This is an interesting find from May 2011 when Andrew Breitbart appeared on the Adam Carolla podcast. Turns out they were talking about how smoking went from acceptable to curtailed to virtually banned in California. That led Carolla to speculate on what the NRA may have learned from this.
As always with Carolla, there is a language warning.
H/T SDA
by Lorne Gunter
For more than two weeks now, scientists with doubts about the dangers of global warming have been buzzing about what appears to be a huge admission from the United Nations.
A draft of the UN’s next five-year assessment report has been leaked and appears to show what the skeptics have been saying for years: Carbon dioxide has less effect on global temperatures than thought, the sun is a bigger “driver” of climate change, and global temperatures have not risen appreciably in the past 16 years. Read more…
I’ve long speculated that China’s one-child policy would lead to economic disaster for the country and eventually it would lead to China losing the political power it so greatly craves on the world stage.
Demographics matter. They matter a great deal.
James Liang, a professor of economics at both Stanford University and Peking University wonders if China is soon to fall into the demographic and economic mess that Japan has been experiencing for more than a decade.
Having looked at the case of Japan, now we turn back to the situation in China. Japan has a 1.3 total fertility rate and is trying desperately to encourage child-bearing so as to fight its way out of the aging population quagmire. Meanwhile, as its Sixth Population Census showed, China has a 1.2 fertility rate and is still implementing the One-Child Policy that restricts child-bearing. Such a contrast looks particularly glaring.
Perhaps in Chinese policymakers’ eyes, what they see are just the crowds filling the Beijing or Shanghai subways, and therefore are convinced that China still has too many people. Nevertheless the effect of a population policy takes time to see. Thus, in the process of today’s formulation of policy, the conditions in 20 or 30 years’ time ought to be anticipated.
According to a statistical forecast coming from the U.S., if China maintains its current total average fertility rate, its demographic structure diagram by 2040 will be nearly the replica of that of Japan today. The series of issues that Japanese society is facing today are likely to befall us.
by John Robson
When an armed madman breaks into a school the right response is to drop to one knee and open fire. Anyone who calls that wrongheaded, or disgusting, invites serious questions about their priorities.
Like the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin, who seized on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to abuse the NRA and Republicans for “primitive minds” and “antiquated positions.” He admitted Barack Obama might have hidden his sympathy for gun control because he’s “mindful of the drubbing Bill Clinton took from the gun lobby,” but said “Mr. Clinton didn’t have a massacre of six- and seven-year-olds as a backdrop.” Read more…
Brian Lilley is Senior Correspondent for Sun Media on Parliament Hill.
Brian has been covering politics for the last 10 years. Five of those years were spent as Ottawa Bureau Chief. More about Brian here.