WIP

It's booming if you own a bank, an arms manufacturing operation or an oil company, otherwise.........

WE? Who's the 'we' that will be paying higher taxes? Mostly those in the top income bracket who believe that neither they/nor the corporations they control should have to pay any taxes. If supply side economic theory actually worked in practice, the "rising tide" would have been raising all boats south of the border for the past 30 years already instead of making America even more unequal and dysfunctional! A vote for the Cons is vote for a US style hollowed out economy.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention the economy yet regarding the subject of Trump's re-election chances. That's what it all hinges on after all. If the US economy tanks, an idiot like Trump is so hated by so many people that he won't be able to be elected dogcatcher without some sort of general confidence that the economy will improve and that he'll actually be able to increase manufacturing jobs.

Read "The Authoritarians" by Robert Altemeyer. An exhaustive analysis of subjects filling out questionnaires reveals that the profile of the average follower of an authoritarian leader is traditionalist, quickly motivated by fear response, and demands clear and definitive answers and proposals....no room for nuance or refraining from making snap decisions and judgments.....now who's profiles do those facets of personality reflect in the realm of politics? And you can still download the pdf version for free: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Through their covert alliance with Saudi Arabia and Gulf States, Israel has been supporting the rise of all of the Sunni extremists....including ISIS. That's why their screaming bloody murder, along with the Sauds, that Russia is bombing their jihadis who invaded Syria to overthrow the Assad regime. It doesn't matter what alphabet soup of names they call themselves, they have received their guns and training from the US/Saudi/Israeli partnership.

That is the authoritarian mindset after all! Conservative-thinking people do as little independent thinking as possible, because their way of looking at the world is rule-based! They demand books and leaders with simple answers to the most complex problems. And when it comes to leadership, liberal thinkers are wary and skeptical of those who strive for leadership....even the ones who match our thinking and positions on issues. And even when conservatives have a nasty, contentious fight for leadership (like McCain vs. Romney in 08), the conservatives are expected to rally round the leader afterwards, and will only snipe at him in retrospect.....like all the conservatives who have complained about Bush's wars and spending policies after he was out of office!

Yes, I know America is here...and I think everyone else knows that as well! I've mentioned previously that I've lived and worked in the US earlier in my life, and I have family relations (through my mother) in Michigan and elsewhere. But, that's not the point here! Most Americans of all backgrounds have been instilled with the notion that their nation is superior and deserves to rule the world....so America is dangerously paranoid today....and that's a big reason why Canada should have protected itself as much as possible from being colonized by US business interests. The problem is (mostly out west) a bunch of morons who want us even more interwoven with US economic policy though the next round of even more intrusive trade agreements. When I was working in a small autoparts manufacturer during the time the Reagan/Mulroney deal came at us, I was in the minority who realized we were trading away independence for the promise of money(that supplier ended up shutting down 10 years later anyway). Things turned out even worse than I or any free trade critic expected...because we didn't know it was all part of the great globalization scam that kicks all of the money up to the top...the owners and controllers of big capital, and everyone else would lose....only difference would be who's wages would stagnate or fall faster! And now the clowns out west who think Canada is all about extracting resources for export...want to do it all over again! That's a big part of the reason why both the Liberal and the NDP parties start turning vague and fuzzy when it comes to environment issues! Extracting tarsands is so important to Albertans after 40 years of free money coming in, that not even an NDP Government can call for shutting it down no matter what the consequences are for the environment!

I didn't say they did! But, if you can't see a parallel between what's happening to the smaller shale oil producers and the larger tarsands operations, you're not paying attention! The only difference is tarsands has more money behind them and will be able to hold out longer. But, if there is no return to a good-old-days of worldwide economic growth, they will end up in the same mess. 4500 m is pretty deep and expensive, and the horizontal legs further down will be more costly than closer to the surface. So, how many holes have to be drilled and how long can the oil deposits be pumped before they go into decline? Because that's what's killing the Bakken right now. There is no means to get the oil out of the ground and make a profit at today's prices.....let alone pay off the accumulated debts to investors.

