WIP

Because atheism as movement to organize around, speak and write books about is not some sort of existential vacuum that contains no presuppositions and is only concerned with overcoming religious and supernatural beliefs. Hitchens made it pretty obvious, if you read his books, that he seen himself as part of a wider secular movement to not only end religion and belief in God, but also to promote western secular values abroad...including the Middle East. That's why Hitch took the leap of faith to become a Neocon, though most of his atheist book-writing brethren like Dawkins and Harris were unwilling to leap quite as far. But if you pay attention to Harris still, as I did recently when I heard him doing a long form interview somewhere, he still can't conceive of America engaging in regime change abroad for brutally selfish economic motivations rather than the expressed goals of promoting democratic principles in the Middle East. I'd say he's an idiot, but what do I know, I don't have doctorate degrees in philosophy and neuroscience! But, when it comes to foundational beliefs of what secularism is supposed to mean today, they and every other writer I've come across who is an antitheist believes the basic framework of western supremacism: liberal social values, representative democracy, capitalist economies, and an unqualified faith in the promise of new technologies are all part of the new secular atheist dogma! Oh, I could have told you from growing up with near-term 2nd coming of Jesus ideology, that the belief that Christ will return soon to save the day, leads many endtimes believers to have a nonchalant attitude about the consequences of global warming. If James Inhofe really believes it, that may be part of his thinking to just take the oil industry money and ignore the consequences; but that doesn't explain the decisions of the supposedly rational, hardnosed businessmen who run the oil and coal companies! I have never read or seen anything about either David or Fred Koch actually giving a crap about religion, or care about anything aside from money and promoting the religion of capitalism - libertarianism. And yet they are the ones paying Inhofe and other stooges to run their disinformation campaign. More likely that they are psychopaths, and like most high-functioning psychopaths who rise to high places in today's business environment, they only care for short term profits, consequences be damned! So whether most of these cretins believed in God/or not, would be immaterial. And it needs to be pointed out that, even in America, the vast majority of Christians, especially younger evangelicals, do believe climate change is a crisis, and want more emphasis on environmental issues from their politicians. So, even though Christianity comes from a type of middle eastern agrarian religion that separates God and spirit from nature (unlike pantheism), it's completely bogus to make a claim that Christians and most religious believers would care less about the environment than secular atheists. Never said it was! But since the name 'Matt Dillahunty' was raised earlier, I started thinking about how he and other panelists on their Atheist Experience show and others like their 'Nonprophets' podcast, Point of Inquiry, the Humanist Alternative, and scores of atheist bloggers all feel a strong need to present a hopeful picture of the near future. My hunch is that, since these are people who tell even the mildly religious progressives that they need to abandon religion, they feel the need to offer a quasi-religious secular alternative to heaven. And what other heaven substitutes are there besides faith in humanist principles that we will invent and innovate our way to the kind of world promised on the first Star Trek TV show almost 50 years ago? A blunt, critical assessment of the promises and pitfalls of ready acceptance of new technology is...admittedly hard to find, but it is out there in the wilderness among a handful of heretics who have taken a step back to make an overall assessment: Techno-Fix And that proves? Actually some tribes saw that those plains tribes that adopted horses and rifles started acting just like the white man: slaughtering more bison than they could use and leaving dead carcasses all across the grasslands. The Blackfoot were a dominant tribe in the plains, but were decimated by their unwillingness to change and adopt the new reckless European way of life. Through a combination of declines in bison and attacks from other tribes, white interlopers and armies, most of them ended up in the forests of Montana and across the Canadian border. But, what did that do for the other plains tribes in the end? Except leave most of them in the most abject poverty in America - at the Pine Ridge Reserve! Thanks for making my point. YOu might want to read that book I left a link for above! Michael Huessemann revives a point referenced early in the book by some ecologists 40 years ago like Barry Commoner, that every technology applied in the world has unexpected consequences because ecological systems are complex and chaotic....not simple linear systems that the engineers designing technologies can easily expect in advance. And Commoner also made the point from what he was seeing in the 1960's that rather than remove the new invention, the most likely solution....even back then...was to apply a counter-technology to fix the problems created in the environment by the first tech. Each counter-technology extends the likelihood that it will also require a counter-tech solution and so we end up with an endless spiral of ecological destruction. Air, water, soil contamination seem to be issues these days that have fallen off the radar while all of the attention is on climate change; but those problems created by new industries, new gadgets requiring exotic metals and minerals, new chemicals, plastics etc. are stlll out there and playing a role in species extinctions and other crises today. And if atheists (which I am one too btw) recognize "that resources are finite" why do most atheists who gain attention have nothing to say about an economic system that requires constant, exponential growth to keep itself from collapsing? "cleaner energy solutions" does not address the issue of overall energy demand, and doesn't answer the question of how serious they take environment as an issue! It should be the most important issue, since we don't have functioning economies if our planet can't run a biosphere! As one ecologist put it:"try counting your money while you're holding your breath if you want to know whether ecology or economics is the most important issue."

