WIP

But, the new physics of the 20th century (quantum mechanics and relativity) that remains counter-intuitive to our expectations, is proven and was essential for the development of modern technologies and space travel. And when applied to cosmological theories, they prove that universes cannot be singular events. If one universe comes into existence, so do an infinite number of universes. The point Vilenkin was making with Eternal Inflation, was that Guth's Inflation Theory occurred during a stage of the early universe when quantum fluctuations would have to be taken into effect, and the result would be an endless, infinite stream of universes or no universe at all! And, if string theory of some sort is the solution to resolving the conflicts between quantum theory and general relativity, universes are events on an even larger stage that cosmologists applying string theory like Paul Steinhardt, say will be too difficult to grapple with until string theory is further developed and connected with applied research that can be examined and investigated.

But, quantum mechanics tells us that in that very early stage of our universe, when it was inflationary - as proposed by Alan Guth - and for a brief period of time, this reverse gravity was driving everything apart very rapidly, that the universe would have been so small and so dense at that point that quantum fluctuations in the space/time fabric would have led to all potential probabilities being actualized, and an infinite stream of universes rapidly inflating and then spreading out like bubbles that have no further contact with the original universe that was expanding, or remain in contact with any other universes formed during the inflationary period. I know I probably mangled that explanation. I heard an interview with Alex Vilenkin on the Eternal Inflation Model he and Andre Linde proposed by developing Guth's theory with quantum mechanics. This Science Blogs regular goes through the details step by step. I'll have to read it over myself! The other main alternative to explain origins of the universe, coming from string theories is from the M Theory developed by Ed Witten, which added an extra dimension to the 10 dimension string theory models. As explained by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, M Theory leads to an endless cascade of universes forming from the energy of branes of existing universes colliding after expanding into each other. If it could be visualized, it might look like a giant fireworks display of universes being seeded and expanding until they have spectacular collisions with other universes and the whole process happening all over again. Here's the Edge lecture Neil Turok gave back in 2007 explaining their Cyclic Universe Model. Where the cyclic model taps out, when attempting to explain everything through naturalistic models is where we come to that metaverse frame containing all of the expanding and exploding universes. The metaverse would have to be timeless and pre-exist all universes that come into existence. The Cyclic Model may never develop an approach to try to understand what that background metaverse would be. If there's a creator, then the metaverse would be where God would be found. But, this would be a very remote sort of God; even more remote than a God of each universe.

Hey, since this thread is about Alex Jones exposing atheists....I'll just assume that's what the video in the OP is about. there's no damn way I'm going to listen to Alex Jones if I don't have to....but now there's an Alex Jones video with real comedic value, thanks to his recent appearance on the Piers Morgan Show. I used to think he was just a windbag out to make money off of selling gold and other crap, but this looks like he's a genuine lunatic. So totally insane that he makes Piers Morgan look good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Ddb3oa5CE

Sounds like your second sentence disproved the point you were making in the first sentence! When it comes to "explaining what's around us" or world view, the obvious difference is that a religions usually start with an explanation of how the world came to be, and answers to all of life's basic questions about existence that are mythical in origin. I don't declare that myth means nonsense and stories that have no value; but when religions declare that their doctrines are divine truth that is direct revelation from the creator of the universe, then they have backed themselves right up to the edge of a cliff. This is especially obvious with religions that demand adherence to creation mythologies which fly in the face of everything that learning and discovery have revealed about ourselves and our world for the last 200 years. Either the fundamentalist young earth creationist has to live in ignorance, or they have to come up with convoluted explanations to rationalize their doctrines in the modern world. A better choice would have been not to claim that their religious texts are sources of scientific and historically accurate information in the first place. And then they could concentrate on what they consider of value in the books....which I hope has little to do with discovering how old the earth is! Before I could answer that question, I'd have to know what you mean by "others" and "circumstances." Sounds a little cryptic to me. I thought I made the point clear enough before, that what I consider important today are ideas and strategies that could make the world a better place, rather than go charging full speed towards chaos and extinction like we seem to be doing today. We've had an overdose on materialism and individualism over the last 40 years, and forgot all about civic and community responsibilities. Solutions to our problems are not going to come from nonsense like "selfish egoism" or similar individualistic claptrap mouthed by believers in an 'invisible hand' guiding market forces to provide the direction. If we are going to turn things around, it's going to take collective effort of everyone working for the common good, because total environmental collapse will make all of us losers. There will be no point to selfish, individual striving against others. It's just hard to see how this is possible now in the face of what we are up against when it comes to dealing with the aggressive, ruthless cliques who control most of the world's wealth and are able to dominate media, culture and control politicians. And the controllers of wealth, who are mostly reckless fools with no consideration of risks, do not want any changes to the type of capitalism the world functions under today -- an economic system that demands increasing consumption that is exhausting resource supplies and expanding environmental destruction. On a personal level, real solutions will come from the realization that none of us are 'self-made' and authors of our success/or failure. We are social animals who achieve and fail to achieve based on genetic inputs that we had no say in, and guided by environmental factors that include what sort of family life we enjoyed, were we born in relative wealth or poverty, the quality of schooling, the sort of neighbourhood we grew up in, our environmental exposure to toxins like lead, or just the lack of a quality diet early in life....and on and on....there's a whole lot of factors that make up who we are that we had no choice in. What we have a choice about afterwards is how we will use what we've been given. And on that point, I'm heading towards my golden years in good health, but certainly past the half way point in the game of life; and after having my world view turned upside down, I'm still not sure what to do that will have much of an impact on the state of the world today. I guess doing something is better than doing nothing, but it's hard not to take an honest look at the near future and not be a pessimist.

