WIP

I guess we can thank the internet for giving everyone...even the people with the most extreme and antisocial views...a home! How anyone can take guys taking more space for no good reason, as feminist persecution of men, is beyond me. But then I discovered this phenomena called "men's rights activism" a few years ago, which is the gender equivalent to the "white rights movement." Everyone can claim to be persecuted these days...even the billionaires like Tom Perkins http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10598265/Silicon-Valley-billionaire-compares-treatment-of-Americas-rich-to-Nazi-persecution-of-Jews.html

Seems like you're mixing apples and oranges here. I'm not aware of any of the vacation planners here being what you would label a "climate alarmist." I am, and I sure as hell wish I had more company in my at least 10 years now as a climate alarmist. I'm not traveling mostly for financial and family reasons, but when it comes to attacking the manmade carbon emissions issue, I believe in going after the big game: governments, international corporations and the banks that finance them, who are responsible for the "tight" and "unconventional" oil developments, as well as the great almost unmentioned climate destroyers: Big Ag factory farming (between 25% and 30% of human carbon production) as well as the increasing carbon contribution coming from the increasing transportation demands of all of these new bullshit "free" trade schemes. My main caution about international travel now...as I mentioned before is the increasing global instability that we can witness in rising conflicts and refugee migrations.....I guess that's something we can learn about on the internet!

I was! Because anyone who delved into the Jeremiah Wright affair below the surface, realized that Barack hardly knew anything about Rev. Wright or shared his beliefs....I agree with the theory that Obama is and has always been a secret atheist since college, but understood that success in US politics means claiming to be a Christian. Obama's handling of the revelation of Wright's most notable speech (included "God damn America!) by Faux News was masterful in the sense of political strategy, but it revealed a soulless opportunism by not directly attacking Wright and alienating his base/ but distancing himself from Wright and his message by being patronizing and condescending towards him and African American history. Wright's main point in the speech "Confusing God and Government" where the phrase was taken and given endless airplay, was that America does not function as a democratic republic at home or abroad, but as an empire. Needless to say, Faux News-viewers do not hear about how their government uses its military and threats of military force to leverage regime changes and favourable trade and banking terms. Nor do they hear how (at least until very recently) how their government uses force at home to maintain a phony war on drugs and keep certain communities marginalized and lessen the demands for higher wages and improved working conditions among the larger white community. * Obama's message to the average white voter as Senate candidate and then candidate for President, was that racial divisions and concerns about race issues can be safely written off as the past...if you vote for a black president! For most of his career as president, he's ignored these issues, while currying favour among the rich and powerful. But now that he's in "legacy-building" mode, he mentions words like 'poverty' for the first time, and visits prisons....after 7 years of doing nothing about the thousands who have been incarcerated in maximum security institutions for drug offenses and non-violent crimes since he took office! My great irritation with American political pageantry, is that the framing is so narrow....barely nudging from a corporate-friendly middle ground...that it's the rabid rightwingers and their thinly veiled racist slogans are the main reason why black and other poor communities have felt the need to stay loyal to a leader most realize has done almost nothing for them! *several Neoliberal intellectuals by the early 70's noticed that the growing middle class became even more demanding in the 60's, even as they achieved greater prosperity. Lesson being: always keep a sizable underclass to prevent the middle class from making too many demands and lessening the economic power of owners of capital.

He likely does, but he's also aware of how the yahoos have taken over the Republican Party south of the border, and doesn't want to overfeed them. The establishment right would rather have the issue than arrive at the religious right solution of banning abortion and birth control.

I think it was enough of a sacrilege that he was singing Ringo Starr's song in public!

I've haven't bothered looking into it, but my point was that it was only relatively recently that children born from a native woman and a white man were considered native. Lineage and inheritance in our society has been traced through the father, while in most of Pre-Columbian North America, people were either moving too frequently to consider inheritance, or those who were settled traced their lineage through the mother's line. Some still do this today, but the Iroquois clan names for example, have no significance in our system of laws and institutions. But, my main point was that the Euroconquerors imposing their "superior" culture on the natives have never examined the disruption and chaos they created by obliterating existing cultural norms and imposing their own from the outside. Once you break something it's very difficult and takes a long time to put the pieces back together again.