Yes, and I don't claim to have it all figured out. But along comes the guy with the vested interest to run the local global warming denial campaign here to call me irrational!

In 1972 he might have been able to win the Democratic primaries....but this is today, and big money runs the Democratic Party, and once again I have to point to this phenomena they created "super delegates" which was supposed to make the nomination process more democratic, but is an obvious tool that can be used by Party insiders to fix the process for the candidate they want. My big question is WHY did Bernie promise to support the nominee at the Convention if he really holds fast and true to the principles you listed above? Donald Trump didn't promise to support the Republican nominee, why would Bernie promise in advance that he will support Hillary and suck all of the oxygen out of any chances for third party reformers to emphasize just how undemcratic America's election process actually is?

This is what the Wikipedia entry on methane says this about recent historical levels of methane in our atmosphere: I wish I had the numbers close at hand, but the last time I looked, average atmospheric CH4 levels are getting close to 2000 ppb today, which is almost a three-fold increase from the 720 ppb levels estimated near the start of the industrial revolution. If methane levels have tripled over the course of the industrial revolution, that reinforces the point made by rising CO2 levels that the Earth's natural carbon sequestration systems aren't able to deal with the amount of carbon we are unleashing to carry out our economic activities. Methane is unstable in an atmosphere with oxygen, and that's how you get it removed in a short timeframe....unlike CO2! But the question is where is that methane going? Some of it will get captured and locked into soils, but alot of methane combines with oxygen to add more CO2 to the atmosphere and the oceans. It's pretty much a done deal that methane levels are rising exponentially today, the only argument among the experts is how fast! Because as noted, methane levels vary greatly around the world, but the fact that they are much higher in Siberia and most of the Arctic, compared to temperate latitudes, indicates that we are already in a stage of positive feedbacks pushing the dials on the greenhouse effect out of our control. If there is still time to slow carbon emissions down enough to prevent disaster is also up for grabs. Most of the serious climatologists have to talk their most cautiously optimistic to make a case for controlling climate change today.

Okay, I wasn't specifically referring to the transfer payments....which has been a debacle for decades...since the original formula for medicare was a 50/50 federal/provincial split on healthcare costs. As the costs of healthcare grew...often exponentially...the Feds, under both Liberal and PC governments have failed to add more, leaving the provinces with an increasing share of the burden to pay for. Increasing healthcare spending to match the rate of inflation (which is a dubious barometer to begin with) isn't enough if the costs of drugs, medical treatments for an aging population keep increasing faster than the rate of inflation. At some point, it would be good to ask Canadians collectively how they want healthcare run to get the best optimal results for most people. Off hand, since I am getting to an age where I know more and more people with cancer and heart disease and requiring expensive operations and treatments to give them a few more years....it would be good if people made an assessment of whether they should go after expensive medical interventions that may give a few more years or at least months...but at a badly degraded level of existence. All I know is I'll pull the plug if I end up having to live out my life stuck in a bed with tubes going in and out of my body. Many medical experts say the biggest cause of increasing healthcare costs today is directly related to the fact that a lot of sick people who would have already died a few decades earlier, are able to linger on. For many of these cases we should be talking hospice care rather than healthcare, and leave greater and greater burdens on younger people to pay for. But, my main point is that Harper decided going in to office that he wanted Canada to follow Australia's model, and concentrate on extracting more resources to sell to the US and China. Now that many experts are concluding that we have likely already headed into a global recession that includes the US as well as China, Canada is in an even worse jackpot because our resources have to be sold cheaper as prices for commodities drops. Maybe that's why Harper was in a hurry to get this election out of the way before the real bad news has time to arrive!

