Peterkin

Yes, there is a genetic factor, which helps to account for clusters of long-lived people in (relatively) isolated communities. And, yes, rich people statistically live longer than poor people, because they eat well, have access to medicine and don't expose themselves to the daily hazards of poverty. I wasn't trying to give the poster a guarantee; just a general outline of what the clusters of very old people tend to have in common. Also a diet consisting largely of vegetables and little or no access to the social toxins, like alcohol, cigarettes*, white sugar and processed foods . (*Civilized cigarettes are far and away more toxic than plain tobacco or cannabis stuffed in a pipe.) Anyway, while there are plenty of harmful chemicals and particulates in the modern urban - and more frequently, work-place - environment, most of those pollutants are not classified as poisons. They may be carcinogens, but we have modern medicine to rescue us from much of their effect, so we can live longer, if not always better. There are foods and food additives that are harmful but not directly toxic: they'll just make us obese, diabetic and ischemic. There are radiations and medications and fuels and garden sprays and microplastics https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-humans-a-microplastic-invasion-may-be-taking-a-toll/? the long-terms effects of which are not sufficiently known. You can survive (technically, that counts as living) a long time with chronic ailments that can't be cured but can be managed with medical treatment. And you cannot sweat any of them out. They're either neutralized and expelled by the kidneys, or stored and sequestered in the liver, until it can't cope anymore https://www.webmd.com/hepatitis/toxic-liver-disease .

120 is not unknown, and in pretty good health. https://goop.com/ca-en/wellness/health/the-geographic-areas-where-people-live-the-longest-and-clues-as-to-why/ If you live in a clean place, work hard, never get rich enough to realize you're poor, have good friends and community, help others and laugh frequently, you'll live longer. (barring war, flood, lightning, earthquake, rattlesnakes, famine, plague or a careless misstep on a ladder...) 150 is unlikely, without artificial enhancements. It's not what builds up in your body that kills you - it's what breaks down.

Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it. We can't do a damn thing about it without changing our lifestyle, economy, social organization and many of our assumptions about how we need to/ought to live. What I did about it was move out of the city at a greatly reduced material standard of living and greatly improved quality of life. Neh... it's something we should have started worrying about (a few people did, actually) about 300 years ago. Too late to worry now: it's done.

There are lots of poisons for which no living organism has a defense system. In most cases, it's not so much a matter of evolution not having prepared us for it as a basic chemical incompatibility between the processes that support life and processes that suppress it, e.g. methane gas displacing the oxygen required to carry on life functions.

If those advertised 'toxins' were really building up in our bodies all the time, we'd all be dead by age 40. In fact, humans' environment is very often loaded with toxins, and we do die of them over shorter or longer periods. Sweating - which their daily work induces in plenty - doesn't save coal miners from carbon monoxide or farmers from glycophosphate. However, poisons like alcohol are removed of neutralized more quickly by the body's natural defenses in the presence of heat of which sweating is also a byproduct. It's easy to see why the association of sweating and feeling better could be presented as a cause-effect relationship, rather than both being effects of the same cause.

There is a slight difference between responsibility and blame. There is plenty of blame to go several times around the industrial world (just follow the thousands and thousands of shipping containers and plastic waste in the oceans) but nowhere near enough responsibility being taken. Showing where it comes from at least closes down arguments over who needs to clean up their act. With a high standard of living comes an unequal proportion of the contribution to the problem, which then affects the people of the world in inverse proportion to the cause. Blame, just or unjust, is ineffective.

[that a god big enough to capitalize "god" for once showed itself and no longer does] It would be interesting to see what they came up with. Though I would much prefer that the poster who made the claim backed it up.

I drew no conclusion as to what protests should be allowed or disallowed. I simply asked whether you wish to make a factual comparison between the two protests you equated; one of which you characterized as 'polite'. I did, in fact. "To speak their opinion" is one category of freedom of speech that has been in question. All the kluxers, bigots, anti-vaxers, Western separatists, kooks, psychobabblers, creationists, freaks, nazis and morons have been allowed to say whatever they please in public - short of inciting to violence - equal to the science experts, sages, pundits and jurists. But only the former groups keeps griping - loudly, in print and broadcast media -about being suppressed. In a progressive society, the opinion of people who actually know something would carry more weight than the idjits', but that is not so in our present society. To that extent, we have a good deal of progress yet to make. "and protest" covers a lot more, and quite different territory. Without regard to their purpose, I approve of some forms of protest, have taken part is some, condone or tolerate some - disdain, disapprove of and utterly condemn some forms. So, when it comes to a right to protest, I'd need more specifics. Yes, a progressive society would ideally grant equal rights of protest to all opinions, within the same framework of acceptable behaviour. The time, place, duration form of the protest would determine the official response - if any is required. Of course, in that same progressive society, legitimate grievances would be addressed through legal channels in a timely manner, before protest becomes the only way to resolve the issue. And, obviously, the group with the grievance would be civilized enough to direct its protest against the bodies or agencies that occasioned such grievance, rather than violate the rights of uninvolved third parties.

