WIP

And, when Israel is a major arms dealer and weapons lab for the US and allied governments, Israel has no legitimacy pulling out the holocaust card to justify killing, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid policies against Arabs. The Law of Return is a sham that can't be squared with any legitimate democratic government! There are still Palestinians alive who were forced out of their homes when the modern state of Israel was set up, where's their law of return?

If nuclear is so clean and profitable, why doesn't this private enterprize we always hear about, step up and offer to build them? So far, even in the US, they only get built when the evil Government fronts all the money and assumes all the risks of liability....then private enterprize steps up to collect the profits!

So, all these years you've been claiming global warming ended in 1998 and using an edited Phil Jones quote for a signature line, and you've actually never read anything that actual climate scientists are saying! From a Carbon Brief blog commentary on the research paper published in Nature late last year: Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is "unburnable", study says The study notes that proposed techno-fixes like carbon capture and storage are years away from reaching the point where they would have a significant impact on slowing carbon increases; and the energy and related costs would likely still make burning less carbon the only alternative to breaking through that 2 degree target. What happens if Planet Earth blows right past 2 degrees? Past history indicates that carbon spikes from natural causes and increased temperatures are periods of extinction. But, when it comes to how much carbon can we burn/ how much do we have to leave in the ground.....these are at best - educated guesses, because the climate research on past events of Abrupt Climate Change, indicate temperatures can rise very quickly...in just a few decades during warmer periods when stored carbon in oceans and permafrost are released into the atmosphere. It's a matter of percentages of risk, and the higher we turn the dials - the greater the risk. So, a 50:50 chance of blowing right past that 2 degree margin and starting a cascade of runaway climate change is already a coin toss on the odds of ending civilization and setting up eventual human extinction.

Can anyone spell "clusterf***?

When there's no other available excuses for mass-perpetration of evil around the world, pull out the conservative logic that blame should be apportioned equally between oppressors and oppressed, arms-manufacturers & merchants/ and the victims of those weapons!

But the Liberals and the NDP are shifting back and forth so much, I'm not sure which one's supposed to be the left party and which one's trying to be the centrists anymore. Granted, the Green Party has filled out their platform a little better, but the "Sustainable Economy" plank is a little light on details. It comes across as a greener version of what we're doing now. There's nothing as bold as the Green Party USA's embrace of Steady State or Degrowth. The simple fact is that continued economic growth cannot made sustainable, and any carbon reductions will be quickly overtaken by expanded economic growth and related increased energy and resource use.

Didn't you just say we're done?

And why should we be in a military conflict with Russia? America is an empire, and if this country wants to goose step to the same tune, that's what puts us at risk of terrorist attacks!

Add: these are the Muslims who have formulated the fundamentalism the right is screeching about, and use some of their oil profits to disseminate through free schools to all of the other Muslim nations. But, they're are friends....as long as we can make money off them!

Exactly! These are the same clowns venting about what Muslims are doing and the need to fight wars on terrors etc.. But, when there's money to be made, conservative values tend to fly out the window!

Trudeau is just one more in a long line of politicians who think environment is just one more issue to worry about, try to use for advantage, or just demagogue with empty useless rhetoric (I think that would describe most of his climate policy speech from June). Nobody is voting/not voting Liberal because of environment! Most will likely be voting Liberal or NDP to stop Harper before he does any more damage. Actually, that 2 degree target is the product of international political compromise and expediency. The original target in the earlier UN climate summits was one degree....not two. But too much time was wasted, and it was realized that one degree, and even 1.5 degrees (the benchmark demanded by third world nations faced with devastation by coastal flooding) would not be supported by the rich industrialized world powers....so 2 degrees is the goal...even though the only way the world will likely meet that target is by way of economic collapse....which is possible if anyone's noticed the fall in global demand for oil and other commodities for the past year or so. That tarsands that David Suzuki wants left in the ground, is much more likely to stay there if the developers can't find enough new money to finance further expansion, than any sort of political accommodation to meet environmental goals. They are the only party that realizes we are part of and dependent on the environment/not in control of these processes.

