WIP

Those "(black) Africans" were only practicing local agriculture until Big Ag arrived in the shape of foreign state and private investors bribing already compromised government officials that allow foreigners to buy up large tracts of land for their own objectives and benefits. This article notes that some major hedge fund vultures are swooping in and joining the land rush: Meet The Millionaires And Billionaires Suddenly Buying Tons Of Land In Africa When hedge fund managers start buying up vast tracts of farmland in Africa or Asia and Latin America (wherever there's cheap land available), that's a tell that the investors looking for high returns see food production and prices as the next great profit opportunity....sure as hell isn't oil right now! And where it relates to species extinction is the fact that large numbers of Africans (like elsewhere in the world) are being forced off ancestral lands because deeds and titles to land are modern contrivances that allow the forced expulsion of people off their land. It's a process that first began in England with a series of 'enclosure' laws that started closing off 'common' lands to peasants, leading to the rush of desperate migrants into cities...just in time...coincidentally enough to provide the workers for the new Industrial Revolution. The same tactics have been applied all around the world...most recently in Bangladesh, but in Africa, if there is an industrial revolution going on, it's of a much smaller scale, because most peasants just cut and burn further into the grasslands and jungles taking away the last remaining wild habitats for large animals to survive on....and that's where the story intersects with wealthy white hunters in a rush to hunt the last creatures before they are completely extinct!

As long as it's not to reduce energy consumption or provide any environmental benefits, it's in keeping with conservative ideology.

I want to take a bit of break from politics and other bad news stories, and focus on a good news story that came in this weekend: Alissa St Laurent winning this crazy, grueling ultramarathon race in Alberta by a long shot, and what it says about the issue of advantages and disadvantages for women in sports. We are well aware that women are at a significant disadvantage with men in most league sports because men have much greater upper body strength on average. And the power advantage gives an edge in individual sports as well. When we get to the endurance sports, men have an advantage because of lower body/fat ratios, but when we push the distance further, in swimming and running, we find a much smaller contingent of women closing the gap and overtaking men in long distance swimming and ultramarathons. In running, this is mostly because 22 to 24 miles is as far as any non-drug aided body can go using blood sugar (glycogen) as fuel. After that, you have to be running at a pace slow enough that you can metabolize body fat for fuel....which I think would probably be walking pace for me....anyway, a different kind of runner takes the lead in races over 26 miles and many of them are women, despite the relatively low number of serious competitors. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alissa-st-laurent-becomes-first-woman-to-win-canadian-death-race-ultramarathon-1.3177415 St. Laurent says she would like to inspire more girls and young women to take up ultra-long distance racing, and I hope the notoriety she gets motivates other young women to compete: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alissa-st-laurent-becomes-first-woman-to-win-canadian-death-race-ultramarathon-1.3177415

I think the system of setting aside nature reserves has been a mistake ever since Teddy Roosevelt created the first national parks in the US more than a century ago. The reserves shrink whenever land becomes too expensive or opportunistic leaders like piece-of-crap Wisconsin Governor - Scott Walker give the go-ahead for mining operations right in the middle of the parks. The idea that we can live the kind of polluting, energy-wasting and resource-depleting societies we've created and have set-asides that will save endangered species is a joke! The larger the animals, the more unbroken territory they require. And their continued viability in those spaces is drastically affected by pollution and changes in weather patterns brought on by climate change. This is why any talk of "sustainable hunting" of endangered species is bullshit to begin with. Every loss among the endangered large land animals depletes already shrinking populations and harms the gene pool, making them increasingly unlikely to survive into the future. I know this is a story about Africa because lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, hippos etc. get wider public attention. There are certain species that will get the attention of the public and others that won't....which is why Greenpeace focused on harp seals off Newfoundland rather than the Alaskan seal hunt because their seal pups weren't cute enough to spark public outrage and donations coming in. That's the story of human motivations and the kind of world we live in!

