ReeferMadness

Who knew the Pentagon consisted of "a handful of bloggers, defunct anti-military writers and companies attempting to sell their own wares........", eh Derek?

Oh, it's f*cked up - and the need for the lift fan is why the butterball is so fat and heavy and stuck with one stupid huge engine. And has such a puny internal payload. Yep, and they pulled the other carriers back on account of the carrier deficit. If the Japanese had pushed their advantage while they still had one, they may have made a better of fight of it. They were afraid to commit their massive battleships. I really don't care. I said it was a story, not my story. No story is perfect and stories that survive generally have elements of truth to them.

You can be as skeptical as you like. You still have offered no source to back up your claim that American medical expenditures are a large percentage of GDP as a result of medical tourism. Take as much time as you need.

Isn't that nice. Good thing the marines are happy since the plane's entire basic design was f*cked up to make it STOVL. There's a lovely story one of the links I posted earlier about how all this dates back to Guadalcanal in WWII when the navy wouldn't risk their precious last few carriers to support the marines. And so, it's fitting now that the marines are having the last laugh by compromising the design of the main aircraft, not only for the navy but for the air force as well. What a gong show. Such a relief that Canada got out of it.

I take it that is your way of admitting you didn't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about and if a relatively poor country like Uruguay can get 95% of its electricity from renewable sources, then of course Canada could do the same. Uruguay does have one big advantage over Canada - it completely lacks a domestic fossil energy industry to keep happy.

I know! They had me at 110.

Ah. A comment from the guy that is economically dependent on fossil fuel energy. I know that might skew your perspective a little. It seems like our Canadian electrical generation companies aren't talented enough to use renewable energy. Something about not being able to get past their 1950's ideas of "base load". But I have an answer for you. Just bring in some people from Uruguay. With roughly the same percentage of electricity coming from hydro (~60%), they manage to generate an astounding 95%(!!) of their electricity from renewable sources. I know, I know. What will you guys do when the guys who know how come and generate electricity? Maybe you could empty the garbage or hold their coats re something. So, that number cane from an IMF report. I know it's sooooo hard for you to figure out but if you click that little blue link, the source pops right up! Go ahead and try it. We'll wait for you.

The "virgin inflation" makes it more and more tempting all the time.

That's not me. I swear!!

There are Buddhist extremists too. Who knew? Any belief system can be perverted.

It is chump change. Global expenditure on fossil fuels is something in the order of $5 trillion annually. Put another way, for every dollar spent to help countries adapt to climate change problems, we're spending 50 dollars making the problem worse. And that doesn't take into account the $5.3 trillion in subsidies that accrue to fossil fuels annually, according to an IMF report. So, we spend we spend $100 making the problem worse for every $1 we spend dealing with the fallout. It's less than chump change.

It's a fine agreement - assuming it's still 1995.

This might be it. I haven't read it yet but it's purported to be weak - long on ambition and short on specifics. I watched a clip of Obama speechifying and he said that it's more of a framework for building future agreements. It's funny how trade agreements are legally binding with extrajudicial committees that arbitrarily judge compliance but agreements to save the planet are aspirational.

I haven't defended any behaviour. What I have pointed out is that the vile behaviour isn't entirely on the part of the Islamists. And I continue to point out the inherent bigotry and blatant double standards in play when people who are OK with the US and other western nations obliterating entire countries suddenly find their moral outrage when it's Muslims doing the killing. Nobody in Canada would accept police firing machine guns into a crowd in order to kill mobsters, no matter what those people had done Yet, some people here seem to think it's OK for us to drop bombs on third world countries.

When I look at religion, I see a large majority who can interpret the religious teachings in a relatively peaceful way and a minority who will interpret them in a way that tells them to subvert and kill people. This is true for all religions. I see a parallel between those who claim that the religion is responsible for violence to be people who claim that alcohol is responsible for violence. Happy people who drink turn into happy drunks. Angry people who drink turn into angry drunks. The alcohol doesn't cause the issue, it just provides a way for it to come out. Same with religion. All religions. For those who argue that Muslim states are inherently violent or repressive, I agree.So are Christian theocracies, historically. So are socialist and right wing dictatorships. If you compare Saddam Hussein's regime (he was not an Islamist, the Baathists were socialist Arab nationalists) with Saudi Arabia with right wing dictatorships in Central America (which were not so long ago propped up by the CIA), the similarities are remarkable. You have repressive dictatorships who use violence and division to rule the population. the

Ah. Now we get to the nub of the issue. Your focus is on people killed "because the killer reckoned their God wanted them to kill them." And so immediately you discount the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because their commander-in-chief wanted the soldiers to kill them. I'll let you explain how one is better than the other. More to the point is how you determine the motives of people. Even ISIS is not the homogeneous group of religious fanatics you and the Muslim hating community would like them to be. The fighters are drawn from around the world and their stories and motivations are diverse. I was listening to an episode of CBC's The Current a few days ago and they interviewed someone who had gone to Iraq and spoken to captured ISIS fighters who were on the Iraqi equivalent of death row. As the American armed forces are employers of last resort in the US, ISIS is an employer of last resort in Iraq and Syria. The other thing that came out was this guy's anger at the west in general and America in particular for the destruction in Iraq and the mess that the country has become.

Not supporting any religion leaves me free to stand back and objectively assess what's going on.

What I understand very clearly is that you and others around here have some pathological need for Christianity to be somehow morally superior to other religions. So, I'll leave you to your fantasy.

Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief has decided that it is fair to call Donald Trump a "mendacious racist". If you want to be accurate, there just aren't polite terms for some people.

It's also clear he has no knowledge of the actual history of Christians.

or not...

Well, now, I'm curious as to how you justify thinking that somehow Christianity loses out on body count. What bodies are you counting? Starting when? Is it every body in history that was killed by someone claiming to be a Christian vs every body in history claiming to be a Muslim? If that's the case, Christians would be way ahead based on the two world wars alone. Are you counting the inquisitions? The crusades? The godless heathens that were slaughtered by Christian colonialists in the new world? A few days ago, I saw a map of the US overlaid with red circles indicating all of the mass shootings. The ones done by Muslims were overlaid in blue. There were only a couple blue ones. What about all the rest?? When a Christian shoots someone, people understand that most Christians aren't going to shoot strangers and refrain from suspecting them. If you can't do the same with Muslims, what does that say? I don't think either one is "bad" but a lot of horrible things have been done in the name of both. Most people who believe in both are capable of interpreting their religion in a non-destructive way. There are a lot of Muslim theocracies and they tend to be not nice places. Is this proof that Islam is inferior? I don't know - compare them to the Christian theocracies that existed in the middle ages. Or any number of left wing or right wing military dictatorships that have existed (or still do). All it really proves is that politics and religion make bad companions.

Based on the 91 pages of mostly hysteria, innuendo, misinformation and lies, I would say the answer to the OP is: TRUE.

Oh. So, you don't like my source and your source is... because you said so? :lol:

Trump leads the GOP lemmings off the side of a cliff. Trump could be the instrument of destruction for the grand old party. We live in interesting times. ETA: my favorite trump tweet was one that said Trump proved you don't need to be poor to be white trash.