WIP

Out of curiosity- do conservatives ever take a step back and ask how these problems arise in the first place? Just curious, because in all the bafflegab about illegal immigration that really started to turn me off about US grassroots conservatives, I could never find one who even wanted to bother wondering WHY people were crossing the southern US border, and even where their countries of origin were! So, now this Syria thing is a competition between who takes the most refugees? That's the only issue at stake? I've mentioned many times already, that there would be no refugee crisis from Syria or Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia, if these countries weren't staging grounds for US covert military operations. The wars never seem to be going as smoothly as planned (in spite of all the high tech electronics and weaponry), and after overthrowing governments, the US doesn't know what to do to pacify the region enough to impose Neoliberal economic solutions on them. And now, the next refugee crisis is in its infancy as US guns, planes and bombs are used by the Saudis to devastate Yemen.....watch for that wave of refugees in a year or two to add to the ones already trying to migrate north! So, I'll leave it with the note that the question of whether Canada is more generous than the US, is irrelevant. The US had been using Assad during WarOnTerror days (Maher Arar) just as they used Gadaffi. And when they decided that they were no longer useful....or at least essential, the US set the process in motion for regime change.....that hasn't quite worked as planned in either case. European nations should be sending ALL of their Syrian, Libyan and Iraqi refugees to the US....because this was their baby! And for all of the Harpercons out there who demand that Canada march in lock step with US foreign policy.....that gives us at least 10% of the total refugee number.....which is a hellofalot more than 10,000!

It wouldn't be much of a problem If Canadians were living better and more healthy as they age! You can't carry 50 or 100 lbs of excess weight around without becoming a drain on the healthcare system by the time you reach 60. Too many people are in too big of a hurry to buy all the crap they think they need, and not getting enough sleep, exercise, or walking past the snack and prepared foods sections of the supermarket, to buy the basics needed for making homecooked meals today. So, it's a bad thing...as things are turning out for us today, with so many aging so badly....but it doesn't have to be that way! Take some action against fastfood advertising and apply surtaxes on the garbage that people shouldn't be feeding their kids anyway, and use that money to cut the increasing prices of fruits and vegetables....that would be a start! Whatever happened to those Participaction commercials anyway? At least they served as some simple level of instruction to motivate people to adopt better living habits.

Reminds me that the reason why there is a Syrian war, an ISIS and a Syrian refugee crisis with as many as 4 million Syrians already having fled the Country is because the US Coup Machine seized upon the local unrest caused by a long-running severe drought, and decided regime change was in order for Syria while they were still mired with overthrowing Col. Kadaffi in Libya! After more than 80 coups and attempted coups, when will the clueless realize that the source of instability and conflict in the world has been right in Washington the whole time: America's Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953 U.S. efforts to overthrow foreign governments leave the world less peaceful, less just and less hopeful.

132 pages on, and it's pretty clear that the harpies here just can't shut up about niqabs! And, since Singapore sometimes gets mentioned by social conservatives out to ban everything that some people do for fun, I'm reminded that chewing gum is banned and criminalized in Singapore. That's enough reason for me to stay away and never reference them as an example of how we should do things over here.

And if the Conservatives were still running Alberta, the economic picture wouldn't look any better! Ultimately, the tarsands operations have to cut staff and even the big ones could be closing down and writing off billions in losses if oil prices don't go back up to $100 by the end of next year, and there's not a damn thing any politician or provincial government can do to stop this rolling disaster from taking its course! I just hope Albertans are smart enough to realize this....I'm not getting that indication from federal polling data showing the usual sweep for the Fed-Cons, but the best Albertans can hope for is that their Government will look after the most vulnerable, and use whatever capital they have at their disposal to diversify the Alberta economy away from its exclusive oil dependence, that allowed the corruption, greed and avarice of the last 40 years. These tarsands projects are so environmentally destructive that they should have never been considered in the first place! Back when Alberta had real oil in the ground, a few surface deposits were used for collecting tar for road-paving.....that's all this crap should have ever been used for!

