Moonbox

How does this work for you? You're the one raising fears of bright hair affecting "camo efforts", when the new regs specifically address this fear: "...the colouring of hair is permitted in all orders of dress unless it inhibits an operational duty. For example, bright coloured hair may have a negative operational impact during field operations or training. So this ends up just being another post where you're ranting about things you haven't even bothered to read about or think about, preferring to be swept up in your own emotion and hyperbole instead.

It was never "no biolabs". It was "no bioweapon labs". You're not entirely wrong. The MIC certainly has its reasons to push conflict and fear where it can, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't support Ukraine against Russian aggression. It's just something we need to recognize in our decision making.

Agreed. Russian troops should go back to Russia!

It states right in the regs. It's only permitted "unless it inhibits an operational duty." That's the end of your line of reasoning, right there. It goes no further. The language is very clear, and the potential accommodations are suggestions that the member and his/her commander try to find a compromise that removes the concern. If it cannot be addressed, the item in question is not permitted. THAT's how this is written. You don't have to worry that officers are only allowed to meekly request that the member fix his glow-in-the-dark hair dye and his jangly nose chain, and that member just can say, "Naw dawg, my purple hair helps with my anxiety." or whatever other goof scenario you've imagined. Here's another quote for you, just as an example: Can CAF members be asked to shave their facial hair? Yes, Commanders of Commands, Task Force Commanders, Formation Commanders and Commanding Officers retain the right to order restrictions on the wearing of facial hair to meet safety and operational requirements. This instruction does not supersede Federal or National safety codes or regulations. Why don't I answer with a quote from the CAF regs that you totally definitely read. Piercings: the only piercing jewellery authorized are single or single set of stud or single stone earrings (one in each ear) in the earlobe(s) only. Piercings are not permitted on the face. Earrings shall not exceed one centimetre square or diameter. Gauges/spacers shall not exceed 2.5 cm in diameter. So we're really left with the green hair, which I'd probably think looks stupid, but I'm not sure how much it would affect me if the RCMP officer shows up at my house. I'd probably be more worried about why he's there. A more interesting question, I think, is how many people you figure go through with police (let alone army) training intent on coloring their hair bright green. From all the noise you're making about it, I'm certain to see crowds of these folk at the next military parade, right?

You've read them? Really!? ? This would suggest you have, at best, only skimmed them, because there are probably at least a dozen caveats on this page alone: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/defence/caf/military-identity-system/dress-manual/changes-canadian-forces-dress-instructions.html INCLUDING restrictions preventing the specific bullshit fantasy scenario you made up about bright-haired "attention-seekers" giving away combat positions: "...the colouring of hair is permitted in all orders of dress unless it inhibits an operational duty. For example, bright coloured hair may have a negative operational impact during field operations or training. Leaders are invited to discuss with their members to find a simple, suitable accommodation, such as a scarf to cover the hair. Accessories do not have to match the colour of the member’s hair. However, all accessories shall meet safety and operational requirements and must not discredit the CAF." I didn't serve in the military. You did. I shouldn't be able to do 2 minutes of Google research and show that you're BS'ing. If your curiosity and willingness to research came even close to matching your emotional conviction, you'd be crushing this debate.

Oh boy. Now you're referencing Almayadeen - Lebanese mouthpiece for Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. "MSM is fake news...until it's a pro-Arab dictator outlet telling me what I want to hear." ? Too funny.

First, I don't think Fertilizer Canada is a reliable source on this topic, for the obvious conflict of interest it represents. For example, they like to talk about how efficiently Canada uses fertilizer compared to "European Competitors", but it cherry-picks the countries it compares favorably to and bizarrely ignores all of the European countries that do much better, or the the United States for that matter. Though I will agree that government setting arbitrary targets without industry consultation is silly, I suspect that's not exactly how it went down. Regardless, even Fertilizer Canada has acknowledged that a 14% reduction is achievable, and coming from a lobby group invested in promoting fertilizer usage, I think we can reasonably assume they're estimating on the low end. Considering this is essentially the gap in nitrogen efficiency between Canada and the US, it's not hard to imagine that we can improve farming practices beyond that. Finally, the target isn't even mandatory/enforceable. It's voluntary. The whole project is aimed towards educating farmers on how not to waste fertilizer and making sure it gets absorbed by crops, rather than wasted into the atmosphere. Experiments around the world have shown that you can increase yields while decreasing nitrogen use when you're applying it properly and at the right times.

No? Nobody, especially not Russia. That's why Putin should withdraw his troops. ? Tucker Carlson links. Do you have any Alex Jones for us while you're at it? Hundreds of billions? No accountability or audits? Weren't you complaining about there being US personnel in Ukraine? They're there to audit what's going on with their donated weapons. Tell us more how you feel.

