if you go into your backyard and you light a can of paint on fire, you're clearly creating a public health nuisance and opening yourself up to fines. almost nobody would argue against this point.

but, if you go outside and smoke a pack of cigarettes, you're upholding your rights in two ways: one as a smoker, and two as a property owner.

but, the functional difference between lighting a can of paint on fire and smoking a pack of cigarettes is that the paint is less harmful.

this is not thought through well, relative to the existing science, and needs to be updated to account for it. my position is that you should not have any more rights to light a cigarette on fire in public than you should to light anything else on fire; that cigarette fumes should not be treated any differently than any other kind of unnecessary pollution and that bylaws restricting property rights to create other types of pollution should be equally enforced towards cigarette smoke.

smokers are not currently being oppressed. rather, they are taking advantage of a special category under the law. the idea that you could ever smoke in public in the first place was always a loophole. that loophole has been slowly closing....

it needs to be shut altogether.

it's a really serious threat to canada. seriously.

i mean, if they keep it up, they might be able to hit japan by 2030. canada's only another several thousand kilometres away. what will we do?

these systems are aimed at china, and we should not get involved with them for that reason. we don't want to be permanently tied to the united states, like that.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/north-korea-u-s-canada-missile-defence-1.4229904

this guy is such a doofus. i don't know how he ever managed to become a talking head on the left, but he should really be shunned and ignored as the ideologically neo-liberal market fundamentalist that he actually is.

both britain and france have monopoly government price controls, cenk. that's why it's so cheap there. in canada, we balance it out by calculating a floating average over oecd countries, which gives the drug companies a bit of extra profit - largely due to the lack of price controls in the united states - but keeps it down, comparably. we're not a model, though - we need reform here, too. the problem in the united states is that you don't have those regulatory systems in place to keep prices down, not that you don't have a "free market".

it's economics 101 that a drug oligopoly will act like a monopoly and collude to set prices, not compete against each other. why would they want to compete against each other? competition hurts producers. you'd have to write laws that force them to compete with each other. but, that would cost so much in enforcement that it wouldn't be worth it, overall - and the enforcement agencies would just end up getting bribed, anyways.

my understanding of bernie's legislation is that it is meant to prevent lengthy drug patents. even the soft left has always opposed intellectual property rights for things like drug patents; you don't have to get as strictly anti-propertarian as i am to develop an opposition to drug patents, especially timeframes around them. but, the point of stripping patents in every other advanced country has been to allow the government to set price controls, which is often in conjunction with universal pharmacare coverage.

france, especially, has a very strong incentive to keep drug prices down - namely that the system is fully socialized. and, that is the most efficient approach to keeping costs down, not long-debunked and discarded intellectual masturbation about "free markets".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pf17uz2S9A&t=475s

to begin with, these guys are thugs, and you shouldn't stand up for them.

but, the government in caracas would not be doing this without american approval. and, if maduro does become a dictator in the end, it's going to be with american support - although you may have to wait a few decades for the documentation.

again: it would take mere days worth of a serious blockade to collapse the government in venezuela, and there's a reason they're not doing it. do not confuse yourself: given venezuela's absolute dependance on american capital, no government can survive there without american support.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/venezuela-opposition-leaders-house-arrest-1.4230086

1) the results of the venezuelan election are not surprising. the chavistas still dominate the mass of lower class voters and workers, while the opposition is mostly limited to a much smaller upper middle class. you have to remember that a country like venezuela has a very large impoverished class and a very small middle class. but, the upper middle class is able to make itself seem more influential than it is because it has so much more access to capital.

2) rhetoric aside, venezuela's primary market - both for oil and agriculture - remains the united states. if america truly wanted maduro gone, it would shut down imports for a few weeks and let the government tear itself apart from the inside.

3) the conclusion - as i have pointed out repeatedly - is that maduro is not quite what he seems to be. the reality is that the american bogeyman is a good distraction to allow for continued resource extraction, nearly solely to america's benefit.

for real, though.

gore can get your attention. maybe. but, you really need to listen to copernicus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_xI_8aLjds