And I've already mentioned I don't know online gaming, but I will go out on a limb and guess that there are likely a lot more men than women spending hours online playing games. That's not really the issue that interests me. The gamergate issue was about the small numbers of women who had entered the game design industry. That's why I was asking if the culture of these formerly male workspaces going coed, was following the same pattern as other male occupations that are opened to women, and a lot of guys have a hard time adjusting to having women doing the same jobs and some act out in all sorts of strange and unexpected ways.

Well, it seems to me that the entire libertarian argument of a need to be free from government interference which forms the economic framework of modern conservatism, has been nothing more than a ruse by business and the rentier class to disarm the only institution (government) that can limit their powers. Which is neither here nor there! Should we be surprised that Big Money bought the other political party also? That's how they hedge their bets. On many issues, a good argument can be made that it's the Democrats who perform a more useful service of advancing the corporate agenda than the slavish devotees of the oligarchs in the Republican Party, because the Dems disarm...or at least attempt to disarm populist opposition from the left, to get the objectives of banks, oil, weapons manufacturers, big pharma etc. past all the government hurdles that need to be cleared.....Obama pushing harder to pass TPP than so many issues he has claimed to be concerned about.

That depends whether you're talking about the real Reagan or the Reagan myth created after he was out of office.

There's likely bipartisan agreement to say good riddance, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out! The corporate right at Forbes notes that he started the fight to defund Planned Parenthood, but likely only intended using it as a rhetorical issue to rail against and appear in synch with anti-birth control nutcases on the far right. Seems the mandatory childbirth lobby decided it was a good idea and wanted to run with it, and backing down or equivocating even a little, started the revolt that would have removed him as speaker if he hadn't resigned. So, I can't say I feel sorry for a political hack who's "life beyond politics" will no doubt include cashing in his bonus miles from the pharmaceutical lobby and the Keystone pipeline he kept pushing relentlessly for:

When it came to reporting on Iraq prior to Invasion, the Times was worse than anything you label a "crackpot site," because they leveraged their credibility as a news source to back Bush Administration sources they already were aware that were lying and had fraudulent information....like the Niger uranium saga. In recent years, they spiked a story from their longtime respected foreign journalist - Seymour (Sy) Hersch, and refused to publish his discovery that the Syrian poison gas attacks that the Obama Administration was using as the basis for a proposed bombing and special ops campaign to remove Assad, was actually carried out by a Syrian rebel militia that had taken control of some shells containing poison gas. Hersch could not even get his report published in the Times after the Obama Administration backed off on intensifying the war! Instead, he had to publish his story in the London Review of Books...where nobody but the already interested minority would ever notice it. This is why I say every source is suspect today! Many of what you consider crackpot sources and dismiss out of hand, will provide accurate information on stories that fit their objectives, and that's no different than what the corporate msm does!