Yep. And I don't want to dump on Neil Young; I like a lot of his music, and really appreciate that he doesn't stand in one place and keep doing the same thing over and over. If you track his career, he's been a folkie, hard rock, country, rockabilly, even electronica....remember an album he did in the early 80's when synthesizers were the rage, called Trans. it wasn't his best work, but it was interesting that after a string of successful albums, he was open to going off in a whole different direction and experimenting with all the new electronics coming out at the time. The problem I've had with his guitar leads is something that irritates me about a lot of lead guitarists, who are more concerned with how fast they can shred, and what chords they can reach, rather than hitting them clean. I just got the feeling that Neil Young hides a lot of fumbling in that heavy distortion. It really bothered me in "Rocking In The Free World." The guitar solo on that song...even the record version is a total mess! It should have been handed off to someone else. It ruined a great song. I can understand why most of their fans gravitate to the earlier work. I remember at the time, back in the early 70's, those first two Roxy Music Albums were totally original, unlike anything else before them....similar to David Bowie....but I actually found their last two records and that final live album the ones that I preferred to listen to. Do The Strand and Virginia Plain just had a quality that was a little too edgy and frantic for my tastes.

Okay, that's better than what I heard from her on Saturday Night Live, but I'm still not motivated enough to actually pay for the unplugged Katy Perry. I'll see your Katy Perry and raise you Brittany Rogers of Alabama Shakes. My bias is towards rock and this is the best thing I've come across in awhile:

yeah, I could have mentioned Justin Bieber too, but then I start feeling sick to my stomach, if I dwell too much on these pop acts that are more about marketing products than making music. It may not be fair to dump on female manufactured pop stars, but the fitness club I go to a couple of times a week seems to cater to the females when it comes to the music they play on the P.A. system....this, is why I always make sure I have my Ipod with me....but, when I don't have it on, I am struck by how they can play one girl pop act after another and I can't tell one singer from the last one or the next one....they all sound the same and sing the same style, and have pretty much the same bland hip hop crap arrangements behind them! And Brittany Spears...to each his own I suppose. I don't find her singing all that exceptional. Everything about her music career is someone else's creation. Does she actually have any connection with the writing, arranging and producing of her records?

I have been generally disgusted by what qualifies as debate on native issues here, coming mostly from dullards who just regurgitate Sun News and National Post propaganda here, without knowing anything further on these issues! Not that I'm an expert on this subject; that's why I was reluctant to wade in on the other native-bashing thread, but I believe that those who attack minority and marginalized groups have the burden of proof before they can go stomping all over native land, water rights, and treaty guarantees that were made to many reserves as compensations for ceding territories and rights of use in the first place. I said on the other thread that it seems to me that past Liberal and especially this Harper Conservative Government, are plotting a course to completely abrogating all of the agreements signed in the past, and the changes they are trying to force through in their latest omnibus budget bill would feed those suspicions. As for this leaked Fraser report about Attawapiskat, the first thing that jumps out at me is that nobody is commenting about the Federal Government's responsibilities to oversee public spending. As for Chief Spence, of the 409 transactions in Attawapiskat that Deloitte and Touche said lacked proper documentation, only about 30 were conducted on Spence's watch. The system for providing First Nations services is fundamentally flawed, according to the Auditor General's report: "Contribution agreements involve a significant reporting burden, especially for small First Nations with limited administrative capacity. Communities often have to use scarce administrative resources to respond to numerous reporting requirements stipulated in their agreements. We followed up on Aboriginal Affairs efforts to reduce the reporting requirements of First Nations and found progress to date to be unsatisfactory..." "The use of contribution agreements to fund services for First Nations communities has also led to uncertainty about funding levels. Statutory programs such as land claim agreements must be fully funded, but this is not the case for services provided through contribution agreements. Accordingly, it is not certain whether funding levels provided to First Nations in one year will be available the following year. This situation creates a level of uncertainty for First Nations and makes long-term planning difficult..." Also noted by the Auditor General is the fact that there are more than 600 First Nations across Canada; some with as few as 500 residents, which would indicate that there might be a problem of lack of expertise in trying to deliver services to schools, health and other services, yet there is little indication that Federal Governments have taken much of any interest in how the money is spent. It appears to the casual observer to be more of a case of 'here's your money, now go away.' Which raises suspicions that the Government doesn't want reserves to function properly in the first place! If there is corruption, the beneficiaries of that corrupt misuse of funds will be beholden to the Government, and have an interest in maintaining the status quo....that would explain the general attitude of most of the Grand Chiefs who are members of the Assembly of First Nations - the only body that the Government wishes to talk to. It seems more likely that chaos and dysfunction are desired effects of this and previous federal governments. The last thing they want is properly functioning band councils that might present greater obstacles to waste dumping, mining and pipeline construction, and commercial use of their waterways.

Which was the only reason I clicked on their youtube videos! In all fairness, I should add that when I saw them...on some late night TV show, I was impressed that she actually can play, and is more than eye candy to promote the band. I don't waste time watching, let alone listening to most of the pop-female acts that get hyped and promoted today....Rihanna....Katy Perry....Brittany Spears....let me know when you actually have some musical contributions worth listening to.

EDIT I think the best version of the song was done in a live album....I believe this tour was the last time Bryan Ferry performed with Roxy Music, and the taped concert from that tour was the best work they ever did, with this version of Like A Hurricane being better than Neil Young's....sorry Neil fans, but his guitar playing is a mess as usual on that song! I don't think Neil ever grasped the difference between what he wanted to play and what his limitations were on guitar. Listen for the Phil Manzanera solo near the end of this piece to hear how it should be done! This live album also included a cover version of another John Lennon song: Jealous Guy.

Amazing how regulation can work when it's to the company's benefit! If corporations can force nations to abolish laws restricting foreign ownership and privatize public assets, why can't international laws be enforced that prohibit anti-union legislation, or demand universal health and safety standards? It's not because labour laws couldn't follow the startup outsourced operations; it's because the corporations and their government pawns wouldn't allow it to happen.