NO and I mean NO media source can be taken at face value to cover all news and issues fairly these days. And that includes a lot of new liberal media favoured by Democrats in the US and Liberals here, like Buzzfeed, Gawker, Huffpo, and Vice News! What you're going to find is that an organization like Vice...which for some reason has endless supplies of money behind it compared to what I consider honest sources like Consortium News, Real News Network and DemocracyNow, and Vice will present stories where it seems like they are going after the right people....and then when it comes to the Ukraine, they churn out the same crap that every other news source in the US comes up with....and that's where the suspicions about how much editorial control a major backer like George Soros has on Vice behind the scenes, becomes a factor. So in the final summation, I'm suspicious of every organization regardless of their political alignment that is well funded (Vice news is worth 1.6 billion) to cover everything honestly. My suspicions are that sensationalist left-leaning media like Vice and the liberal clickbait crap like Huffpo, Gawker, and Buzzfeed are there to work the left side of the aisle and drop in essential propaganda that their wealthy patrons want added in to the news.

Most scientists are not very good debaters It really doesn't tell much about the merits of someone's position on issues. And thats most of the reason why a clown like William Lane Craig can win so many debates on religious issues with atheists and scientists!

Thanks for the encouragement, and I have to say that since my experience on forums started about 10 years ago, when I was more rightwing thinking and was on mostly US rightwing boards, I've seen worse....a lot, lot worse when it comes to trolls than bc. I often wonder why he's stayed here so long also! He would be much more at home on American forums....where he would be part of the mainstream thinking.

Since, according to my Twitter feed it is World Vegetarian Day today, I want to mention that one of my great frustrations with mainstream environmentalism is that all of the attention is on transportation and power generation.....like in this thread! While at least 30% of carbon emissions in modern economies like Canada and the US, comes from industrial agriculture....primarily dealing with the meat and dairy industries and their high demands for the large chunk of the corn, wheat and soybean production. I don't know about Suzuki, but Mckibben and his 350.org group that gets so much money and attention and celebrities doesn't deal with the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture. So, if most environmentally conscious Canadians want to make a major reduction in their personal carbon footprint, stop eating meat and dairy products....or at least cut down your intake! I noticed yesterday when I had to make a trip to the supermarket that hamburger was about $5.50 a pound and better cuts of beef were $8 to $10.00.....so, aside from environmental, health and ethical reasons, consumers can save themselves a lot of money these days by shifting to a vegan diet. And, it would probably do more to reduce your carbon footprint than buying a Prius or a new solar panel or whatever yuppies are doing these days to be eco-friendly! How Factory Farming Contributes To Global Warming

Which only proves once again that capitalist markets are hard to predict how they will react to outside pressures because they are fundamentally irrational to begin with! The %200 per barrel prediction was advanced by a number of economists like former CIBC chief economist - Jeff Rubin (one I read several articles by), because the reaction to increasing costs of oil production and flattening world production levels after 05 would logically be an increase in the price of oil. But, after oil spiked to $147 (thanks to futures markets panic buying) oil dropped down to $100....which is still too high for economic growth in most capitalist economies....so, after almost a year of a glut in supplies on the world markets, oil prices started reflecting the lack of demand. I don't find any mainstream economist (left or right) who has a good explanation for why falling oil and commodity prices aren't spurring another rise in economic activity and production. The best explanation over the past year I've found has come from Danish actuary and Oilprice.com contributor - Gail Tverberg, who posted a lengthy editorial on her Finite World blog making the case that the lack of real economic growth has led to excessive debt loads at all levels, so even if $50 per barrel should restart production, the debtload is reflecting the real hard limits to growth today, and keeping prices for oil and commodities at levels where it has become impossible to exploit them profitably. According to the latest numbers, the rig count of active drilling rigs in the US shale fields has dropped from 1600 to less than 600; and with low oil prices and investors pulling out, a crash in shale oil production and some other high priced oil ventures, will likely lower supply enough for demand to raise prices. But, all indications are that once oil goes beyond $60, then everything slows down again. This is why the peak oil economists like Rubin predicted that the longterm trend would be gradually downward, with each 'boom' being less than enough to recoup the losses from the previous recession, and that would be the course over the coming decades. On that point, I think Rubin is probably still on track! Where this issue of peak oil and limits to growth intersects with the environment issue of carbon production, is that we will likely see much less carbon being produced by industry and transportation in the coming years, and neither the big environment groups/nor the oil industry propagandists are factoring declining carbon production into their predictions of the future. So, we may meet carbon targets...but not for the reasons that Suzuki or Greenpeace or 350.org are expecting to meet them.....instead we may meet our carbon targets by the same means that Russia was easily able to meet their Kyoto targets: economic collapse!