Yes. That goes without saying! But, that story reminded me how empty and shallow the conservative rhetoric of "hiring based on individual merit" that's used against providing incentives for hiring minorities and people from various disenfranchised groups actually is: like it or not (especially in an era when good jobs are hard to find), without any goals or guidelines in place, an employer can find lots of excuses to cover for rejecting any applicant based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation etc..

At work a few years back, we had an HR manager who accidentally let the cat out of the bag when he bragged in a message through his company email account that 'no pakis have been hired in here since I've been managing this dept..' Till then, he probably had ready excuses every time a South Asian was turned down for a job. I guess it's a matter of where the burden of proof should be!

Well, off the top, it's another industry that benefits from limiting public access to information.

I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but once again, the limits to growth seem to be doing what environmental groups and spineless politicians can't or won't do: close out risky and expensive tight oil drilling ventures. Earlier today, Shell announced that they are shutting down their Arctic drilling venture indefinitely, and with no other oil companies in the US or Russia willing to invest billions into Arctic ventures, Arctic oil spills are no longer a threat to be concerned with! So, they were drilling a mile and a quarter under the Arctic sea floor and still hadn't reached the oil and gas deposit they were hoping for. Recall that the BP Horizon disaster in the Gulf, hit that major gas deposit about a mile under the seafloor, and needless to say this venture would have had to find a huge oil deposit to justify costs. And with oil at $50. per barrel, they could never pay for the costs of getting that oil to the nearest export terminal 1000 miles away. Some time, I'd like to come across something from the geologists who are studying and mapping out the Arctic seafloor...because if we think of how oil, gas and coal deposits are the buildup over millions of years of organic material trapped underground, it would seem to reason that over Earth's geologic history, the Arctic and Antarctic regions should be relatively poor areas to look for carbon deposits! But, somebody at Shell decided it would be a good enough gamble to waste 8 billion dollars on! And the reason why the oil companies are still spending huge amounts of cash to develop "unconventional" oil like deep sea, tarsands and shales, is because the easy stuff has already been tapped, and the large conventional oil fields are all past their points of peak production. An oil company has only two choices: find another way to make money or try to go after the last drops of oil that can be exploited for profit. And that's what's getting difficult today! OIl at over $100 a barrel causes our wasteful economies to stall out and decline, and then low demand for oil creates low oil prices that can't allow further exploration and development. Some of that may return when prices inevitably spike upwards again, but will there be enough cash available to start up these tight oil ventures? Eventually the time comes when we transition towards renewable energy supplies and a lot less energy consumption per capita....or we play road warrior and fight for control of the gas stations.

I've noticed that the IPCC seems to be placing a lot of their hope in the promise of carbon capture and storage.....one report I came across estimated CCS could sequester between 10 and 55% of emitted carbon by 2100. Off the top, that makes a pretty big barn door to drive through, since a 10% reduction would barely slow down the increasing amounts of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere....let alone if carbon starts getting released large scale from the Arctic. But, even a 55% reduction....if feasible, would require substantial capital investment and energy supplies. I don't see any way of getting around the problem without reducing carbon emissions to start with. Then there's the fact that global warming isn't the only environmental problem this world faces today! There's also rapidly declining wildlife habitats, groundwater depletion and topsoil loss, overpopulation (of humans), continuing buildup of plastic wastes in the oceans.....these are all problems that can't be dealt unless we stop demands for increasing economic growth....the world's not growing any bigger to accommodate all of our demands!

That is a faith-based assumption that I don't share, and don't believe should ever be tested. How would we know the answer? If a surviving remnant population made it through a major bottleneck, they might have lost all ability to record that information to warn future generations. And if nobody survived, who's going to write up the final chapter?

Maybe this is why Frank Luntz and other conservative propagandists are so busy creating and test-driving new pejorative buzzwords these days! Since the Berlin Wall fell almost 25 years ago, younger people can't be scared of hearing terms like socialist and maybe even communist....so they've got to come up with something to keep the masses busy and working for the benefit of the tiny, wealthy ruling classes.

