Moonbox

I don't think he meant 'make him suffer' in the sense that we're going to torture him or keep him chained to a wall. I don't want to speak for jbg, but I imagine he meant something more along the lines of Mr. Li will have to deal with the consequences of these actions for the rest of his life, and that in light of what he's done it's unlikely he'll be treated or dealt with the same way as a mental patient who did not chop off someone's head and eat them.

There's nothing idealogical about it. He sawed off someone's head, held it up for everyone to see and then he proceeded to eat him. He killed someone in pretty much the most gruesome way possible, and that person is the victim, not Mr. Li.

There was no fabrication. The numbers Hansen brought up couldn't have been more irrelevant to the more moderate impressions you're pretending he was trying to make. There is already faaar more than enough viable oil and fossil fuels in the world to last numerous generations with or without the tar sands, and therefore enough to put us well past the 500 ppm referenced AND to continue our reliance on fossil fuels. Knowing this, explaining that there's enough potential Co2 in the Alberta bitumen reserves to match the world's total historical emissions is a useless factoid, but one Hansen put in for good reason. Combine that sort of statement with others telling readers that 'fully exploiting' the tar sands (another farty and unquantified term) means 'game over' for the climate, and only the strictest apologist could suggest that Hansen wasn't trying to falsely attribute the relative dangers of the tar sands in order to mislead naive readers. What...are you saying that wind capacity hasn't increased Ontario electricity costs!?!? Is that what you're telling us waldo? Let's get that straight first, and THEN I'll know what part I need to substantiate. Challenge something specific about what I said and I'll look to substantiate it. As it stands, we're not writing academic essays, so I'm not going to provide a quote for every single statement I make unless you're going to argue that I'm saying something false. Failed energy policy in Ontario and Europe were merely examples of dumb initiatives I would not support, because unlike you I'm going to discriminate between good and bad ideas rather than cheerlead them all no matter how stupid.

He sawed off someone's head and then ate part of him. There is no set of circumstances, no matter how effective his meds may be, that would justify his release. The merest possibility that he could relapse (even 1/100,000,000) is enough to keep him in. In light of what he's capable of, his freedom is not worth even the slightest chance of danger to someone else's life. A case by case basis is fine. In this gentleman's case, he sawed off someone's head and then lifted it for all to see, and then proceeded to eat him. That's all we need to know. Well that's rather vacuous logic, and you even asked a stupid question to follow it up! Nevermind the logical conundrum that jailing everyone presents (who jails the jailors?), you miss the obvious fact that jail is a deterrent/punishment, not a preventative measure. You jail someone for what they've done, not what they might be loosely considered capable of. Even if that wasn't the case, you present another giant failure in reasoning by suggesting that a person who has already viciously murdered someone presents no greater risk than the average dude on the streets, which is dumb.

I like it when my vegetables and fruits are not only bigger and juicier, but stay fresh longer and cost less. Mmmmm!

Yes, fully exploting the tar sands, which he explained have enough Co2 in them to match all historical emissions (scary) but he didn't explain that we'll never use more than a fraction of it! He purposely didn't attach one because you have to stretch it out 100-150 years before the impact of the tar sands would even be noticeable, and that's not a timeline that will get people on his side! I didn't say it helps. I said that that it doesn't doom the world like Hansen is trying to tell people. I also said that there are much better and much more reasonable ways of reducing emissions. I said there were viable alternatives for electricity (lol), and the best and most economic way of reducing emissions significantly would be to increase capacity via nuclear, especially considering most of the world's largest polluters already have the tech and the means to make this a reality.As for the Green Energy Act, you brought it up with you sad wall of year-old quotations. That was one of the topics being discussed in that old thread, where I proposed that nuclear was our best short/mid term option and not the currently immature and unviable wind/solar tech being peddled. We also talked about Europe, and look at THEIR green shift. It's not hard to see how much of a failure it's been so far. They've lowered their nuclear capacity and shifted it to wind, essentially choosing the most expensive tech available to replace existing clean tech that, after factoring decommission costs, is the most expensive to phase out. That's pure genius. How have they met their expanding generation needs? A continued reliance on coal and massive natural gas expansion. Brilliant stuff really.