Well, thanks for trolling by, but you should know by now that this is not an argument that's going get me outraged. I've pointed out many times to the chagrin of Canadian patriots from left to right, that voting and accepting more and more cultural and economic entanglement with the American Empire removes our legitimacy to challenge the aspects of Pax Americana that we don't like, and we knew our national identity would start to unwind back when the first FTA treaty was signed. But, there were too many opportunists who bought that bullshit line that we could get richer exporting more and more to US markets. So, we sold our sovereignty and independence for 30 shekels or whatever would be the modern equivalent.

It's hard to tell the difference between ISIL and the Israeli Government!

I watched that Netroots Nation Sanders speech where he had his first encounter with Black Lives Matter. It would have never have been a problem for him if, during all of his time in Washington, he had delved into the issue a little or had some understanding of how law enforcement is applied more frequently and with greater violence against black communities than among whites. And let's face it, on a personal level, Sanders has long been understood to be an asshole when dealing with people.....even his own supporters! And maybe you can tell us what this has to do with microaggressions!

Who has the money? I've never been to university, but I know for a fact that the so called "radical" professors are aging out and being replaced with adjunct teachers with no opportunities for tenure...in other words - no opportunity to speak freely on any subject that the university administration considers of importance. Economics and MBA programs are being funded directly by business (even in my hometown university), and profs that speak out forcefully against racism and zionism are being pushed out, and unable to find work in other institutions. So, this rightwing theme you're repeating all the time here of colleges and universities being bastions of radicalism is pure bullshit that started changing way back in the 60's! Now, with non-tenured professors, direct corporate funding, and students who will graduate with debtloads that will keep them from buying a first home until their about 50, real radicalism....which I would argue is necessary because radicals come up with new ideas and new approaches) doesn't exist here anymore! But your despicable crew defines radicalism as any marginalized group attempting to push back. I haven't really looked into the UN Report, but since 75% of women who go online report varying levels of sexual harassment, it seems that online geeks and gamers wouldn't be threatened with the prospect of censorship in the first place, if they were dealing with the problem to begin with! Like I said before, I don't really know online gaming, and it's your issue to begin with/ not the original point of the rightwinger who started the thread. It's just part of the picture of how our culture has become more/not less misogynistic in modern times....countering a lot of liberal hopes and dreams of the future. Galileo is like Hitler! A trump card played by everyone trying to advance bad logic! In actual fact, Galileo wasn't alone in positing that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and even more important: his critics were not the equivalent of today's flatearthers and creationists. During that time, nearly all science and philosophy was taught directly and indirectly by the Church, and the adherents of a geocentric universe had a good argument against Galileo and other proponents of heliocentrism: when objects in the night sky were charted (as best they could at the time), the early astronomers couldn't detect any change in position of the stars during the course of one year. At a time when the Universe was believed to be much smaller than it is today, most of the astronomers (who included highly placed clerics) reasoned that a parallax effect at six month intervals, would have shifted the position of the stars from season to season. And since the stars always seem to hold their place in the night sky, they decided that the only way to resolve the movements in the heavens was to create elaborate models of overlapping spheres around an Earth at the center of God's Creation. Of course, now we know they were wrong, and even today's telescopes with equatorial mounts do not show any change from diurnal parallax, except among the nearby stars in our Local Group. But, just to set the record straight, Galileo did not have a ready answer for the apparent lack of shift and the Pope at the time, was dealing with rising protestant movements across Europe and determined to enforce uniformity in all things. So, if Galileo's colleagues agreed with him, the Pope would have likely demanded that everyone change and adopt the new theory of the universe. I know this is going way offtrack, but I am getting so sick and tired of having Galileo dragged out as the lone man of science persecuted by the forces of ignorance, I had to add it in. As I see it: every argument that is made to give individual rights and freedoms a veto power over obvious examples of discrimination and persecution of marginalized groups is a right wing argument!

