly. So, by this year it seems they've woken up and smelled the coffee, and are trying to do an about-face on coal and identify the most damaging aspects causing air pollution and environmental degradation: China to cut coal consumption - Mining Australia *and this happened prior to the Chinese stock market collapse and expected declines in real economic growth, that will weigh even more heavily on the demand for coal than directives from government administrators to change plans during better times.

I started out as a leftwing idealist in my teens, mostly moved politics aside in my busy middle years when apparent good times (less wars, improving economies) made standard liberal/conservative mainstream thinking look on track....and then along came the new century, and it seems like the facade that had papered over a lot of festering unsolved problems started floating back to the surface again. I've discovered few people actually re-evaluate long-held core beliefs and double down on them demanding more of the same. I can give you reasons why I'm a radical eco-socialist today. It doesn't matter to me whether people I know (let alone online) agree with me or understand, I can make a case that goes beyond 'socialism is bad, global warming is false, capitalism is good' and other similar slogans!

With a little correcting on spelling and grammer, that statement could make the perfect epitaph on our collective tombstone in the not-too-distant future. Off topic and totally false oil industry funded propaganda! The real story on history of life on Earth has been that...as the Sun has slowly increased energy output over time, Earth's atmosphere has been decreasing the concentration of greenhouse gases through carbon sequestration. Photosynthesizing plants creating oxygen and putting carbon into the soil caused some dramatic cooling events that caused many ice ages over 500 million years ago. As the Sun increased in intensity, so did carbon sequestration. The exceptions where CO2 rose during periods of high volcanism were also the times of mass extinctions of life! In recent Earth history, CO2 levels haven't exceeded 400 ppm for between 2.5 and 16 million years...depending on who's rock analysis you want to accept....still a pretty damn long time! More recently, during the Pleistocene Era, Earth has spent the bulk of it's time in ice ages separated by short interglacial periods averaging about 10,000 years where CO2 would go as high as 300 ppm. And this last interglacial was the perfect time for us to discover agriculture and burning forests.....and Earth has been working overtime just to keep CO2 under that 300 ppm cap.....and then we came up with the Industrial Revolution! And for more than a century carbon sequestration hasn't been able to keep up with us, and we've climbed above 300 and steadily rose to 400 and we're still raising CO2 levels at ever increasing annual rates, which is an indicator that we have busted the cycle this time and CO2 will keep on rising or we'll go extinct! Because it will take decades for partial effects of what we're doing to show their impacts, and many centuries before the full results of anthropegenic climate change land on this world. Most of the heat is still trapped in deep ocean layers that will slowly warm the upper ocean layers and atmosphere and acidify the oceans. So, thanks oil industry fans! We may already be past the point of no return and not be able to do a damn thing about the crisis, and yet we have the right wing suicide squads who want to kill off life on Earth a little faster. Why stop now!

The revival of an old thread presenting you as a socialist, featured you making extremist statements that went far beyond what any liberal or anyone further left here would have said. And your posts were just declarative statements providing no reasons or supporting evidence for your beliefs at the time. If you hadn't thought out your socialist positions at the time, is there anything showing that you have thought through a switch to rightwing conservatism now?

Can't say "always" because as a young NDP member in the late 70's I recall attending a non-election season event where Ed Broadbent was the keynote speaker. Ed advocated something similar to a Keynsian New Deal solution to get Canada out of its economic recession at the time, by increasing public spending on a full employment strategy. The deficit (which was already growing under Trudeau) would take care of itself as increased employment and economic growth would eliminate the deficit in coming years. So, if the NDP is the land of the deficit hawks, this must be a fairly recent development. Was Jack Layton arguing for balanced budgets.....I wasn't paying close attention at the time. Looks like there was a little spin on that pitch! Mulcair agreed "in principle" to the debate, and it shouldn't matter whether or not Harper would be there anyway. As Elizabeth May said:'the organizers could have left an empty chair for Harper and that would have spoke volumes about the Prime Minister's attitude on women's issues.' But Mulcair & advisers just made a cold political calculation that they didn't need the debate as much as Justin Trudeau or Elizabeth May.

Are the fixers in the Democratic Party going to let Bernie win, now that he's getting close in the polls (7 points down in Iowa)? Or is that why Biden is warming up in the bullpen?

Or, I really don't care, and am just happy to see the Oil Party tossed out of office after nearly 50 years running Alberta!

Facts are what they are! How much richer? From the American experience, this chart...based on Congressional Budget Office data, shows the highest 20% doing well, but that 1% is the group that really got richer over a 32 year period. If they narrowed the focus down to the richest .1%, the results would be even more dramatic: So, who was talking about communism? The debate was comparing flat vs. progressive taxation.