Yeah, he offered a clear distinction between long and short-term warming, not the actual impact of the tar sands along any time frame. His words, not mine, were, "If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate." He immediately follows up with "Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history." The first statement was a giant exaggeration considering how little impact Canadian oil has now and will have anywhere in the near or long term future. The second statement was a scare tactic. Hansen gave numbers that, like I said before, were academically irrelevant, but dramatic and poorly explained for his audience. It's akin to saying "Don't eat apple cores because the seeds have cyanide in them." without explaining that you'd need to pull the seeds out of 20+ apples and crush them before eating them to hurt yourself. No, he didn't. He simply avoided the topic, much like you do, and much like he danced around the interview question of whether or not he exaggerated the impact of the tar sands, giving the audience the scaaary slippery-slope metaphor of "ifyou open the spigot." As I've repeatedly stated, the tar-sands are a small piece of the puzzle, and singling them out as a target for restrictions will not have any effect because there are lots of viable alternatives. Your assertion that complicating tar sands development will have even a noticeable impact on oil prices, now or in the future, is not based on reality, and even if it did, we have plenty of history to show us that increasing prices doesn't decrease demand the way you're proposing it would! This is a market controlled by suppliers, who gauge demand and price accordingly. As for alternate energy, there are none for transport, and none coming any time soon. There are very good alternatives to fossil fuel burning for electricity, however, and that's where we should be looking for emissions reductions. Instead, however, brilliant EU environmentalists are shutting down their nuclear stations and doing smart stuff like importing wood-chips from the US to burn in their power stations!

What are you educating them about, precisely? The label itself implies that there's something to be concerned about. Woudl the GMO label be accompanied by a disclosure that there is zero scientific evidence that GMO crops are anything to be worried about, and that customers would be purchasing better value for their nutritional dollar? The fact that there's a label at all implies concern. The arguments protesters make against GMO's are the same you could make about thousands of different ingredients. Do you know if acesulfame-K is good for you? Probably not! If you were buying juice at the supermarket and you had two different brands of equal price, flavour and quality, however, and one of them had a label saying "contains acesulfame-K" and the other didn't, it's VERY likely that totally harmless label would steer people away. The fact that it requires a label at all implies concern.

Yeah it means something to small and organic farmers trying to sell their crops for far more than their worth, and then the usual trashy granola protest-about-everything crowd. It also means something to the people they've succeeded in scaring, although those people have no clue what they're scared about other than the fact that apparently GMO's are 'bad'.

Keep what information from the public? That their food is bigger and stays fresh longer?

Pot - meet kettle! The lack of perspective you're showing here is literally mind blowing! Nice job avoiding the point! Shut down the tarsands, slow down development -- take your pick of wording! None of it will have even a noticeable impact of worldwide C02 emissions, and I'm still waiting on you to engage me on those numbers! Keep dodging waldo! Except the massive expansion you speak of is a relative drop in the bucket (once again feel free to quantify otherwise), and there is more than enough viable oil elsewhere in the world to fuel the long-term reliance you speak of anyways. A halt to tar sands expansion would, at best, cause a temporary and negligible increase in prices, whether it happens now or later. The oil market is demand-driven, not supply driven. Large shocks to prices unfortunately don't change consumption the way they would in other markets. With or without Alberta tar sand oil, there's enough viable goop in the ground to carry us FAR beyond Hansen's apocalyptic climate projections. I didn't purposely twist anything Hansen said. He gave us as many alarming figures as he could without giving us any idea how miniscule potential exploitation of the tar sands would be in comparison to them. He wrote an article specifically about the Canadian tar sands explaining that fully exploiting it would wipe out 20-50% of the world's species and then goes on to explain the academically potential 120 ppm that would be released. Sure, you and he can worm around being called out on the obvious and gross exaggerations, but Hansen was trying to alarm people, not give them a realistic idea of the impact of tar sands. I can see why you like him so much! You both have a flair for the dramatic!

