The problem isn't selling bitumen to China, though if we have to buy gasoline produced from that bitumen from China it is a problem. The problem is China owning the majority of the bitumen sands. And yes if India was buying up all the oil producing land and companies in Alberta I'd have a problem with that. The other problem I have is selling raw product instead of adding value here. Even the Keystone pipeline was bad that way as it leaves us dependent on US refineries on the Gulf coast. We're a major oil producing nation and gas is $1.30 a litre and the local refinery (the last one left) which is located at the end of a pipeline (Kinder Morgans) has to buy foreign oil as the Chinese have already claimed our production.
As if the government would give any warning, there's a reason it was done over the holidays. The PMO (Prime Ministers Office) has an iron grip on the government and nothing is said or done without their say so. This from a government that ran on being open and transparent and more democratic and yet make Obama look very open and non-authoritarian.
Bullshit. Even the former Torie Minister of Fisheries says this is nuts along with most every other decision this government has made when it comes to the fisheries. This government has exactly one aim, to sell tar, I mean oil, gotta be politically correct. They've pissed away the budget surplus while claiming to be conservative and much better fiscal managers. They've sold or allowed to be sold much of the tar, whoops I mean bitumen sands to China. They import foreign workers at a never before seen rate, not to do IT as they don't believe in it but to work at McDonalds and Tim Hortons and force wages even lower while Chinese investors drive the cost of living up. They treat a 38% win as an overwhelming mandate and cry about how it is undemocratic for the majority to vote against them and prorogue Parliament whenever they feel like it because, you know, democracy. Sorry I don't have any assistants to help me get links, I'm in Canada so only have a dial-up connection.
Mandela was updated to being a freedom fighter in IIRC 2005. We all know anything a freedom fighter does is OK, justified etc because the American government told us.
The problem is Americans being confused between right, left, authoritarian and anti-authoritarian. Hint they're actually 2 different axises on the political spectrum with left authoritarians, right authoritarians, left libertarians and right libertarians. Authoritarian is obvious in its meaning but the left is for the people and right is for the aristocracy in its original meaning.
Not hard to catch a few hundred salmon a day when the runs were at their peak. The hard part was drying and/or smoking them. Can't find any really good links on the locals, the Stó:l people but here's the wiki entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sto:lo_people#Salmon and of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_run. While dentistry and surgery do go back a long time, I don't think it was a pleasant experience nor do I think it was very common but it does show that hunter gatherers weren't totally backwards and especially the richer ones had a fairly good life, at least if they made it to adult hood.
They did survive for 5 times longer then we have so another 800,000 years of Homo Sapiens before you can say we survived for longer. They probably died out when the climate changed, like most species and even human civilizations. Our advantage is being very general purpose and we don't really know how general purpose this species was, they still might of eaten a lot of insects along with sedges for example.
Human hunter gatherers, at least the ones in the richer environments, also only foraged a couple of hours a day. The ones that lived around here actually could get by with 2 weeks work a year harvesting the salmon. They spent a lot of time sitting around the fire bull shitting, visiting the nieghbours and such. Artistic things like carvings and if bored, little things like making a dugout canoe could eat a lot of time. Cutting down a 10 ft thick tree with fire and stone, carving it out with fire and stone, dragging it to the ocean, then paddling to Hawaii to snag a cute chick. The meme is that being primitive was a horrible life and while it was horrible if you needed dentistry or such and of course those years when there was a famine, much or the time was leisure time.
Actually there is a universe with tooth fairies trading teeth for coins unless of course they can't make change, then the pliers come out. In the same part of the multiverse there are numerous gods and to stand outside and declare that you're an atheist is inviting a lightning strike so you better be made out of clay to last as an atheist.
Now I'm intrigued, I thought there was no lethal dose of LSD; at least, that's what I've read.
It's roughly the same as water, something like 2 inches, enough to submerge your nose, fill up your lungs and kill you from oxygen starvation. Also I'd guess, like pot, if large mass of it is dropped on you it'll also kill you.
The problem is that the American people seem to somewhat accept these re-definitions though the blame isn't totally on them. Obama got a lot of votes based on fixing these issues so obviously the American people would like some of this stuff changed. Unluckily after he failed at some of this stuff, the offered choice was worse. Still the point stands that political points are scored if Obama (or whoever) are not seen as tough on terrorists and a lot of Americans seem to agree to killing people on the other side of the world.