What I've noticed while sifting around for data on the subject, is that virtually every source on the issue of global poverty, and how to measure it, is affiliated directly or 2nd or 3rd hand with some umbrella of globalization like the World Bank or the UN NGO's, who have a vested interest in propagandizing the clearing of the global commons and setting up third world sweatshop industries. But, I notice a few contrary critics of the WB occassionally like this one...about 71 pages in full: http://www.columbia.edu/~sr793/count.pdf And since we're talking fears of the future...which are scoffed at by the OP loaded with hubris, it should be added that the transition to manufacturing should have never been allowed to gallop along and increase output and resource consumption without any restraints! That should have been the lesson learned from the Great Depression, when the normal boom and bust cycles inherent in capitalism, created too much for consumers to buy and absorb. So, everything started grinding to a halt, and finally didn't resume until the great jobs program (otherwise known as WWII) and the skillful application of psychological motivation with new technology platforms...beginning with television, led to demand that seemed unending. Every time over the last half century that demand should have leveled off, some new strategy was concocted to keep juicing the system: first, fueling a rise in real estate prices and new home expectations that pushed even the less-than-willing housewives to go back into the paid workforce they were sent home from after WWII. When that could no longer feed the demand, immigration was increased, and credit became easier and more irresponsible. And during the past 30 years, one new globalization pact after another has been created to keep trying to spur demand by privatizing the last remnants of the global commons in formerly too remote regions in Africa and Asia to include in the modern economy. But, today we are at a point that none of the major economists (Keynsian or Libertarian) expected: where natural resources beginning with oil, would become so expensive to produce that continued production to meet rising demand would start killing off economic growth worldwide. The worst kept secret today is that there has been no real economic growth since the crash of 08! That crash, attributed to the creation of derivative markets and various levels of corruption, was not likely the original source of the problem: the leveling off of oil production in 05 is the likely culprit! When the economies stalled...especially after China started decreasing oil imports, someone eventually noticed that there was too much oil on the global markets to justify $100 a barrel, so the price fell....and fell...and seems to have settled temporarily at $50. A price that's too low to keep the flow of capital in keep drilling shales, deep ocean ventures and deep tarsands deposits. The production is grinding to a halt in North Dakota, and next year, those tarsands operations will have to stop production also if the price of oil doesn't rise in time to pay off some of the debt being accumulated. It looks like prices will only rise after production is halted, and could just as easily jump over 100 or 150 per barrel again, at a time when there won't be enough capital available to restart operations that are shut down. So, I'll end this expansive narrative observing that I expect something worse next year and the year after, because over time, the resource base that our globalized consumer economy is based on, is in steady decline, and no one is planning for how to scale it back without some kind of panic causing everything to crash down. This is the brave new world that the organs of globalization have dragged the citizens of the third world into today! Before, at least they were living at a near sustainable level regardless of whatever hardships they might face at home. But, they are subject to the forces of the market today, and have the least amount of money and are the least able to deal with the failure of this brave new system! On that basis alone, they are not better off if their land is destroyed and they can't go back to their former way of life in the coming decades. Who says? When I was doing my own personal research into translated testimonies of factories workers in Bangladesh back when their textile mill disasters were even making the MSM, I came across several personal testimonies of men and women who had been forced off the land within the past 20 years, and had no intentions of leaving the farm and moving to the big city and working in a mill. The horror stories of the mills were drifting back to the countryside, and the globalist propaganda that indigent peasants all across Africa, Asia and Latin America (most recently Haiti) drop their hoes and bads of seed to rush to the city for the promise of jobs and opportunity is just that: propaganda! Most of the millworkers stated that being poor in the countryside was far better than being poor in the city, because at least on the farm, they could grow their own food (and decide much of what they wanted to grow), while in the city, they could only usually afford rice and a few other grains....with most vegetables being expensive and likely contaminated. Yet, because economists can't measure production for personal use, it's tallied as an improvement in wellbeing. That's not my job...to convince you or not convince you, that's all up to you, and I'm at an age where my search for truth has nothing to do with influencing and dragging along others. I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with the world, and ever since I first went online, I find most educated and uneducated sources (whatever the topic or issue) have specialized areas of research and understanding (usually sourced in career and personal financial opportunities), while few voices in the ether are trying to develop an all-encompassing understanding of how different factors and competing interests leave us the mess we have today.

I should have thought of that one also! I had heard before that this and other forms of Islamic dress can be a personal statement on how important they consider their religion. I'm just glad that we still have a Supreme Court that tries to follow higher principles than polling numbers or political affiliation.....which is at least reason #85 to get Harper the hell out of the Prime Minister's Office! I'm sure that turning our Court into a tool for conservative activism (SCOTUS) is high on his priority list if he successfully divides the Opposition this time!

As someone who lost interest in videogames around the time Wolfenstein III and Max Payne came out....because they started getting ridiculously complicated timewasters, I haven't followed the gamergate saga too closely, other than to notice that the experiences for women entering formerly all-male Nerdsville aren't a whole lot different than the way men act in formerly all-male preserves like a shop or a factory floor...although I have to add that low brow blue-collar types say what's on their minds pretty early on, so the problems for women moving into supposedly brainiac realms like computerworld actually seem more dangerous! Maybe it's because vengeful nerds have had to go through school and life having not having the same freedom to say what's on their mind, and are more likely to scheme and plot out their revenge.... who knows! But, the pattern long noticed by psychologists and related social scientists: that men in exclusively male occupations feel their jobs have more prestige than those performed by both men and women (even regardless of income level) seems to hold even where it's guys sitting around and staring at a computer screen. And, in non-physical jobs, they have no ready excuse similar to physical occupations, to declare that their jobs are too hard for women.

