Moonbox
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Posts posted by Moonbox
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The reins? You want to wear reins like common livestock? Not me. Those protesters are people. They protest because there is currently not a level playing field for everyone. A free market economy is the answer to that.
It's fairly clear you're not much of a student of history. It's funny, because from your brief posting history here you're like...the stereotypical small-town Albertan libertarian. Your naive fantasies are pretty charming.
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What's dumb about it?
About Quebec and Alberta as independent countries? Well it's economic suicide for Quebec, and beyond that I don't need to go further. As for Alberta, that breaks up Canada's contiguency (sp?) leaving British Columbia isolated, as well as leaving Alberta a tiny, land-locked state entirely dependent on oil to sustain its economy. Those are just a couple of reasons, but you can stew on those and maybe if you think hard you can come up with some others.
If the francophones in Quebec are serious about their concerns federally, and they get a consensus within that province, the feds should step out of the way and let them declare independence.
They're not. They don't want independence, and neither do most Albertans.
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I resent the fact that he (like some other previous PM’s) does not get the majority of the vote (about 60% voted against his party) but he now claims a mandate for changes to policies that were never discussed during the last campaign.
You don't vote against any party. Our intellectually bankrupt collection of whiners needs to get that through their collectively thick heads. You vote FOR a candidate. If you voted for a candidate that didn't have a chance of winning, that's on you. If the Liberals and NDP split 60% of the vote, but the Conservatives won 40% and the riding, it's moronic to say, "but...but...60% of us voted AGAINST them!" Shut up. No you didn't. You voted for someone else (who lost), and the point of an election is not to NOT elect someone.
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Topaz your concerns with Harper stem more from an idealogical programming (pro red/anti blue) than anything else. Put Harper in a red suit and you'd love him lol.
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The NDP will keep most of their seats in Quebec. If the Conservatives make any gains in Quebec, they'll be retaking the odd seat they previously held. There will be no surprising reversals of Tory fortunes in Quebec.
I've discussed this in other threads, but I think Quebec is going to be left isolated in Canadian politics for a long time unless they can smarten up. The sad protest mentality they've exhibited for the last 20 years will continue to get them nowhere, and, as we saw in the 2011 election, will actually polarize the RoC against them. The NDP surge in Quebec, as we saw, was accompanied by a Liberal rout and a surge in Tory popularity in Ontario. I think that had less to do with Ignatieff and more to do with Canadians just wanting a majority and not having to deal with an NDP opposition.
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Look for more Conservative Quebec seats in the next election.
NOPE. I'll bet good money on that. It's a wasteland for the Conservatives, and will continue to be.
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1) Being the first government in the history of all commonwealth nations to be in contempt of parliament, resulting in the 2011 election.
A pathetic, trumped-up event orchestrated and exaggerated by a pathetic, frustrated and impotent opposition.
3) Turned a $16 Billion Surplus into a $56 Billion deficit, a swing of $72 Billion, yet still cutting social services and dumping the money into asinine pet projects (ie, Gazebos and bathrooms).
Recessions do that. You don't go through a massive recession without a deficit, unless you're going to completely gutter social spending at the same time, which would be an aweful idea at a time like that.
He really is kept in check by the electorate, contrary to what the more rabid leftists argue.
The only reason I keep voting for him.
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Funny how your first post on this board is one as dumb as that. Hope that's not what we're to expect from you here.
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Good points Jerry. That's pretty articulate and fair.
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That's the real caveat here though isn't it? The population growth is due to immigration. If it's good/productive immigration, that's great news. If a large percentage of that is refugees and/or welfare bozos, not so much.
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Gee we haven't seen/heard that joke about 5000 times on this forum. I guess that's the direction you take though, when the fantasy costing figures you and LM have been insisting on get completely debunked.
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the opposition deserves praise for highlighting the issue and forcing harper to back away, he didn't do it because he wanted to...
The opposition doesn't deserve any praise for anything. They highlight and criticize EVERY issue by default. If anyone deserves praise it's the PBO and the auditor general...you know...people who actually have a clue and aren't just wetting their pants over EVERYTHING.
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To be clear guys, we may end up buying the F-35 still anyways. This is just a cancel of the sole-source purchase and will make it a more open contest. Maybe it turns out the F-35 can be manufactured and operated at a reasonable price, but until that becomes clear, we should not be going for this dog.
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It looks like the Tories are finally pulling the plug on the F-35 purchase in anticipation of the results of KPMG audit this week. It's been much discussed on these forums here, but this is pretty solid confirmation now that the program was going to cost FAR more than the original $9-15B originally projected.
This is long overdue as far as I'm concerned and, as discussed in the article, will likely have ripple effects for the other partners of the program.
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Quebec and Ontario are the front runners by a long ways. Quebec with its corruption and Ontario with its total incompetence.
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The economy will come back to life when we finally stop paying attention to those shouting for austerity and we bail out Main Street instead of Wall Street. The only reasons businesses exist is to service the demand people have for what they offer. But let's not do anything to encourage demand. It's far better to encourage supply, even though nobody has any idea what they should be supplying in the face of weakened aggregate demand.
It's nice to see that you're able to harp cliched tag phrases and stuff, but you still don't understand how the economy works, and that's a long standing problem you have here. Social services do not stimulate the economy. There's huge amounts of data and history that prove this. Short term transitional help is one thing, but long term public support the chronically unemployed and under-employed acts as a disincentive for finding productive work and promotes waste and laziness, which is a huge drag on the economy.
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She strikes me as a common-sense person, and that's enough for me to want to vote for her. I could get behind this woman from what I know (no pun intended).