Your claim is the one that needs proving, and I provided evidence suggesting it was wrong. Typically, you've provided nothing. I know you're wrong when I can show that you're wrong. You've a worrying tendency towards stubborn opinions with little backing them other than emotion or rhetoric. You've already shown you didn't know what the dress/uniform reg updates were when you lobbed out your fantasy scenarios of blown combat ops (which the regs would still prevent), and you did it again here projecting assumptions about minorities that (for reasons unexplained) apply to Canada but not the US where the opposite observations are shown. That lack of curiosity and research is even more apparent when you're talking about things you know nothing about, like central banking and monetary policy. The 20-year old as a recruitment officer is a make-believe straw-man. The grey-haired sgt isn't, because he's real. 40+ non-comm officers trying to attract millennials who they couldn't relate to with brochures etc. was highlighted as a problem in the outdated recruitment process by RMC research papers from ~5 years ago even, which is really the tail end of the millennial generation as the coveted recruitment pool. That the CAF was only starting to figure things out as this generation was aging out is a worrying sign considering we're already transitioning to Gen Z.

As with many things unfortunately. It’s one of the side effects of pushing unilateral partisan agendas simply because you can. Things aren’t as bad here yet as in the US, but we’re far from immune ?

The Europeans would have beat them just by scale. The advantage was everywhere. From more intense farming and husbandry, to better transport, building and logistics, the settlers would have beat the natives with early medieval weaponry (providing they could cross the Atlantic safely). Guerilla warfare wasn't a uniquely native thing either. I don't really know either. I remember the debates on this forum back in the Harper times were silly things, with left-leaning folk talking about large swathes of urban Ontario and BC being handed back to First Nations etc.

Not as much as you like to bogeyman it out to be, that's for certain. but this wasn't what you were asking. You were asking why merit-based hiring/promotion is bad, which nobody was arguing. So, once again, you're making things up to debate against. Sure, but they don't have to be identical. You offered up reasoning for why minorities don't join the Canadian forces, but they're obviously not true because those same minorities are joining in the US in outsized numbers. Unless you can reasonably explain how American Asians are so much less scarred by colonialism etc than Canadian Asians, this theory falls on its face. This 20 year old you're talking about is yet another another straw man you've invented to argue against. Cop out of what? ?

We're not really debating anything here. The North American natives were thousands of years behind most of the rest of the world in everything. They didn't have horses. They never even worked in bronze, let alone iron, so it goes without saying their weaponry didn't match up, but that's far from the only disadvantage they suffered. They quickly adapted and traded for European weaponry, and that didn't really do much to stem the tide. Yes, perhaps I could have written that better. You obviously can't rip up the Indian act without a new agreement. In the meantime, it would be nice if we could make this a bi-partisan thing that all parties share an interest in fixing. As it stands, like with a lot of things, we just kick the can down the road and send good money after bad.

Not likely the ones you're referring to, and this thread isn't about vaccines. You have several other threads dedicated for that if you want to post some DoD vaccine data documents and the relevant conclusions there, I'll look at it.

Sure, but the Americas were thousands of years behind in development for everything, so this is just one of innumerable ways the settlers outcompeted the natives. I would feel a lot better about it if we were approaching it as we do other disadvantaged groups. We can talk about fixing things, but I don't think that's possible under the current state of affairs with the reserves or special native status etc. We have 3 sets of people in Canada who cannot legally own property: children, the mentally incompetent, and natives living on reserves. That's an unworkable system and a recipe for perpetuated hopelessness. I think a good start would be ripping up the Indian Act and similar legislation and coming to agreement with the First Nations that actually makes sense. That's probably a hopeless endeavor and would be a Constitutional Issue, but I don't think it's any more hopeless than resolving/fixing things under the status quo.

Everything seems to be cancel-culture bullshit as far as your concerned. If a thread goes on long enough, you're almost guaranteed to bring it up. Yes, they're public knowledge, which is why it was so awkward that you presented the bogeyman case of all of purple-haired ninnies giving away friendly positions, considering it wouldn't even be allowed in a combat zone. because you're not asking intelligent questions? Stuff like: I'm not really sure you're using the term flow-chart properly, but nobody's said merit-based hiring and promotion is bad. You're making up stuff to debate against. The effort has been ongoing for 10+ years, and started long before the Liberals took over. The Conservative administration understood the issue and where demographics were headed. No doubt there are differences, but then your explanation that ethnic minorities just aren't interested in the military (as a symbol of ethnic repression/colonialism or whatever) falls flat on its face simply by examining the US forces and it's more diverse makeup. Maybe you could explain why black people in the US join up in outsized numbers, but in Canada we somehow have more colonial baggage...or something? We have the same problem across the board. The occupations are not attractive for anyone right now. I considered it after university (RCAF mainly), and the idea of spending years rotating through buttf*** nowhere places (like Cold Lake) turned me away. I suspect a large part of the problem is millennial tendencies towards researching every decision they make and, like me, not liking what I was finding, not to mention hearing from people coming back how frustrating it was in general. They've also done studies on how poor the recruitment practices have been, sending out grey-haired sergeants almost old enough to be the prospects' grandfathers to career fairs and expecting them to be able to communicate effectively with kids less than half their age. I don't have the answers for why recruitment has been failing. I DO know that listening to dinosaurs like Michel Maisonneuve ramble is not going to attract the young people the military needs, because by and large they just don't share those attitudes.

