Mid-Week Post

The buttercream frosting middle of the week.



(Mmmmm....buttercream....)



Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley make a point of exposing excess and are awesome for doing it.



Doctors in Canada get paid far less than in the US:

Despite recent fee hikes, Canadian doctors still lag dramatically far behind their American counterparts in income, according to a new study that underscores the wide pay gap in both countries between front-line "primary-care" physicians and much-wealthier surgical specialists.

Orthopedic surgeons in Canada make less than half the $440,000 average net income of colleagues in the States while doing more procedures, two U.S. health-policy professors concluded in one of the most detailed looks yet at the differences in doctor compensation between nations.

Because working for an MD in Canada is a revolutionary struggle against the bourgeois  masses who think they deserve to be compensated for their years of training and all-hours attention to patients in need.


Or something like that. Let the NDP explain it to you.



Tell me what's wrong with this picture.

A New Brunswick appeal court has ordered a new trial for a man convicted of assault for spanking his 6-year-old, saying it is not clear unreasonable force was used.

The case of a four month old aboriginal boy who died while under the watch of 16 social workers and in the custody of an alcoholic relative exposes the gaps in British Columbia's child protection system and a major flaw in its family courts, a new report says.

I would be far more concerned about a pattern of abuse and deliberate inaction due to racism of lowered expectations than about a parent at the end of his tether.


Yes, teach this as opposed to useful things like engineering or medicine:

University College at the University of Toronto this fall offers first-year students a new course, UNI10471: Sex in the City, taught by Dr. Scott Rayter, the school's associate director of sexual diversity studies. Students enrolled in a full-year course called UC One: Engaging Toronto, whose lecturers will include former mayor David Miller and Ontario's minister of research and innovation, Glen Murray, can choose Sex in the City among four spring-session seminars.

The Sex in the City course description elaborates: "Students will learn about the sexual politics of the city and how cities and their neighbourhoods become sexualized spaces. How and why do certain spaces become 'gay ghettos' or villages? How some spaces are designated or coded as 'safe,' 'dangerous,' or 'sexual,' and how are these designations inflected by racial and class markers?"

Because God knows we need more white liberals who see sex everywhere they go than people who know how to construct a bridge or remove an inflamed appendix.


Whoever accuses Stephen Harper of throwing a temper tantrum or ignoring the French clearly has no idea what lurks outside the walls of his studio apartment:

Since then, the Québécois have gradually been turned off by Harper, beginning with the infamous blunders of the 2008 election when, trying to appeal to their core base in the gun-toting crowd to get out the vote, and others who, like Harper at the time, hated "extravagant galas," the Conservatives promised to cut wasteful spending on arts and culture and get tough on young offenders.

It's been downhill ever since for the Tories in the province, a steady and slow slide capped with those 59 seats going to the NDP last May. Harper, while appearing characteristically without emotion on the outside, must have been broiling inside.

He is not going to waste time there anymore and, with those 30 new seats in Ontario, Alberta and B.C., why bother?

Yes, indeed. Why bother? It's not like French is the language of commerce anymore or that the number of francophones in this country is going to one day exceed the anglophones or allophones or that stock phrases like "gun-toting crowd" aren't just retarded reactionary sputterings.



Only lesbians are allowed to humiliate children online:

A six-year-old boy in Australia was removed from his lesbian foster parents after they posted a photo of him dressed as a girl onto Facebook, a Supreme Court judgment revealed last month.

Related: the landmass of Australia is on drugs:

Australian passports will now have three gender options — male, female and indeterminate — under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender people, the government said Thursday.

You could be tying your kangaroo down, sport, but then again you could be attacking your neighbour's dog. You're so high, you don't even know anymore.


The New Zealanders are right, I'm afraid.



Ssshhhh.... George Jonas is talking:

If multiculturalism is being re-examined in Canada today, it's due in no small part to its supposed beneficiaries, immigrants. They have as many reservations about Canada's official policy as the host population, and are less reluctant to express them. I've been fuming about multiculturalism for decades - but fuming about things too soon is like trying to pluck unripe fruit.

