Moonbox

Quebec and Ontario are the front runners by a long ways. Quebec with its corruption and Ontario with its total incompetence.

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.

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).

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. 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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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). 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.

You need to chill out. I didn't romanticize pre-industrial living. I implied that the industrialization and modernization of the West removed Mother Nature's ability to keep populations in check. That's great that we can feed more people and stuff, but look what the results have been. Cheaper food and longer life expectancies are a recipe for disaster with no education to go with it. The industrial economy will NOT save Pakistan when the Indus Valley is over-farmed and the river starts to run dry. It's not saving the 160million (and growing) Indians who live in literally the most squalid conditions the world has ever seen. It's not helping Congo, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Angola etc. Don't act like things are good there or that people have the west to thank for their current lifestyles.

Well...not really Tim. In the past people starved or were still-born etc and the population stayed in check. What developing countries (save China and a few others) have to thank us for is the tools they needed to overpopulate and destroy themselves.

Helicopters don't need a permissive environment. The 1991 Gulf War US intervention opened with Apachi Gunships flying low across the desert at night to knock out radar installations. That being said, I get what you're saying.

I think it's hit or miss on having a good GP though. I am going to cry when my GP retires. He's been looking after me since I was a wee baby and has ALWAYS been right and ALWAYS sent me in the right direction. I had a problem with my eye a few years ago and he arranged for me to have a CT scan the NEXT DAY. I'm sure this isn't normal but I love the guy. This is the attention I expect and I'm going to be pretty disappointed when it's not delivered...

Even Canada couldn't eliminate Co2 in 10 years. The tech isn't there yet. If we decided to stop driving cars, turn our lights out by dark and go to bed, and spend trillions shutting down our current infrastructure and building new and inefficient tech, then maybe we could do it, but only in fantasy land would it even be a possibility.

Grade school geography would have also taught you that not all of Northern Canada is the Canadian Shield. I know you like to toss out that, "grade school" stuff all the time, but it would work better if you had a clue before you say crap like that. Look up a map of the Canadian Shield, then look up a map of Canada's farming regions. There is a LOT of space neither occupies right now (ie most of Yukon and Northern Alberta/Saskatchewan), not to mention the longer growing seasons Canada would enjoy. As for Bangladesh, their problem is of their own doing, and much the same holds for Pakistan and India. They're rivers aren't running dry because of global warming. Their rivers are running dry because there's way too many people there and they're over-farming. The only way that problem's getting solved is fewer people living there, and Mother Nature is going to sort that out one day. More likely, and sooner rather than later, however, we're going to see India and pals go to war over and the world will watch in horror.

Where are those numbers coming from, and where is the comparison with how much wind power is costing? Consider that New York is probably the world's (or at least North America's) biggest and most expensive coastal city, and at the same time compare that to how much money has been dumped into wind/solar and how little energy is actually being generated. $7B is bananas in comparison.

You'd posted a stupid wiki graph going back to 1970. That's what I was commenting on. Good try though. What about the last 2000 years? http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2012/jun/6jun2012a5.html We see the same thing. Go back further too. You'll not like the results. wyly you couldn't discredit a hobo doomsayer on a New York subway. Your climate expertise doesn't extend any further than anyone's here, although you certainly do spend a lot more time than the vast majority of us pretending to be an expert on the subject.

wyly you don't know "how" to make clear points. Your kid logic and childish mockery usually don't extend much further than linking us crap and then ranting about nothing. Linking a ~600 page IPCC report and then claiming, "Aha! I win the argument!" is a perfect example of how sad your debate skills really are. Common sense would dictate that if you wanted us to believe you read the report (we know you didn't) you'd at least pull specific statements out of the report and quote them. You failed to do this, which is funny but unsurprising. I reference the IPCC's SREX report from March which indicated: "There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change," writes the IPCC in its new Special Report on Extremes (SREX) published today." "The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados," the authors conclude, adding for good measure that "absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses"." http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/ Which goes directly back to the "open letter" that very openly exposes the UN Secretary General's bogus claims and what can be considered ignorance/incompetence and/or an obvious political agenda. Even IPCC authors try to distance themselves from people saying these sorts of thing. and again we have a "here's a graph - this proves it" sort of argument. Sure, your graph shows several decades of warming. Show us the previous 30 years before that, however, and you'd see the opposite happening, suggesting that there's a strong cyclical influence as well. Your hypocrisy is pretty funny, considering you've been calling people out here on cherry-picking the data sets, when you did the exact same thing.

The IPCC disputes the assertion that we're causing extreme weather.

They didn't dispute global warming by man. They stated, as a fact, that the world hasn't warmed anywhere NEAR what the climate models had predicted in their hysteria, and that this lack of warming couldn't have been responsible for things like Tropical Storm Sandy. Their conclusion, ultimately, was that the science was unclear and that the politicking needs to stop.

Michael I thought you smarter than that, or at least less of a hack. Come on man. There's 129 names on that list, 90+% of them are PhD's, and you're taking exception to the fact that ONE of them is a marketing PhD (one who happens to specialize in analyzing models and forecasts - climate ones in particular). Umm...I'm pretty sure most of these guys HAVE done their own work. If you look at their credentials and their areas of expertise, you'd assume that they know something about the topic....

Perhaps this is in the wrong sub-forum, but this is a pretty solid follow-up to a lot of the discussions that we've been having here confirming a lot of what I, and others have been saying. Please note that the article isn't flat out denouncing man-made climate change. It's merely pointing out some of the giant gaping holes in current climate arguments (ie the planet hasn't warmed for heading towards 20 years) and that the claims that green house gases are responsible for more, and more damaging, extreme weather events are bogus. Here's the article: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/11/29/open-climate-letter-to-un-secretary-general-current-scientific-knowledge-does-not-substantiate-ban-ki-moon-assertions-on-weather-and-climate-say-125-scientists/ Of note is the suggestion that any attempted reductions we're making today are going to be grossy expensive and almost entirely ineffectual, and to abandon the current course and move towards mitigation rather than prevention with currently available data.

I'm not really against affirmative action either. Women make up 50% of the population, so I don't think it's unreasonable to want more of them on the force. The physical requirements should make allowances for the difference in sexes for sure, as I understand that's a current barrier to entry. Where affirmative action becomes a problem, however, is where completely unqualified or lousy candidates get jobs just because of demographics.

We don't know decent cheeses here. The more I read about this the angrier I get.