Since we've just passed the one year anniversary of the Michael Brown Shooting in Ferguson, the latest....largely unmentioned story (except in foreign media) has been the arrival of a few heavily armed right wing militia members who call themselves "Oath Keepers." They say they've come to Ferguson to stop looting and protect property....which is likely at least partially true, since rightwing thinking gives much greater regard for property rights than human rights. Oath Keepers Say They're Defending Ferguson; Others Say They're Not Helping A local St. Louis reporter interviewed on the CBC Radio show: The Current, yesterday, said that the protests were winding down late that night when these clowns approached the crowd gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the Mike Brown shooting. Previously, they had been close to police lines and talking to police....so most of the crowd....including that reporter thought they were SWAT or some plainclothes police, since seeing police armed like soldiers and wearing body armor isn't an unusual sight in Ferguson these days! So, at least in the eyes of that reporter, the Oath Keepers didn't "calm things down" as they tried to claim in other interviews they were doing yesterday. So WTF are the Oath Keepers and why are they important? It's not their numbers...they're still believed to be a relatively small group of right wing anti-government militia nuts scattered across America. But, in recent years there has been a growing number of these openly hostile gun fanatics running around proclaiming their 2nd amendment rights. Many of these Oathkeepers are former military, and there are claims that they have members among police forces. I predict that as things spiral out of control in the US in the coming years, the Oathkeepers will play the role of fascist goon squad that we see in countries like Ukraine...when after the US-engineered regime change, we all of a sudden discover that the "peaceful" demonstrators have an armed militant vanguard called the Pravy Sector, which at this moment threatens to overthrow the puppet Ukraine government in Kiev with the aid of other disgruntled right wing militias who aren't happy about their experiences and failures in attempting to re-conquer the Russian eastern provinces. With Oathkeepers running around and trying to intimidate demonstrators right in black communities in America, I don't think it's long before we see a reaction in the form of armed Black Panthers taking to the streets.

Electric cars are a stopgap technology at best, because if someone is really taking the long view of the future they have to consider the infrastructure costs in economic and resource terms. Another problem is very similar to the game builders of windmills and solar panels try to play: avoiding total carbon output of proposed new tech. Specifically, if we're going to keep cars on the roads rather than scale back transportation and settle for mass transit, what are the carbon footprints of the sources of electricity and the production of those sources? Whether the electricity is coming from an outside outlet at home or a "charging lane," producing electricity cannot be done for zero carbon emissions, if we consider the entire carbon footprint of the sources. Even windmills and solar panels have to be made with mined resources and manufactured! But, specifically dealing with cars: what are carbon footprints of the production and maintenance of the batteries and electric motors and let's not forget all of the steel, plastics and rubber needed to be produced and assembled to make the car! Many of these new high tech miracle breakthroughs are being done with using rare earth elements, and as a rare metal like the highly conductive and heat resistant - Neodymium becomes in even greater demand in the era of "green technologies," the increasing scarcity plus the increasing carbon footprint of that already ecologically damaging ingredient needs to be factored in, since all of our excess carbon emissions add to the increasing Co2 levels in the atmosphere, regardless of their sources or the intentions of their proponents! And let's not forget....if we're going to try to keep running the auto-centered societies we have today, then we need to add the carbon footprint of construction materials for roads...especially highways, and for the building and maintenance of those roads. Putting electric cars on those roads and highways won't change the carbon footprint demands of producing and laying thousands of miles of concrete and asphalt (like we're doing right now). In the final analysis, my greatest frustration with how these "green" issues are debated and argued, is almost everyone....including the people wearing green....are trying to run the same kind of economies that have put us collectively at the edge of extinction, and rather than step back and look at the whole picture, the environmentalist collective that gets most of the money and most of the media attention since the Algore era just wants to make piecemeal changes to the way we do things now, rather than look at where we are likely to be 10, 20, 50, 100, let alone 1000 years from now and ask what has to be done...what sacrifices have to be made to stave off disaster. Because personally, I can't take anyone seriously who thinks we can still keep running the kinds of capitalist constant growth economies we have now and that it will be easy and make us richer! That is just a fantasy veering on fraudulent or a sign that almost everyone prefers to live in denial.....even those who believe they are dealing with climate change.

