WIP

And the countries that live out this anti-abortion, anti-birth control bullshit are paying for it now....Egypt for example! Right wing religious nuts care nothing about life; their goal is to bring back patriarchy and take away reproductive freedom from women...which proves that rightwing fundamentalist women are the biggest fools of all....since they're like freed prisoners trying to put their chains and ankle bracelets back on!

Ever hear of the Guilded Age? That was also a time when the rich thought they could do whatever they liked and got fat while people in factory sweatshops were literally worked to death....and that's how we got the Labour Movement! The weekend, the 8 hour day, and the right to collective bargaining were concessions extracted when the fatcats started to fear for their lives. Now that most of America has lost their unions and collective bargaining rights, the rich are trying to tear down the last citadel of collective bargaining -- the public employees unions....and I hope that what's happening in Wisconsin is the beginning of a long-overdue reform movement to take back some of what has been lost to your Republican friends over the last 30 years.

It's not improving; 2009 provided some relief with greater harvests than the previous four years. At the end of 2008, the starvation estimate was 1.02 billion as cited previously. Tentative figures for this year show it will rise back to a billion after falling to 925 million last year. 2010 was a bad year for world agricultural production, and 2011 is not going to be much better due to prolonged droughts in Russia, China and Brazil, and floods in Australia. Current projections are for a modest improvement (at least for wheat production) over last year's disaster, but that's assuming no big surprises from Mother Nature, which are coming more frequently than in the past. Canada's spring wheat production is expected to be much lower because large snowfalls out West are expected to lead to spring flooding. It might help China! But forcing indigenous peoples off land and setting up large scale operations for growing cash crops for export to China is not going to help Africans; and will likely lead to more starvation. Hunger rates have doubled, not halved! There were half a billion at starvation level in the late 60's; now there's a billion. Birth control helped slow the rate of population growth here; but in the Third World the birth rates started increasing due to the meddling of religious fundamentalists...especially the tag team of the Catholic Church and leading Muslim clerics that pushed back against the U.N. family planning organizations, and eliminated birth control, condoms, and the abortion option. And technology pulled their last big food-growing rabbit out of the hat with the Green Revolution. There is limited capacity to find any more big efficiencies in food production now. And, those underlying fundamentals of topsoil depletion many times greater than replacement rate, and declining fresh water have to be dealt with at some point. The experience of past civilizations has been that nothing is done until a crisis cannot be avoided.

I'm allergic to Alex Jones! Most of his fellow conspiracy theorists follow his same recipe of one part facts, one part conjecture, and two parts exaggerated bullshit. I found of this Gerald Celente even more irritating and obnoxious than the host....and that takes some doing! This guy may know currency issues and economics....I started drifting a bit during that clip....but this Mr. Knowitall is talking about money, when the real underlying issue is rising food prices. It's not just an economics issue if it's a country like Egypt, or many other Middle Eastern nations that are overpopulated and can't grow enough food to support their populations. Egypt's population has grown from 27 million in 1960 to almost 85 million today. Oil production is in decline, and imported food is getting more expensive, since there are so many other buyers of food commodities lately. This would be an economics issue if Egypt and other M.E. countries had the capacity to turn these problems around; but a new government, whether it's democratic or not, has little room to work with to figure out a way to bring down food prices in Egypt. And, if you think that's bad, take a look at some of the background articles on Yemen! Same problems: overpopulation, declining food production, importing more food from abroad plus there is the unusual looming crisis for Yemen's population of having almost the entire nation dependent on an underground fossil aquifer for fresh water. That means this is water that does not replenish. Like oil, it will run out, and when it does, there will be an entire nation with no water supply.

Maybe not solutions for you! But for working class people, especially union members, the failure and co-opting of liberal institutions is a total betrayal, since union leaders, liberal politicians, liberal journalists, and the liberal university intellectuals have mostly sold out to the highest bidder over the last 30 years. In the U.S., there is a pitched battle among left bloggers over who represents the progressives....the Obots and other diehard supporters of Democratic politicians, or the leftwingers who put principle ahead of personalities, and declare that if Obama and other Dems are carrying out a largely rightwing agenda, then they should be totally discarded and real progressives should be trying to take over local Democratic Party Associations the way Tea Party groups have taken over the Republican Party at the local level. Here in Canada, it means anyone who thinks Michael Ignatieff would be any more than a marginal change from the Harper Government, is a fool! Whether the NDP is worth supporting, is matter of locality. I'm happy with my local MP, but Jack Layton needs to go.

