WIP

Well, that explains the hairsplitting! In absolute numbers, there are a lot more Muslim Palestinians than Christians, so unless the numbers (if you can find them) are broken down by percentage, they're misleading or worse. Nobody is keeping official records regarding how many Palestinian immigrants are Muslim or Christian; the information available is secondary and anecdotal. Though it does stand to reason that, as anti-Islam hysteria has grown since 9/11, it would be much harder for any Muslims to get to the West. The government officials who validate or choose to refuse immigration applications are never going to say that the choice was mostly made on religious affiliation, but I'm sure that being an Arab Christian eases the process a lot more than being a Muslim! I've never bothered to look up this issue before, but the wiki article: Palestinian Christians says this about their diaspora: Today, Christians comprise less than 4% of the Palestinian population of Israel and the Palestinian territories - approximately 8% of the Arab population of the West Bank, less than 1% in the Gaza Strip, and nearly 10% of the Arab population in Israel.[2] According to official British Mandatory estimates, Palestine's Christian population in 1922 comprised 9.5% of the total population (10.8% of the Palestinian population), and 7.9% in 1946.[3] The Palestinian Christian population greatly decreased from 1948 to 1967. A large number fled or were expelled from the area during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and a small number left during Jordanian control of the West Bank for economic reasons. Since 1967, the Palestinian Christian population has increased in excess of the continued emigration.[4] There are also many Palestinian Christians who are descendants of Palestinian refugees from the post-1948 era who fled to Christian majority countries and converted to the predominant faiths there, and formed large diasporan Christian communities.[5][6] Worldwide, there are nearly one million Palestinian Christians in these territories as well as in the Palestinian diaspora, comprising over 10% of the world's total Palestinian population. Palestinian Christians live primarily in Arab states surrounding historic Palestine and in the diaspora, particularly in South America, Europe and North America. I've never researched this topic beyond the anecdotes I have heard from people who've come here from the Middle East, and I was struck by how the claims on right wing Christian fundamentalist/zionist/anti-Muslim sites kept trying to present claims of Christian extermination in Palestine by Muslims. The truth would indicate otherwise, as would the fact that the most dangerous Palestinian guerrilla movement of the 60's and 70's - the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was founded and led by a Palestinian Christian. Not that any of this has much of anything to do with Charlie Hebdo and Muslim immigrants in France, but the fact that the most extreme right wing Christians who run U.S. right wing media, never mention them or try to pretend that they don't exist! It's just further proof (as if any was necessary) that virtually every time the media defines a war or civil conflict as a religious conflict, it is just further evidence of how lazy and inept they are, and how much they desire simple, one paragraph explanations for complex struggles rooted in: economic decline, discrimination, food shortages etc., and rival religious affiliations are used by both sides in a conflict to justify their violence and reasons to oppress, isolate, expel and sometime exterminate their rivals.

And how widespread is that prosperity? The global trend, both here and everywhere else in the world that's been measured, is that any economic growth from neoliberal economic reforms, has only been at the top of the income ladder, and not distributed down ...or 'trickled down' to lower income and especially the bottom of the hierarchy. This source provided a series of links contending that poverty has increased during India's economic boom, and one third of India is living on less than $1.25 today! But then again, I wouldn't expect anything different from adopting the same Reagan/Thatchernomics that have been spread throughout the rest of the world. If there are carcinogens going up in the air somewhere, they have to come down eventually. Even if absolutely nobody got cancer...as you are apparently claiming, the smog from cities still contribute to acid rain problems that are wrecking forests. Your theory sort of reminds me of the big Inco smelter in Sudbury, which many years ago, built the tallest smokestacks in the country, so that less soot would fall in the City and destroy all plant life. Problem was their air pollution was diffused over a wider area and likely caused more damage than when it was more locally concentrated.

Some obviously don't care about tomorrow....until tomorrow comes....possibly a little ahead of schedule.....who knows, but we'll all find out in the coming years, if there is a sudden increase in methane release that some climatologists fear could happen at any time because of the increasing ocean temperatures and sea ice declines. Sort of like playing russian roulette, except that most of us don't have a choice in this game.