There you go again using big-boy market terminology you read on your internet blogs, but now you've added redundant adjectives for dramatic effect! The unfettered, massive supporting infrastructure is now unencumbered and no-holds barred too! Unfortunately for you, expanding your list of adjectives doesn't make up for the fact that you keep refusing to quantify what you're talking about! Shutting them down doesn't meaningfully tackle the problem. Let's go over those numbers again, hey? Maybe we could take a look at how much the tarsands have to expand before they become even noticeable part of the debate? Wait...no...You refuse to go over those numbers with me. If you step outside of the fantasy world you live in, you'd remember that climate change action has costs. Shutting the tar sands down does nothing but force the expansion of dirty oil projects outside of Canada (market forces), and keeps a lot of money out of the country, with negligible impact on emissions. As for what you call my contradictory statements, I explain again that I'm not going to support dumb and ineffective ideas. This does not mean that I don't support better ideas to tackle climate change, only that I reject bad ones. Juvenile schoolyard logic and a dogmatic "agree with everything I say or I'll get my panties twisted" approach to the debate are the only reason you have trouble understanding this. A wide spectrum of opinion both on the existence and the need to combat climate change exists, ranging from frothing zealotry to complete ignorance (or apathy). The fact that you seem to view anything short of frothing zealotry as contradictory or "concern-trolling" is hilarious, but unsurprising. Interestingly, you don't seem to have any interest in discussing what I DO think we should do about climate change. This, of course, would sorely test your claims that I'm just a cunning concern-troll trying to derail intelligent change, so I'm not surprised! It's harder to get the ego boost you chase when you're lashing out at your opponents if they're actually being reasonable! Quick! Someone find waldo a climate-change denier! Arguing with someone who has more moderate and rational views of the situation is way outside his expertise! There it is! That's the ego seeking behaviour I was talking about! Thanks for giving us a good sample! We're all really glad you see yourself that way, but I think the rest of us would describe you differently! Petty and spiteful are good starts! Saying that a timeline isn't salient, frankly, is moronic, and we couldn't get a better example of a dodge. Our argument stemmed from Hansen's claim that the tar sands development means 'game over' for the environment, and he cited how much C02 would be released from it (120 ppm) to support of that claim. My position was that this was a grossly exaggerated and misleading statement meant to paint the picture in as scary a way as possible, and that those sorts of emissions are pretty much impossible anytime over the foreseeable future. You argued that he's talking about 'unfettered and unencumbered no-holds barred massive expansion to market supporting infrastructure" (hilarious and juvenile rhetoric by the way - nice job), and I've simply asked you to qualify and quantify what that means. Tell us what sort of expansion is required before the tar sand emissions even become a noticeable component of world totals, and while you're at it try and show us that Hansen's public credibility can't be challenged in light of his 120 ppm claims.

When we start seeing widespread allergic reactions to peanuts when people eat apples, we'll consider your complaint. Until then, you're just making up threats. You could make a case for the overuse of antibiotics with raising chickens etc, but breeding crops to be resistant to bacteria and pests and improve food productivity is something I'm not scared about at all. As TimG already explained, you have options to avoid GMOs. Go waste your money on organic. Don't try to force your goofball (and scientifically unfounded) beliefs on the rest of us.

Yes! World much better in Red China! In Red China, don't need worry about GMO's, only tainted milk!

