Mid-Week Post

It's the middle of your train of thought.


Prime Minister Stephen Harper is selling off Canada bit by bit has signed new trade deals with China:

Nearly 20 years of negotiations on an investment protection deal for Chinese and Canadian investors has come to a close.


The prime minister says negotiations on a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement between the two countries are over.

The deal still needs to be legally reviewed and ratified by the Canadian and Chinese governments before it can come into force.

In Canada, that will include debate in the House of Commons.

A FIPA, as it is known, gives foreign investors equal footing with domestic businesses in either country and business groups had been urging Harper to wrap up talks with China in order to spur greater investment between the two countries.

Canada and China had been negotiating a FIPA since 1994, and by January 2010, a dozen rounds of talks had failed to produce an agreement.

By the end of 2010, Canadian investment in China increased by 38 per cent over 2009 levels. That same year, Chinese investment in Canada totalled $14 billion, an increase of nine per cent.

The announcement was part of a slate of deals signed between Canada and China at the end of Stephen Harper’s first day of a four-day tour through the country.

They include agreements to co-operate on energy, natural resources, education, science and technology, and agriculture.

I don't know why as Chinese tycoons are buying our oil and Chinese spies have engaged in industrial espionage for years.


Quebec is going further down the national  toilet than one realised.



Sixty-three percent of Canadians feel the death penalty is sometimes "appropriate":

According to a new Angus Reid/Toronto Star poll released Wednesday, Canadians are warming to the idea of a return to capital punishment.

The survey found that 63 per cent of the 1,002 Canadians surveyed across the country believe the death penalty is sometimes appropriate.

In particular, sixty-one per cent said capital punishment, which was abolished in Canada in 1976, is warranted for murder.

 Because he's Mark Steyn:

In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

As it happens, I have been on the receiving end of the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” a characteristically modish piece of Trudeaupiana foisted on the country in the early Eighties. As I wrote here:

Since this magazine and I were ensnared in the “human rights” machinery, I’ve come to regard Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms as—what’s the legal term?—oh, yeah, a worthless piece of crap.  

If that’s insufficiently legalistic, I’ve also described it as “a worthless piece of junk.” By design, it excludes property rights, which Locke, Montesquieu, and other irrelevant dead guys all saw as an indispensable condition for liberty. It embeds identity-group preferences as a constitutional principle. And it empowers hack bureaucrats to determine the appropriate balance between genuine rights such as free speech and the pseudo-“rights” doled out by the state’s social engineers. It represents, as do many of the more fashionable constitutions admired in the Times piece, a precise inversion of the definition of “rights.” As I put it to one of the Charter’s many admirers:

“Rights” are not those things granted by the sovereign and enumerated in statute, but the precise opposite: They’re restraints upon the sovereign. They’re not about what the state allows you to do, but about what the state is not allowed to do to you.

Beyond tragic- the driver of a van involved in the crash that killed eleven migrant workers ran a stop sign:

A van carrying 13 poultry farm workers from South America drove right through a stop sign and into the path of a freightliner truck, police said Wednesday, citing driver error as the cause of one of Ontario's deadliest collisions.

Ten workers from the van and the truck driver died Monday after the violent impact sent the van hurtling across a lawn, trapping the dead and dying workers inside the wreckage. What was left of the truck was so mangled that it was thought at first to be a flatbed.

All of the workers — except one man originally from Nicaragua — were Peruvian, some of whom arrived in Canada days before their deaths and some of whom had well-established lives here.

The driver, David Armando Hernandez Blancas, 45, was one of the workers killed in the crash and had been in Ontario for some time, living in New Hamburg, not far from the crash site. He had an Ontario driver's licence, but not the type required to drive a van of that size, investigators said.

Of course:

The mother of the Shafia family has joined her husband and son in filing her intention to appeal her convictions on four counts of first-degree murder.

The Liberals are a weakened and paranoid party. Anyone with a conscience has no business being in its rancid ranks:

Toronto MP Carolyn Bennett, chair of the Liberal women's caucus, recalled the attempted riding takeovers in the past and said it's "worrying" to see the abortion issue being raised once again in a nomination meeting.