You're right. It seems like even our media was devoting more attention to the storm coverage in Boston, than in Newfoundland.

thanks for hairsplitting! are you a goddammed lawyer or something similar? You know any uncivil act can be interpreted as violence if you want to be a total a-hole and try to shift attention from issues you find uncomfortable! Now, I don't know the details on Palestinian life...and I don't really care a whole lot either! My point is that in the Muslim lands where you and your ilk are trying to paint a picture today of a religion with cultures that never allow other religions or splinter sects from Islamic orthodoxy, there nevertheless were minorities like the Christians...some descendants of the original crusader kingdoms of the middle ages, were still living there, and most of the reasons for declining Christian populations in Palestine today is because they have an easier time emigrating to the west than Muslims do! Talk to any if you happen to meet them, they'll tell you themselves!

BTW, all of you libertarians out there, this is why everyone who is not self-employed needs to belong to a union...hopefully an effective union: Tim Hortons layoffs blindsided workers, manager says Company had played down speculation about mass job cutsThey didn’t see it coming. That’s what a laid-off Tim Hortons manager tells CBC News. Instead, she says, just days before job cuts were announced, the company played down media speculation about mass layoffs and gave employees the impression they shouldn’t worry. So when Tim Hortons started doling out pink slips at its headquarters and regional offices across the country on Monday and Tuesday, she says, "it was really shocking." "We all anticipated something happening. I don't think any of us assumed it was going to happen so fast. There was just no transition time and it was pretty much, these guys came in, your job is gone."

Really! Very few were actually on the "frontier, except in novels." Everywhere you go, you're going to find some form of government, and if it was a real, actual wilderness locale, as more people gather, they create a government of their own. Nevertheless, the world is a very crowded place today; and the only frontiers are in outer space...if anyone is ever able to live there in the future. What is unique in human history is the rise of radical notions of individualism beginning with the privileged dilettantes of the age of the enlightenment, leading up to increasingly bizarre libertarian ideologies that are with us today.......not because of their intellectual merit, but rather by the degree with which they stroke the ego's of those who already consider themselves superior to those around them...so they don't need the rest of us anyway....they can do it all on their own....except in real life! Anyway, this "club" you talk of, has been with the human race ever since modern humans walked the Earth. In the beginning, it was the small family group tribal societies that varied in size from about 40 to a max. of 200 individuals. Our beginnings were non-hierarchical...even anti-hierarchical, especially among the men of a tribe who, in the more modern examples practiced "status-leveling" behaviours any time the group felt someone was trying to rise above the pack. That's how much early human life depended on cooperation for survival. What is of note, is that regardless of whether these communistic lifestyles are practical in modern cultures, these are the behaviours we are hardwired for, and NOT the radical individualistic crap of the Ayn Rand novels and supporting works. What happened as the first tribes became more sedentary, depended more on planted grains and figs and other plants, and then took up farming permanently beginning in Asia Minor, is that we see the rise of hierarchies and differences in social status we have today. Some early village farming communities were more hierarchical than others, but the general trend has been towards increasingly hierarchical, larger and more impersonal societies. Once a society is too large (over 200 members) for everyone to know each other, then government is more impersonal/ but still necessary! There are costs for whatever level of services we want from government, and somebody has to pay for them! What we have today, are too many people who expect to be protected from: foreign invasion, natural disasters, crime etc., while expecting public services, such as road, water&sewage, schools etc. to be provided. And some of us would rather kick in a little extra to provide better social services to guarantee at least a basic standard of living: food, clothing, shelter, rather than leave people dangling on the edge of survival, depending on the charity of those with money to provide for them. I have charities I support too! But, I would rather pay extra in taxes and have a guarantee that nobody dies in the streets, than leave it up to chance...especially as social studies inform us that high income earners are the most selfish and give less to charity than those in the middle class and lower!

I was watching the weather channel closely, and at the peak intense period of the storm, most of the precipitation was falling over the Atlantic. So anyone with an ounce of sense, should consider it to be like dodging a bullet.

