WIP

Most outstander poster needs to actually read something besides filtered rightwing propaganda sites.

Then, if negotiations are impossible, say so...I'm old enough to remember when Israeli leaders like Golda Meir said that there was no such thing as a Palestinian...stop the charade, and just build the walled fortress. Netanyahu is not interested in a peaceful resolution, so stop pretending. The Apartheid Government of South Africa kept using the excuse of fighting communism to keep their regime going; the difference today is that most of the West is being guilt-tripped into supporting an Israeli Government that is following a determined policy of ethnic cleansing.

Global warming discussions usually focus on greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, how much sea levels will rise in the future, the impacts of extreme weather events, but a report that came out of an international conference of ocean scientists reported by AFP says that what's happening under water to the world's oceans is much more crucial for our future than what's happening on land: Pollution and global warming are pushing the world's oceans to the brink of a mass extinction of marine life unseen for tens of millions of years, a consortium of scientists warned Monday. Dying coral reefs, biodiversity ravaged by invasive species, expanding open-water "dead zones," toxic algae blooms, the massive depletion of big fish stocks -- all are accelerating, they said in a report compiled during an April meeting in Oxford of 27 of the world's top ocean experts. Sponsored by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), the review of recent science found that ocean health has declined further and faster than dire forecasts only a few years ago. These symptoms, moreover, could be the harbinger of wider disruptions in the interlocking web of biological and chemical interactions that scientists now call the Earth system. All five mass extinctions of life on the planet, reaching back more than 500 million years, were preceded by many of the same conditions now afflicted the ocean environment, they said. "The results are shocking," said Alex Rogers, an Oxford professor who heads IPSO and co-authored the report. "We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime." Three main drivers are sickening the global marine environment, and all are a direct consequence of humans activity: global warming, acidification and a dwindling level oxygen, a condition known as hypoxia. A couple of years ago, I read a book by paleontologist - Peter Ward (Under A Green Sky) about how these factors caused the great Permian/Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago, and connected the present trends with the likelihood of a human-caused repeat. more..... "We have underestimated the overall risks, and that the whole of marine degradation is greater than the sum of its parts," Rogers said. "That degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted." Indeed, the pace of change is tracking or has surpassed the worst-case scenarios laid out by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its landmark 2007 report, according to the new assessment. The chain reaction leading to increased acidification of the oceans begins with a massive influx of carbon into Earth's climate system. Oceans act as a massive sponge, soaking up more than a quarter of the CO2 humans pump into the atmosphere. But when the sponge becomes too saturated, it can disrupt the delicately balanced ecosystems on which marine life -- and ultimately all life on Earth -- depends................. "We now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation," said Daniel Laffoley, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas, and co-author of the report. "And we are also probably the last generation that has enough time to deal with the problems," he told AFP by phone. I'd like to be more optimistic about the odds of acting in time to stop the poisoning of the world's oceans but other news doesn't point to a rosy scenario: UN talks must save Kyoto or 'collapse': AOSIS

don't give me that contrails bullshit. Try to start a serious discussion on an issue which is already having repercussions on weather and food production, and a drug addict having acid flashbacks says the sky is changing colour.

Those sound like better approaches than what's used today, but as long as there are pumps and pipes and valves, there is the chance of disaster. Most of the systems described in that article can't really be termed "walkaway safe" if they have up to 72 hours to get the cooling system up and running again! I found the story I picked up from a podcast of an NPR show on mini-nuclear reactors, called NuScale Reactors: They're designing what they call "modular" or "mini"reactors. Instead of occupying a city block of buildings, the smallest could fit in a two-car garage. And it won't break the bank. "We've been calling it the economy of small," says Jose Reyes, who runs a company called NuScale Power. Reyes has designed a reactor about one-tenth the size of current reactors. It looks very different, though, kind of like a 50-foot-plus thermos. "The concept is that you can't take a large reactor with all of its pumps and valves and piping and just shrink it down and expect to see an economic advantage there," he says. In a standard reactor, there are pipes running everywhere, and pumps and valves to circulate water to the reactor core. The hot fuel creates steam that is piped out of the reactor vessel to run a turbine. If pumps or valves fail to keep the water moving, you can get a Fukushima-style meltdown. In the NuScale reactor, there are no pumps. Water circulates naturally as it gets heated and then cools off. The whole reactor sits underground in a tank of water that will flood everything in case of an accident.