Even among whites, there are so many video examples of bad things happening when people follow the cop's orders and get out of the car when no charges are being made, that nobody is just going to step out of the car because a policeman asks them to.

Don't hide your racism behind opportunists like Jesse Jackson! FWIW, I live in a neighbourhood with a high immigrant population from all over the world, but it's those white jackals that I keep my eye on when I'm out at night, because they are the ones who go out of their way to attack random strangers for no good reasons, or throw stuff or shoot paintballs driving by. So, in the Canadian context, which has not experienced the long slavery/Jim Crow legacy of America, you better not feel safe whatever colour you are if you see a gang of white guys approaching you! In the US context of impoverished mostly black neighbourhoods, as the Atlantic journalist - Ta Naheisi Coates puts it in context of growing up in Chicago:'nobody calls the police in black neighbourhoods except maybe the elderly. To young blacks, the police are just there to stop you and find reasons to write tickets or try to add you to add you to the jail/prison system. If you have a dispute at school or with your neighbours, you have to go with vigilante justice and call up your cousins and friends to go with you. Going the legal route puts you most at risk of being charged for a crime, so it's not considered an option, even in cases of murder and aggravated assault.'

I have too many other things to read rather than to waste time on propaganda coming from the NY Post! So, when it comes to the neverending Muslims are going to takeover Israel story, I'll look at who's got the guns, who's got the unregulated nukes, and who's doing the ethnic cleansing to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank and make Gaza unlivable, and I'll just call Bullshit to it as something we should pay attention to. A sidebar to our election story could be: why has Harper turned Canada from an independent western nation with a public position of working for peace in the Middle East into a pro-Israel lapdog! There is a similar theme in most stories of foreign conquerors claiming territories by divine right: In America, they claimed to establish a "Shining City on a Hill" in an almost empty undeveloped wasteland....which more recent anthropological evidence from human settlements reveals to be a total lie. In Israel, it's returning to a land that mostly had many people already living there for many generations that had to be forced out to create a Jewish state and to keep expanding that Jewish state to make room for more and more arrivals.. Yes, and the border nuts in the Southwest (most of whom only arrived there after WWII) go on and on about a small Mexican group that has the goal of reconquering lands America seized 150 years ago. It's another matter of who's got the guns/and who doesn't! Everything else is drivel. And yes, I've heard of Andalus. Now tell the other half of the story that the Moor Kingdom was a cosmopolitan society which was destroyed when they were completely forced out of Spain and Ferdinand & Isabella set up their Catholic kingdom which ethnically cleansed out Muslims, Jews, heretical Christians and other minority religions....even accusing remaining converted Jews (Conversos) of secretly practicing their Jewish religion and putting them to the test of inquisition trials. Most of the prominent Jews, such as the renowned Jewish scholar and philosopher - Moses Maimonides, had to flee to North Africa to escape being put to the sword.