And a melting Arctic could release methane from permafrost and clathrates over a period of centuries before it's all gone....so it's not going to be all over in 12 years by any sense of imagination! Since some so called skeptics like Anthony Watts are having to eat their words denying an El Nino would happen this year now that the Pacific has entered a powerful El Nino phase, wouldn't you think that the Precautionary Principle would have been wise to follow on a subject that means literally life or death?

Matt D repeats a lot of the drivel of "enlightenment values" as said and written about by Hitchens, Dawkins and other atheist writers. In Europe, the new atheists have taken the ground once occupied by their state church leaders, that the nations of Europe conquered and exploited the rest of the world through their superior genius and work ethic. Only difference was that they would have labeled it divine providence. Supposedly, the Enlightenment marks the great break in history when we abandoned a cycle of rise and decay, and entered the age of progress that...with a few bumps and hiccups along the way, will trend endlessly upward making the lives of each generation better and better, through new expanding knowledge and the discovery and application of new technologies. The whole point about the importance of deconversions from traditional religions (something they especially go after liberal believers for more than fundamentalists) is only justified if there is a reasonable prospect that we are indeed making this place a better world. If we're not, and the unqualified application of new technology has unforseen deleterious consequences, then so much for paradise on Earth! From what I hear when evangelical atheists speak, the message is something like sure we've got a few problems now like global warming, nukes, and sometimes even overpopulation gets a mention; but these are all problems that we can solve...how do we know this? Well, we don't! A hard, unsentimental look at the state of this world today, and what we would have to do to avert disaster, makes some climate scientists skeptical about the long term survival of the human species itself, though it's not something they like to say out loud to too many people. But, just like many endtimes religious believers will get up on their roofs and wait for Jesus to return for them, the atheist activists just put faith that techno solutions will do the job, and pray that enough windmills and solar panels will be built to avert disaster before positive feedback effects start to set in.

Barack wasn't Bernie in 2008! Oh sure, a lot of people thought he was an insurgent populist left/liberal Democrat (even I did) becasue that's what the packaging told us was inside! The real truth was that Barack Obama realized very early on his political career that he had to play ball with the people who have the real power of deciding who wins/who fails....especially in Chicago politics! The first tipoff should have been how nebulous and carefully scripted the Hope and Change messages were when it came to details. Since all of the criticism was mostly coming from the right, nobody noticed that Obama's health care reform strategy was Hillarycare/ not expanding Medicare. Obama posed as a pacifist and made promises that were soon broken (closing Guantanamo, ending wars etc.) but even early on, his focus was all about ending the war in Iraq.....not Afghanistan....the right war! Some very powerful people with lots of money...such as Penny Pritzker introduced Barry to other powerbrokers, who decided very early in the primary process to invest in The First Black President rather than The First Woman President....and the rest is history. Because, in spite of all of the hype about how skillfully the Obama campaign was using the internet as a grassroots organizing and fundraising tool, it was NOT small donations that filled the coffers of the Obama Campaign....it was largely Wall Street Bankers, who dumped so much money that Obama dropped out of the matching funding arrangement (and effectively killed it) that had been put in place as a reform tool to hold down political spending. Why did so many important oligarchs within the Democratic Party establishment shift from brand - Hillary to brand - Barack? Hillary Clinton would have been a tried and true centrist Democrat, who....like her husband...would say the right soundbites to appeal to liberal voters, while doing as much as possible to please important contributors. Maybe they reasoned that Obama would be easier to control than Hillary...who as leader, might have tended to be too hands-on, rather than the kind of leader who would more or less do what the military brass asked for on foreign policy, and do what Wall Street wanted domestically. One thing's for sure this time around - Bernie Sanders is not as leftist as advertised, but that still makes him too radical for the people with money that Bill Clinton brought in who took over the Democratic Party. Even if Bernie is able to raise enough of those small donations to keep financing a long, expensive grinding primary campaign, the deck is stacked in favour of who the Party leadership councils favour. If it's at all close on a count of pledged delegates on the first vote at the Convention, the party leadership is almost certain to have most of the never mentioned superdelegates' votes under their control.