Obama's handling of this and every other environmental issue that has come across his desk since he became President, is exactly why real environmentalists in the U.S. don't see any value in either the Republican or Democratic Parties! One (Republicans) are totally in the tank and sucking gas fumes from Big Oil....but, at least we know where they stand! But, the shape-shifting Democrats are typical liberals...who befriend as much of left wing populist movements as they deem necessary, only to play games and disappoint the activists after they've taken power! No more excuses. The message coming forth from the majority of climatologists is that - regarding policy decisions, all of the "unconventional" oil has to be left in the ground where nature buried it after extracting most of it out of the atmosphere over the past many millions of years! And unconventional means deep sea offshore drilling too! It's not just about shales and tar sands drilling. If the developers want to go two miles under the sea floor looking for big oil deposits, there is a consensus of evidence that we release all of the carbon sequestered in the Arctic, along with methane clathrates in deep water in lower latitudes. Once it all starts going up into the atmosphere, the chain reaction won't stop; and the final determination on whether the resulting continued extinction is total, will only depend on how much carbon is turned loose. Now, Obama has access to the scientific panels, and here it all firsthand before the press releases and the official IPCC reports. Either he doesn't really believe it...or he doesn't care! There are no alternative explanations for his strategies. And it doesn't matter whether he doesn't believe it, or this issue...like so many others, he demonstrates the qualities of a narcissistic psychopath...which is likely a high number of people who seek high political office in the first place! Some hopeful idiot Democrats in the U.S. have been proclaiming Obama's refusal (after four years) to sign on to completion of the Keystone XL as the great sign from above that he has finally seen the light and realized how important the climate change issue is. But, he dithered and dallied with that issue because risk to his poll numbers is a greater concern than risk of human extinction! But, after oil prices at least temporarily collapsed, then it was an easy political decision to cancel the pipeline...since a. he doesn't get money from the Koch's, and b. there's no way this tar sands project is profitable with oil selling below $70 per barrel....let alone $45. Obama knows the central and mid-west Republicans are in big, big trouble right now, because the impacts of collapsing oil prices have already started shutting down shale drilling operations, and most of the best plays have already been exhausted. By the time oil inevitably goes back up in price, the small time shale drillers will be bankrupt, the workers will be out of jobs, and billions of dollars in losses will prevent shale fracking from making a comeback any time soon. Tar sands may be a little different, because these operations are run by mulitbillion dollar players with deep pockets....but they should all be shut down permanently regardless. And, in this latest round, we have Obama trying to play King Solomon and split the baby: protect ANWAR but let the deep sea drillers risk blowouts in the Arctic. If there is an upside to this story, I must have missed it!

According to what I've heard, Fox News and friends were castigating the mayor for not closing the schools early enough during last year's snowstorm. It seems like his enemies want it both ways.

I can understand why fundamentalist Christians are adamantly opposed to Islam....it's not their brand, and they're all about brand loyalty. But, the atheist Islamophobes and same goes for their criticisms of Christian theology also....always will say that they don't believe in any supernatural forces and people twist religious claims and beliefs to suit their own needs and purposes; and yet here we have some self-proclaimed atheists who believe that Muslims have to follow some Quranic verse like brainwashed Stepford Wives, and make the identical claims about Christianity....though usually saying it is not quite as harmful as Islam. Don't atheists see the irony here, by claiming that two religious texts have the power to override the desires and intentions of its adherents?

I haven't seen him for some time now, so I can't claim him as a friend. But, when I got to know him, I took him for a simple guy who wants simple answers, and would get agitated if anyone tried to explain to him that the world is not 6000 years old, and Adam and Eve didn't ride dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. What stood out to me, was that every issue, every decision had to be based on some Biblical rule...and if he didn't know what the answer was, he would go to his trusted sources for the right answer. The point I was trying to make was that this guy didn't seem to have much of a capacity for introspection or have that inner voice telling him right from wrong. Without a clear set of rules, people like that can end up causing all kinds of harm if they just follow their impulses.