Yep, at least this pope is resetting the dials that got switched when prosperity gospel started, and god's blessings went to the rich, while the poor were told they weren't working hard enough! A few months ago, I heard a couple of interviews with an historian (forget the name) who had a book out titled: "How Corporate America Created Christian America." His bold thesis was that the shift to the right and the embrace of capitalist values wasn't a product of anticommunism that started during the Cold War, but instead started during the Depression, when some disaffected business leaders began strategizing with a popular Hollywood radio evangelist to create a Christian message that was pro-capitalist and pro-American...now I'm wishing I had picked up the book and got the details. I mentioned previously some of my misgivings about someone who's taken over an expansive, corrupt organization, and how much change he can actually accomplish; but at least he's doing what Christian leaders are supposed to do: comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.: At U.N., pope condemns 'boundless thirst' for wealth and power

NO, the Times pulls up some good stories, but there editorial decisions on major foreign policy issues shows they support the US Government's prolific use of military force...both large and small, all over the world...135 countries by last count: A Secret War in 135 Countries .

I think you're assuming that there is a strategy of containing ISIS to begin with. We don't know that yet. The pieces that metastasized and came together as ISIS seemed to be given a long time to fester and carry out attacks on Kurds and the Syrian Government for a few years before declaring their Islamic state. As for partition...there was no need for partition before US forces invaded Iraq! One of the reasons why there was so much killing and violence early on in the US Occupation was because Sunni and Shia populations in major cities like Baghdad were intermixed throughout the cities...in many neighbourhoods they were even sharing the same mosques. But after regime change, a power vacuum left a complete state of anarchy, and the only forces with guns were sectarian. The big losers in all this have been the minority religions like Christians and Yezidis, and dividing Iraq between Sunni and Shia makes them permanent exiles from lands they lived in for centuries. I wonder if division was the plan all along! Once the US actually started getting around to proposing a democratic government for Iraq, they set it up by sectarian/not a regional basis....a sure way to increase divisions. And dividing Iraq and Syria into smaller fiefdoms, makes it less likely they can oppose US/Saudi/Israeli objectives in the region. The last thing I am going to assume is that these are all just unfortunate errors by well-intentioned outsiders.

It looks pretty obvious that Foxnews is trying to stop Trump! It sure as hell can't be any journalistic integrity that makes them the only news channel giving Trump a real interview! If they applied the same standards with the other Republican knobs, it would give them some credibility. So far, all it means is that the oligarchs who run the Republican Party (Kochs) see Trump as a dangerous outlier. They want yesmen who want their money and are willing to do anything for it! Trump has enough of his own money, and worse: he showed how the secret sauce in today's election process is made, when he bragged about buying favours from politicians (like Bill and Hill) in that first debate). Anyone else notice there were no follow-up questions on that one?

It's an apples and oranges comparison to begin with. Because the NDP has never been very good on environment issues anyway...they're more concerned about losing blue collar support from dirty industries like tarsands and construction workers hoping to get jobs building pipelines. And, ever since the 70's, NDP federal and provincial parties have tended to shift to the middle whenever they see a chance to crowd out the Liberals or win an election. The Green Party began with the primary focus on environment, and at least at the beginning, was casting the ideology net wide enough to try to snag Liberals who focused on environment issues...especially global warming. The only time the Greens were in a de facto alliance with a major party, it wasn't with the NDP/ it was with Stephan Dion's Liberals after he proposed a shift to a carbon tax.

Oh yeah, that's going to work! How much time did you spend thinking through the logic of this? If it's not a freewill decision, and a woman is coerced by husband or family to wear a niqaab, what will be the result of the ban? You likely won't see her in public at all, and the ban will be interpreted as a rejection of their religion and culture and an attempt to impose western culture on them....which has a lot of things we can't brag about either!