Besides the points that dave420 makes, every time these discussions come up, it is always the same, killing of American citizens, which leaves the impression that the average American doesn't care if non-citizens are being killed, whether in another sovereign country or even in the US of A. Obviously it is a generalization but even here, where the average poster is more intelligent then the average, the vast majority of posters seem to be upset about killing citizens rather then killing. Same with other rights, even though your Bill of Rights mostly references People, a large number of Americans seem to think it only applies to citizens. Anyways, have to go to work so will have to leave it here for now.
Historically Canadians have a higher ownership of firearms per capita then Americans, just long guns rather then handguns which are pretty useless in an armed conflict. At that to buy a gun in Canada all I have to do is take a short course on firearm safety (it's illegal to sell a gun to someone without the piece of paper that says they've taken the course) whereas if I was an American I wouldn't be allowed to buy a gun due to doing something stupid over 30 years ago. I wouldn't even be allowed to vote to change that law in most States. The only ones banned from owning firearms in Canada are those who a judge banned during a sentencing hearing, usually due to a firearms related offence, and you guys claim it is a right while practicing segregation on a large portion of your population through an artificial class of people based on feudal principles that the rest of the world moved away from during the 19th century
Most of the world has illegalized mines, with the exception of America. I wonder if the Geneva conventions were being drawn up now, the Americans would boycott them?
Remember that Anslinger was related to Hearst, through marriage IIRC. Hearst had a lot of power, much like Murdock today and had heavily invested in the wood pulp paper process when the break through for processing hemp came. You are right though that it was a confluence of forces, which is basically what I was trying to say. The same thing is happening today with copyright. The government is very happy to exercise extra powers in the name of protecting the *AAs business model.
Why? Just do what the Canadian Conservative government did, give them a small lump sum payment, close down all but one office and other supporting structures and go on about how you support the military. As a bonus pretty quick enough veterans are committing suicide that the total number of veterans drops. At that you can get rid of benefits for everyone who isn't a politician and save all kinds of money.
One example is Canada where we currently have a right wing government. They inherited 8 years of balanced budgets and partially got voted in on the principle that the previous government was inept to be paying down the debt instead of cutting taxes. They cut taxes and went through 100's of billions of dollars to put us back in debt then started cutting the parts of the government that they disapprove off. Food inspection? Industry can do it better, at least until people started dropping dead from salmonalia (sp?) and our trading partners refused to accept our meat. Scientific research, programs stretching back years and costing very little were canceled so quick, scientists were muzzled, the fisheries department was given to the oil industry to look after. (they just closed the fisheries libraries and chucked years of research into the dump) Even things like small coast guard stations at one of the busiest ports in the country were closed. Seems the assets are valuable and they can sell them just before the next election, balance one budget and go on about their one selling point, they're conservatives so they have to be better then the losers who actually balanced the budget for close to a decade. Meanwhile they have totally not supported industries such as manufacturing as wages are too high, import tons of foreign workers, not just for tech but even to work in McDonalds to drive down wages. Lower wages means higher profits and people who are desperate for tax cuts. The oil companies who are supposed to be our saviours get so many tax cuts that they don't want them any more as it looks bad from a pr angle if they're not paying anything but instead getting billions of dollars from the government along with their high profits. Which is another problem, huge subsidies to the oil industry, all research has to be oil related now and even our diplomacy has to ignore human rights and only be about business, and the only business we should have is oil. Nothing like putting all your eggs in basket, especially a basket that has always had boom and bust cycles. Being very authoritarian they also don't mind spending money to spy on the citizens as they consider the majority of Canadians to be subversives (only 38% of people who bothered to vote supported them), building more jails, increasing penalties for many crimes along with 3 strikes laws that even the Texan Republicans tell them are a stupid waste of money They no longer talk to the Provinces, just unilaterally do things. They no longer worry about doing unconstitutional stuff, just passing laws and delaying the Supreme Court making a decision when traditionally our government has often asked the Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of laws before signing them into law.
The conservatives have not shrunk the government, instead just shifting it to support their pet projects to the detriment of everything else, all in the name of small government and people some people are so polarized that instead of looking at the budget, they only listen to the propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't selling bitumen to China, though if we have to buy gasoline produced from that bitumen from China it is a problem. The problem is China owning the majority of the bitumen sands. And yes if India was buying up all the oil producing land and companies in Alberta I'd have a problem with that.
The other problem I have is selling raw product instead of adding value here. Even the Keystone pipeline was bad that way as it leaves us dependent on US refineries on the Gulf coast.
We're a major oil producing nation and gas is $1.30 a litre and the local refinery (the last one left) which is located at the end of a pipeline (Kinder Morgans) has to buy foreign oil as the Chinese have already claimed our production.
Fascists? Really?