Well, I can't explain this multi-headed hydra that believes in using selective application of military force to make the world a better place, any better than Nick Turse - who tells us about the shocking size and scope of using military force on behalf of the empire: Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Shadow War in 150 Countries To America’s black ops chiefs, the globe is as unstable as it is interconnected. “I guarantee you what happens in Latin America affects what happens in West Africa, which affects what happens in Southern Europe, which affects what happens in Southwest Asia,” McRaven told last year’s Geolnt, an annual gathering of surveillance-industry executives and military personnel. Their solution to interlocked instability? More missions in more nations -- in more than three-quarters of the world’s countries, in fact -- during McRaven’s tenure. And the stage appears set for yet more of the same in the years ahead. "We want to be everywhere,” said Votel at Geolnt. His forces are already well on their way in 2015. “Our nation has very high expectations of SOF,” he told special operators in England last fall. “They look to us to do the very hard missions in very difficult conditions.” The nature and whereabouts of most of those “hard missions,” however, remain unknown to Americans. And Votel apparently isn’t interested in shedding light on them. “Sorry, but no,” was SOCOM’s response to TomDispatch’s request for an interview with the special ops chief about current and future operations. In fact, the command refused to make any personnel available for a discussion of what it’s doing in America’s name and with taxpayer dollars. It’s not hard to guess why. Votel now sits atop one of the major success stories of a post-9/11 military that has been mired in winless wars, intervention blowback, rampant criminal activity, repeated leaks of embarrassing secrets, and all manner of shocking scandals. Through a deft combination of bravado and secrecy, well-placed leaks, adroit marketing and public relations efforts, the skillful cultivation of a superman mystique (with a dollop of tortured fragility on the side), and one extremely popular, high-profile, targeted killing, Special Operations forces have become the darlings of American popular culture, while the command has been a consistent winner in Washington’s bare-knuckled budget battles. This is particularly striking given what’s actually occurred in the field: in Africa, the arming and outfitting of militants and the training of a coup leader; in Iraq, America’s most elite forces were implicated in torture, the destruction of homes, and the killing and wounding of innocents; in Afghanistan, it was a similar story, with repeated reports of civilian deaths; while in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia it’s been more of the same. And this only scratches the surface of special ops miscues. In 2001, before U.S. black ops forces began their massive, multi-front clandestine war against terrorism, there were 33,000 members of Special Operations Command and about 1,800 members of the elite of the elite, the Joint Special Operations Command. There were then also 23 terrorist groups -- from Hamas to the Real Irish Republican Army -- as recognized by the State Department, including al-Qaeda, whose membership was estimated at anywhere from 200 to 1,000. That group was primarily based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although small cells had operated in numerous countries including Germany and the United States. After more than a decade of secret wars, massive surveillance, untold numbers of night raids, detentions, and assassinations, not to mention billions upon billions of dollars spent, the results speak for themselves. SOCOM has more than doubled in size and the secretive JSOC may be almost as large as SOCOM was in 2001. Since September of that year, 36 new terror groups have sprung up, including multiple al-Qaeda franchises, offshoots, and allies. Today, these groups still operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- there are now 11 recognized al-Qaeda affiliates in the latter nation, five in the former -- as well as in Mali and Tunisia, Libya and Morocco, Nigeria and Somalia, Lebanon and Yemen, among other countries. One offshoot was born of the American invasion of Iraq, was nurtured in a U.S. prison camp, and, now known as the Islamic State, controls a wide swath of that country and neighboring Syria, a proto-caliphate in the heart of the Middle East that was only the stuff of jihadi dreams back in 2001. That group, alone, has an estimated strength of around 30,000 and managed to take over a huge swath of territory, including Iraq’s second largest city, despite being relentlessly targeted in its infancy by JSOC. “We need to continue to synchronize the deployment of SOF throughout the globe,” says Votel. “We all need to be synched up, coordinated, and prepared throughout the command.” Left out of sync are the American people who have consistently been kept in the dark about what America’s special operators are doing and where they’re doing it, not to mention the checkered results of, and blowback from, what they’ve done. But if history is any guide, the black ops blackout will help ensure that this continues to be a “golden age” for U.S. Special Operations Command. NO, I said that they weren't being forced out of their homes or subjected to mass killings prior to the 20th century, and the European/American intrusions on behalf of oil development.