What do you mean "are calculated"? By whom? Lots of agencies, organizations, research groups and individuals collect and compile lots of data. Each set of calculations may be based on different criteria, for (presumably) different purposes. Locating sources of emission is important to any efforts at amelioration of the problem.

Maybe so. Shall we compare causes, histories, justifications and methods?

Some theorize that a god big enough for its own capital on a common noun once existed and at sometime stopped showing itself? Who theorizes that? So then, the fact that we can make flying machines out of steel proves that iron is capable of flight? We don't. We notice that a process is taking place. We attempt to trace it back through one or more causal chains as far as possible, predict its effects, explain how it works and experiment with how we can manipulate it to work for us. Each time we know a little more about the process and how it works, we can trace it a little farther back, predict a little more accurately what will happen next, and influence it to our benefit. In fact, every process is part of a longer, more complex process that we are trying to understand. Nope.

Indirectly. The smoke isn't necessarily confined to the air over Canada, but the resulting deforestation (that plus logging) is confined to Canada, where the dead trees are no longer cleaning the air. That also applies to the US (Russia, Spain, etc) but in Canada, the residual CO2 is shared by fewer people. The bulk of the non-combustion contribution, however, comes from permafrost thawing, which I neglected to mention earlier. Good thing this not a question of blame, since the whole industrial world contributed to the global warming - a few nations more than many others; several nations more than Canada - but the effect is concentrated in Canadian and Russian lands.

It's true that Canadians own fewer cars than Americans, but we maintain a generally high standard of living - i.e. a smaller percent of the population below the poverty line (according to each country's own definition of the poverty line) We drive everywhere, all the time - probably farther, what with road-trips, family cottages and far-flung relations. We also do a huge amount of trucking, both raw materials and finished products, over great distances. All of those natural resources have to be extracted with the use of immense machinery, all burning diesel. In summer, we zoom speed-boats over every waterway; in winter we roar with snowmobiles. We heat tiki-taki houses with propane and still generate half of our electricity with gas, oil and coal. Those numbers are decreasing, however (as long as conservative governments don't halt and reverse the program), so the stats in that chart may already be out of date. Forest fires. Still combustion, just not engines. Also the resulting deforestation (lack of trees to capture CO2), cement production, and garbage dumps. And now, everything's been said twice. If that's not convincing, what is? Who said anything about blame? It's a chart. Numbers don't judge; they merely report.

I'm not sure how those two events are connected. I don't think I said that truckers were the only impolite people in Canada. Yes, that is much to be desired. None of which precludes the anti-vax and other frinjy-idjits being dead wrong.

There is just nothing could undermine this pundemic, is there? Should have known better.

It's not how many of us saw it, either. For three weeks, they terrorized downtown Ottawa and kept people who live and work there from going about their normal lives, shopping, working, sleeping... That is far from polite. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/timeline-of-convoy-protest-in-ottawa-1.6351432 That's what I've been talking about. It's not Canada's gun problem: it's the gun, drug, hate and general crazyness problem we share.

And that's all the association it takes for him to make a plausible bogey-man: mega-rich, powerful, mostly invisible, able to control a large chunk of our work and commercial life. The kind of people who subscribe to anti-science conspiracy theories are not too particular about the technical details. They're content with a big, readily identifiable target for their angst.

I marked it on the calendar to celebrate with coffee and a cookie on Oct 23rd. Might be an hour or two late, though.

Can you define stagnation in a society?

I guess. I couldn't see a world where people mature in 25, years grow old in 70, and then just keep on being old. If that were the case, every healthy person would be looking for excuses to euthanize their over-50 relatives - even if they just caught a cold. So I just made up my own framework for longevity.

Why haven't they always? If, as I stipulated, the proportions of life-cycle are the same as now, the relationship of young to middle aged to old don't change. The sad and awful truth is, they want to go to war - in fact the 15-25's (in the new math, that would be 150-250) are about the only ones who do - and they're never doing it for the old folks. They're doing it for patriotic or religious fervour, for glory, adventure, for the gang ('part of something greater than myself') and for the peer status. 6-800 years younger. And there won't be much to inherit, because long-lived people have a lot more time to make mature decisions about their economy. They might even establish a stable one, with no policy changes every four to eight years. It wouldn't. At 70, they would be in Grade 1. They wouldn't start working until 180-260, and not retire until 700+ because with universal health-care - and all the extra time researchers would have to perfect new drugs and treatments - they would be strong and healthy much longer.