But, if he gets defensive and makes excuses when challenged about making an assumption that women cannot know anything about electronics, then he's deliberately promoting that imbalance. I tried to make a similar point with Mr. mathformula about what I noticed coming from women entering non-traditional...formerly male-only occupations. When I read in the literature that men in formerly male occupations sense a loss of social status in our society when a woman gets hired to do the same job...or apprentice at the same job, I realized that I had picked it up also on an unconscious level, judging by the way I referred to work to others....usually avoiding any mention of women getting hired. After 5000 years of the work men do being considered more important than what women do, it becomes and ingrained cultural phenomena that has to be dealt with directly and honestly.

The "menacing our NATO allies" is bullshit! NATO could have been dissolved after the Warsaw Pact was ended. Instead, NATO has kept expanding and encircling Russia, with the goal of destabilizing Russia enough to break it apart into separate, smaller countries. As for the Arctic....lining up with the aggressive posture of the Americans (and trying to look tougher even though we have no means to project power) hasn't helped us any in dealing with Russia over the melting Arctic Ocean (the reason why this is an issue to begin with). Right from the start, Canada has issued threats against Russia for encroaching in the Canadian Arctic, and never made any serious attempts to discuss or negotiate Arctic issues with Russia....that should be the sensible first option! We...along with the other nations bordering the Arctic and Aboriginal councils belong to an Arctic Council. But all it's been used for is negotiating environmental treaties! Why hasn't the Arctic Council been the used as a forum for discussing and trying to resolve any disputes over land or resources? Probably a dumb question to ask people who would rather have the next world war!

In a previous interview, Putin noted that Assad is president of the internationally recognized government of Syria....a minor inconvenience for Obama and US lawmakers in general, but someone should ask what right the United States has to determine who should be in charge of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and every other nation in the world!

Great! Everyone in the radioactive pool!

And this is why nuclear and the oil industry is pushing so hard to get more concessions from government! If it comes to a straight head-to-head competition with renewables, they're fast reaching the time (if not already there) where they are no longer competitive without using government to prop up their businesses. In Africa and Asia already, new powerplant projects are being mothballed because potential investors fear too many are buying solar panels, solar cookers and windmills to make the power stations and the electrical grids profitable.

I don't!

Or maybe he's a sociopath! The reckless conduct of today's business and political leaders would indicate that we're being ruled by psychopaths....who among their features, are poor at risk assessment, and choose immediate gratification regardless of the consequences. It might explain a lot of what's happened in the world over the past 50 or 6o years.

The IPCC reports always have to be revised upwards on CO2 levels, sea level rise, declining ice caps....but what I'm talking about are the proposals to mitigate climate change...let's just say there's no hope in hell of getting atmospheric CO2 levels back to 350 within the next 500 to 1000 years. Those enviro-scares aren't in the past...just not being discussed anymore. Earth's human population consumes too much of the planet's primary production already, and when the oil starts running out in a couple of decades, all of the cheap grain production dependent on fertilizers and underground water goes as well! Population levels should have been brought under control back when Paul Ehrlich wrote his book....and there 3.5 billion people in the world. Instead, the so called Green Revolution was used to allow populations to further expand and absorb all of the food production on new lands that were cleared and irrigated. Now, there's almost nowhere to expand for more food-growing, and the seas are being depleted of fish and marine mammals....so you're dreaming if you think the population bomb was a scare tactic of 50 years ago. It should have served as a warning because the fundamentals haven't changed! Instead, all we did was double down by raising the stakes even higher...meaning that the inevitable shortages, famines, and resource wars will be larger and more threatening to human survival than they would have been if population started plateauing 30 or 40 years ago.

Even if we were to accept the Just War Theory in the case of Hitler and WWII, let's see you make the case that any of these more recent wars fit the designation of 'Just War'. It seems everyone with a just war argument can only come up with Hitler for some reason! What we have now is a cascading effect of wars causing more wars. Want to end war: ban the international sale and export of weapons!

I'm not a liberal, but off the top I notice that conservative governments have blown holes in the budgets of both Canada and the United States, which the liberals are tasked with rebalancing afterwards. Money is no object, when the spending is on military and other conservative wet dream projects. But, when it comes to any sort of domestic programs that might benefit average people: how are we going to pay for that?