Why didn't Europe's participation in a common trading system prevent WWI? It seems the exact opposite occurred when Germany became a rising economic power and England started feeling threatened by their growing economic clout....war was an inevitable result. And what we have today....a world with thousands of nuclear warheads, is the US seeing China on the rise and doing an "Asian Pivot," meaning trying to force China into a subordinate role or forcing them out of favoured trading status, and then there's the dangerous game of trying to stop Russia from gaining more economic influence in Europe and surrounding them with hostile forces. We've likely never been as close to WWIII all through the Cold War years, and yet nobody talks about it mainstream media. All we did with land and water resources, was learn how to squeeze more out of an empty bottle: 1. oil drilling technology started being applied in the 70's to drill down into deep underground 'fossil' aquifers, and even rechargeable aquifers all over the world are being depleted at unsustainable rates. Even the US Interior Dept. is predicting that the largest aquifer in the US - the Oglalla Aquifer, may be depleted by the year 2030 at current rates of use....that's not very far away for the #1 agricultural producer to adjust to! 2. more land has continued to be taken from cutting down and destruction of tropical rainforests. The increasing numbers of species' extinctions is largely because wilderness zones are being demolished so fast in recent decades. Neither of these trends can be continued to provide more food in the future. Even the most optimistic estimates point to declines in global food production even while populations keep increasing. These are crises created by capitalism and unregulated application of new technology, so the last thing we can expect to fix them is applying more of the same!

And now he worships human potential at the secular humanist church of techno-optimism.....the point needs to be made now that atheist/humanist movements are arriving at foundational beliefs (dogmas) that NOBODY has all of their beliefs sourced in reason and evidence, and changes ALL of their beliefs when they are contradicted by available evidence. Case in point: Matt Dillahunty is not going to stop believing that today's climate change crisis can be prevented through new, superior technology solutions, no matter what evidence is throw at him.

Thanks for ignoring the history and the strategy of invoking enclosure laws and regulations that make your contention of the poor flocking to the cities to escape rural drudgery and thankful for sweatshop jobs a complete fabrication! First, people have to be forced off the land, and then they move to dirty, overcrowded cities and take jobs that put them at a state of virtual slavery. It's the same as a somewhat related issue that infuriates me: all of the vitriol surrounding illegal immigrants moving to Europe and America, which never asks the WHY question, so that nobody in respectable media looks at root causes of why so many people feel forced to uproot their families and live a precarious existence in refugee camps and risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean or the militarized US border with Mexico. In both cases, the reader, viewer or listener is led to believe that these people are acting on volition rather than coercion! Before capitalism, they didn't need those written property rights! It wasn't until the arrival of capitalists seeing their land for its export potential, that property laws became paramount....and the lack of legal title has been used time and time again wherever wealthy interests backed by guns, wants their land!

The cartoon has a universal message, troll.

Could it be the right playing the fear card again? Too bad these base emotional appeals work so effectively on conservatives, and sideline logic and reason. They keep coming back to the same lying bad arguments regardless of how many times they've been lied to in the past!

Yeah, I'll take the scientists' word on it rather than lying, tarsands-dependent politicians!

That's a good one! One picture tells the whole story on who really is using our tax dollars. The people who buy politicians aren't giving away money....they're making an investment! And this is how their investment in the politicians market pays off. It's something Donald Trump said out loud and apparently scared the crap out of Fox News at the Republican debate.