Yes, that's an almost completely U.S. phenomena called Christian Zionism, which I commented on somewhere else recently. It came about after the latest wave of end times millenialism started spreading through Protestant churches beginning in England, but really taking hold in America, when the teachings of John Nelson Darby started taking hold. He was the originator of this Rapture theology that has so many evangelicals expecting to be taken up to heaven before the world descends into chaos. Darby's other big contribution is the notion that biblical history is a story of God having separate "dispensations" or covenants with different peoples at different times, so unlike the standard Christian theology of God had a covenant with the Jews, but then that was abolished when Jesus came along, the Dispensationalist followers of Darby, are connecting the founding of the modern state of Israel with their interpretation of end times prophecies, and that all the Jews in the world have to gather back again in Israel. So, many of them...especially some Texas oil billionaires, are actually the ones putting up most of the money to build new Jewish settlements in "the holy land." The Vice documentary series on HBO had a recent feature on the Christian Zionists which through interviews covered most of the essentials, notably that these Christian supporters of Israel are expecting Armageddon to happen there soon and kill one third of Israel's inhabitants....with the remaining survivors making a last ditch conversion to Christianity! So, what kind of friends are these? The kind of friends who instigate a fight, expecting you're going to lose!

Your past comment claims the prevailing winds take air pollution away from the City....I'm not sure if you are claiming that the wind never changes direction or the winds are always blowing...but regardless, do you have a source for that claim? The claim does show a clear disregard for the simple fact that someone has to be downwind of the City's air pollution. Sounds like the typical nimby attitude of 'as long as it doesn't affect me, I don't care.' Even if you did,

It is for those who are rich and can afford to live in the highrise condos. It's not for the poor slum-dwellers forced off the land, who move there and do the menial jobs, and have to live in shacks and live surrounded by garbage, dirty water and pollution.

So, we should allow one gazillionaire to buy up all the property and businesses...if he so chooses, and according to libertarian fantasy, it will still be a "free" market economy!

Obama...even with a Democratic Congress didn't have the guts to cut the pork where it really exists in the U.S. Government: i.e. the CIA's secret black ops budget that has grown four fold in size since 9/11....cut the rest of the billions in pork that every military and security dept. and contractor has used to try to grab more money; cut the Farm Bill! There's one I don't understand. Those farming states like Kansas, used to be considered leftwing decades ago, until Republicans started giving them subsidies. But, rather than support the family farm of Republican rhetoric, they allowed corporate conglomerates like ADM to swallow up millions of acres of farmland and collect the subsidies to grow more of the crap like soybeans and corn...which is causing obesity and type 2 diabetes in the first place! Obama could have taken a chainsaw to the Farm Bill and improved the environment and general health, along with balancing the budget.....but he didn't have the guts to do it, so without any alarm from the MSM he went after his supporters: freezing most federal govt. employees wages, and cutting funding for social spending programs for the poor....I know the rightwing media doesn't care about the poor, but where the hell were the so called liberals in the first term of the Obama Administration? Too late now. What the Obama Administration has done, is follow the same general bipartisan plan of the last....at least 40 years...since Nixon officially took the U.S. off the Gold Standard: keep piling up more debts with more virtual dollars, and use overwhelming military power as the leverage to enforce the continued supremacy of the U.S. Dollar as international reserve currency. As long as just about every other nation on Earth has to make trades with Dollars, they are stuck with assuming their portion of America's deficits and growing debts. If they try to break from the Dollar...well we know what happens because that's been the reason for the wars that aren't being fought because of oil these days.