I'm looking over Cook's followup dealing with the AGW denying critics, and the consensus still looks accurate, while the counter-claims amount to little more than hairsplitting because the 97% don't agree on absolutely everything themselves. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-advanced.htm

No, you're conflating Stalinism with Marxism! Because Karl Marx's point was that the workers hired by a capitalist have to provide surplus value to the owner to maintain their jobs. Instead of handing off that surplus value (imagine the surplus value of the typical Walmart employee) the workers collectively own the enterprise and control all surplus value among themselves. The Marxist economist - Richard D Wolff has written and lectured on the subject of worker cooperatives, and favours the Mondragon system of worker co-ops that began in Spain in the 1930's, as the model for a Marxist workplace. Links: http://www.democracyatwork.info/articles/2014/02/hearing-on-worker-cooperatives-is-this-a-model-that-can-lift-families-out-of-poverty/ http://www.democracyatwork.info/articles/2012/12/the-work-experience-wsdes-vs-capitalism/

According to Naomi Oreskes's history of climate change denial movements, the libertarian right was the first to note that dealing with rising man-made carbon emissions would require an effective, organized international effort. So they began attacking the existence of global warming early. And as the AGW signal become clearer and clearer, the old excuses: conflicting satellite temp readings, solar activity, changes to Earth's axis, have fallen by the wayside, and the only excuse left standing is one offered up by the boys in Huntsville (Spencer & John Christie) advance an argument first proposed by Richard Lindzen - that as the lower atmosphere (troposphere) warms, cirrus clouds disappear and heat is vented into space....eventually....with all of their reams of math and charts, they're a little short on explanations for why this heat-venting effect cannot be determined yet, let alone how they can assure us that all of the heat trapped in the troposphere by rising GHG's will vent off into space! The deniers have taken advantage of the fact that the planetary biosphere and oceans and atmosphere are complex interacting systems that are difficult to connect and predict results. One that they've seized upon is the intersection where natural forces and rising atmospheric carbon levels meet together. A major one being the last strong El Nino event in the Pacific and Indian oceans in 1997/98, which vented so much heat into the atmosphere that peak atmospheric temperatures were reached that led to slight declines in atmospheric temps in the succeeding years when the Pacific went back into a cycle of absorbing more heat than giving off. And that's where followers of UAH's contrarian climate research lab have been running around ever since telling us that "global warming peaked in 1998 and the Earth is cooling ever since," ....assuming that it will continue to cool off into the future. Problem: late last year, ocean temperature monitoring stations in the western Pacific Ocean started noticing a rise in temperatures that were extending across the Pacific (for a couple of years there were false El Nino's as the heat was reabsorbed into lower ocean depths) to the east coast by winter. And, the ocean experts monitoring the Pacific are increasingly convinced that the clear El Nino that we are in right now, will continue on through next year and likely be much stronger than that 97-98 El Nino event. What does that mean for us on dry land? We are likely to see a whole lot more record temperatures this year and next, and we can say goodbye to the "global warming peaked in 1998" flim flam. Problem is that the highly motivated rightwingers who want no international controls (except to guarantee copyrights and trade in products and services) are deadenders who will accept no evidence regardless of how conclusive! If they have concerns for the future, it's just some faint hope that it will all go away by itself, so they can go back to worrying about their money and investments. Halfway to 2 C — According to NASA, We Just Blew Past an Ominous Milestone

No, what's pathetic is that you've spent years here trolling a Canadian forum without grasping the fact that few Canadians are nationalistic or give a shit about criticism from American "patriots!" As much as everyone who wasn't a Liberal despised Pierre Trudeau, he was the last true Canadian nationalist leader of this Country who was trying to carve out a Canadian identity and more importantly - an independent political and economic path for Canada. Ever since Mulroo got the job and started singing Irish ditties with Ronnie Raygun, we've fast-tracked our way into a death spiral of trade agreements and treaties that tie us closer and closer to the American economy and to American politics as well! Does current Con PM Harper have any major policy disagreements with Washington? Actually, even if he did, there wouldn't be anything he could do about it now. So, all of your trolling for imaginary irate Canadian nationalists is laughable! Because most Canadians already know we have no real independence on anything anymore.