Now the fruit is beginning to ripen.

Immigrants who question multiculturalism range from a Korean lady I know in her 70s, whose English is still marginal after 40 years, to learned scholars such as Salim Mansur, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario, whose latest book, Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism has just hit the bookstores.

To understand why Professor Mansur, a Muslim who came here from Bangladesh more than 30 years ago, considers multiculturalism a "delectable lie," it's sufficient to read his book, but the Korean lady's reservations require interpretation. Her idea of what was "Canadian" came from meeting some Canadian soldiers as a child during the Korean War. Her dream was to live among them, and she eventually realized it. When the ethnic composition of her Toronto neighbourhood started changing, she felt cheated.

"What happened to all the nice white people who used to live here?" she asked my wife plaintively one day.

My wife, also of Korean extraction, wondered herself. "Yes, what did happen to those nice WASPy people?" she asked me. "Did multiculturalism get them?"

Once again, the Koreans get it. They wanted Canadians. They wanted Canada. Now, we have a failed Marxist experiment (paraphrasing here), nothing that resembled the unity, the consensus, that the aforementioned newcomers once saw.



Read the whole thing.


From Chris Alexander:

In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, al-Qaeda's attacks on the U.S. mainland were recognized as a catastrophe, but the aftermath of the American invasion at least held the prospect of an end to the country's isolation and civil war. Afghanistan had been without a national army or police force since 1992. It had known no peace since 1978. It had lacked a legitimate government since 1973. For nearly three decades, Afghans had been hungry for sustained engagement from the international community. And then came 9/11: The ashes of Ground Zero had thrown up a phoenix of hope for a beleaguered country hemmed in by a phalanx of evils - from poverty and warlordism to impunity and heroin production.

A new era of stability for Afghanistan never seemed so tantalizingly close as in December 2001, when prominent Afghans hammered out the Bonn Agreement, which envisaged both a transitional government for the country and the fielding of a NATOled International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The Taliban had fled Kabul, Kandahar and every other provincial capital. In the old royal palace in Kabul, used by all Afghan leaders since the 1880s, Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as chairman of the interim administration - president in all but name - under the watchful gaze of ministers and diplomats from abroad. The seal of legitimate rule had been restored.

When one puts it that way, it seems like a moral imperative to temporarily occupy the nation even if to give the inhabitants a brief taste of peace.



Ssshhhh... Sarah Palin is talking:

Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars.  They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

The Mama Grizzly luxuriates in a bath of her total rightness.

Artist's conception

But seriously, she IS right. The economic situation in the US is dire. Forty-six point two million people are living in poverty. No new jobs were created in the month of August this year. The American electorate needs to remove itself from the shadow of those whose vested interest lies in keeping themselves in power, not empowering the people.



(Muchas gracias)



Quick, somebody get the special-interest groups involved!  Oh wait... Christians....

Last week, five Iranian Christians were sentenced to a total of 5 years in prison despite the fact that they were exonerated of all charges by a lower court. They were retried because the prosecutor had objected to the initial verdicts.

There may be Iron Man suits in the future? Too awesome....

High-tech robotic suits, similar to the one portrayed in the 2008 Hollywood blockbuster Iron Man, could become a reality within 30 years, says a University of Victoria neuroscientist.

Paul Zehr said while the technology will have practical benefits, like helping people with spinal-cord injuries walk, it will also have military applications, too.

So Zehr, the author of the just-released book "Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine," said now's the time to talk about the practical and moral implications of the technology.

"I think the main conclusions are that we have to think in advance about some of the places we are headed to here," said Zehr in an interview.

He said if researchers are going to create technology allowing people to control "suits of armour" with their minds, then safeguards will have to be put in place to ensure those machines can't be taken over and controlled by others.

 Society will also have to address moral questions related to military, he added.

"I don't know? Is that where we want to go with society as well when it comes to warfare?"

While the suit worn by Iron Man's protagonist Tony Stark is still decades away, society is "on the trajectory" for the technology, said Zehr.

I want one for me.


And in a nice blue colour.