Did you run out of hyperbole? The numbers don't lie - accumulated wealth and annual earnings are increasing at the top of the food chain; and after 40 years of increasing concentration of wealth at the top, and shrinking of the middle class, the latest word is that this trend continues today, through recessions and what qualifies as 'recovery'. From yesterday's NY Times: Gains From Economic Recovery Still Limited to Top One PercentIt’s the economic statistic that spawned the Occupy protest movement (“We are the 99 percent”), reshaped President Obama’s domestic program (“middle-class economics”), and most recently led the eternal Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to bemoan that “the rich have gotten richer.” I am speaking of the income share of the richest 1 percent of American families. Emmanuel Saez, the economics professor who crunches these numbers based on data provided by the Internal Revenue Service, has just released preliminary estimates for 2013. The share of total income (excluding capital gains) going to the top 1 percent remains above one-sixth, at 17.5 percent. By this measure, the concentration of income among the richest Americans remains at levels last seen nearly a century ago. But, why would this surprise anyone, after the decades-long trend in the U.S., Canada and other Neoliberal lab rats, to cut top tax rates, shift the tax burden to sales taxes, cut investment income taxes more than earned income tax rates, expanding corporate rights, allowing large corporations to reduce competition through mergers etc. etc. etc.! The system is designed by the rich (or more specifically their lawyers, accountants and lobbyists) for their benefit. As to what to replace it with? That's a harder problem to deal with today than it was prior to the establishment of the modern globalization cabal, which has the power to ruin almost every economy that refuses economic blackmail! Today's exhibit is the new government in Greece. They are promising that they won't default on the E.U. loans which mostly went to enriching Deutscebank and Goldmann - Sachs, and that can only be interpreted as a loss of courage on their part, since the wealthy Greek tycoons have already sent most of their ill-gotten wealth to foreign tax havens, and Greece is left with a choice of: a. calling the E.U.'s bluff, and refusing further payments on foreign loans by past governments or b. caving in, and accepting the E.U.'s terms: paying loans to stay in the Eurozone, further privatization of the Greek economy, and the continued downward spiral that has already led to wide scale homelessness and malnutrition. I haven't been following Greece's political scene closely, but if Syriza's leader is turning into the Greek version of Obama, then they will likely end up with the bloody communist vs. fascist battle that had been predicted three or four years ago. The sad fact is that the only thing that can ultimately save us from economic, ecological and nuclear destruction is the complete collapse of our present global capitalist system. That seems to be the only avenue for starting over with something completely different.

Some of them are. One that stands out in particular, was a grimy, middle-aged...not too terribly bright...guy I worked with some years ago, who was always doing the Jesus spiel whenever he got a chance. He could turn just about any conversation..whether it's how's the weather or how are the Leafs doing lately, into "have you been saved?" So, obviously he was a pain-in-the-ass for me and most others to try to avoid. I did learn that he was a former full patched member of the Outlaws and after a few years behind bars came out with some bikers-for-Jesus outfit..but he wasn't doing it just to reduce his sentence or try to impress or swindle others. He could convincingly say that you wouldn't be safe around me if I was still an outlaw; and judging from his take on issues, I got the clear impression that he was someone who could only understand morality and live among the civilized as long as he was rigorously following some rule-based system like the evangelical church he became affiliated with in prison. I know that the exception doesn't prove a rule, but there are some people that are never going to function outside of a correctional facility without being part of some rigid system like a fundamentalist church.

I'm reminded that one of the reasons Superstorm Sandy caused much higher deaths and severe injuries, was because there had been one or two major storm warnings that fizzled out...or in the case of Hurricane Irene...shifted course and missed NYC. I wonder if a lot of Vermonters felt it was retribution for going on and on about how New York dodged a bullet, when that bullet - Irene flooded out valleys and cause major destruction in Vermont. The average New Yorker only has room for what affects them directly. So, since news this morning says New York was spared, they'll be yacking about how 'nothing happened' because....nothing happened to them. And the next time a storm comes barreling in, they'll be out and about just like during Sandy!

That's not going to work! The attention spans of most people these days are too short to learn from the past or learn from previous mistakes! So, wishing a big storm will wake people there up to climate change, will likely last as long and yield the same long term results as the results the Sandy Hook Massacre had on gun control. Many people....even Democratic lawmakers...who never stick their necks out without checking polling data or focus group testing...jumped the gun and called for banning assault weapons like the AR-15 (why the hell is that even legal in the first place?), only to watch the issue fade from the headlines and wither on the vine as various branches of the gun lobby went to work promoting more gun sales and fewer restrictions. Nothing much surprises me these days, but even I was surprised that the killing of 20 grade one schoolchildren couldn't end the insanity of allowing most everyone to run around carrying firearms; so I can't say I would hold out much hope that those denying the obvious on climate change will change course because of any size storm before the wheels fall off the wagon of civilization.