And the underlying fundamentals haven't changed! The Green Revolution only succeeded in delaying the final reckoning -- the final results will be worse than what was forecast in the late 60's, since the population has doubled, and environmental degradation has been prolonged to bring us to our present situation where there is no slack left since there are no large tracts of arable land in the World to be put into food production.

There are numbers tallying the losses in 2010 caused by extreme weather events. You can argue opinions, but you don't get your own facts because the real ones are inconvenient. And the environmental fundamentals that power big agribusiness are unsustainable...that's also a point beyond argument, since topsoil is being depleted 10 times faster than replacement capacity in the U.S., and China and India are losing soil 30 to 40 times faster than the natural replenishment rate. Add declining fresh water levels, peak oil's effect on the use of oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, and pollution from these toxic chemicals and factory farm runoff, and tell me again how big agribusiness is going to sustain its present levels of production....let alone try to increase them to meet increasing population demands? Your last suggestion is the nihilist response, but it may be where we actually end up in the coming years!

I just showed you the numbers if you cared to read them! I'd like to be an optimist too; but blind optimism is just as irrational as paranoia; such as we find in some people who insult their Muslim neighbours because they believe they are secret Islamic sleeper cells. The simple facts are that the world is in a state of ecological overshoot by 25 to 50%, depending on who's numbers you use. The Green Revolution and intensive agriculture using oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, is using up available topsoil about 16 times faster than it can be rehabilitated. Plus, water is in steep decline: rivers have been diverted so intensely that Lake Chad is drying up in the Sub-Sahara, the Aral Sea goes dry in the Caucasus, and the Dead Sea between Jordan and Israel is also shrinking because of increased demands on the Jordan River. Long story short, these debts owed to Planet Earth by world food production have to be payed back at some point. If it doesn't start now, most of the world we become a giant Easter Island in the next one to three decades. BTW that current projection that the World's population will reach 9 billion in 2050 and then gradually level off, is just not going to happen! Even without periodic weather disasters, world agriculture yields are already in decline, and will never be able to support a population of 9 billion! We are in a situation similar to deer living on crowded little islands with no predators, who consume all of the available food until there is mass starvation. The classic human version of this drama (if you think we are too smart and logical to find ourselves in this situation) is the Polynesian civilization on Easter Island, that built those giant statues as a legacy. I've noticed on most issues that you seem to hug the middle of road somewhere, but mushy middle-of-the-road liberalism is not solving any major problems in the World today! The great liberal institutions of the Press, the Labour Unions, the Universities, have either stood by silently, or been coopted by the corporate agenda of Globalization. There is no smiley face to draw on the way modern economics works today. It is a toxic system that colonizes poor nations and leaves the vast majority in the developed nations declining in wealth. The professional liberal class that occupies the New York Times, and the Toronto Star here, have not provided any solutions to the growing wealth gap or the growing power of corporate citizens at our expense....since they collect cheques from the same sources. Their advice has left us exactly where we would be following the conservative agenda.

Yes, there did used to be climate norms that formed the basis of modern agriculture...especially in the Tropics. For example, all of the major rice-growing countries have depended on a regular cycle between a dry season and a monsoon season, with the occasional bad year with little rain; but it has been assumed up until recent years that a drought year was an aberation, and next year would be better. Now, we are seeing droughts last several years, interspersed with massive floods that bring the rains down in torrents and destroy crops, and drain away before most of the water can be absorbed into the water table. The new normal is that every year (especially in the Global South) is a crap shoot -- no one knows what to expect, and along with eroding topsoils and declining water tables, that's why agricultural production in the Third World is in decline....and unfortunately at a time when their populations are still increasing. It appears that the scientists are confirming what the World's major insurance companies have been trying to tell us in recent years: the World is experiencing greater extreme weather events, which are a disaster for modern agriculture: Researchers Link Extreme Rains To Global Warming

As if that makes any difference. You can't consistently claim a distinction between right and wrong either. Try! For every example you can find of a divine just rule, I can give you a scenario where that rule would lead to dire consequences. No, we (or at least most of us) believe we find meaning and purpose in our own lives. It's not something that already exists in the Universe, and it's not something that is handed down to us from above. If you actually read anything about the subject, people with antisocial personality disorders tend to believe in rule-based ethics....just like you do. They lack the ability to use empathy as a guide to decide the right course of action where there are no convenient rules to apply. So, they are more likely to be fundamentalists than atheists!