So funny! I JUST said (on this page) that those quotations show how consistent my position has been since you and I started arguing. The fact that you brought them up without any context only shows how desperately you need the ego boost you'd get from making it appear like you've caught me contradicting myself. Now here's a pretty good example of how intellectually bankrupt your tactics are! You're implying that disagreeing with stupidly conceived and costly plans inherently doomed to fail means that I don't believe in global warming or that we should and could do reasonable things about it! Essentially, if I don't agree with you on how to tackle a problem, I don't agree with there being a problem at all? That's a pretty black and white way of looking at things! Maybe that's why people keep likening your rabid devotion to religion! except you didn't expose anything, and this criticism is reserved exclusively for you! Nobody else on this board blasts a thread with walls of quotations and re-quotations cross-posted from other old and dead threads! That's only you! Was I posting here in this thread while you were away? Nope! As for time spent, despite joining this forum before you, I barely post 1/3 as much as you! lol no, I actually didn't. My apologies. The circumstances in which I'd support an end to tar sands development would have to pass the same tests I'd put on any other initiative, namely, a practical, realistic solution that will work, and not a stupid one that will just force/allow dirty energy expansion elsewhere. If the rest of the world were to end development of similarly dirty fuel (ie other dirty and heavy oils and things like shale gas and coal), I'd be all for it. If that's not going to happen, I'd rather the money be kept here than go to Chavez's dirty oil or Australian coal miners. Oh good! We're back on topic! Now, unless you want to go dig up more year-old quotes from me, maybe we could go over current tarsands production, proposed tarsands production, and the amount of 'market force' required to expand them to levels where they'd make even a noticeable impact on world CO2 emissions. C'mon waldo! Let's go over some numbers! Let's look at world oil production, world oil supply, projections of demand in 2020, 2030, 2050 and what sort of tarsands expansion we're going to need. As we've already seen, you don't have a clue about market forces (although you feel pretty smart using the terminology). As for timeline, there has to be one. You can't term the oil sands depletion out over 200 years, because if we're still burning fossil fuels by then we're screwed either way by your buddy Hansen's projections! You bring it on yourself! Too funny! Maybe it has something to do with how dogged your devotion to the topic has been, or the fact that you lash out at anyone who voices any sort of question/disagreement with you?!? I certainly see some parallels!

Waldo, the fact that you actually go through the effort of digging through 9 month old thread topics speaks volumes as to how desperately you need the ego boost associated with 'winning the thread'. You snipped a bunch of quotes from a 9 month old thread and did not provide any context to it. For most of them, there's nothing more than the quotation itself. There's no explanation of the thread topic, what I was responding to, or anything of the sorts. The best part about it is that nobody else (including myself) will have the inclination to sort any of it out, because it's a sad and pathetic waste of time. The safety of knowing your opponents have less time on their hands than you is likely the main reason this is one of your favorite tactics! Once again, I explained my position, and once again, you skipped over everything else I said and chose to troll instead. Dumb solutions are not solutions. I explained the circumstances in which it would make sense to stop tar sands development., but you're not interested in reasonable arguments. At 1/2 of the world's entire consumption. Good for them!!! Let's see how well they do meeting their 2015 goals. which the Europeans happily used, further illustrating their hypocrisy.

What the heck are you talking about? You asked why Canada's financial, communications and transport companies can't be owned by the Americans. I told you exactly why. Do you know why Banks all locate their headquarters in the same city, August? Do you think that there MIGHT be a really practical reason for this? Regardless, the fact that you even asked the question raises some doubts as to what country you think you belong to. When I've flown Air Canada, I thought I was flying a domestic Canadian airline, even though it's headquartered in Quebec. Are you suggesting that this was, in fact, a foreign airline, or that National and Laurentian banks are also run by foreigners, and that Desjardins (north america's biggest credit union) is foreign to me too!?? August, you're talking out of your butt. Canada's banks are some of the most widely held companies in the country, held mostly by major institutional investors and in mutual funds (many of them from Quebec!!). Canada's banking laws ensure that these companies (vital for day-to-day life) are controlled by Canadians (people from Quebec included in that). This is some of the stupidest, silliest and most unreasonable tripe I've seen on this forum in a while. You're complaining about nothing and giving everyone a very clear idea of why anglo-Canada is tired of listening to Quebec's griping.