Also worth noting that, even if we're talking about the Inuit in the Arctic, the traditional way of life is rapidly falling apart because of rapid decline of the winter icepacks and thinning of sea ice.

Get off the !@#$%^& drugs!

Which is exactly what we have in a capitalist system where a few at the top own most of the wealth! Whining about government is pointless in this system because governments are bought and sold by the privileged few who control the money. Real democracy depends on the majority feeling that they have a say, and a stake in the system. Over on the NDP thread, the underlying issue behind attempts to remove the word "socialism" have nothing to do with ideology, but the mere fact that the leaders of the NDP are trying to do what Democrats do in the U.S. -- curry favour with corporate class while trying to appear working class to their base of supporters. Rightwing parties do not have to perform this balancing act, and that's why they will dominate this system if nothing is done to stop the increasing stratification of wealth. Hate him! For classic science fiction I'll take Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury any day.

And, how long will it be that this policy remains in place? Everybody knows this is the other boot that's about to fall, since Harper Cons are just following the Republican playbook. The next step is a Canadian version of the theory behind the Citizens United Case against the FEC -- where corporations express their free speech rights through the money they throw around, and restrictions on corporate campaign donations are a denial of the artificial citizen's free speech. Now that we have a governing party that believes in American-style election campaigning, money is going to become a bigger and bigger factor in Canadian elections. Harper started out-of-season campaigning and big spending ad campaigns weeks and months before calling an election, this is the template for all future elections unless non-brainwashed Canadians dump them out of office four years from now.

If negotiations are about a setup of tiny, isolated Palestinian enclaves on the West Bank separated by Jewish-only roads and surrounded by guard posts, what the hell is the point of having negotiations in the first place? It tells me that there is no such thing as a "Two State Solution" even in theory....let alone in practice.

Nope! I knew you were just pulling that one out of your ass since I had a vague recollection of the chronology of events at the time, since both were pushing a policy with the South African Government called "Constructive Engagement," which apparently collapsed after Congress overrode a presidential veto (when's the last time that happened?): In October 1986, the United States Congress overrode President Reagan's veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (the Senate vote was 78 to 21, the House vote was 313 to 83), despite objections by conservative Representatives such as Dick Cheney, who noted that Nelson Mandela was the head of an organization that the State Department had deemed "terrorist".[13] In the week leading up to the vote, President Reagan appealed to members of the Republican Party for support, but as Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. would state, "For this moment, at least, the President has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America."[14] The legislation, which banned all new U.S. trade and investment in South Africa, also refused South African Airways flights from landing at U.S. airports. This legislation was seen as a catalyst for similar sanctions in Europe and Japan, and signalled the end of the constructive engagement policy. [edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_engagement It's uncanny how Dick Cheney's name pops up every time there is a dirty, slimy story from the past is mentioned.

Speaking as a casual sports fan, I have to say that dedicated sports fans, regardless of the sport, are the stupidest, most boneheaded clowns in the population. Otherwise, you grow out of this stage in life instead of spending hundreds of dollars on tickets in your middle years. So, I'm not surprised that winning the Stanley Cup...losing in the final game...can lead to riots afterwards. At least in Greece, there are people in the streets demonstrating and rioting about things that actually affect their daily lives! Who in their right mind really gives a shit about a game? It's just a game! The world will be exactly the same the next day regardless of who won and who lost.

I don't check in on these threads too often, so I don't know if this has been mentioned in the 175 previous comments, but, after looking at a map on TV last night of West Bank settlements and Palestinian zones, the thought came to mind that this looks exactly like the isolated Bantustans that the Apartheid regime in South Africa tried to create in the final years of Apartheid to prevent the eventual collapse. Is this really what the purpose of the Jewish settlements is for on the West Bank? One difference between present day Israel and 1980's South Africa, is that they eventually ran out of friends as even Reagan and Thatcher were forced to cut off military and financial assistance and downgrade their relationship. Present day America (and Canada) looks like we're going over the cliff with Israel if worse comes to worse!

I figured they would start repositioning themselves as soon as soon as they became aware of an opportunity to remove that Liberal middleground. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, considering that this is exactly what leftwing parties have done in England, France, or any country that uses a first-past-the-post election system. We also have the added problem that the people with the money are not on the political left. Now that Harper is ending public campaign financing, everyone is chasing the same people with the bags of money, so our future NDP will look similar to the Democratic Party, which tries to be populist enough to get the votes of the majority, while currying favour of the Wall Street bankers and other sources of funding and future employment after leaving office.