When you first asked that subjective question, you didn't include the qualifer:"developing." Not that it makes much difference anyway. The facts on the ground are that the promises made that globalization would get impoverished third world nations on the first rung of the development ladder....where presumably, they would be able to continually advance until they reached the limits of their resource and human capital (now there's a exploitive term for people). What has happened instead, is that nations signing on to globalization free trade agreements, are forced to cut food and gas subsidies to the poor, and abolish any protections against foreign ownership (seems like we got this here in Canada big time!), and then, if the price is right and the nation writes anti-union legislation into their judicial code, then in come the sweatshops willing to hire people at whatever the ground-floor price is for wages. And, as we all know now, the first sites for cheap workers - like Mexico - were soon dropped for even cheaper locales. And your question is not the relevant question in this thread regarding the fallout from that fire! It's why are even the minimum of health and safety standards ignored in these outsourced manufacturing operations? And, where are the benefits promised, that would raise the quality of life of people living in undeveloped nations? This was a minor point back when we were being sold the globalization propaganda 30 years ago, but it was used as leverage or blackmail against those of us who were not pro-'free trade,' as if we were being selfish in some respects by not allowing manufacturing of labour-intensive, unskilled manufacturing like textiles to go to other nations that could do it cheaper and benefit their people. Along with the promises that increasingly specialized and as we have learned today - fragile economies - would benefit us in the long run by being able to concentrate our energies on less labour-intensive, higher input value work, the people on the bottom rung were supposed to benefit too....and I don't mean marginal benefits that can barely be measured, or are totally unrelated to globalization - i.e. life expectancy figures, which are more closely connected with immunization and water quality issues, not whether people are working on the land or in factories! But, the pro-globalization crowd...both the corporations here seeking cheaper labour and the third world elites and ruling classes are the ones who benefit by the land and resource sales and skim off most of the benefits locally when a Tazreen or similar factory starts up. But, the big, unreported story behind the fire is that, where we are, the abuse and horrors of these operations are completely unmentioned over here where consumers are buying the products! Unless there is a fire killing more than a hundred workers, consumers in the west know nothing of the abuses and bad working conditions in places halfway around the world, where companies like Walmart and Apple among others, have set up third party subcontractors to get the cheapest product, while making sure they are not directly connected when things go bad and some scandal like a fire, or stressed out employees rioting, makes headlines over here.

It's not just about the b.s. Green Capitalism story! Green Capitalism, advanced by Suzuki, Al Gore, and the majority of environmentalists with easy access to mainstream media, is a compromise position for regular straight 100 proof capitalism that is pushed as the elixir for all that ails us by conservatives, libertarians, and everyone who has no social conscience and has some sort of ideology to justify their narcissism. So, on the environment front, the public is presented with only two alternative visions that cannot provide longterm solutions: one that denies global warming and widespread evidence of environmental degradation, or choice two is a moderate position that merely tries to shift present economic theory towards environmentally friendly ends. At best, these solutions, from electric cars to carbon caps and carbon offset markets, can only slow down the increase in carbon and degradation of the environment, not stop the increase, or return to the CO2 target level of 350ppm (identified by James Hansen as the maximum level to maintain the polar ice) and made the rallying point of Bill McKibben's activist organization 350.org.. Our present economic system demands continuous growth, or it will collapse. Nobody in mainstream media asks how the two can be resolved, nor mentions the futility of tightening auto emission standards, since the improvements over the last 40 years have been negated by the increase in cars on the road and the fact that people respond to a perceived benefit of greater fuel efficiency by driving more miles than they would when they had their old gas guzzler. When Walmart becomes a monopoly, or near monopoly in many locales, individual choice is a joke! And it is dependent on income, as those of us who refuse to shop at Walmart have to pay a premium price on many items that those who are struggling financially cannot afford to do. So, in the real world, your degree of choice depends on how much your discretionary income is and you can't pretend otherwise! Your day may "starts and ends with me" if you have the income that makes it possible. Those who don't, have their choices severely restricted by their lack of economic power. And I haven't even gotten to the pernicious effects of sophisticated marketing combined with new, increasingly absorbing personal technologies that have increased levels of social isolation ever since the first TV's arrived in the average home. Nader said himself that the gains made through consumer activism were being eroded in the 80's and his organization was being shut out by both political parties because the U.S. was changing and becoming less democratic in practice as politicians were more concerned with the interests of powerful elites: In the 1980’s, with the election of President Reagan, powerful corporate interests gathered momentum and became increasingly assertive in the pursuit of their narrow interests, throwing up roadblocks to Nader’s efforts to advance the well-being of the American people. With the two major parties dialing for the same dollars, their differences dwindled on most major issues (single-payer healthcare, living wage, replacing fossil fuels and nuclear with many practical variants of solar power, and a foreign policy that wages peace instead of war). After working for 40 years on behalf of the health, safety and economic well being of the American people, Nader took stock of the situation: “I don’t like citizen groups being shut out by both parties in this city — corporate occupied territory — not having a chance to improve their country.” Never one to be stymied, Nader responded to the declining influence of civil society over elected representatives by entering the electoral arena himself, and is now on his third major presidential campaign aimed at reinvigorating America’s democracy, in the best traditions of the suffragettes, labor party, and abolitionists of the 19th and early 20th century. http://votenader.org/about/ You must be aware that the internet is a difficult place to find accurate information in the midst of all the noise. And as Net Neutrality disappears and is being replaced by a new ethos where money buys influence, it becomes harder and harder to wade through the corporate-sponsored bullshit to find the truth on more and more issues. Eventually, as the screws tighten, I expect that marginal voices, who don't have money behind them or attract generous amounts of cash from advertisers and sponsors, will become like trying to find a needle in a haystack. The Borg will eventually rule the internet, and reign in the degrees of free expression and content available to most subscribers. Since you seem to be at least as old as I am, compare what is happening now to activism with what happened in the 60's into the early 70's! Today's Occupy movements were attacked in coordinated strategies by (in the U.S.) FBI, Homeland Security with local law enforcement) and efforts by MSM (including NPR and PBS) to first, ignore them, and then to disparage their goals and shift attention away from the issue of economic inequality. Today, Occupy Wall Street is still an active organization, but you wouldn't know it if you only go to liberal or conservative media, and is doing more to assist those New Yorkers in the most damaged districts after Hurricane Sandy than FEMA or the Red Cross have done....and needless to say, they are providing relief with a lot less money than these organizations. The MSM has pretty much moved on from the issue entirely, once Wall Street had their power back on and the subways were running again, while there are still areas without power and running water. Here in Canada, from what little I've learned so far of the Idle No More movements, they have begun from the grassroots as a challenge to many of the chiefs, the umbrella organization - Assembly of First Nations and especially the Harper Government, which has accelerated the process of defunding reserves. Idle No More looks similar to Occupy in that it has not begun with coordinated leadership, and it has also benefited by using the internet to network together and coordinate demonstrations. And it is more likely that natives will maintain the kind of solidarity needed to make a populist movement a success, since they have much more shared interests than disaffected college students who have recently realized that the promises made to them about what they would receive through their educations will never be realized. And, once again, our little side debate here I have to ask: what the hell lot of good to these individual feel good stories do in dealing with problems that are getting worse. Mike Holmes can build as many houses as he wants in the third world, and poverty and food scarcity is still increasing, and as world grain reserves have declined this year, is expected to be even worse this summer. There is no getting around the fact that civilization is facing collapse...likely by the middle of this century, and nothing of substance will be done to prevent collapse or environmental degradation, because it is almost impossible to advance the case for radical change to economics and demilitarization of world affairs.