Most nations of the world were energy-independent before the coal and oil age began! They're a finite resource that...when it comes to "tight oil" is becoming too expensive to run the kind of energy-wasting economies we've developed, so we either get used to the post-petroleum era now when there is enough capital to make the infrastructure changes needed...or wait to the bitter end and fight over the last oil reserves like in the first two Mad Max movies. Of course those movies were made before awareness of present climate impacts were known, so a Mad Max scenario would be even worse in real life. What we can't do, is expect oil-based economies to keep running along like they do today (because of declining reserves that are cheap to extract); but neither can we power the same kinds of economies we have today on "Green Renewable Energy" like the mainstream environmentalists keep trying to tell the public. Certainly we need to build windmills and solar panels etc., but one of the reasons why the message isn't getting through to enough people is that too many politically and business-oriented environmentalists aren't honest with the public (or probably themselves either) about the sacrifices that will need to be made now to provide a decent future for our children and grandchildren and so on. If we look at one important example of modern life - the private automobile...which really only took off after WWII when three carmakers, the oil industry and government leaders decided to tear down mass public transit in most places and build free highways for new generations of car-buyers; that was a deliberate long-term strategy that was being planned out during the War. But, though the auto age fueled economic growth for several decades, the long term costs of resource depletion and carbon added to the atmosphere, are sending the bills to us today. And making electric cars is a questionable solution on any level for reasons I'll get into if anyone really wants to discuss it. Where we are heading...one way or another is the kind of world my father was growing up on, on a farm on the South Shore of the Gaspe back in the 1920's. Cars were becoming common in unprepared major cities at the time; but where he was living, there were only two people who owned their own cars: the priest and the village doctor. Everyone else had to either walk to wherever they were going, ride a bicycle, or go by horse-drawn wagon, which were still common. If we don't do a serious job of putting back the streetcars and light rail systems that were abandoned after the War, those three will end up as the transportation options for most people in a declining world. The problem is nobody is really taking the future seriously...even the people who make a play at being environmentally conscious, so it's almost impossible to present these sorts of options in a political campaign. All of the parties will just continue tinkering around the edges by arguing over how much to invest in tar sands, not bring it to an end as fast as possible...as James Hansen advises us in his latest study, 2 degrees C of added average temperatures will already be catastrophic for the kind of civilization we have today, and even staying with the politically chosen 2 degree target requires a quick halt to the petroleum age on a global scale. If we were in danger of a Soviet invasion during the Cold War, we were even more dependent on the US during the long reign of mostly Liberal Prime Ministers, and yet they flew an independent path from the Americans...especially when it came to the Vietnam War! I'm surprised it hasn't become an issue yet, but Harper's decision to tag along on the US decision to buy Lockheed-Martin's latest white elephant...the F-35 fighter jets is one that has already cost us billions and will continue to do so years into the future! In the US, is plainly obvious that...among the oligarchs of business, the weapons contractors own the most politicians. That's the only thing that explains a monstrosity like the F-35 which is increasing in costs, is unstable and dangerous to fly, and has been beaten in war games even by the US's own F-16's! Not only is it expensive garbage, it is also obsolete garbage, as the rapid increase of much lower cost remotely piloted planes and bombs makes the F-35 the equivalent of France building the Maginot Line at the start of WWI. Lockheed and most of the US weapons makers could come out with any piece of crap and sell it to the Government because they always own enough votes in Congress to do so. But what about Canada? What is Harper's rewards and his future rewards for buying in and pushing so hard on this F-35 fiasco?

The problem with parliamentary systems of government (assuming first-past-the-post representation) is that majority governments mean Prime Ministerial dictatorships. So whether it's provincial or federal, minority governments are more inclined to focus on the people's interests and be less inclined to overreach...Joe Clark being one glaring exception of note. The trend towards concentrating more and more power in the PMO has been going on covertly for a long time...it was one of the big complaints against Jean Chretien. But Stephen Harper.....he's raised the bar and cleared it several times, as even ministers in the 'important' cabinet posts like foreign affairs, finance, trade and commerce, are taking orders from experts working out of the Prime Minister's office. Add in the changes to regulatory agencies and muzzling scientists, and he has to go as soon as possible! I'm glad there is a distinct public mood that seems to be across the Country that Harper has been around too long and is too dangerous to keep around because he is trying to change the way we do government to something along the lines of the American system of working for corporate lobbyists. With the economy tanking, people in swing ridings (like my former hometown) are talking about which opposition party to pick, not keeping the Conservatives in power.

They wouldn't be the "patriotic parts" that fly rebel battle flags and build monuments commemorating leaders of their slavery-based secession movement by any chance?

I think you're right there. Politicians do seem a lot similar to rats leaving a sinking ship when they think their chances for re-election are going bad.

