I agree with you in general, but there's no need to single out sifters for personal derision like that. Better to keep comments like that generalized.

I have family members who listen to his ilk who graduated college, read daily, and eat like kings from their gardens/farms, but for some reason switch off the critical thinking portions of their brains when a right wing mouthpiece starts flapping. It's inexplicable.

Yeah, gotta love the fish people....even better than his #1 hit, gay frogs.

To be clear, 99% of Americans don't have any problems with socialism as long as they belong to the group getting the handouts.

Case and point, $12 billion in farm welfare to ease the "temporary" (yet to be seen) pain Trump's trade war is causing farmers (so much for free market economics). You won't find any Republican farmers turning that money down just because they hate socialism, but those same people denounce welfare for the un and under employed, the hungry, and the homeless as harmful and unAmerican.

As to affirmative action, keep in mind the specific case mentioned was about reversing sexual discrimination too, not just race and class. How, exactly, they think public institutions can achieve the diversity of genders and races many are required by law to achieve without looking at gender or race is beyond me.

It bears noting, the people claiming to hate socialism (but who love our socialist programs like the military) invariably don't think giving the disenfranchised and those denied opportunity preferential treatment is OK....until that includes them.

....That's right, Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Mostly the trouble depends on where you work and how publicly you make your statement. I'd mostly get called a racist, but working for a partially publicly funded place if I was vocal enough losing your job or being told to apologise and be quiet are real possibilities.

The not allowed to talk about it applies much more heavily to anyone in the media. A recent example would be an aboriginal man that was recently shot by a white farmer. The narrative on the national CBC media made a big deal about rampant racism in the region against aboriginals. In their coverage of local opinion it was even more one sided, as they described two sides, the grieving family of the deceased and their supporters, and then the racists who sided with the farmer because they hated aboriginal people. They very slowly, reluctantly and buried deep under a lot of disclaimers released more information on the case.

The young man that was killed was in a truck with 4 of his friends, and their story was that they got a flat tire and pulled into the yard to seek help with repairs. The CBC ran that much right away. They were much more reluctant to include that the RCMP had been called BEFORE the truck got onto that farm because they had been trying to steal a truck from a neighbouring farm already beforehand. It wasn't until during the trial that even more came out, and CBC again reluctantly included details from the friends that where with the victim. All the occupants of the vehicle had been drinking very heavily all afternoon. They admitted to 'checking cars' at the earlier neighbouring farm. They admitted to using the butt end of a rifle to try and break the windows of the truck at the neighbouring farm, but the stock broke off the gun. It was found at the neighbouring farm by police. Upon arriving at the final farm, they admitted trying to start up an ATV and going through and unlocked vehicle there as well, but disagreed on who was doing which. The trial even included text messages from the night before wondering if one of the friends would be able to "go on missions" tomorrow because they were hiding from police after a liquor store robbery. The farmer also mentioned being scared about what could happen the day of the shooting because he thought back to a story he'd been told about 2 farmers being killed on their yards a few years before he'd moved into the area. Only 1 media outlet in the country, and in 1 article checked out that the identity of one of those killers back then turned out to be the victims uncle. I had to go back looking for the original article from when those murders took place to be sure that the current news article wasn't just sensationalising things.

Now of course none of that means you want to see somebody getting killed over property theft. None of that means racism in any way shape or form is justified. However, when there was a rampant run of rural crime across the area and farmers were getting more and more fed up and nervous about their safety something bad was eventually going to happen. It's a tragedy, but our media was absolutely terrified of covering the full story because listing the facts I just laid out is considered racist. Your blaming the victim. My listing of the above facts is not supposed to be done without including many times more explanations and reasons that this was the white man's fault.

Ultimately, the absolute failure to talk openly about things in Canada is getting people killed. We absolutely need to be clear that stealing doesn't deserve a death penalty. We ALSO need to tell a group of young adults that were going farm to farm, with a loaded rifle, raging drunk, stealing and breaking into vehicles that doing that was a BAD idea and one of the reasons is that doing so might get you shot by someone that doesn't know if your going to hurt them or not. I really believe if the kids had been white that would have been the narrative, but because of race it wasn't. It just makes things worse and inspires more risky and dangerous decisions from people in the future and more people will continue to get hurt.

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The dairy farm can now sell hole milk cheaper than whole milk.

This Moore, OK EF5 flyover gives a good idea of what is left by the path once you get about 4 minutes into the video.

I know the Jarrell F5, which I was around 12 miles from at the time, left similar damage but it was harder to tell because it just hoovered up everything. It literally ripped the asphalt from the roadways and left them like old dirt roads. Because a lot of it was rural, entire trailer parks and farms just became empty fields.

Piglets need to be protected in commercial farms as their sows will eat their young.


I get the feeling this sow might understand the impulse.

There's plenty wrong with decimating their natural habitats and then shooting them when they have nowhere else to look for food.

Animals might not understand how to write a contract but they understand territory very well.

We walk through their land and then we get upset if they aggressively defend it.

And the vast majority of this habitat loss is so someone can stick a cow on the land because that's what consumers are demanding. We're effectively replacing the planet's wonderful biodiversity with 5 animals and 5 types of crop to feed these farm animals. We must change our consumption habits, otherwise nature will change it for us in about 50 years.

Good points.

I'm not a gun nutadvocate, but I have friends who are. I have shot a fairly wide range of guns with them, including an AR-15. For myself, I only ever owned BB guns and a .22 pellet air rifle, for target shooting and varmint control on my family farm. I did go pheasant hunting with borrowed 20 and 12 gauge shotguns a couple times.

My friend that owns the AR-15 is a responsible gun owner. Do I think he needs it? Hell no. But he likes it. Do I need a PC with an i7 processor and nVidia 1060 GPU? Hell no. But I like it.

So I guess it becomes a question of to what extent the things that we like can be used for negative purposes. My nVidia 1060 is unlikely to be used to facilitate a crime (unless games or bitcoin mining get criminalized). However, even though AR-15s might be one of the primary firearms of choice for murderous wackos, the percentage of people that own AR-15's who are murderous wackos is also extremely low.

If banning AR-15s would significantly reduce the rate of mass shootings and/or the average number of deaths per incident, it could be well worth doing even though it would annoy many responsible owners like my friend. ...But, I just don't think that would be the case. Not by itself.

I think we're at a point where we NEED to do something. If the something that we decide to do is to ban AR-15s, well, so be it I guess. But I don't think we'd be pleased with the long-term results of that. It'd be cutting the flower off of the top of the weed. We need to dig deeper, and I think that registration and licensing are sane ways to attempt to do that.