Yeah, all billion and a half Muslims behead people....or is that a slight exaggeration? Good thing Christians never do evil....like fire laser-guided bombs at unsuspecting villages.

No! It's because most of us don't want to bother wasting our time with your crap! You write a string of racist statements, and then declare that it's not racist. You hurl wild accusations and have nothing to back them up with....and then you call your own writing "brilliant." But then I already assumed a long time ago that anyone who comes in here calling himself MR CANADA has ego problems!

In a nutshell, most of your country's foreign policy is devoted to doing what's best for the oil industry and keeping oil flowing through the MidEast and the Persian Gulf. And, what's left over is attention to taking care of the interests of other multinational corporations in Latin America and Asia. The U.S. wouldn't need a fraction of its present military budget, nor be meddling with supporting despots if it had started moving out of the oil-based economy when its own oil reserves started running out....back in the 70's. Imposing a form of corporate colonization on the world makes the massive military and the wars part of doing business.

How so? Because the number of people going hungry is increasing! Forty years ago, half a billion people were near starvation; that increased to almost a billion in the 80's, dropped to about 850 million in the late 90's, but it's been going up ever since, and as of 2009, is over 1.02 billion. They're buying up land...just as many multinational corporations are also in a big land-grab...and neither China's nor the agribusiness giants' intentions are completely clear. But it's not likely that they're buying land in the interest of what's good for the locals!

Where do find hyperbole? Take a look at what's been happening the last few years....food prices soaring, global food stocks declining, and weather becoming increasing erratic. There's no guarantee that the good times will keep rolling here based on what's happening in other places in the world. Maybe...if they stopped diverting corn for producing ethanol. What would happen to that surplus if the U.S. got hit with a heatwave similar to the one that hit Russia this last summer? Russia's grain harvest dropped 40% and led to a halt on exports....what would happen if U.S. grain harvests dropped 40% in one year? Then add it to the others! The facts are: population is increasing, while world food production is dropping because of depleting topsoil and declining water tables. And, add the wildcard of climate change -- which will bring us more floods, more droughts, and wreak havoc on large scale agriculture that depends on stable, repeated weather patterns. Sure, the U.S. will need profits to pay for the extra military and security costs that are going to be associated with food shortages in the Third World. Sure it would! Check out Goldman Sachs for one -- that is buying up wheat, rice and other commodity futures to keep the prices from falling. But, they wouldn't be willing to lose money cornering the futures markets if they believed there was any possibility that present food crises were about to change. The Wall Street vultures are circling for good reasons! Well, one thing it means is inflation, from rising food prices. It also means more uprisings and instability in countries that have been straining under the effects of rising food prices for the last couple of years. Australia is normally a major food exporter; but being one of the few developed nations that is partially within the Tropics, Australians are privy to the most dramatic and devastating effects of climate change so far....which have primarily affected countries in the Global South. Prolonged droughts have wiped out wheat and livestock, and the floods in Eastern Australia are taking care of what's left of Australian agriculture! Australia has the money to import food, just like Russia, China, and a few other countries that have been hard hit recently; but what does that do for global food prices? And, these sorts of things cannot be written off as temporary shortfalls anymore, thanks to global warming. The variability in weather is going to be with us permanently, and some of the changes, such as the prolonged droughts in Australia, China and Brazil, are telling us that there is no "normal" to return to anymore.