That's why I say we're the ones with the southern border problem....not the US! Even without formal invasion, what are we going to do when millions of Americans all armed with guns decide that Canada is part of their manifest destiny?

Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that people are staying healthier longer? Because I'm reading about rising type 2 diabetes rates, and increasing obesity likely being a factor in higher cancer rates as well. And, nursing homes...like the one my 97 year old mother is living in now are being stressed not only by increasing numbers of applicants (long expected by changing demographics) but more so because new prospective residents are moving in at younger ages and have higher likelihood of dementia and other mental illnesses, requiring more hours of care than other residents.

Or based on past historical behaviour, the Americans will just move north and claim the land for their farmers!

You're always looking for that case of reverse discrimination, aren't you? My anecdote is from personal workplace experience, a manager was able to discriminate and hide it, and dismiss suspicions for seven years, until he accidentally outed himself in a careless email post.

I said before that I wouldn't really care about this issue, if it wasn't for people like you who throw it around as a pejorative to vilify what I consider disenfranchised groups, who have every right to make their points about the majority culture....which tends to pretend that everything's okay....no need to investigate further... So, if it's that important to you to argue that social justice advocates themselves started calling themselves "warriors" and it was not a pack of internet hounds, take it up with Know Your Meme....because...as I stated previously, they were the only ones I could find who made an attempt to find the origins of the term, which they say began with a Blogspot blog called: Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage........so, take it up with them! For my part, it seems logical that the typical right wing attack of creating terminology to make weaker groups appear as the aggressors, was in play when that blog was created. Just like global warming-denying scientists, the stable of antifeminist female aggit-propagandists is small enough to fit into my livingroom.....so once again, Christian Hoff Sommers is the one and only credentialed female academic to present the case that feminism has destroyed modern culture and is harming boys and young men....and that's why the American Enterprise Institute has her on their payroll of go-to rightwing counter-experts. And Karen Straughan....jesus christ! Every single misogynist trying to justify their hostility against women for the past 10 years links me to these Karen Straughan Youtube videos! Karen Straughan herself is a nobody....but she does have the talent to stroke a lot of fragile male egos in the cybersphere, and is likely making a lot of money at it....since she is very territorial about her importance to the MRA movement, and gets into pissing matches with every female who goes online with videos and attains a relative amount of popularity. Unless the others on your list, have something better or at least something new to argue, I'm not going to bother looking them up! "left wing" is meaningless designation when taken out of certain contexts! I can give you lots of socialist and even marxist-leaning labour activists who are misogynists. The tendency is going to be for those on the left to be more female-friendly because the left will put more emphasis on social needs and concerns than rightwing everymanforhimself libertarians. And that right there is why right wing causes do not win as much support from women as men. But, the exceptions don't prove a rule here either.