Really. Instead of caring about things like human rights and serving the people of Canada, now the government only serves [some] businesses. A good example is diplomacy where we've historically pushed for more human rights. Well no more. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-new-foreign-affairs-vision-shifts-focus-to-economic-diplomacy/article15624653/
This government is also doing the usual fascist things such as pushing nationalism, law and order where the idea is to expand the police state and considering anyone not agreeing with their policies re pipelines to be foreign radicals http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/radicals-working-against-oilsands-ottawa-says-1.1148310 and anti-truth, http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/10/06/the-canadian-war-on-science-updates-to-the-chronology-of-the-conservative-governments-anti-science-actions/
There's a reason that they're dong it over the Christmas holidays and it isn't to get more publicity to brag about the digitizing.
Mine has an anonymous loon on it.
As if the government would give any warning, there's a reason it was done over the holidays. The PMO (Prime Ministers Office) has an iron grip on the government and nothing is said or done without their say so. This from a government that ran on being open and transparent and more democratic and yet make Obama look very open and non-authoritarian.
Bullshit. Even the former Torie Minister of Fisheries says this is nuts along with most every other decision this government has made when it comes to the fisheries. This government has exactly one aim, to sell tar, I mean oil, gotta be politically correct.
They've pissed away the budget surplus while claiming to be conservative and much better fiscal managers. They've sold or allowed to be sold much of the tar, whoops I mean bitumen sands to China. They import foreign workers at a never before seen rate, not to do IT as they don't believe in it but to work at McDonalds and Tim Hortons and force wages even lower while Chinese investors drive the cost of living up. They treat a 38% win as an overwhelming mandate and cry about how it is undemocratic for the majority to vote against them and prorogue Parliament whenever they feel like it because, you know, democracy.
Sorry I don't have any assistants to help me get links, I'm in Canada so only have a dial-up connection.
And Mao was raised as a Buddhist, Hitler as a Catholic and Pol Pot as an atheist. Majority of mass murderers seem to come from religious backgrounds.
The justice system satisfies the revenge urge good enough that the neighbours don't kill the murderers family.
And the Bible.
Mandela was updated to being a freedom fighter in IIRC 2005. We all know anything a freedom fighter does is OK, justified etc because the American government told us.
The problem is Americans being confused between right, left, authoritarian and anti-authoritarian. Hint they're actually 2 different axises on the political spectrum with left authoritarians, right authoritarians, left libertarians and right libertarians.
Authoritarian is obvious in its meaning but the left is for the people and right is for the aristocracy in its original meaning.
Slashdot dropped the last character of the Stó:lo, an o with an accent mark. Wish the preview was accurate.
Not hard to catch a few hundred salmon a day when the runs were at their peak. The hard part was drying and/or smoking them. Can't find any really good links on the locals, the Stó:l people but here's the wiki entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sto:lo_people#Salmon and of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_run.
While dentistry and surgery do go back a long time, I don't think it was a pleasant experience nor do I think it was very common but it does show that hunter gatherers weren't totally backwards and especially the richer ones had a fairly good life, at least if they made it to adult hood.
They did survive for 5 times longer then we have so another 800,000 years of Homo Sapiens before you can say we survived for longer.
They probably died out when the climate changed, like most species and even human civilizations. Our advantage is being very general purpose and we don't really know how general purpose this species was, they still might of eaten a lot of insects along with sedges for example.
Human hunter gatherers, at least the ones in the richer environments, also only foraged a couple of hours a day. The ones that lived around here actually could get by with 2 weeks work a year harvesting the salmon.
They spent a lot of time sitting around the fire bull shitting, visiting the nieghbours and such. Artistic things like carvings and if bored, little things like making a dugout canoe could eat a lot of time. Cutting down a 10 ft thick tree with fire and stone, carving it out with fire and stone, dragging it to the ocean, then paddling to Hawaii to snag a cute chick.
The meme is that being primitive was a horrible life and while it was horrible if you needed dentistry or such and of course those years when there was a famine, much or the time was leisure time.
Actually there is a universe with tooth fairies trading teeth for coins unless of course they can't make change, then the pliers come out. In the same part of the multiverse there are numerous gods and to stand outside and declare that you're an atheist is inviting a lightning strike so you better be made out of clay to last as an atheist.
Holy Bible of lethal dose
Now I'm intrigued, I thought there was no lethal dose of LSD; at least, that's what I've read.
It's roughly the same as water, something like 2 inches, enough to submerge your nose, fill up your lungs and kill you from oxygen starvation.
Also I'd guess, like pot, if large mass of it is dropped on you it'll also kill you.