From The American Dream: Will 2011 be the year that we point to as the beginning of the great global food crisis? Food prices are soaring, supplies are very tight and already we have seen some very intense food protests flare up around the globe this year. When people don't have enough to eat, they tend to become very desperate, and unfortunately it looks like the global food situation is not going to improve much any time soon. That last point needs to be underlined, since the great overlooked backstory to what's going on in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen etc. is that rising food prices and food shortages in the Middle East have created the public mood that's shaken the majority out of their complacency. .....What is going to happen if weather patterns get even worse or if we have a string of really bad natural disasters? What is going to happen if we experience a really bad global economic collapse? Right now these are just the "birth pains", but if things get much worse we could be looking at a horrific food shortage that will rock the globe. The following are 14 facts that make you wonder if the coming global food shortage has already begun.... #1 According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. corn reserves will drop to a 15 year low by the end of 2011. #2 The United Nations says that the global price of food hit another new all-time high in the month of January. #3 The price of corn has doubled in the past six months. #4 The price of wheat has roughly doubled since the middle of 2010. #5 According to Forbes, the price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June. #6 The United Nations is projecting that the global price of food will increase by another 30 percent by the end of 2011. #7 Due to all of the unprecedented flooding, the winter wheat crop in Australia has been absolutely devastated. #8 This winter Brazil was hit by some of the worst flooding that nation has ever seen. This has substantially hampered food production in that country. #9 Russia, one of the largest wheat producers on the entire globe, is still feeling the effects of last summer's scorching temperatures. In fact, Russia is actually importing wheat this winter to sustain its cattle herds. #10 China is busy preparing for a "severe, long-lasting drought" that is projected to have a huge impact on several provinces. In fact, Chinese state media says that the eastern province of Shandong is dealing with the worst drought it has seen in 200 years. The provinces being affected by this severe drought grow approximately two-thirds of the wheat in China. #11 It appears that Chinese imports of corn will be about 9 times larger than the U.S. Department of Agriculture originally projected them to be for 2011. #12 Approximately 1 billion people around the world go to bed hungry each night. #13 Somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds, and 75 percent of those are children under the age of five. #14 As food has become increasingly scarce around the world, many companies have started using whatever kinds of "fillers" that they can think of in their "food" products. For example, Raw Story is reporting that some companies in China have actually been mass producing "fake rice" that is made partly of plastic. And, how will starvation and food riots in the Third World affect us? Well think about it for a second...some of those countries that are overpopulated and currently straining to produce enough food, have nuclear weapons - India and Pakistan for example. If their dispute over water rights in Kashmir goes nuclear....that's bad for everyone no matter where you live. Food stockpiles all over the world are disturbingly low at this point. If a major global famine broke out not even the United States would be able to last for long. The U.S. government is supposed to be keeping a lot of food stockpiled in the event of an emergency, but that is just not happening. Right now a desperate scramble for food is beginning. Quite a few nations that used to be huge food exporters are now importing a lot of their food. Prices for staples such as wheat, corn and soybeans are absolutely soaring, and the UN is projecting that they will continue to rise rapidly throughout 2011. Unless something dramatically changes, the global food situation is only going to get tighter and tighter and tighter as this decade rolls along. So who is going to decide who gets fed and who doesn't?

Whatever the minimum wage is set at, why is the rightwing solution to unemployment and welfare to cut benefits off those who are in the system? The standard claim is that welfare or unemployment lowers their incentive to work....well, why not put some rungs on the ladder, so someone who was on welfare and able to work, would have a good reason to...instead of taking a minimum wage job and losing whatever benefits they currently have on welfare or disability.

A general rule of thumb is that any website calling itself "Real Science," that is diametrically opposed to the consensus of the majority of their colleagues (if these are actually scientists) is likely nothing more disinformation and misinformation for a simpleminded audience of closed minds....and same thing goes whether the subject is global warming, evolution, homeopathy etc. Here, in this blog post we have a compilation of real science stories on disappearing polar ice with links, just out today: An ice sheet is a huge layer of land ice. The only ice sheets are in Antarctica and Greenland. The Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate. In recent years the ice loss has spread from the south coast around to the northwest. Similarly, Antarctica is also losing ice at an accelerating rate. Antarctica is basically divided into two distinct ice sheets, the West Antarctic and East Antarctic. The East Antarctic ice sheet, which is much bigger than the West Antarctic one, was until recently considered stable, but has also begun losing ice. Ice shelves are thick, floating platforms of ice formed when glaciers flow from the land onto the ocean surface. The Antarctic Peninsula is warming rapidly. Several ice shelves have collapsed completely, including one covering 3,250 km2, almost twice the area of urban Sydney. Glaciers are retreating around the globe. Although one can point to particular glaciers that are growing, glaciologists look for trends in the total mass of glaciers worldwide. It turns out the world’s glaciers are losing ice at an accelerating rate. And despite all the hype about a certain mistake in the 2007 IPCC report, the Himalayan glaciers are in fact melting. Arctic sea ice grows and shrinks seasonally, with an annual minimum in September. In 1979, when satellites first measured it, September Arctic sea ice extent was roughly equivalent to the area of Australia. Since then it has declined by about a third, equivalent to losing Western Australia – outstripping all projections. Contrarians claim Arctic sea ice has “recovered” since the record low extent of 2007. But sea ice exists in three dimensions, and it has continued to thin rapidly. Ice volume data paints a picture even more dire: the Arctic has actually lost not one third but two thirds of September sea ice. What’s more, the volume reached a record low in 2010 – not an encouraging sign of recovery. 2010 set the stage for continued melting. At the end of the summer, a record-breaking 86% of ice cover was less than two years old; ice older than five years has all but disappeared. The remaining new ice is thinner and much easier to melt than older ice. So, are all these reports of sea ice, ice sheets, and mountain glaciers receding all wrong? And it's a handful of dubious credentialed experts who get payed by the oil companies - can explain away these apparent signs of massive scale warming. When there is a clear consensus of expert opinion on a technical subject, it's usually the majority who are on the right side, not the ones working from political agendas and collecting money from dubious sources!