Don't try to pawn this off as some sort of force of nature or a series of events with no causal link. Like I was saying before, the west was warned by a number of sources that climate change and fights for scarcer resources would lead to refugee migrations on unprecedented scales and...here we are! Over five years ago, a Pentagon report mentioned in this Guardian article presented near future climate change as a catalyst for wars, conflicts, famines and refugee migrations. The uprising in Syria was largely a result of an extended drought that has ruined agriculture in Syria and caused many farmers to migrate into cities several years prior. In the here and now, the Obama Administration acted as the instigator for regime change, and should assume a substantial share of the refugee burden facing Europe, along with the liabilities of likely thousands already who have died in transit by sea and by truck....as we were presented yesterday with a horrifying story of dozens of dead bodies of refugees just dumped by the side of the road by smugglers. The present crisis is in large part coming from Syrian, Libyan and Libyan immigrants trying to flee to Europe. The rest are from that other brilliant idea: regime change in Iraq. But most of the present refugee crisis has Obama Administration fingerprints on it, but I don't hear a word of criticism coming from Republicans for some reason! Read Gwynne Dyer's book "Climate Wars" from 2008. What he was told by his sources within the Bush Administration is confirmed already: Could you give an example of one western leader who was a supporter of Robert Mugabe? I recall hearing about the civil war on a regular basis on CBC Radio shows like As It Happens, which featured regular reports throughout the conflict and transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. Nobody wanted Robert Mugabe in the west....maybe the Soviet Union did, but they didn't invest a lot into him either. You have to include the context to show how Mugabe came to power. That great white farmer you mention...which I presume was Ian Smith...a man who created a separate white-ruled nation when Zambia became independent, and resisted majority rule right through to the bitter end....a bloody, protracted civil war...was the reason the war chief of the largest tribal group in the territory (Mugabe) ended up as absolute leader. Under Smith, blacks were not allowed to vote in elections, nor was it possible for them to own land in most of the country. So, the only option was working for white farmers and adding to their wealth. How long did you think that situation would last? The most dispicable tactic of today's right is to turn empathy into a vice and call attempting to understand how others see things as "liberal guilt." In this incoherent rambling, you lost sight of the fact that we're talking about Germany and Europe/ not Canada! Canada has accepted refugees before..such as the Ugandan refugees during the 70's and Vietnamese after the fall of the South Vietnamese government. But, what we would take will still be a drop in the bucket compared to what Europe has to deal with. As I said before, the European powers are partially culpable, but the main offender is the USA. They have a shitload of money for weapons systems, they can divert part of their war spending to find solutions to the refugee crises that they have played a huge part in creating! What was that again you were saying about racism? FWIW, I have a son who has been in a relationship with a black girlfriend who's parents are naturalized Haitian immigrants. Ask me if I'm concerned about "blood-mixing" or having "coloured" grandchildren? And in this Country, most immigrants are doing more work than native-born Canadians. A lot of old and aging racists living today will find themselves dependent on them for nursing care etc. in the coming years!

Aside from Ron (not Rand) Paul and a few of what they used to call "paleoconservatives," no one connected with the Republican Party criticizes Democratic presidents for warmongering. They can only move in one direction on this issue - further right and demand more wars and more military spending.

He thinks the Presidential Race is a new series on The Apprentice....then again, that's probably what Donald Trump thinks also!

All this Moore's Law crap has missed the point that Moore's Law only applied to miniaturization and data storage - and nothing equivalent to Moore's Law works in areas like energy production and storage. So, fusion power is still 20 to 30 years away from practical application....just like it was 40 years ago, and making batteries even modestly more efficient has come at a high price because of rare metals needed to produce them. Point being your smart phone isn't going to drive you home tonight! And if there is such a thing as a techno-fix to avert economic and ecological collapse, something close to Moore's Law would have to be happening in the production of cheap, clean energy.

The Alberta provincial government is as corrupt and incompetent as every government of nations that have become used to the easy money coming in from oil revenues! You're going to blame this mess on the new NDP Government in Alberta! Alberta's economy is going to tank regardless of who's in charge, because the wheels are falling off the tar sands wagon, and there's not a damn thing any politician can do except make sure that basic needs and services are covered, and the economy finally starts to shift away from its long running oil dependency. The new government has a chance to clean house for the first time in nearly half a century! I hope the Rachel Notley government doesn't lose resolve and make half measures.

I imagine a lot of them are, if we include the proxy armies that are armed and trained by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. But since this thread started with blather about "stopping terrorism" it needs to be pointed out once in a while now, that the root causes of terrorism and sectarian wars need to be addressed. What's better than fate having three army guys just happening to be in the right place at the right time to stop a terrorist attack on a train? NOT having someone with an axe to grind against the Neoconservative regime changers in the Arab World.

The flat tax BS started in the US with trust fund baby - Steve Forbes. Back in the 80's it was more acceptable, because we didn't realize that the rich would keep getting richer and the poor getting poorer for the next 30 years! Flat tax would be fine and dandy if we were all earning about the same income....but we're not! And someone who's earning minimum wage or living close to the poverty line is not going to have any discretionary income after they've paid for rent, food and a few necessities, while the superrich are parking their money and trying to get better returns on investment because you can only buy so many big houses and fancy cars....and maybe a yacht...but the rest goes back in and earning bigger returns and increasing the wealth gap.

Tom Mulcair is showing himself to be a student of Machiavelli/ rather than a man of principle, now that he's trying to grasp the brass ring and become Prime Minister. He's doing his best Stephen Harper imitation by talking balanced budgets, and another story that really bothered me (even though nobody here seems to have noticed) withdrawing from the women's issues debate because Stephen Harper wasn't going to be there. Anyone who really respects democratic principles will show up for every debate available. That said, like a majority of Canadians this time round: the Conservatives have to go! So, I'll vote NDP or Liberal if I really have to.....otherwise I'll try to bump up the Green Party tally figuring my vote won't be needed in the riding I'm in.

Yes, that explains why the most peaceful, most moral societies are the ones that have the most executions.....oh wait! Nevermind!