Our species started with a highly developed capacity for empathy, which was essential for cooperative living in those hunter/gatherer societies that dominated most of human history. As civilization developed, there was still the basic understanding that the needs of society as a whole can overrule personal wants and desires. The problem is today that modern society has become so complex that people feel disconnected from society. In the Information Age of computers and internet, people are more isolated and have less involvement with real people living in their neighbourhoods, so it's easier to call yourself an 'ethical egoist' or some equivalent claptrap than it was during her time, when this sort of thinking was privy to intellectual elites. My basic thinking on Ayn Rand is that, regardless of how much she has made her philosophy seem complex, it boils down to little more than presenting the opposite approach of Marxism. Marx taught that the good of the collective was the highest value, so an anti-Marxist like Rand, creates an opposite philosophy where individual wants and desires are supreme. Most people realize that the best way to live would be somewhere between two extreme approaches to life...whose proponents served as poor examples of healthy living in their own lives.

The cozy relationship between the religious right and Ayn Rand followers in the U.S. is the strangest political tagteam of all. If the Democrats are smart...and I'm not putting big odds on it, they would be promoting a couple of mostly liberal evangelical coalitions that are trying to unhinge their churches from the Republican Party. One of them: The American Values Network is running ads specifically targeting Republican politicians like Paul Ryan (the guy who forces his staff to read Atlas Shrugged) for their slavish devotion to the Ayn Rand cult: Simple message -- you can either be a Christian or be an Objectivist, but you can't be both...so why haven't the Democrats thought of running with this before?

Which can be inverted to say that the reason why Ayn Rand is so popular is because she allows selfish, greedy people to live guilt-free.

And, another factor could be found in our changing technologies that rely more on satellite, and less on radio wave broadcasting, which send strong signals in all directions, including into space. Our radiowave profile is likely much less than it was 20 years ago. If an extraterrestrial signal is found, it proves that intelligent life can progress beyond primitive, self-destructive tendencies; if no signal is found, we still have that nagging possibility that intelligent life is like a stillborn child -- doomed before it leaves the womb! Ecologists are just coming to understand now how much we have modified the Earth's environment. Many forests were turned into grasslands by early agriculture, and never recovered. But, the problem now is that our present population levels and resource use are proceeding at unsustainable levels. The World economies are at the limits of what the Earth's biosphere can accommodate, and the Biosphere's natural limits are going to overrule whatever wishes and desires economists have for continued economic growth....and that's why things will change, and are already in the process of changing...as evidenced by rising food prices, oil prices, floods droughts etc. Declaring that humankind will survive, and especially that our modern civilization will survive are faith-based assumptions, as long as no strategies guaranteeing longterm survival can be produced....aside from the other unfounded faith that some future technological rabbit will be pulled out of a hat! I am more and more convinced that the unwillingness to look squarely at these problems is little more than an escape through denial. Back when I was young...in the 60's, when the space programs were giving us the impression that some people would soon be leaving Earth to begin exploring The Final Frontier, the problems of overpopulation, pollution, overconsumption of resources (global warming wasn't on the radar yet), and especially the threat of extinction through nuclear war, were considered problematic for future generations, but the assumption was that we would be building colonies on the Moon, Mars, and floating space colonies in L5 orbits before it was too late. With the space programs now bounded by the reality that it is much more difficult to build a biosphere than it is to destroy one, there is less willingness to make changes to prevent or mitigate disaster than there was 40 years ago...and that could be our ultimate downfall.

And that's a strange arrow to pull out of your quiver, as evidence that everything will be fine as the World's oceans become increasingly acidic. The study is just examining recent history, and indicating that the coral producing organisms have some limited ability to adapt by moving to cooler waters. In the past, corals have become extinct, as evidenced by the fact that continued building of the reefs was continued several times by new species of reef-builders. And, there is the other problem, that we are adding more carbon into the atmosphere (there wasn't even a slowdown during the recent recession), so for all intents and purposes we have placed a brick on the gas pedal, and there is no telling when man-made carbon will start being reduced considering economic factors driving up CO2 production. Also, the previous article I linked about a study on why the common Clown Fish (the star of Finding Nemo) is declining in numbers worldwide. The new study indicates that the changing ph of the World's oceans is screwing up their sonar abilities, which are essential for detecting approaching predators. Further research will likely show that this may be a factor besides over-fishing in the rapid decline of fish stocks worldwide. In Peter Ward's study of the Permian-Triassic Extinction (Under A Green Sky) he theorized that the poisoning of the World's oceans during The Great Dying caused more death and extinctions than the warming effects on land from high carbon dioxide levels; and argues that more focus should be placed on ocean acidification today for the same reason.