A quick look at your link reveals the first fatal flaw in history studies: the subject index has four chapters on European history, then it moves on to look at four centuries of American history, and Africa and Asia added as an afterthought! That tells us right there the major fatal flaw of western education...everything is presented from a Eurocentric viewpoint. The rest of the world is "discovered" even when other people have lived there and built civilizations of their own for thousands of years. And right to this day, a good case could be made that our present wars and geopolitical conflicts stem from the belief that the rest of the world has to think like us and adopt our cultural, political and philosophical viewpoints (values of the enlightenment). Read something from an outsider looking in on the European/American experience, like Edward Said, and the enlightenment and its age of exploration and conquest looks to much of the rest of the world like a human plague descended on them and their lives were never the same afterwards! I don't want to be pedantic about it, but now is as good a time as any to stop assuming that using male terminology for entire groups "all men" need to be replaced with terms like everyone or all people. Whether it seems clunky or cumbersome right now, much of the reason is that we have to many legacies from times past in our culture when women didn't count for much outside of making babies and doing housework. But, the big mistake I see here is treating nations as collectives of equal individuals all sharing in the decisions their nation makes. This doesn't even happen in the nations that have elections and pretend to be democracies! At least since recorded history began, nations have been ruled by small cliques with inordinate power to control the fates of thousands and millions of people within their nations. So, referencing the later portion of your post: is America slow in learning and making the same mistakes getting into costly, devastating wars, or is the whole process beyond the control of average Americans to begin with...and possibly even most of the elected leaders as well? Because warfaring is a very profitable business. Right now, today, America is the largest arms merchant in the world, and is still willing to sell weapons like landmines and clusterbombs to nations like Saudi Arabia....who are busy at work creating the next mass wave of refugees with their bombing campaign in Yemen. The average American (and average Canadian) isn't much aware of the costs of war, the civilian costs (except possibly if the media connects the dots between the latest refugee crises with the wars), and especially the profiteering that goes on behind the scenes with the business of war, because 99% of our servile media is owned and controlled by corporations who earn most or part of their revenues from war. And I didn't even get to the main motivation for most of the wars the US instigates today: taking control of oil and other economic assets in countries that aren't playing ball with US-based institutions, and using the threat of military force to keep other debt-ridden economic colonies in line. So, nothing can be done about stopping the foolishness of war as long as it is profitable for powerful ruling classes, and is actually essential for maintaining the global banking and commerce empire.

No kidding! The big problem is the problems associated with global warming have been lowballed by all sides in the debate. The public has never been presented with the scenario that tough choices will have to be made in the future. Liberals just want a softer, nicer version of the usual status quo, so the platform from the beginning of the global warming debate has been what can we afford to do without making major structural changes to our economic systems, even though the advocates of "sustainable growth" never get around to explaining how growth can be derived without increasing energy demands and resource inputs. So my expectations are low from mainstream politics anyway. The bad news coming in regarding rising oil and essential resource costs of extraction, seem to indicate that the scarcities that are being created and leading to worldwide grinding economic malaise, may accomplish for reduced carbon emissions what a room-full of politicians and experts could never accomplish!

First off, since I didn't know what the hell this crap was when I saw SJW tossed around, I look to Wikipedia and find that "Social Justice Warrior" is a concocted pejorative to try to mock and vilify any activists concerned about social justice, and persecution of disenfranchised groups in our modern, extremely unequal society....guess who's side I'm on? So, the few women who find their way into the He-man Women-Haters Club are just making it all up! I am sure as hell not going to blindly accept the narrative of the rightwing knobs who create terms like SJW, to try to shout down their critics. Well, since I waded in this deep to the latest rightwing outrage of the week, I find the Breitbart outrage is because Sarkeesian's group is concerned about ALL forms of cyber abuse directed at women around the world...of all different backgrounds, and NOT just the narrow targeted range of misogyny that the right will stamp put a stamp on approval on (crimes committed by Muslims). Millions affected globally, but most countries still failing to effectively address growing problem Date : 24 September 2015 Yeah, we don't need girls on our internet! No, I recognized that I am as subject to accepting at an intuitive, subconscious level, many things that I reject at a conscious level. And the only way to clear up any behaviours and motivations that are unwanted, is to stop occasionally and apply a little reflective analysis of our actions from time to time. And then there's those who prefer to live in denial and claim to others that they are never racist or sexist etc.!