Still waiting to hear if this is more than a bitchfest! What do you propose as a solution to the welfare problem...cut off social assistance...reduce benefits?

I would say Israel is a democracy much the way South Africa was during Apartheid, or the U.S. was pre-Civil Rights.... since it is a democracy that privileges one group over another. Also, for years we've been told we have to support Israel because it is the only Western democracy in the Middle East. The lack of freedom there was taken as a given that 'that's just the way Arabs are!' Now, we discover that U.S. Foreign Policy prefers useful despots who sign blank cheques when it comes to U.S. interests in the area. No surprise now that democracy was never encouraged, as (has happened with Turkey) democracies may be inclined to follow their own national interests, rather than what's good for U.S. and Israel.

I like Neil Young, but as a guitarist, he should have checked his ego at the door and backed off those fumbled, clumsy solos. His guitar playing is a mess when he tries to go too fast or play hard-to-reach chords. The overall point is valid -- some guitarists are technically good, but play with no emotion. Since I mentioned Steve Hackett earlier as a personal favourite, I'm recalling watching the last Genesis live concert video, and how their touring guitarist - Darrell Stuermer played totally bland when they do a medley of their 70's prog rock classics. Stuermer can play the same chords I guess, but it's totally soulless.

yeah, it's sickening how many people look for someone to kick down, rather than go after fatcats that have rigged the system and are robbing us blind.

Here's where bush/cheney's getting is upside down view on reality: I'm surprised Billy Joel didn't sue the asses off these clowns for stealing "We Didn't Start The Fire" as the foundation for this song. The only nuance added is a horrible nya nya nya nya nya lead guitar....has to be heard to be believed! If not, check out these wonderful, insightful lyrics: Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye Taliban Free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up Osamas staying underground, Al Qaida now is finding out America wont turn and run once the fighting has begun Libya turns over nukes, Lebanese want freedom, too Syria is forced to leave, dont you know that all this means Chorus Bush was right! Bush was right! Bush was right! Yeah, good thing Bush took care of that Taliban....and everything's sweetness and light in Iraq.

Looks like you're running away from your post opener that tells us what a great friend of democracy Dubya was with all of your attempts to divert attention. Seems like you're trying to derail your own thread!

Those are key identifying characteristics of a psychopath. Yes it does! In the sense that someone who meets the clinical definition of psychopath has a limited sense of empathy, understanding of the needs of other people, and are impulsive, highly attracted to seeking rewards, along with risk-taking....so how much capacity are they going to have to identify what is good, and do good? This isn't a matter of choosing! Someone who is a psychopath fits that definition because of distinct abnormalities in brain function that manifest these problems: Psychopaths' Brains Wired to Seek Rewards, No Matter the Consequences Are you just trying to create word salads here? If you pulled that out for some reason, utilitarian ethics is based on careful deliberation...weighing the balance of maximizing benefits, while minimizing harms. Utilitarian ethics would appeal to the careful, deliberative thinker, not the impulsive psychopath, who is not going to follow any ethic other than selfish self-interest....so the psychopath will find Ayn Rand's Objectivism more to his liking....if he actually reads about ethics! NO, I would say: once again you don't know what you're talking about, unless you can elaborate and provide some useful examples. And just as I figured. Nihilists believe there is no meaning or value in life, and atheists are not necessarily nihilists. An existentialist believes that we live in a universe that has no meaning or purpose that we can perceive, so we have to find meaning in our interactions with others. A positivist believes we can find purpose in the Universe through using the scientific method to learn more about it and how everything works. The only thing that atheists will agree on is that proposing the existence of a god does not provide any useful answers for valuing life.