I'm not going to be able to afford vacations anywhere for the next 4 to 5 years (whenever I'm ready to retire), so I'm not really paying much attention to all this; except to ask globetrotters and wannabe world travelers if we are going to be able to safely travel anywhere in the world 10 to 20 years from now? Specifically, I'm reminded that both Somalia and Afghanistan were safe places to walk about 30 or 40 years ago, when hippie backbackers were wandering about. I have a couple of friends who wanted to do Kashmir and India on the cheap, so they backpacked from Iran right across Afghanistan - through the Khyber Pass into Kashmir. Imagine doing that in this day and age!

That's right! I think we already mentioned before that this is also an insult and an inconvenience for many elderly men and women to have to put up with.

Our PM takes orders from Washington, so if we want to go to the source we don't find it in Ottawa!

The AGW zealots who make up every climate scientist not employed by the Koch Foundation apparently. My first principle when dealing with technical issues that I do not and won't have the time to develop expert opinion on myself, is to go with the consensus of expert opinion....which doesn't look good for your side.

Economics is as much of a science as psychoanalytic theory is a science! In both fields there are particular theories that explain absolutely everything...even when results don't match their predictions! As many physicists who are critics of new T.O.E.'s like String Theory point out, if a theory explains every result, then it actually explains nothing! Where do you get the idea that he thinks he's God? I didn't have time to deal with the fundamentalist atheist comments yesterday from you and others, but this notion advanced by Dawkins and others that 'belief in God or religious supernatural beliefs is delusional' or 'all our beliefs need to be scrutinized for scientific accuracy' is atheist equivalent of religious dogma that is not or likely cannot be proven! And if you actually took it seriously , your libertarian beliefs on economics and climate change are on the fringes of reality and fail any sort of real scientific testing. Maybe it's all of the fundamentalist atheism coming at us today makes me prefer to identify with naturalism rather than call myself an atheist or even use secular humanism. So, why isn't he fixing everything? If that's the question, it seems obvious that any reformist leader at the helm of a large, conservative organization with a deeply entrenched bureaucracy is going to have be pragmatic about making changes and not over-reaching. I'm not a Catholic, and this is an issue that is ultimately up to the members of the Church to decide for themselves; but from the outside, he has changed course from the two previous popes who ignored issues of poverty and inequality and focused laser-like on personal morality issues, especially on women's sexual conduct. Just the fact that he's saying 'let's give this a break and take a look at the larger picture of suffering in this world is a big step. Remember Pope Benny was most actively involved in persecuting nuns he considered too liberal....like...not only was opening the priesthood for women beyond discussion, he was trying to drive women from having any active role in the Church. So far, by ending the attacks, Francis has made progress on women's issues.

As Big Guy has already pointed out, you're the one who's 'unhinged' on the climate issue, since you make great efforts to advance implausible theories of low atmospheric sensitivity to carbon that are advanced by a small (less than 3%) contingent of climate researchers who may only be acting from political and obvious financial motivations. This is equivalent to joining the fringe on any other scientific issue, so why would you expect the Pope to side with a small coterie of cranks when...more than likely he has traveled the world himself quite enough, to notice a lot of the growing ecological damage being done to this world.

Is part of the reason why you and Westcoast consider this a joke issue of no consequence that you never have to ride on a bus or a subway train? It's been pointed out by feminists and others in these debates about 'intersectionality' that I'd rather not have to open up, that different groups within a larger group (like women) have different concerns. So women of colour and immigrants have to deal with issues that the average white woman wouldn't have to. And upper and upper middle class women are largely free of many of the public safety issues that women of lower economic classes have to deal with....like riding public transit...especially after hours and coming home late at night. It's a different world if you can just jump in your car and drive home! There, you don't have to consider an issue like "manspreading" or the safety risks that are more serious.