Not yet! But, they are all hemorrhaging money with oil below $50per barrel, and slowing down operations to cut costs, in the hope that prices will be higher next year. I made the point earlier that the tarsands operations were big money and had billions of dollars in capital lined up behind them, so they may not be in as much trouble as the ventures in the Bakken Shales in North Dakota and Wyoming, or Eagleford in Oklahoma/North Texas, where some of the smaller, independent riggers are already going bankrupt, and at least one large venture capitalist (KKR) is writing off more than a billion dollar investment in the recent bankruptcy of Samson Resources. According to the Bloomberg News article, KKR has a total equity of over 100 billion dollars, so the bad bet on Samson isn't enough in itself to bring down the Wall Street firm, but they will obviously lose investor confidence over this huge looming writedown of assets....and what about the other, smaller operations? How long will they be able to keep drilling before investors pull all of their money out of this decrepit business? So, now that costly shale oil development has reached the point where it can no longer be done profitably, do you expect anything different from tarsands? They are larger, and have more capital at their disposal, which in these times just means that it will take longer for them to fall! If allowed to follow its course, northern Alberta would be covered with tailing ponds. But, too many Albertans in the south don't give a shit because they don't have to deal with it! Sure, improvements can be made in efficiency to reduce extraction and development costs, but world oil prices are too low to make it profitable, and as tarsands keeps drilling and pumping into lower and lower sediments, the energy costs inevitably rise. As for steel manufacturing....I've lived most of my life near the City of Hamilton, and steel production has become much cleaner and more efficient over the last 40 years than it was when I was young, and you could smell them even when you were riding in a car going over the Burlington Skyway! One difference between tarsands and steelmaking is steel is an obvious essential for maintaining any modern civilization....extracting bitumen from tarsands is not! I have mentioned numerous times that I wish it was more than a few hippies and radical economists back in the 70's, who understood the simple fact that all of our extractions and developments of nature have to be scale back and consumer-driven capitalism has to end. In the longer term future, even some of the things we consider essential today - like having our own cars, has to be phased out, because providing everyone with a car and roads and highways to drive them on is the greatest part of the average person's resource and carbon footprints today. I took a quick look, since when I was last in that area in the early 80's, I was led to believe that the oil was running out and there wouldn't be much worth keeping the rigs out there in another 10 years. The 2013 Alberta quarterly report on oil and gas (latest I could find) mentions the oil you're talking about, PLUS the part you left out: it requires hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to get the oil and gas out of the ground! In other words, it's the same damn thing being used in socalled "Saudi America" to get their oil and gas. It's a dirty, expensive and energy-intensive extraction process every bit as much as tarsands extraction! So, back to Square One!

So, all you're capable of, is reading off the latest Conservative Party talkingpoints, and when you get slammed by hard facts that cannot be denied...like the squandering of billions of dollars in oil revenue by the Provincial Conservative Governments in Alberta over the decades, you got nothing! You think a childish personal attack is going to impress anyone?

I won't be voting Conservative, primarily because....after the changes Harper has made so far in our government, I don't believe we will be able to dislodge this kind of Neoliberal/corporate-friendly government again even when the Conservatives are out of power! We've seen this process unfold over the last 30 years or so in the US, where the Republicans went from being the minority party in Congress and in most state houses, to being the Party that runs local government all across America....even in many of the more liberal states; mostly because of gerrymandering of districts, but also because "money equals speech for corporate "persons."" No doubt we will end up with the same crap in this Country after another Harper term finds ways of reducing the size of the voting public, expanding thought control under Bill C-51, and essentially making us the 51st state once the TPP, TISA and TTIP get rammed through.....another issue that doesn't seem to be able to be brought to public attention. Good thing the dairy farmers came along this time and actually got TPP back in the news cycle, and what the repercussions will be after 2nd stage NAFTA goes through. When it comes to the economy: you're dreaming if you think things are going to be better next year! Regardless of who's in power, a resource export-dependent economy like Canada's is going to get whacked by a continuing economic malaise where trillions in accumulated debt are crushing demand for oil and other commodities. I'm betting the storms on the horizon were the reason why Harper called the election now, in the first place! Maybe the Liberals nor the NDP will be able to do a better job managing an economy during times of reduced demand for oil and metals....but at least their not fascists like the modern day Conservative Party!