The first study is 268 pages long, and I had planned to read the whole thing before responding, and for some reason, I couldn't get the 2nd document to open. The problem here is that garbage in/garbage out is the general rule of statistical analysis regardless of subject. Political polls can produce varied results depending on questions asked, and who's responding; at a time when the overwhelming expert consensus on global warming agreed with James Hansen's conclusions that there was a definite signal of anthropogenic climate change in global temperature data, we had idiots like self-proclaimed lord monckton running around with their own graphs and charts claiming that global temperatures had started cooling. And here, in this analysis of happiness under the direction of a Ronald Inglehart, I find that he is only measuring self-reported measures of happiness, whereas the wellbeing studies conducted by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett for the Spirit Level:Mental Health subsection, is using physical evidence of depression and psychosis, and drug abuse, that are more reliable as true measures of wellbeing than just going by surveys of people checking boxes on a multiple choice question sheet. And it's also worth noting that Inglehart's study is at least 5 years old. So he is missing a lot of what is happening lately in many economies around the world, as many people go from struggling to keep up with the cost of living, to struggling to put food on the table and facing at the prospect that they and their families will be homeless. I can't help notice while glossing over some other stuff that Inglehart has written, that he is a genetic determinist; in the same or at least similar camp with evolutionary psychologists like Stephen Pinker - who believe most of our behaviour is hardwired, but have a long view of history that human progress is putting more stuff on the table and making life easier, and this continued and expanding cornucopia will be the key to making us happier and less violent and antisocial. Among other reasons why this is a fallacy is the greater likelihood that other psychologists and philosophers of mind share, that an organism's phenotype (development of physical and behavioural traits) depend more greatly on the environmental factors that guide an organism's gene expression, than the genetic blueprint itself. Also, his claim that rising happiness is just a matter of economic growth and democratization do not explain why the U.S. performs more poorly on this and so many other measures of personal wellbeing than poorer nations. Even Costa Rica, with about a third of the U.S. GDP, outperforms the U.S. on the Happy Planet Index. That seems to me to be a finishing blow to any theories that increased wealth alone can improve societies. My suspicions are that Inglehart is just another one of those university academics who works as a hired gun for business interests....since his libertarian theories so closely coincide with the modern business approach to economics and political theory. I think that's the same report I posted previously. Did it occur to you yet that you are asking a nonsense question? And you even provided a link to show that it "sucks" more in England now than it did in the 1950's.....same as U.S. and Canada. My question remains: why are we allowing banks and international corporations to overrun the power of all political institutions (including national governments) when the claims they made in advance of open trade have only enriched themselves and are impoverishing everyone else? We heard that globalization would allow poor nations like Bangladesh to get in on the ground floor of modernization, and a patronizing approach to less developed nations just presented it as a given, that modernization (textile industries and cash crop agriculture) would improve their lives. The Tazreen Factory Fire has opened the window a crack on a world that is ignored here in the West, by those who think all's fair as long as a global conglomerate sells us $10.00 shirts and pants. We have discovered that the "ground floor" to modernization is virtually bottomless! There is always somewhere cheaper, where the Borg can set up their supply operations....Sri Lanka, or a recent offer from China...which has lost a lot of the bargain basement export business lately....to set up prison labour operations that are even cheaper than the competitors.