It was a colossally bad policy for economic and environmental reasons. What Harper and the oilpatch investors hadn't figured on is: OPEC nations like Saudi Arabia, do not allow independent analysis of their oil fields and operations. There was a lot of speculation 10 years ago when the Saudi's allowed prices to rise and stay over $100 a barrel, that their primary reserves were being depleted, and they could not boost production to keep prices in a comfort zone desired by their US allies. In the past year, they've found extra production capacity to help drive down global oil prices, but now the question is why? Who are they trying to punish? Their enemies - Iran, Iraq and Russia...all oil producers dependent on oil exports? Or were they doing what US officials didn't want to believe or admit to: deliberately trying to kill off the "unconventional" oil production operation that started in the new era of oil scarcity: deep sea drilling, tar sands and shale oil developments. The Saudis believe they have the US more dependent on them than vice versa, since their multibillion dollar annual arms purchases are important export for the US, so it may not have been by accident that they have taken out small time shale drillers in the US and seriously damaged the future prospects for more tar sands developments in Alberta. For Harper, it's just one more example of a politician's luck running out by hanging around too long. But this thread hasn't got to the main reason why I will be voting for anything but Harper: foreign policy.....namely we haven't got one! With Stephen Harper in charge and his US advisers by his side, Canada's foreign policy seems to be run out of Washington!

All I know is they started disappearing awfully fast recently.

Didn't Harper have them all executed?

Reason One is a bad joke considering that Harper's "stability" was based on turning Canada into a petrostate complete with an over-valued petrodollar that was killing manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec. We would have ended up as Saudi Arabia north if it wasn't for the collapse in oil prices....and the end of this suicidal dream of turning massive quantities of tar sands into oil products! On elections: Harper is the one who is trying to change the way we do elections in Canada...i.e. Americanize our system with more corporate money and longer election cycles. Yes, cap and trade is idiotic...so were you for cap and trade back when both Harper and the NDP had cap and trade proposals to counter Stephan Dion and the Green Party's carbon tax proposal? A carbon tax would at least be better than nothing, as it would put the externalized environmental price of using carbon fuels back where they belong! What would be needed to stop environmental disaster is a Marshall Plan to bring the carbon era to an end, but no serious leaders in any developed countries...let alone Canada will do something politically risky until civilization crashes. So, family values includes making sure that immigrants aren't allowed to reunite families in Canada! Immigration is not one of my top 10 issues, but I am aware that there have been numerous scandals through Liberal and Conservative governments regarding these policies favouring "skilled workers" and foreign investors. Maybe the problem is not enough Canadians being bilingual then. Since courts work in two official languages, should any Supreme Court judges be hired who need interpreters?

What's worse, is that it follows the pattern police departments have been using all across America whenever the heat is on them: smear the victim's integrity with leaked information, including lies and misinformation. Until an independent toxicology report is given, I won't believe a word of it!

The habitats for wildlife in southern Africa are disappearing and getting broken up into parcels of land too small for large land animals to maintain healthy, sustainable populations. Populations are still increasing while large sections of land are being sold off to foreign investors and fenced off to grow cash crops for foreign markets. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the leaders that the US and Europe have kept in place will put anything and everything up for sale! All that said, the backstory here that doesn't get enough attention is the motley collection of wealthy sociopath collectors who want to say they killed one of the last ___________ before they became extinct. Walter Palmer's misfortune is being the unlucky great white hunter to get noticed by the social media movement and not be rich enough to be completely sheltered from public wrath!

Mulcair may shine....if he shows up for the debates! Latest story from the Post tells us Conservatives say Harper isn't going to debate, and Mulcair is declaring if Harper doesn't show up, then he's not going to either....and that will likely kill the debates entirely! There should be a formal system set up that is consistent through every election, and I think it should be mandatory that qualifying party leaders appear on the debate stage, and not try to play games with the process. The Liberals and the NDP have long tended to cooperate when necessary, and make all the political shifts necessary to try to turn the federal system into a two party contest....like the USA. In Ontario, we haven't forgotten yet that when the Liberals gave a half-hearted effort to honour a campaign promise of a referendum on proportional representation, the Tories and the NDP both worked quietly as possible trying to kill it through a widespread disinformation campaign. If any of the Big Three have their way, they'll find a way to winnow the process down to two parties, and have something similar to the duopoly government they have south of the border!