The whole US election process is a pointless and ultimately meaningless exercise that has nothing to do with democracy! America has the lowest voter turnout of any advanced nation largely because so many people understand (even if they don't know the backstory) that the process is a sham. Bernie Sanders (first of all is not that progressive on many issues) will get reeled in long before the Convention next summer, and there's no way in hell that he is going to get more votes plus alter the rigged process that has successfully kept out insurgent candidates ever since George McGovern rode the antiwar tidal wave into the 72 Convention. Bernie's job is to keep disgruntled voices on the left occupied and away from supporting third party movements like the Green Party. I suspect the same strategy was at work during Ron Paul's perenial run as the libertarian candidate for the Republican Party. As long as he was in the race, he could prevent any oxygen from reaching the real Libertarian Party and pull that constituency away from the GOP. Part of maintaining duopoly government is both parties reaching out for their strays and pulling as many back into the pen every four years. This year Bernie gets to play sheepdog for the Dems!

I can tell from personal experience that you're just pulling this out of your ass! Because I left home in 1976 and worked a number of low and minimum wage jobs for several years. As long as I had fulltime hours, I had enough money to pay rent, buy food, even to go out on the weekends. The only thing I couldn't afford was a car....because of the insurance and costs of keeping a car on the road. Big difference back then, was I left home to split on a two bedroom apartment for $135 a month, and then had to get my own bachelor for $70 a month. Maybe those numbers should provide a little perspective on what the cost of living was in the 70's and 80's compared to now.

That's true, but what I was referring to is how some industrial trades like welding, machining, tool&die etc. have been degraded, not only through the general decline in manufacturing, but also because the government has allowed piecemeal attacks on trades like welding - where a company can just train complete novices at the spot welding techniques required to perform the job, without having to go through the fully accredited apprenticeship process. The welders in such a shop can become expert at what they do, and their skills and expertise are not transferable outside of that employer. If they leave for a new welding job, they likely have to start all over again at the lowest level. Certainly, most of the collapse in earning power for young people today is because of the trend towards part-time, casual, and contract work (also trends that could have been stopped by government), but even within many job categories, the trends in pay have been downward over time.

There's been an endless backnforth over whether Harper caused this recession. Yes, Harper gets recession points because he loaded Canada's dice for petroleum extraction and export as much as possible. But, looking at the big picture..... the one thing neither liberals nor conservatives will admit to is a simple undisputed point made by Karl Marx 150 years ago - capitalist economic systems are fundamentally unstable and so will be prone to booms and busts. The onlly thing that can be adjusted is how high and how low! One thing old Karl did not consider was that a time would come when the constant growth demands of capitalist systems would push right to the limits of what our planetary systems can provide for raw materials to feed our economic demands. And any reasonable assessment of where we are regarding a number of environmental and resource indicators would conclude that we - as a species are getting pretty damn near the limits of what we can demand from nature. In recent times, I suspect that the declines in available unclaimed arable lands and resources, are the primary reason why the numbers of wars and military conflicts are increasing/ rather than declining, as all of the apostles of globalization told us 10 or 20 years ago, when the whole world economy was incorporated into one banking and trading regime. When I watched the leaders' debate last week, what I found most nauseating was that...in spite of some party leaders focusing on the environment to varying degrees, they still treat environment as something separate from economics and other issues, and that fueling more economic growth should be job one.....only argument being over how to get it.

I didn't notice this thread before, and I want to take a look through it, since I have a lot of relatives in the US and have to at least be up to speed on US politics as much as NFL and NASCAR. I haven't checked yet, but I doubt anyone here follows the black leftist news and blog site - Black Agenda Report, which pulls no punches when it comes to political and economic issues, even when dealing with political and business leaders within the black community. Back when Bernie had just announced his run for the presidency, BAR editor - Bruce Dixon coined the term "sheepdog candidate" to describe Bernie and other past Democratic Party candidates going back decades, like Dennis Kucinich, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown...that governor - former NBA star who's name I forget...anyway, there's always a candidate on the left when there's no Democrat in the Whitehouse who's there to keep the left in the Party molified and active and not joining third party movements that might take away votes from the Democratic Party. Link In the most recent example, it's been noticed that the Democratic Leadership Committee (a Clinton house organ) has been running ads for Bernie. Why would they build up Sander's campaign? Except that the know that even with a groundswell of populist support, a political party with "super" delegates will erase him at the Convention! And Bernie has already promised to support the nominee...which will be Hillary...let's not be naive about it! Bernie is not as left on a lot of issues, especially foreign policy and dealing with the military industrial complex as some of his supporters would like everyone to believe. But what is most important is that he is playing the role of "Sheepdog" this time round, to gather up as many stray disgruntled Democrats as possibel and herd them back into the pen to support Hillary in the Fall 2016 Campaign! Also worth noting that the 2nd post referencing Daily Kos is one more of those fake progressive blog sites that is really a house organ of the Democratic Party, and starts erasing bloggers that don't get in step when it counts!