On that point, I've heard a few times, in articles I've read from some American academics who are considered radical, that new professors in American universities often aren't earning tenure to begin with. They will stay as permanent contract employees who could be terminated at any time by the university administration. This has been mentioned a time or two, whenever radical professors like Cornel West, Richard Wolfe, or Noam Chomsky are asked why there doesn't seem to be many younger university academics stepping into their shoes today. Part of the problem may be that they have no protection if they run afoul of the administration....which is increasingly dependent on corporate and military money to keep everything running. Also, U.S. universities, especially state universities, are increasingly becoming glorified trade schools as the public financing which started them, and was promised to provide low cost (even zero tuition) post- high school education, has been cut back with successive budgets, in good times and bad. And as a result, the humanities programs, running from philosophy through anthropology and related social sciences are being scrapped altogether, as the universities refocus on churning out more engineers and mba's for their corporate sponsors. The reason why everyone jumped on the bandwagon that line workers in GM, Ford and Chrysler, and the steel plants, were making too much, has more to do with basic psychology than any of the nuts and bolts debates about wages and contracts. Simple fact is that people judge their net worth by what others are making; so if they're working on a line in a small factory or a food processing plant, and making a lot less for doing a similar job, it is likely that they will agree with kneecapping the autoworkers and steelworkers just ahead of them, rather than working a little harder to advance their own interests. Same mentality crept in at the auto and steel companies, where workers started developing an attitude that they really were better than the average blue collar, and showing less interest in the problems going on in more marginal industries and especially with the growing non-unionized workforce. And that was pretty much the end of the worker solidarity that existed in the 1930's, when my father was young, and virtually all factory workers and farmers across the country felt that they had a common cause against the bankers and business owners. The divide-and-conquer strategy against the unions will finally play itself out very shortly as our conservative politicians are going with the same basic plan adopted by U.S. Republicans over the last 10 years, to bust public service unions of nurses, teachers and all public service workers....except for police of course.....they know that's one union that they're wise not to screw with! I can see the same thing happening here as sifting through the smoke and noise about teachers unions across Canada, the reality is clear that young people entering the teaching profession are coming in under much different terms than the teachers who came before them. And that demonstrates just how shortsighted most Canadians have been over the years. Like I said, the GM workers thought they just deserved a lot more than the average factory worker, and never expected a situation like what's happening to GM in the U.S. -- where new hires start at half the money as they existing employees who are getting older and will likely take early retirement buyouts. And the decline in wages filters its way through the workforce....just as the rise in manufacturing wages bumped up the pay of non-union workers....even service workers working in hotels and restaurants. I know that new welders, machinists, tool and die makers, who thought their skills protected them, are also seeing their earnings decline. Most Canadians hardly blinked 30 years ago, when textiles became the first manufacturing industry to leave the country. Even a lot of blue collar workers reasoned that those were lousy jobs that payed crap wages....let em go! But, outsourcing has challenged all manufacturing, even forcing wages lower in the first nations like Mexico who were the ones who originally benefited by outsourcing. As we are learning from this disastrous fire at Tazreen in Bangladesh - the supplier to Walmart - Walmart and other buyers who set these companies up at arms length, weren't satisfied with even 37c per hour with no pay for overtime....they were still demanding that the company make the products cheaper, even if it was at the cost of safety and health....and even looking the other way on the issue of child labour. The youngest victim of the Tazreen fire was a 12 year old girl! Would that situation be tolerated in this country? But, even that wasn't enough, in the brave new globalized business environment. They were threatening to pack up and move to Sri Lanka. And we were doing so well! No, you can't just dump the blame on the consumer; because you are presenting a fallacy that the social evil of globalization, which has been carefully planned and coordinated over the last two decades by the wealthiest and most powerful financial interests in the world, cannot be dealt with as matters of individual choice! This is a remarkably similar theme to the green capitalist bullshit arguments advanced by the likes of Al Gore and Maurice Strong, as the solutions to our environmental problems. The green capitalists have presented a collective evil - the externalization of environmental costs causing climate change, as issues that can be dealt with through individual consumer choice - low energy light bulbs, inflating your tires, making windmills and solar panels, and setting up a new market to buy and sell the right to dump carbon into the atmosphere (carbon credits). And, how well has that worked? A real solution to the environment problems cannot happen without a reshifting of the way our economic system works, and virtually all of the green ventures promoted, will make little difference if the problems of growth in energy and resource consumption aren't dealt with first. Same with globalization. I think 40 years ago, before media consolidation and the present stranglehold that the wealth elite have on our government.....back then it was possible to have a real consumer movement. The consumer movement started by Ralph Nader had some success in pushing back against unsafe products, and if the situation would have been leading mass protests against globalization and outsourcing, or demanding that global standards be set for workers in third world countries.....but none of that has happened obviously this time, as Nader says himself, that many of his objectives - like mandatory seatbelts in new cars, would be impossible to do as a consumer movement today. In some of his interviews, he has mentioned that the changing media and political climate was the reason why he did those presidential campaigns in the first place! As he tells it, by the 80's, he was finding doors closed in Washington....first Republican, and then Democrats as well, except for a few holdouts with no power inside the Party. Nor was he able to get his press releases on consumer safety issues picked up in the MSM, unless there were deaths connected to a particular product....and even that would be a shortlived story in the news cycle. So, running for president was the only option left to get any publicity. But, as I remember his appearances on the news, they showed short clips of him talking somewhere and never included any substance of his actual speeches, or bothered to interview him. It would just be a voiceover of a reporter giving a brief synopsis of where the third party candidate was, and who he was talking to, usually followed up by a criticism from some prominent Democrat, criticizing Nader for "splitting" the vote. So much for the power of the consumer! I could get into how modern info technologies, beginning with television, have played a pernicious effect of brainwashing, generating impulsive buying decisions, and promoting isolation and individualism...but that can wait for another time. Any successful movement pushing back against the collective evils that face society today are only going to happen as group action, not individual choice. Individualism is promoted because a few who have money and power, can so easily divide and conquer the vast majority of people, by keeping them isolated and focused on internal divisions, whether they are race, gender, ethnicity, union/non-union etc. We are heading into times remarkably similar to the era of the RobberBarons; and back then, a lot more people were much better informed about how banking and currency manipulation were used to enrich the owners of the money at everyone else's expense. Maybe if we head back into a time when everybody is a have-not, we will feel some real solidarity again. The big problem though is that the world our children are inheriting is a badly degraded and shrinking world that doesn't have the resources to grow that allowed a reformed version of caplitalism to flourish in the 20th century. It's difficult at this stage to figure out if these are all lost causes or there are really things worth fighting for! But, if we don't try to do anything, it will definitely be a lost cause!

We are fast reaching a point where that's not working anymore. There are limits to growth after all. Especially when mother nature tells us that the collective toilet is backed up and we're starting to feel the effects of trying to use the environment as a giant garbage dump. There's no more moving on....now it should be a time of reckoning; and anyone who is advocating ways to live sustainably in a no growth economy, has to be taken seriously.

No, it hasn't. When technology impacts the environment, it provides temporary bandaid fixes to problems that require the development of counter-technnologies to keep fixing the problems of previous tech solutions. the proposals to geoengineer our way out of global warming would be a case in point. The problem is that every new technology proposed is put to use unless there are obvious harms that may be caused - like nuclear power plants - otherwise the new tech solutions go into production, and it's not until years later that an assessment is made of what the damages may have been....and by that time the collective wisdom is 'too late to stop it now, better invent another technofix to solve the problems.'

I'm betting that most people here will be too stupid to realize something is wrong with the way things are going now until it's too late.