Quit being coy and tell us what your objections to RU-486 really are.

I kept my Facebook account active for all of about 3 or 4 weeks a few years ago when I got talked into signing up. Once you join, Facebook won't let you leave! A lot of people who are my age and older don't like using facebook, so I wasn't seeing much point to sign up for surveillance by marketers....and maybe government agencies too. I found myself collecting Facebook "friends" that I either didn't like or didn't want to know. But, I've found having a Twitter account at least useful for getting news and information. Main complaint about Twitter is the fake clickbait accounts and you soon find yourself in a likeminded silo where everyone shares the same opinions and information if you express your opinions on public issues.

This latest story tells us something about his character: Dentist who killed Cecil the lion was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee at his practice and settled out of court for $127,500 Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3179047/Dentist-killed-Cecil-lion-accused-sexual-harassment-former-employee-practice-settled-court-127-500.html#ixzz3hiVcbBvp Seems dentistry is even a more lucrative business than a lot of us realized!

Right! Fools who think it's all about the economy should try counting their money with a bag over their heads. Fiscal conservatives are always lecturing poor people about 'living within their means,' yet think nothing of overconsumption of both renewable and non-renewable resources. Eventually someone has to pay the bill....and they're secretly hoping to check out before the bills come due!

The pessimists among the climate research community are mostly quietly pondering whether or not we're already past the point of no return and human extinction is inevitable. In the meantime, the great hope of environmentalists 20 to 25 years ago...that the people...especially the rich people who run oil companies...would wake up to the threat and do something before it's too late, appears to be badly mistaken, as too many in the rich, developed world decide they love short term comforts too much to make any longterm sacrifices to save future generations from disaster. And they can create whatever obfuscating bullshit arguments they want to excuse their choices, but Planet Earth has already started into a major extinction cycle for a number of factors, including the rapid carbonization of the atmosphere, and it is highly unlikely that there will be a place for humans after the extinction has cleared the table and starts all over again. *I just have to add that since a certain someone considers comparing RU-486 with the US stem cell debacle to be off topic, we sure as hell have gone right off the rails in this latest round!

Agreed! It's bad that so many get away with causing so much harm, but at least one of them didn't.

The Liberal Party is floundering, and it's not all Justin Trudeau's fault! There are systemic problems that have led to declining memberships and funding, and Justin has to make the best of what he's got. The latest tracking polls indicate little has changed: the Cons are stuck at 31% (Harper has no hope in hell of keeping a majority government), while the Libs and NDP moved up slightly. The total seat projections show Harper holding on to a lead over the NDP by 10 seats (likely goodbye Harper Gov as well). Unless the Saudi's announce that their oil wells have run dry, and tarsands crud can be sold for $100 to $150 a barrel again, his plan of running as the "sound economic manager" will crash and burn as layoffs really take their toll out on the oilpatch. Some of the pundits who were doing the most talking yesterday were predicting that the Liberals are going to have a hard time holding on to what they've got, and it may boil down to a two party race between the NDP and the Conservatives. Though, without a complete collapse of the Liberals, they would still have some sort of role in government, as it's unlikely that either Conservatives or NDP will form a majority government. Off the topic of NDP/Liberal coalitions for a moment, I want to say that in the interests of democracy, there should be as many party leaders included in upcoming candidate debates as possible. So why should the Green Party or the Bloc be shut out? There should have a consistent standard for which parties are worthy to appear/and which are not. This will have a major determining factor for smaller parties like the Green Party or the Bloc have any potential to improve their numbers. First-past-the-post voting systems automatically skew in favour of old line existing parties, so why should the debate organizers be allowed to winnow the process down to three main parties? Eventually, they'll have us down to their desired goal of two big business-friendly parties....just like they have in the US!