Yeah, you really are making up my opinions, and your 'short sampling' of my past statements confirms not only that you're so desperate for the ego-boost associated with scoring points on an internet debate that you're willing to go through the sad effort of digging up out of context quotations from year old threads, but also that my position has been consistent the entire time. I believe in global warming. I think we should do something about it. I am not, however, going to support costly, idiotic proposals that aren't going to work. I'll support practical, realistic solutions, but not stupid ones. You, on the other hand, wholeheartedly accept any idea no matter how silly or counterproductive it might be, and then denounce anyone who doesn't agree with you. Climate treaties that don't impose costs and restrictions on China, for example, are inherently broken. I've explained why in the past, but you've never had any interest in looking at the numbers or investigating the economics of this argument. You only need to look at how far ahead China is of any other country in the world in terms of C02 emissions, and how quickly they're increasing their emissions, to see see this. Increasing our manufacturing and energy costs with things left unchanged in China does nothing more than make their dirty industry more competitive and help them increase their emissions even faster. What's happened in the past does not change this simple fact. This is the reality today and moving forward. Similarly, I've argued that spending billions on unviable and immature solar/wind power infrastructure, like Ontario's Green Energy Act, which has proven to be a debacle, is equally stupid. The amount of electricity created as a result does not and will not even come close to making up for the increases on electricity bills. When you force huge increases to people's electricity bills for literally irrelevant amounts of green energy, all you're doing is throwing people's money down the toilet and making them resistant to further (possibly productive) initiatives. How much electricity is generated in Ontario by wind/solar, waldo, and how much has it increased the average electricity bill? Let's go over those numbers, shall we? So again, my position hasn't changed and hasn't waffled in the entire time we've argued. Dumb ideas are dumb ideas, and I'll not support them. Much like I wouldn't support bleeding a person to cure an illness (which hurts the patient and doesn't cure anything), I'm completely against finding dozens of different ways to essentially burn cash to make zero noticeable difference in worldwide C02 emissions. You have no such qualms. It doesn't matter if it's a smart idea or a dumb idea. As long as it says, "Green" you're on board! Take all the money we've blown on bio-fuel, wind and solar infrastructure so far, and throw that towards research on tech that will actually solve our problems. Our best and greatest hope is something like the ITER, which is budgeted to cost $10B and is the world's leading and largest nuclear fusion experiment. Ontario's Green Energy Act is estimated to cost something like $60B, and will make next to zero impact on C02 emissions. That's just Ontario. Imagine what a concerted effort throughout the world could do. I'm not arguing with you on that waldo. I know that CO2 emissions are cumulative. I understand that if we didn't burn another ounce of carbon for the next 10 years that overall CO2 levels would still be higher 10 years from now than they were 15 years ago. I get that. That is NOT how Hansen explains the dangers of the tar sands to NY times readers or in interviews with the CBC, however. No matter how quickly the tar sands expand, they'll never release even a fraction of the amount of C02 that Hansen warns before US/European/Chinese coal burning puts us well past whatever theoretical doomsday scenario Hansen is suggesting.

That was pretty funny actually, and true.

No. Forcing people who don't care to vote would do little more than force uninformed and lazy idiots to show up at the polls and mark a box. Afraid of what, exactly? Am I afraid that intelligence requirement tests would be skewed towards the wealthier and more educated elements of the population, thus moving Canadian politics to the right, or that compulsory voting would make Canadian politics even stupider than they are today? Yes to both. The majority of voters deserve ridicule and disdain. Believe it or not, I don't include you with them. The fact that you're here discussing issues with us puts you in a rare category many levels above the average voter in terms of how informed you are. I may rarely agree with you and I may mock the conclusions you draw, but I respect you for at least caring and putting some thought into the issues themselves. Your vote, at least, is based on something, rather than vague/farty perceptions of 'liking' or 'disliking' the candidate and his/her commercials.