When was this decided? I mean, over what period of time, how many generations, in how many countries was the study conducted? Or this this just one of those 'truisms' that 'everybody knows' simply through the power of repetition? It would certainly make Bernie Sanders, Jaque Fresco, Noam Chomski, Michael Moore, Saul of Tarsus, Jane Fonda, Socrates, ML King, John Dewy and me anomalies of our age-group. I suspect that where that notion comes from is the voting patterns of Americans between 1970 and 2004. And even then, it leaves out vast uncounted numbers who don't participate in polls, for one reason (they're not asked) or another (they don't respond) and/or don't vote for one reason (they're blocked by legislation) or another (they're disillusioned with the system). You might find that those same people have voted the same way all through their adult lives - they haven't changed; the parties they support have. The only person I've ever known who switched from left to right (by his own narrative) was P. J. O'Rourke. And he's an... never mind. Maybe you mean more conservative in our own actions - more responsible, thoughtful and careful in our decisions; not so reckless in our actions. In that sense, many people do change in that way when they become breadwinners and parents.... but then, a great many middle-aged people who can finally afford it, do make bad investments and take risky holidays and dump old reliable partners for exciting new ones. Would society stagnate? In what way(s)? Or grow more stable? In what way(s)? How do you measure the difference? An-y-way, if we assume the tenfold increase in lifespan corresponds to the same pattern of aging, we'd be looking at 3-400 years of being old. No, I don't think we'd grow less tolerant in the five centuries of effective adulthood. It's more likely that we'd institute a far more robust social safety net, universal health insurance, excellent retirement communities. We'd be very much more careful what poisons we put in our environment and what resources we waste, because we'd still be here when the piper submitted his bill. We might have long-slow wars of strategy instead of fast explosive ones. And nobody would get a gerbil or goldfish as a pet. Tortoises, maybe.

I don't know that any any Canadian agency has the power to keep the crazyness (I think I'll adopt your term) in check. I'm not sure anyone does. Thing is, whatever the US has, we get next. Because of the proximity, language and heritage, trade and political alliance, cultural and personal ties. Also, parts of Canada have always been convenient for certain US factions - loyalist, escaped slaves and draft-dodgers, as well as smugglers and agitators. The KKK made its first incursions into Saskatchewan in 1917 and throve on British paranoia throughout the '20's. https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-kkk-has-a-history-in-canada-and-it-can-return/ And it reaches into the present just the same way. The Freedom Convoy nonsense was not exactly home-grown. The anti-vax nonsense is more complicated: it has roots in England and in the bible. The religious influence was probably more powerful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but now, there are more factors in play. The population of prosperous western countries has lulled itself into a false sense of blanket immunity due the success of mid-20th century vaccination efforts orchestrated by smart governments. There is a widespread distrust of pharmaceutical companies (and they are in large part responsible for their own bad rep!). Fundamentalist religiosity has been enjoying an electronically-assisted revival (strong US presence on that front) and all the right-wing broadcast media's and internet cabals' crazyness is readily accessible. The whole ball of crazy-wax is constantly heated by public and private angst: people find solace in the mob, in the identification of a bogeyman, in the catharsis of chanting and screaming. It's not driven by social media, but it's facilitated and enabled and exacerbated by social media. Is there any way to combat it? I have no idea. If peace, security and prosperity were to return, it would die out by itself. Everyone is saner is saner when they tomorrow to be better than today. But there are too many forces in too many places tearing down security, tearing down communities, tearing down optimism. The thing about that is, they're right. Small groups of extremely powerful people are, in fact, controlling our economies, electoral processes and news sources. The uneducated fail to identify the conspirators accurately. It's like they know there is a burglar in the bedroom, but it's dark and they can't see him, so they aim their shotgun at every shadow and destroy their own furniture.

Te charts are worth studying.

Yes? Polarization exists, in Congress, in the media, in the electorate (somewhat less the judiciary, which is a little bit heartening) I could trace a history as to how that happened (hint: not through the Democrats' refusal to compromise) but it's far too much work, given that you haven't done any al all. So: Who said what that vilified or expressed animosity toward whom? Which open-minded conservatives have changed sides because which closed-minded progressives alienated them? It's no good telling people to stop doing something you can't demonstrate them actually doing.