I have no idea on the specifics, and that's why I was happy to see someone from the other side of the propaganda line that exists on these forums come in and make a case that's different than the usual BS here on native issues. I think I mentioned previously, native issues have not been a major area of focus for me, and the only reason why I started to wade in here was because I seen a need for some sort of pushback against the majority at MLW who are constantly bashing natives, and usually don't have a clue about the issues at stake. And, it's worth noting that the band councils are not all the same and not all organized along the same lines. Some, may be better than others. But, even if the BS from Sun Media was true, that is still no excuse for allowing people to get sick and freeze in inadequate housing. If there was an honest interest in solving the problems in Attawapiskat by Harper and co., I think they could easily help. Did I miss something! It seems to me that many of the Idle No More protests are against band councils as well as the Federal Government.

Yeah, who's leaving it alone? Right now, 40% of the Earth's productive land surface is exploited by human development of some sort -- agriculture, cities, roads etc. - a big part of the reason why half of the world's land animal species face extinction over the next 40 years. STFU! We have no idea who the original inhabitants of Easter Island were, and new evidence from biologists and geologists reveals that the conclusion you are referring to - mostly closely linked to the writings of Jared Diamond...who is not a scientist btw are wrong! The primary reason for the loss of the forests was because of vermin and diseases that started killing trees: Hunt and Lipo argue that the trees were killed off mostly by rats, which ate their seeds and shoots faster than they could regenerate. Humans surely cut down plenty, but fossil palm nuts are invariably punctured by rat teeth and could never germinate. Diamond also cites the rodent factor. But Hunt and Lipo bring a wider range of evidence to the table, including studies from Hawaii showing how rats can multiply into the millions in a few years and have profound effects on ecosystems. Next they question the moai argument. There is no evidence, they say, that islanders ever transported the statues horizontally, and thus that they used timber sleds. The moai, they assert, were moved vertically with ropes and muscle, rocked and pivoted like refrigerators along roads radiating out from the quarry where they were hewn. Those roads can still be seen today, and all along them are moai that have plainly fallen and broken into two or more pieces on impact. If they were sliding horizontally, it is hard to see how this could have happened. Oral traditions speak of the statues “walking” upright to their ritual sites. Far from being the source of Rapa Nui’s downfall, moai construction, in the view of Hunt and Lipo, had the effect of keeping the population down. Citing studies of other societies in extremely resource-challenged environments, such as the Inuit, they view the making of moai as a classic “bet-hedging” strategy by which people channel the reproductive urge into something else – in this case, statues. It may not be a conscious decision, they explain, but people in many societies will forgo having children in favour of engaging in massive civic projects. To argue that they preferred carving to sex is not an easy argument to sustain. The authors maintain that the population did indeed stand at a manageable 3,000 when the first Europeans arrived, not the 15,000 or more suggested in previous accounts. Hunt and Lipo see flabby assumptions everywhere in the traditional story of Easter Island. They challenge the thesis that statue-erecting shows the island had some kind of central authority to organize it all. Variations in moai style from village to village suggest independent traditions, they write, and anyway dispersed and small-scale societies from Stonehenge to Ohio mound-builders have been capable of monumental art. The whole notion that culture is a product of surplus resources, or that high art can be made only by centralized, “highly evolved” societies is bunk, they assert. Next comes the war that supposedly followed the islanders’ depletion of natural resources. The island shows none of the hilltop fortifications or defensive earthworks seen elsewhere in Polynesia, Hunt and Lipo note, and the “trench” on the island’s eastern side that tour guides explain was dug by one faction to bury the other alive is a natural formation caused by the confluence of two lava streams. Collapse followed the introduction of European disease, the authors argue. The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen arrived on Easter Sunday, 1722, and described well-tended gardens, hundreds of standing statues, and, in his words, “whole tracts of woodland” – remnants of the native forest. He stayed a few hours, just long enough, Hunt and Lipo believe, for his men to introduce venereal diseases to the trusting, curious islanders. On this point, Hunt and Lipo ironically echo Diamond’s own Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which dramatically showed the power of exotic disease to transform societies. It is also the most speculative part of their argument. As Diamond, Charles Mann and others have shown, we have ample evidence for the implosion of aboriginal populations in the Americas in eyewitness accounts of abandoned towns, colonial death records and mass graves. Hunt and Lipo have none of this, at least not for the forty-eight years that followed Roggeveen’s visit. They say the Dutch visit “likely” caused the population to plunge to a few hundred, recovering to 800 or so by the time the next Europeans arrived – a Spanish party in 1770. The party stayed six days, long enough to land plenty of microbes. Warmly received, the Spaniards remarked on the island’s liberal sexual mores and how the native men did not object when the women offered the visitors their favours. More traumas followed. In one of the best chapters, the authors explain how the arrival of European goods led to the collapse of moai traditions. Islanders continued to venerate the moai as late as 1770, yet they were entranced by the jaunty hats, jackets, tools and weapons brought by the outsiders, and brazenly stole them. With these new symbols of prestige, the old ways lost their value and the neglected moai toppled over – not levelled in the iconoclastic frenzy that previous authors have posited. Curiously, it was not until 1845 that claims of cannibalism appeared, in a French account of a sailor who returned to ship covered in teeth marks and alleging the islanders tried to eat him alive. It was probably a hoax, say Hunt and Lipo, but the cannibal label stuck, and was embellished with similarly lurid tales that reinforced colonial stereotypes about the heathen past just as missionaries were settling in to save souls. The final, nearly fatal blow arrived in the form of Peruvian slave-raiders in 1862, who rounded up over 1,400 islanders and shipped them to Peru to dig guano. Many were by then Christian converts, and the forcible “blackbirding”, as the practice was known, drew international condemnation. It came too late. The few, pustuled islanders who straggled home brought a new wave of smallpox, and by 1877 the population was down to 110. Centuries of folklore and knowledge were lost, and in its place a melodramatic pseudo-history of man-eaters and selfinduced catastrophe arose. Fresh, revisionist, multidisciplinary – The Statues that Walked makes for bracing reading. For those who saw Easter Island as a parable of apocalypse, its conclusions will come as something of a let-down. It was not civil war that ended Easter Island’s cultural golden age, but the inadvertent introduction of European germs. It was not human excess that killed its forests, but escaped rats. “History is the witness that Rapa Nui suffered near genocide, not self-inflicted ‘ecocide’”, the authors write. There are plenty of lessons for today’s world in this story, just not the ones we may have imagined. http://www.the-tls.c...ticle802176.ece But, like they say, never let evidence get in the way of a good argument! So, keep the bullshit coming that they are savages who devoured their resources and turned to cannibalism until civilized Christians arrived to teach them right! This is not about noble savages or ignoble savages! My elevator speech of why our world is so F@#$%& UP today is because we took all that Great Enlightenment crap seriously a few centuries ago, and started believing that the progression of history is linear and progress will be endless as long as we keep inventing and making use of new inventions. The real story is that pre-agricultural peoples (and by agriculture, I'm speaking specifically of those who rely more heavily on animal husbandry, not growing grains) are people who have to live sustainably, because they have no choice other than to live sustainably! It doesn't matter what your race is or where you live, if you are a hunter/gatherer....even if you also grow a few grains and other plants, you are s.o.l. if you overconsume your local environment. Your life depends on allowing hunting grounds to recover, as well as the places where you fish, forage for berries, nuts and other important plants. Even after the Age of Agriculture arrived, we did not make a clean break from nature either! We were aware of natural cycles, because we had to rotate crops and allow fields to lie fallow so topsoil to recover. And all of this completely ended when we discovered oil....and thought oil could be pumped out of the ground forever! Oil and mined phosphates all of a sudden meant that you could just dump fertilizers on the land and keep growing high yields on the same land, year after year. Problem is that topsoil is still essential for growing, and topsoil is being depleted in every major agricultural zone around the world. But, what about the rise of the Industrial Era? Well, industry is dependent on farming to provide low-cost raw materials that can be “value-added,” and industry needs a place to externalize pollution and other costs, and a source of cheap labor. No surprise that industrial societies have large ecological footprints. And, along with our complete detachment from nature, we adopted new technologies and an economic system that can't maintain a steady state economy, but must increase constantly, or the monetary and banking system will collapse. And, this is where we are today -- facing a convergence of crises that are going to shut down civilization as we know it. So, instead of demanding that indians and other groups trying to hold on to traditional ways of living, change and get with the program; you think it might have been smarter if our ancestors came here with as much of a desire to learn as to promote their own religions and ways of doing things?