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The Bubonic Plague was a regular coinsurance. The last major outbreak filled 12 million people. See http://en.wikipedia....plague_pandemic
What is interesting is the plague hit India in 1994 and caused a mere 52 deaths. Is it because the strain was milder or perhaps because even people living in squalor benefit from modern medical and public health techniques?
First of all, there have been all sorts of Plague outbreaks that had minimal consequences. More often than not it was a small, isolated set of incidences. Only three times in history have we seen the large Plague-induced population culls that the world fears.
I think this corroborates my assertion that even the poorest of the poor have gained from modern technology.
The assertion that you are defending is that their lives are *worse* than they were in the middle ages.
You're really not getting it. I'm not saying that more food or medicine makes the life of the wretched poor person worse. I'm saying that more food and medicine, without accompanying support (ie. education, clean water etc), has led to out-of-control population growth among that demographic, which has led to more and more people living in unbelievable squalor. It's no secret that malnurished areas generally have the highest fertility rates. All other things being equal, by increasing their food supply all you do is balloon the population until you reach a new equilibrium where resources are just as strained, people are just as malnurished, and any shock to the system will produce even greater consequences.
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The Black Death was a uniquely deadly disease and the world hasn't seen anything so deadly again. That's a curve ball so let's leave that out of the discussion.
You're not getting what I'm saying. I'm not saying that more food is necessarily bad. I'm saying that having the benefits of industrialization without the knowledge/education that goes with it leads to an unsustainable mess. India has 400 million people living in absolute poverty. Look up what absolute poverty means. It's not just being poor. These people don't have access to basic medicine. They don't have enough food to eat. They don't have access to safe drinking water. They live short, miserable lives, have as many babies as they can, and then die, if they're lucky, in their 40's. That's how the average person lived in the Middle Ages. Yeah. Let's give ourselves a pat on the back for that.
Interestingly, these are the people with the highest fertility rates, which makes it worse. With ~900 million people living in constant hunger (the vast majority of them being in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan), and this being the fastest growing population in the world, something will eventually give. It's going to be messy and dangerous.
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I don't agree. In fact, it don't see how it would be possible in an age where excrement from animals would have been everywhere.
I think you need to travel more, because that's still the case everywhere that isn't using cars as the primary method of transportation (outside the major tourist areas of course). The rivers in Calcutta etc are pure cesspools. The world has never seen dirtier.
I really can't follow your logic. You are saying that people starved to death but the lived in better conditions? It makes no sense. If people have enough food to expand population then they must be better off than they were in the past.
I'm saying that without proper education, more food doesn't actually improve living conditions as much as you think in your happy little world. Without proper education and contraception, the extra food leads to an increase in population growth, which eventually just leads to more people living in squalor up to the point where it's not sustainable even WITH industrial agriculture.
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Tim the rantings of a bunch of enviro-dorks hardly counts as solid authority on Roman history. Rome, as a city, was a metropolis well before its time. The slaves, wealth and production of more than a full continent were being re-directed to one city, and that led to some logistical problems from time to time. People like to come up with all sorts of neat and clever theories about why Rome collapsed, but the reality is far simpler. Imperial Rome was too big to be ruled by one man, and leaders and wannabe leaders fought too many civil wars. Look at the list of emperors and how many short-lived emperors there were.
Anyways, getting back to topic, none of us can really say whether the life of a slave was better than the life of a Dhalit in India. It can certainly be said that slaves in Rome probably lived in less filth than slummers in India or large parts of Africa, but we're not really talking about war crimes victims here. I'm sure the life of a prison-camp victim in WW2 was worse than being an Untouchable in India, but that's apples to oranges. What I'm talking about here is the unbelievable mass of humanity the world has given birth to that lives in absolutely wretched poverty. In the past, starvation kind of worked the problem out itself. Nowadays, there's enough food to have these populations just explode.
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Experience as an MP isn't really a quality I cherish in my leaders. The lifetime public servants, IMO, are often the worst people to have running the show. They're as often as not out of touch morons who left the real world and how it works behind sometimes decades ago.
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I would vote for her in a heartbeat from what I've seen so far. I'd take her over Harper, Trudeau and any of the other clowns out there.
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Over farming triggered the collapse of civilizations from the Maya to the Romans. The industrial economy is the only thing that has a chance of preventing such a collapse.
I know next to nothing about the Mayans, but I know a great deal about the Romans, and it wasn't overfarming that 'triggered' their excrutiatingly slow downfall (it took about 1000 years).
And what basis do you have to claim that the conditions are the 'worst the world has ever scene'?
Look up what a Dhalit (Untouchable) is in India. Take a look at the types of places they live in. If you can find an example of somewhere, anywhere, with filthier living conditions than that, now or anywhere over the last 1000 years, on anywhere approaching the same scale, I'll cede the point to you, otherwise I'm going to have to wonder at how rose-colored your glasses are.
F-35 Purchase Cancelled; CF-18 replacement process begins
in Federal Politics in Canada
Posted
My point is that your obvious lack of knowledge/insight into human history leaves your utterly ignorant as to how the world has worked in various places and at various times, and how this history repeats itself. We have regulations etc because the crap you're peddling here has been proven to work out poorly for the vast majority of people, over and over again, on innumerable occasions. See Standard Oil for one of the easiest examples. Regulation can go too far, sure, but total lack of regulation is just as bad.
If we didn't know from your juvenile profile pic, the Trappers reference seals the deal. What are you, like 19?
You'd like to think that. Naive was about the nicest way I could think of describing your posts. Ignorant and completely clueless would be leaning more towards reality...but the amount of effort you're putting into arguing off the entire forum is cute...or charming.