Before the Republicans were taken over by white nationalist xenophobes, they used to have a handful that kept dialogue with leaders of the NAACP and black business associations like Jack Kemp and Bob Dole to name a couple. Now, they have completely written off non-white minorities. But, even though the Dems and Repubs have turned US politics into a Duopoly, blacks and other minorities, including the real left in American thinking, need to build the Green Party or some other third party into a movement that threatens the control the Democratic Party has today over everything that isn't on the lunatic right.

Maybe I shouldn't be taking it as a given that you are quoting real numbers at me! This Globe & Mail piece from a couple of years ago says average household income is $76,000 and the top 1% " http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/who-are-the-1-per-cent-a-snapshot-of-what-canadians-earn/article14269972/?page=all. As for median average Full Time income: So, I was already well aware that I am ahead of median income...that is especially crucial in this day and age of part time/casual/contract and other factors that have driven down wages and earnings for younger people. *a recent employment survey of southern Ontario revealed that 60% of the workforce in Hamilton are in that parttime and casual category. No wonder so many people seem so stressed out these days! The reason why I am not celebrating, nor an acolyte of the Great Man theory of capitalism, is because I know damn well that as a skilled tradesman, the only reason why my earnings haven't been chopped...though they are not increasing much...is because I work for a company that decided since it would be too much effort to force out the union, they would just create a new collective agreement for all the new hires 15 years ago, and just wait out us oldtimers who are rapidly dwindling down and on our way out the door. Facts are that at one time, if you couldn't or didn't want to go to university and get some sort of degree and work as a professional of some sort, you could still make a good living with your hands if you had those kinds of skills, and that is no longer the case in our brave new world of globalization. Though from what I am reading lately, I'm expecting a lot of those libertarian-thinking professionals will be waking up in the next 10 years, as automation and outsourcing are about to give them a slap upside the head....like the computer and IT pros after 2000 got their wakeup call when their employers discovered armies of low cost math geniuses in India. I'm looking beyond my own situation, and even my own kids who are not going to live as well as I do as easily. I'm looking at what life is going to be like for the majority of young people here and around the world, especially as the effects of declining resources and climate degradation impact on how people are able to live...in ways that we are only beginning to make sense of now. It's a dismal future at best for the coming generations, and much if not most of the blame should land on creating a way of life that is more greedy and avaricious the worse things get. In terms of income and taxes, I would gladly pay higher income taxes if they are being used to rebuild infrastructure and social programs to help balance out the negative aspects of the type of capitalism we are mired in today....even though, as an 80k per year employee, I would take a hit that an 80k a year business owner who limbo under with all the tax breaks and incentives available to the business vip club that runs the political system at all levels of government.

The problem is too many people in hot markets (like even where I am in Hamilton) start thinking prices can only go up, so they better buy in before it's too late...even if they barely qualify for the mortgage at today's low interest rates; or even worse, the people buying up...selling their homes and mortgaging a bigger, more expensive house. The last time real estate dropped, it was the people who bought into the high end of the market who were in the worst shape(like some of my in-laws who built an expensive lakefront home they realized they couldn't hardly afford, but were underwater on the mortgage a year after they moved in!). At least the new buyers with the starter homes can get most of their money out if they have to sell, since those entry level houses hold their value better in a downturn. This speculating and big profits/big losses never used to happen in residential real estate years ago, because nobody would consider the house they needed to live in to be a short term investment vehicle!