Les policiers de la langue? You know what I'm talking about. You do know why it's called Tim Hortons and not Tim Horton's, right? Because certain industries are dangerous to have under the control of foreign entities. A country can be crippled by interruptions in any of the above services, so the government makes sure that Canada controls its own essential services. I never said it wasn't a civilized society, or that it wasn't complicated. What I said was that the majority of the blame for the deeply (and increasingly) entrenched regionalism we've seen can be laid squarely at Quebec's feet, and not Harper or the Conservatives. The attack ads against Justin Trudeau that you've cited are less about attacking Quebec itself, and more about tapping into the sense of contempt and exasperation that the rest of Canada has increasingly felt for the province's behavior over the last 20 years. Quebec is not Canada, but you'd never know it from all the complaining we hear.

The politicians aren't the point. The prevailing attitude of Quebec towards the rest of Canada is. This is one of those instances where you might need to take a step back and think, perhaps, that everybody else might not be the problem. There's a reason Quebec is the poorest out of the major provinces and perpetually requires equalization payments There's a reason that the Conservatives hold a majority, and needed zero support from Quebec. There's a reason that the Americans and the rest of Canada make fun of Quebec. It's not because they're French. It's not because they're Catholic. It's because of things like the language police and the tedious outrage the province exhibits over basically anything and everything. 20 years of useless protest votes for the Bloc (which didn't even run federal candidates) has given the rest of Canada a good taste of how what to expect from your province. You're right that Canadian politics have become regional. Most of the blame for that, however, can be laid at Pierre Trudeau's feet, along with the Bloc and the blatant conflicts that they instigated. The Reform Party and the Harper Conservatives were the natural and inevitable push-back to that. For all the hatred Quebecquers have for Harper, can you name anything that he's done that comes even close to the NEP? Not a chance. Did the Reform party only run candidates in the West? The Bloc Quebecquois was a slap in the face to the rest of the country. Instead of being part of the debate and trying to affect change from within, Quebec voters insisted on closing themselves out and building veritable walls out of outrage and indignation. After 20 years of crying, fussing and protesting anything that didn't put Quebec first, is it any surprise that the rest of the country voted overwhelmingly to shut Quebec out in the last election? Not at all.

August I just read your opening post today, and all I have to say to you is "Boo-hoo." Quebec marginalized itself. It wasn't Harper or the Conservatives that did it. A long legacy of combative anti-western leaders and rhetoric, along with a pauvre-nous attitude has finally caught up with Quebec. It's not about language, it's not about religion and it's not about nationality. It's about an anglo-Canada that's become tired with the culture of perpetual outrage and crying that's existed as long as I've been alive and which shows no signs of abating. La Belle Province des Pleurnichards

Everyone's already included. Making voting compulsory doesn't help anything. If you're suggesting one opposite extreme instead other other opposite extreme, you're basically just saying that you want things to change because you haven't like the results! Boo hoo....

It couldn't be more different. Voting in an election is nothing more than you choosing your personal preference for who should lead. It's also a constitutional right. Being selected for jury duty is a burden and the screening process is meant to ensure that personal preference and bias has no bearing (or as little as possible) in the final decision and that someone doesn't have their freedom taken away because someone didn't understand what was going on or didn't like that person's race or religion. An intelligent electorate would absolutely be more biased against stupidity, but it would also probably be biased against the stupid as well, and that's why it's not going to work. To even suggest that system works the way it does because the 'powers that be' want to keep the status quo is just childish whining. Again, if you were a student of history (which you're obviously not) you'd know that a system implementing requirements for voter eligibility would be inherently abused to the disadvantage of the poorer and working class. Well-off, educated urbanites would run the show and the working class would largely be shut out.