She pointed out that Haitas's views are contrary to a priority resolution passed at last month's convention, reaffirming women's right to reproductive health services. The resolution noted many publicly funded health institutions refuse to perform abortions and urged the federal government to financially penalize provinces that fail to ensure access.

Bennett also questioned the legality of the name Liberals for Life.

"We will speak to the leader and to the party but I don't think (Liberals for Life) should be able to portray themselves as an official branch of the party, that's for sure," she said in an interview.

What a stupid cow she is.



Related:  the Susan G. Komen for the Cure "charity", recently stinging from its cut and re-attached ties to abortion provider Planned Parenthood (which doesn't provide mammograms, by the way), has cut nearly half of its funds that would go toward research. Trendy causes seem to fall into this manhole.



Obama's forcing health insurance companies to include contraception angers the Catholics who unfortunately voted him in the first time. What were you thinking?



Rick Santorum batted three for three as he took Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado. Did not see that coming. Good for him.



A Danish study finds- somehow- that post-aborted bipolar women will not end up in a psychiatric institution:

In women with a history of mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, getting an abortion does not increase their chances of landing in a psychiatric facility again, suggests a new study from Denmark.


Still, those who had an abortion had a higher overall readmission rate both before and after the procedure than women who gave birth.

Some researchers -- as well as political opponents of abortion -- have suggested that aborting a fetus can take a serious psychological toll on women, although doctors who do the procedures argue that's generally not the case.

"We're not saying that this group of women is necessarily doing really, really well. What we're saying is that the procedure itself doesn't seem to be associated with a higher risk of readmission," said Trine Munk-Olsen, from the University of Aarhus, one of the study's authors.

"It does seem to be a more vulnerable group of women," she told Reuters Health.

Munk-Olsen pointed out that her study only took into account psychiatric episodes that were severe enough to require intensive treatment, so it can't give any clues into whether abortion might have an effect on more mild depression, for example.

Feelings of sadness and loss around the time of an abortion are "temporary and appropriate," said Dr. Anne Davis, an ob-gyn at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

"There are going to be normal emotional reactions to that type of stress," Davis, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health. That's not the same thing as saying women are likely to have serious mental health issues as a result of the procedure, she added.

(Sidebar: that's like saying someone is slightly off after being set on fire.)

The new data come from records of Danish women with a past psychiatric facility stay who had an abortion or gave birth between 1994 and 2007. In each of those cases, the researchers tracked the woman's chance of being readmitted for any psychiatric disorder in the nine months before the abortion or birth and the year afterward.

Of the 2,838 women getting a first abortion, 11 percent were readmitted sometime during the study. That compares to just five percent of the 5,293 women who gave birth.

However, women who had an abortion were no more likely to be sent back to a psychiatric facility around the time of the abortion or afterward than in the months before the procedure -- including before women became pregnant.

That suggests that some of these women may have in part decided to have an abortion because of psychiatric problems and related life stressors -- not that the abortion itself worsened their mental illness, Munk-Olsen and her colleagues wrote Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

By comparison, rates of readmission were higher after having a baby than before in women who gave birth, peaking in the first month after their babies were born.

That's consistent with prior research, Munk-Olsen said, and may be due to a mix of genetic risks and sleep deprivation, biological changes and hormone swings that happen after childbirth.

She said that the generally higher rate of psychiatric readmission in the abortion group, up to nine months before and a year after the procedure, might explain why some previous studies have suggested abortion does increase the risk of mental health problems.

However:


Forty-one percent of women had become pregnant on at least one occasion prior to age 25, with 14.6% having an abortion. Those having an abortion had elevated rates of subsequent mental health problems including depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviours and substance use disorders. This association persisted after adjustment for confounding factors.


 Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion. The strongest subgroup estimates of increased risk occurred when abortion was compared with term pregnancy and when the outcomes pertained to substance use and suicidal behaviour. 



University of Oslo researchers compared 40 women who had had a miscarriage with 80 who chose to have an abortion.

Miscarriage was associated with more mental distress in the six months after the loss of a baby - but abortion had a much longer lasting negative effect. 

Celebrities and a biased judge can now look down their noses at Black and Latino American Christians whose votes now do not seem to matter.



And now, a shark eating another shark.



Freaky, yet you cannot turn away.