The problem is that the American people seem to somewhat accept these re-definitions though the blame isn't totally on them. Obama got a lot of votes based on fixing these issues so obviously the American people would like some of this stuff changed. Unluckily after he failed at some of this stuff, the offered choice was worse. Still the point stands that political points are scored if Obama (or whoever) are not seen as tough on terrorists and a lot of Americans seem to agree to killing people on the other side of the world.
Besides the points that dave420 makes, every time these discussions come up, it is always the same, killing of American citizens, which leaves the impression that the average American doesn't care if non-citizens are being killed, whether in another sovereign country or even in the US of A.
Obviously it is a generalization but even here, where the average poster is more intelligent then the average, the vast majority of posters seem to be upset about killing citizens rather then killing. Same with other rights, even though your Bill of Rights mostly references People, a large number of Americans seem to think it only applies to citizens.
Anyways, have to go to work so will have to leave it here for now.
Historically Canadians have a higher ownership of firearms per capita then Americans, just long guns rather then handguns which are pretty useless in an armed conflict.
At that to buy a gun in Canada all I have to do is take a short course on firearm safety (it's illegal to sell a gun to someone without the piece of paper that says they've taken the course) whereas if I was an American I wouldn't be allowed to buy a gun due to doing something stupid over 30 years ago. I wouldn't even be allowed to vote to change that law in most States. The only ones banned from owning firearms in Canada are those who a judge banned during a sentencing hearing, usually due to a firearms related offence, and you guys claim it is a right while practicing segregation on a large portion of your population through an artificial class of people based on feudal principles that the rest of the world moved away from during the 19th century
Most of the world has illegalized mines, with the exception of America. I wonder if the Geneva conventions were being drawn up now, the Americans would boycott them?
How about: Murder of innocent citizens.
95% of them aren't americans (me included). Why would the distinction be important?
Americans don't seem to think that non-Americans are people, therefore not deserving of rights
Remember that Anslinger was related to Hearst, through marriage IIRC. Hearst had a lot of power, much like Murdock today and had heavily invested in the wood pulp paper process when the break through for processing hemp came.
You are right though that it was a confluence of forces, which is basically what I was trying to say.
The same thing is happening today with copyright. The government is very happy to exercise extra powers in the name of protecting the *AAs business model.
Why? Just do what the Canadian Conservative government did, give them a small lump sum payment, close down all but one office and other supporting structures and go on about how you support the military. As a bonus pretty quick enough veterans are committing suicide that the total number of veterans drops.
At that you can get rid of benefits for everyone who isn't a politician and save all kinds of money.
One example is Canada where we currently have a right wing government. They inherited 8 years of balanced budgets and partially got voted in on the principle that the previous government was inept to be paying down the debt instead of cutting taxes. They cut taxes and went through 100's of billions of dollars to put us back in debt then started cutting the parts of the government that they disapprove off. Food inspection? Industry can do it better, at least until people started dropping dead from salmonalia (sp?) and our trading partners refused to accept our meat. Scientific research, programs stretching back years and costing very little were canceled so quick, scientists were muzzled, the fisheries department was given to the oil industry to look after. (they just closed the fisheries libraries and chucked years of research into the dump) Even things like small coast guard stations at one of the busiest ports in the country were closed. Seems the assets are valuable and they can sell them just before the next election, balance one budget and go on about their one selling point, they're conservatives so they have to be better then the losers who actually balanced the budget for close to a decade.
Meanwhile they have totally not supported industries such as manufacturing as wages are too high, import tons of foreign workers, not just for tech but even to work in McDonalds to drive down wages. Lower wages means higher profits and people who are desperate for tax cuts. The oil companies who are supposed to be our saviours get so many tax cuts that they don't want them any more as it looks bad from a pr angle if they're not paying anything but instead getting billions of dollars from the government along with their high profits. Which is another problem, huge subsidies to the oil industry, all research has to be oil related now and even our diplomacy has to ignore human rights and only be about business, and the only business we should have is oil. Nothing like putting all your eggs in basket, especially a basket that has always had boom and bust cycles.
Being very authoritarian they also don't mind spending money to spy on the citizens as they consider the majority of Canadians to be subversives (only 38% of people who bothered to vote supported them), building more jails, increasing penalties for many crimes along with 3 strikes laws that even the Texan Republicans tell them are a stupid waste of money They no longer talk to the Provinces, just unilaterally do things. They no longer worry about doing unconstitutional stuff, just passing laws and delaying the Supreme Court making a decision when traditionally our government has often asked the Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of laws before signing them into law.
The conservatives have not shrunk the government, instead just shifting it to support their pet projects to the detriment of everything else, all in the name of small government and people some people are so polarized that instead of looking at the budget, they only listen to the propaganda.