Except that these aren't regular landowners. Back when Canada was young, sparsely settled aside from a few isolated pockets, and still had vast reserves of untapped resources, past governments freely gave sovereign rights to many native bands living in the north. Now that things are a little more crowded down here, and many natural resources were used up in unexpectedly short timeframes, now, according to the Government and the corporations they take orders from, it's time to move them off the land, or just start developing treaty lands anyway, and declare the operations perfectly safe....even if it means creating giant tar sands tailing ponds. I wish I could remember the details off hand, but on The Current, a couple of weeks back, there was a show segment about a mining company which has sent geologists on a reserve twice already to do exploratory work, without any permits, or notifying anyone on the reserve......just plain trespassing, and seeing how promising a few secret test sites were. The mining company may have sent their people to sneak onto the territory other times, but during the two occasions when they discovered the company trucks. And what would have happened if they found billions of dollars worth of ores underground? We would see how fast the Government would be leaning on local chiefs, and making veiled threats, if not overt threats, to reduce services, or do whatever it takes to get deal signed, and the natives are handed a few trinkets as compensation! Worth noting, that the people living in this isolated territory have declared several times that they did not want this kind of development, and did not want any exploration for minerals. But the Government and the mining companies don't seem to take no for an answer.

This woman is doing nothing but hurting her cause and I think people in general are sick and tired of the Indians and their endless whining. Go out and get a job and stop depending on daddy government to give you a hand out is a great place to start. Didn't you post this about your own situation in that thread whining about being picked on: I am a disabled person who is living on a pension in Toronto, First, we have to raise the issue again that Aboriginals as a group, have literally been robbed over the years by plundering governments and the mining companies, power companies etc. that they do backroom deals with,and what has been handed back in any form of reparations would not come close to what would have had to have been payed if they were regular landowners who could extract better terms from the Government......that sort of comment takes the cake! Because it's one thing for us middle class taxpayers, who often feel squeezed at both ends....often having kids still living with us, or depending on us for college, and aging parents who need help dealing with the costs of nursing care.... to act a little selfish; but when it's someone who is on a disability themselves complaining about what others are taking, it is too hypocritical to even put into words!