I'm sure they would be every bit as corrupt and greedy as the multinational fossil fuel industry, which is why I would rather support taxing the externalized costs of fossil fuels instead creating carbon trading markets where the players can play games like planting a few extra trees and claiming them as carbon offsets. Nevertheless, any scheme that inhibits continued extraction of coal and oil, in favour of supporting non-carbon burning energy sources would be a step up. That is a religious dogma that cannot be backed up with facts. And a smaller government allows corporate profiteers to sell dangerous, even toxic products to the public...check out the recent stories about David Koch's lobbying to prevent the EPA from recognizing formaldehyde as a carcinogin for an example of how far people solely motivated by greed will go if there are no government institutions applying constraints on their desire for more riches. In principle, there is no logical argument against government regulation of industry and commerce, nor the principle of progressive taxation -- which is the only restraint in our society preventing wealth gaps from turning into entrenched class hierarchies.

Passive cooling would be a major step towards better safety; but, from what I've read, it's only possible with smaller reactors, not the big reactors built for large scale power plants.

I'm going to get into Ayn Rand later, since I found her notions on altruism to be totally ludicrous even back in the time when I considered myself to be a libertarian (for what it's worth Rand hated libertarians and accused them of stealing her ideas). Her basic philosophical stance on free will and altruism are as out of place in a modern understanding of the human mind as the Christian fundamentalists are. And, she was a total, lying hypocrite in her personal life. Her blather about "ethical egoism" was supposed to show us that altruism was unnecessary in a healthy, functioning society, but she was a ruthless, manipulative cult leader who was a drug addict, sexual predator (Nathaniel Brandon affair), and couldn't even live up to her own bullshit philosophy in her later years when she ended up on Medicare! More later....

Maybe you have a personal stake in the games that the World Bank and IMF play on the world stage, but you are starting with a false analogy to begin with if you're comparing the development loans offered to third world dictators (many of which were put in leadership by CIA and other foreign interference) with personal borrowing. Did this woman have any choice regarding the loans to her nation of origin? Or the austerity measures that were forced on her country which include increased foreign ownership of their economy....this is the crux of the IMF game, since debtor nations in need of more loans are slaves to the bankers offering more money on conditional terms. I made the analogy to the reasons why she might have been forced to emigrate in search of work because I found it ironic that a man who makes the rape of poor nations his business would be rapist on a personal level also; but the key aspect of DSK's crimes is that he, like many of the filthy rich, feel that they live above and beyond the laws and rules that apply to the reset of us. DSK has had a long track record of notorious sexual behaviour, and likely felt that assaulting or even raping another lowly domestic worker would be covered up by the hotel - since they would wish to avoid scandal by covering it up and/or offering the woman some hush money as compensation. Afterall, the hotel waited for more than 3 hours before they first called authorities and reported the incident. That's why DSK was already on the plane and almost got away, Scot-free! At his advanced age, it's a safe bet that this is a long standing pattern of behaviour, and he's gotten away with ambushing domestic workers in the past.

Western culture, as you define it, cannot continue in its present form for much longer anyway...so it's a moot point! Western culture has been built upon economic colonization of the undeveloped world and extracting their resources at low prices. This and the fundamental problem that the modern capitalist system depends on continuous growth and inflating demand for more and more consumer products...at a time when we're bumping up against declines in oil and many other natural resources, and I'd say we need to do something to change our own culture before we start pointing fingers at the Muslims. Big difference is that the Islamic Expansion was based on religious zealotry...just like Christian expansion and propagation from the time of the Roman Empire through the Colonial Era...while the expansion of the last century and a half is primarily driven by Globalization, and the desire of multinational corporations to control their markets as well as the nations which serve as the sources of their production and raw materials. It's not just the Muslim countries where this economic colonization has created animosity against America and the West in general.

No, they're just building drama for the upcoming Michelle vs. Sarah Catfight....I'll wait for the video!