Let's cut to the chase here, because I see the Greek Crisis continuing to spread around the world. I already pointed out that US and Euro-based international institutions like IMF, World Bank, ECB etc., readily jump in to bail out the original creditors (thereby removing the moral hazard for those handing out loans to clients who cannot pay), and gladly take on the role of debt collectors...demanding hard assets and control of government economic policy when they assume the role of creditor-of-last-resort. As I mentioned previously from the example of John Pilger...the "economic hitman", the tactic of willfully writing up loans and loading national governments with unpayable debtloads is a strategy that began at least as far back as 50 years ago, when nations of Africa...newly freed from European colonization, mostly found themselves re-colonized by US and Euro finance capital under the watchful eyes of the World Bank and IMF. All that's new here is that disaster capitalism has clearly arrived on European shores, and Europe will extend the process of austerity budgets and seizure of real wealth to one European nation after another....maybe Germany will be the last one standing! But, this is a process created and continued by a system that demands growth in profits at all costs. If no growth can be obtained through actually increasing economic output, then growth is obtained by devouring existing wealth! It should be pointed out that in the Greek example, there was no moral hazard for the frontline bankers, bailed out by the ECB and the IMF. Just as most of the mortgage lenders in the US were bailed out as the Government assumed the risks of "too big to fail" banks and quantitatively eased their way to push the day of reckoning off a few more years into the future. So, my takeaway is that the entire global banking and monetary system is a fraud from the outset! The reason why banks are the wealthiest, most profitable institutions in the first place, is because even when loans default, they get to claim hard assets in place of the virtual assets they offered as credit to begin with. Remember, under a fractional reserve banking system, 97% of that money loaned out, didn't exist until the deal was finalized. The only thing that has kept this capitalist ponzi scheme solvent to begin with, is that ever since fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking was allowed, the rapid creation of new money/debt has fueled enough economic growth to allow the virtual capital to be absorbed and the debts to be paid. So, now that we are in a brave new world, where capital cannot create much actual wealth any longer, capitalism is cannabalizing itself! A quick example can be seen in this graph provided by a report originally from the Brookings Institution showing that share values of companies under liquidation is greater than the value of those new entrepreneurial startups we hear so much about: This shouldn't be surprising since finance capital has grown in size and profitability as manufacturing and real production have declined. Many large corporations find it more profitable to buy back stock to boost share values than to actually invest anything in increasing production - http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/07/when-capitalism-turns-to-cannibalism.html Back to the geopolitics of the Greek example...now that Greece is used up and soon to be an economically spent force, what happens when the US/Euro oligarchy decides that the only source of profit left is to seize the wealth of lesser oligarchies of the BRICS nations? Most notably nuclear-armed Russia and China? This system of profit-at-all-cost is so insane, I'm willing to bet that it will overpower spineless narcissistic political leaders like Barack Obama or whoever his successor is, and push all the buttons to start WWIII.....game over!

It's pretty sad when Obama is allowed to step in and play leader on important issues he has disregarded for two terms as president.

Think of how many people were denied Treaty status or Metis status because the European patriarchal system of tracing lineage through the father was imposed on the natives of this Continent! For my part, my grandmother on my father's side was a Mi'kmaq, but I have no status because women who married white men lost native status along with any children born from the marriage.

My beef with what a lot of economists write (from various ideologies) is that they act like economics is a science and it's not! Latest example in recent years would be the Keynsians, like Paul Krugman, calling for a revived New Deal when Obama first became president. Krugman has written numerous editorials in the NYTimes complete with charts and statistics on why a new deal would fix all of America's economic ills, but he has never considered that America of 1930's was a far less populated nation with vast undeveloped territories and unmined resources. That is certainly not the case today! The industrial boom that allowed the building of a vast military industrial complex from scratch was fueled by cheap, easily accessible oil (only the costly garbage is left in the US today), and the rise of the middle class after WWII, owed much more to the vacuum in industrial capacity caused by the War and the tolerance of the capitalist class than it did with the theories of John Maynard Keynes. And the supply-siders are just as bad, but I won't go into that. Also, this Pope is a scientist with an advanced degree in chemistry; maybe he wasn't a specialist in biology and ecosystems management, but the global warming deniers look like idiots attacking him for talking about a subject he can't understand when he's addressing the climate issues.

Some of the Catholic historians say he is a throwback to Pope John ( I forget the number) who called together the Vatican II Conference and reforms back in the early 60's.

With all the strawmen being heaped onto this thread, I hope there isn't a fire!

Right. And for that matter, those of us with fairly wide shoulders can contract a bit in crowded situations. Maybe bodybuilders are too stiff....but most of us can manage.

That's up to her. On my part, I'm 58 and I'll look, but don't want to get caught leering at young women (dark sports sunglasses while walking a dog who likes to wander a bit, seems to help being discreet).