Of all your dumb, uninformed comments, it seems like you're raising the bar even higher, as you go out on a limb to always be onside with whatever the Pentagon strategy is at the time. Let's take a look at the mess this attempt to micromanage regime change in Syria is turning out to be: Nearly 1 in 10 Syrian Rebels Are Now Terrorists In The Eyes Of The US But challenges remain since U.S.-made weapons have gone to hardline jihadists who have turned out to be the opposition's most organized and best fighters in the 21-month civil war. The al-Nusra front has been leading rebel attacks from the front lines, including the recent capture of the only significant government facility remaining west of Aleppo. While some Syrian rebels fear the group’s growing power, others work closely with it and admire it — or, at least, its military achievements — and are loath to end their cooperation. Leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit rebel umbrella group that the United States seeks to bolster, expressed exasperation that the United States, which has refused to provide weapons throughout the conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people, is now opposing a group they see as a vital ally. The Nusra Front “defends civilians in Syria, whereas America didn’t do anything,” said Mosaab Abu Qatada, a rebel spokesman. “They stand by and watch; they look at the blood and the crimes and brag. Then they say that Nusra Front are terrorists." He added, “America just wants a pretext to intervene in Syrian affairs after the revolution.” The Nusra Front’s appeals to Syrian fighters seem to be working. At a recent meeting in Damascus, Abu Hussein al-Afghani, a veteran of insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, addressed frustrated young rebels. They lacked money, weapons and training, so they listened attentively. He told them he was a leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, now working with a Qaeda branch in Syria, and by joining him, they could make their mark. One fighter recalled his resonant question: “Who is hearing your voice today?” On Friday, demonstrators in several Syrian cities raised banners with slogans like, “No to American intervention, for we are all Jebhat al-Nusra,” referring to the group’s full name, Ansar al-Jebhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham, or Supporters of the Front for Victory of the People of Syria. One rebel battalion, the Ahrar, or Free Men, asked on its Facebook page why the United States did not blacklist Mr. Assad’s “terrorist” militias. Another jihadist faction, the Sahaba Army in the Levant, even congratulated the group on the “great honor” of being deemed terrorists by the United States. Even antigovernment activists who are wary of the group — some deride it as “the Taliban” — said the blacklisting would be ineffective and worsen strife within the uprising. To isolate the group, they say, the United States should support mainstream rebel military councils and Syrian civil society, like the committees that have sprung up to run rebel-held villages. The Nusra Front is far from the only fighting group that embraces a strict interpretation of Islam. Many battalions have adopted religious slogans, dress and practices, in what some rebels and activists call a pragmatic shift to curry favor with Islamist donors in Persian Gulf countries. One activist said he had a fighter friend with a fondness for Johnnie Walker Black who is now sporting a beard to fit in. The group gained prominence with suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo in early 2012 that targeted government buildings but caused heavy civilian casualties. It was the first Syrian insurgent organization to claim responsibility for suicide and car bomb attacks that killed civilians. Many of its members — Syrians, Iraqis and a few from other countries —fought in Iraq, where the Syrian government helped funnel jihadis to battle the American occupation. In Iraq’s Diyala Province, a former member of Al Qaeda in Iraq said that a leader and many members of the group were fighting in Syria under the Nusra Front’s banner. An Iraqi security official there said they travel through Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey to Syria. “They are well trained mentally and militarily,” Major Issawi, the official in Anbar, said. “They are so excited about the fighting in Syria. They see Syria as a dream coming true.” Syrian fighters also have Iraq experience. Abu Hussein, a commander of the Tawhid and Jihad brigade, which is not slated for American blacklisting and has taken a leading role in many battles, said he fought with Al Qaeda in Iraq for six years. “I decided to return to Syria because our people need me,” he said, adding that his group was attracting secular young men because it could provide ammunition, training and medical care that non-jihadist groups could not. Syrian ‘Rebel’ Group Threatens the US with Bloodshed Ilana Freedman In its latest move, Al-Nusra Front has declared a no-fly-zone over the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and once-thriving commercial center on the Mediterranean. Now much of it is in ruins. Not unlike Hamas in Gaza, the ‘rebels’ place their weapons in heavily populated areas of the city, drawing lethal fire from Assad’s military, and destroying much of the city around them. al-Nusrah has now given notice to airlines that they risk being fired upon if they fly over the city. According to the statement, broadcast on Al-Jazeera on December 21, al Nusrah said its fighters had surrounded Aleppo’s Nayrab airport, and that they intended to fire on it and on any planes flying over it. Al-Nusrah warned that they would use 23mm and 57mm caliber anti-aircraft guns to down any planes in the area. Although it would seem that the situation in Syria could not get worse, the reality is that it is likely to get much worse. The killing will go on, supported by funding for the ‘opposition’ from the State Department, working with and through Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that Al Qaeda and other organization, including some which are on the US ‘terrorist list’, are an integral part of the Syrian opposition. Like they say:"choose your friends wisely." Or keep your nose out of situations where you don't have a clue about what is really happening on the ground. I'm sure the U.S. policy advisers in the Pentagon and State Dept. thought this was going to be another easy regime change like Libya....which was also done with a large contingent of mercenaries, mostly gathered from Sub-Sahara Africa, and after the war in Libya, are now trying to turn the West African nation of Mali into an Islamic state. It should be mentioned that there still is an ongoing genocide occurring in Libya, as Gadaffi's tribal region is still under seige, including aerial bombardment from the Government coalition forces. But that story rarely pops up in our news, as the only thing talked about after the war was the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. Whatever.....it looks like Syria is going to be a much dirtier and bloodier conflict to micromanage, if for no other reason, because it is a multiethnic nation with large religious minorities, just like pre-invasion Iraq! And, unlike Gadaffi, the Assads may not have friends, but the other Shiite forces in Lebanon, Iraq and especially Iran, are well aware that overthrowing Syria is the last domino before there is an all out assault against Iran and Hezbollah and their allies in Lebanon.....although from the looks of things in Iraq, the Maliki Government looks like it has decided that they want Russia as an ally, rather than the U.S., and may be ready to make a move soon in purging and ethnically cleansing Sunni strongholds in Baghdad and other cities where the Sunni populations are being blamed for the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against civilians in the last year. It may take the U.S. even longer to mount their planned invasion of Iran, since these dominos aren't falling as quickly as expected, and Russia appears now that they are going to make their own behind the scenes final stand to maintain the Assad Government in Syria, and the Hezbollah-dominated Government in Lebanon. Depends on the country: Libya: Yes Tunisia: Yes Egypt: After making a deal with the Army Guys, Yes Syria: Yes; and the U.S. was giving arms to that Al Nusra group in Syria as far back as 2005, that they declare to be terrorists today Yemen: No. As long as your despot allows us to have military bases in your country, and to be able to bomb anywhere in your country with impunity....no democracy for you! Bahrain: No. Same as Yemen. Even though most of you are Shias...well, considering that we are a on a war-footing with Iran, and our Sunni Wahabbi fanatic friends who let us pump out your oil in Arabia and the Persian Gulf, consider your version of Islam to be heresy and oppose Shias ruling in any and every Mid-East state....no democracy for you either! And we need your Sunni despot to stay right where he is, since he not only allows us to pump out your oil under terms we like, he also has generously allowed us to maintain one of the largest U.S. naval bases off U.S. soil....so, you guys, don't listen to all this stuff about democracy either....unless you want to move to one of those other countries that we have okay'd for Arab democracy!

Simple rule: if Ezra Levant's mouth is moving, he's lying!