It's still not confirmed. The only thing we can say now is that the body of evidence would point towards this rather than it just being natural spillover, since we don't really have any evidence whatsoever of that when we should. It's unlikely we're going to get helpful information out of China either way, so absent of some whistleblower/defector providing evidence this is probably going to continue as another reason not to trust China. Good gob on providing a credible source though. Funny how easy it is to do when it aligns with your worldview. ?‍♂️

You're layering complexity on top of complexity. Economic and climate sciences are both exceptionally complicated, with so many variables at play that even the brightest in their respective fields can at best offer guesses, probabilities and scenarios. Any model meant to integrate them would therefore be an order of magnitude more complicated and probably inaccurate to the point of uselessness. That's not to say that economists don't try to make WAGs and encourage businesses and governments to incorporate environmental costs into their long-term plans, but that's far outside the scope or purview of the central banks and their raison d'etre.

I think he has at least a kernel of a point. It wasn't his fault. It probably wasn't his parents' fault, or his grandparent's faults either. The pre-Columbian First Nations were enslaving and exterminating each other for millennia before the first settlers ever came, so it was hardly the agrarian utopia that some folk seem to think. More competitive cultures supplanting and overtaking less competitive ones has been the way of the world since pre-recorded history. The difference here is that Europeans were far better organized and developed and operated at far greater scale than anything seen before in the Americas. The other difference is our capacity for self-shame and guilt for this. While we should certainly be acknowledging things like residential schools and reconciling for that (particularly considering some of these folk are still alive, or their direct/immediate descendants are), we're not going to fix much of anything dredging up centuries-old grievances from bygone days with ways of life (both aboriginal and colonial) that no longer exist. Practical solutions for impoverished aboriginal communities are not going to come out of the Indian Act, the reserve system or reparations/treaty settlements.

True enough, but that was likely because of the media attention the military was getting more than anything else. Debatable. Though as a sweeping generalization there's some truth to that, I've played enough co-ed sports throughout my life to know that there are plenty of women out there with the strength and intensity for combat roles. Nobody's suggesting we need 50% of our combat ranks filled with 100 lb waifs with no upper body strength though. Gee, the military's recruitment efforts focusing on visible minorities and women started long before Trudeau came to power. I wonder if that's because even the Harper Conservatives understood the changing times.

It may have appeared from a biolab in China, though this is far from confirmed. Either way, what does this have to do with Ukraine? ?

Not at all. It'd be more like trying to incorporate the long-term projections of dietary and demographic trends of Canadians over the next 30 years into your decisions about how to operate your fishing boat over the next 6-18 months. It's sort of related, but well outside of the scope of your business and certainly not something you can control.

? Stop projecting. Your culture-war bullshit is exhausting. It's all you seem to care about these days and somehow you manage to swing almost every topic back to cancel-culture and wokeness, whether or not it has anything to do with the debate. I don't have to have served in the military to know when you have no idea what you're talking about. You didn't even know what the new dress rules were before you started bullshitting about purple-haired dandies giving away combat positions. While you pretend to know why minorities aren't joining the military, those same minorities are joining in outsized numbers in the US military, a country with similar history and demographic trends.

Things like droughts and floods are part of scenario testing for economic models, but it's more of a stress-testing of external variables. Sure, they acknowledge it. They know that food prices this year are a result of this years crop yields (or even last years, or from the year before), and they account for that when trying to breakdown inflation factors for the year. On the longer time horizon, also yes. Economists are absolutely trying to include climate change into their models, though it's almost certainly in a very generalized/scenario sense. Like monetary policy, this is a complicated science and they probably don't integrate well or provide useful tools together. I don't really know, but this is well outside their wheelhouse/mandate, so I suspect you're right. That's a good thing. Probably not much. Their interests are much more focused on numbers than general policy.

but the folks who understand the "body of evidence" aren't coming to these conclusions at all. The politicization of ignorance is all that's going on here. By all means ignore the economists when you go buy your house near the top of the market despite all the warnings of it being overheated and inflated. Go ahead and liquidate your investments in preparation of the calamity you think is coming but never will. You're only making yourself poorer, but sometimes ignorance and foolishness is a choice. This is true enough, but so much of the speculation is driven by the average person's greed and short-sightedness, and when it goes wrong they turn and look for someone to blame (like the economists who warned it would happen).