Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (11689)	4/8/2007 3:08:57 PM
From: seventh_son	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37549

That long diatribe ends with "American Liberals just don't get it." This is coming from a neocon. Well, these neocons don't get it. They DO NOT speak for conservatives -- they are usurpers. A lot of conservatives are fed up just like "liberals" that the US government and both its major political parties are totally beholden to lobbies for Isreal, oil, and the weapons industry and do not speak for the American people, conservatives, or liberals -- they only speak for the lobbies that have bought and paid for the power that they have attained. The US needs to wake up that they are NOT the guys with the white hats who can go and bomb away and sort out "the guys with the black hats" in the Middle East. This whole standing up to an "Islamic threat" doctrine is a total joke if it has any relation to past or present neocon policy. Saddam Hussein was secular. Syria is secular. Iran is at odds with the Osama-bin-Laden type Sunnis. Ally Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, supports militant Islamic schools and hopes to appease its radicals before they revolt. Pakistan, another US ally, has nuclear weapons and a population as radical and anti-US as any other in the world. Just cut all the crap and call it the way it is. All these "bad guys" that we are being goaded into loathing and attacking (Iran, Syria, etc) are nothing more than a very diverse group who are low-hanging fruit to destroy as threats or potential rivals to Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. Add to this equation that others want to control Middle East oil. And others want to sell the big fancy new weapons, make the service contracts, and make massive war profits. End of story. It is way simpler and more plausible than all this rhetorical neocon crap that couches things in clever words but laughibly and totally unconvincingly keeps trying to make parallels to WW II. Any parallels I see to WWII in current geopolitics have the neocons on the opposite side of the equation from the innocent victims of the last war who had to fight back. They are aggressors pure and simple, just like Hitler.

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (11689)	4/12/2007 10:26:13 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Respond to of 37549

"UN Report Proves Canada Must Act Now On Climate Change," National Post April 9th, 2007 "UN Report Proves Canada Must Act Now On Climate Change," trumpeted the headline of a Liberal party press release on Friday, timed to correspond with the release of yet another alarmist UN summary on climate change. "Canada must act aggressively now to avert the destructive consequences of climate change," the Liberals insisted. "Canada must be ready for a carbon-constrained future," said party leader Stephane Dion. "Human beings can't continue to use the atmosphere as an unlimited and free dump . It is within our power to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change." This, of course, marks the second alarmist release by the UN this year, both coming before its own scientific report on global warming is even out. Just why would the UN release these teaser summaries before its actual scientific findings are available? It could it be that the science is becoming less alarming as scientists learn more, so the UN wants to maximize the public hysteria before its catastrophic forecasts for the future can be checked against the more moderate scientific truth. We already know that the coming report -- the fourth by the UN in 15 years -- will say that maximum projected temperatures over the next century will not be nearly as high as projected in the last report in 2001; that man has contributed less to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than originally thought; and that sea level rise will be only a few inches, rather than the several feet once thought. Yet the so-called "summaries for policy makers" are becoming more shrill each time: Species will be wiped out, crime will rise, starvation will kill hundreds of millions, disease will become rampant, islands will disappear beneath the waves, deserts will consume entire continents. Science goes down, UN hysteria goes up. Curious, isn't it, how that plays into the UN's desire to be at the centre of a global effort to plan human activity? But let's look at just what the global-warming theory implies and at Mr. Dion's charge that humans, Canadians included, are dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Think of the atmosphere as 100 cases of 24 one-litre bottles of water -- 2,400 litres in all. According to the global warming theory, rising levels of human-produced carbon dioxide are trapping more of the sun's reflected heat in the atmosphere and dangerously warming the planet. But 99 of our cases would be nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), neither of which are greenhouse gases. Only one case -- just 24 bottles out of 2,400 -- would contain greenhouse gases. Of the bottles in the greenhouse gas case, 23 would be water vapour. Water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas, yet scientists will admit they understand very little about its impact on global warming. (It may actually help cool the planet: As the earth heats up, water vapour may form into more clouds and reflect solar radiation before it reaches the surface. Maybe. We don't know.) The very last bottle in that very last case would be carbon dioxide, one bottle out of 2,400. Carbon dioxide makes up just 0.04% of the entire atmosphere, and most of that -- at least 95% -- is naturally occurring (decaying plants, forest fires, volcanoes, releases from the oceans). At most, 5% of the carbon dioxide in the air comes from human sources such as power plants, cars, oilsands, etc. So in our single bottle of carbon dioxide, just 50 ml is man-made carbon dioxide. Out of our model atmosphere of 2,400 litres of water, just about a shot glassful is carbon dioxide put there by humans. And of that miniscule amount, Canada's contribution is just 2% -- about 1 ml. If, as Mr. Dion demands, we honoured our Kyoto commitments and reduced our current CO2 emissions by one-third -- which would involve shutting down all the coal-fired power generating plants in Canada (and living with constant brownouts and blackouts); or taking all the cars or all the commercial vehicles off the roads; or shutting down the oilsands; or some combination of all these -- we would be saving one-third of 1 ml-- the tip of an eyedropper. And somehow, that is supposed to save the planet from warming; the tip of one eyedropper out of 2,400 bottles of water. That might be true if carbon dioxide were the most toxic substance ever discovered by man. But it is not. We each expel it every time we exhale. It's hard to imagine how such a tiny amount of a benign substance could cause the end of the planet. Maybe Mr. Dion could explain that in his next press release. ____________________ Lorne Gunter Columnist/Editorial Writer, National Post