Posts Tagged ‘canada’

Jason “Sonny” Pratt: I get it, by day the mild mannered children’s book author, by night the fearsome masked avenger.

Jon Sable [in B.B. Flemm guise] Just the opposite actually. If anyone knew I was writing Children’s books…I don’t even want to think about it.

Sonny Pratt: Well if you’re embarassed about being a children’s author why do you keep doing it?

Jon Sable: Sonny, There’s just so damn much money in it.

Jon Sable Freelance #7 1983

One of the things that has become very apparent in reading about the Transgender push among medical centers, particularly involving the young is that it’s a cash cow.

You not only have low risk (in terms of complications leading to death) elective surgery but you have drugs and hormone treatments taking place over the course of years or even decades and a psych department staying busy with counseling that can last just as long.

That’s a ton of billable procedures and products for EACH person who dives into the Transgender pool that will keep your practice and department in the black for many many years and all it requires is to throw out that pesky first principle of medical treatment “Do no harm” and replace it with “Do no harm to your bottom line.”

While exposing this might be effective to some degree against hospitals and practices that depend on donations and sponsors no amount of public shaming or twitter quips or thoughtful commentary or even detailed exposés is likely to cause people who have abandoned both Judeo-Christian ethics and medical ethics for profit to change their behavior.

This however might:

A woman in Ontario who identified as transgender and underwent hormone therapy, a bilateral mastectomy, and a hysterectomy filed the first lawsuit in Canada against her healthcare providers for facilitating her transition. 

Michelle Zacchigna, a 34-year-old woman from Orillia, Ontario, recently announced a lawsuit she filed against the eight doctors and mental health professionals who treated her over the years, alleging that they failed to address her complex mental health needs and instead allowed her to self-diagnose as transgender and undergo irreversible procedures that she now regrets. 

It’s worth noting that this woman is 34 and started this process at 21 meaning that this has been going on for a very long time before attention was being drawn to it.

“I will live the rest of my life without breasts, with a deepened voice and male-pattern balding, and without the ability to get pregnant. Removing my completely healthy uterus is my greatest regret,” Zacchigna wrote in a blog post for Lighthouse Forum.

Zacchigna’s lawsuit claims that the healthcare providers who treated her failed to address her serious mental health issues and developmental disabilities and instead offered her irreversible medical interventions. 

“The Defendants permitted Michelle to self-diagnose as transgender and prescribe her own treatment without providing a differential diagnosis or proposing alternative treatments,” reads the Statement of Claim filed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

I suspect this is the first of many such lawsuits we are going to see over the years as people who have been castrated and sterilized in their youth discover that it doesn’t bring them the relief promised by those who drugged and cut them up for fun and profit.

Mind you as I noted this woman was 21, can you picture how strong that argument might be for a person who started this as a teen, as a minor, as a pre-teen. The lawsuits practically file themselves. Once we start seeing jury awards in the millions or even tens of millions (after all when your life has been destroyed by thirty you might have fifty years of suffering to pay for. the cost benefit analysis will change in a real hurry.

These suits will be a series of solid jabs to the transgender body mutilation industry, and now Florida is preparing a follow up right cross taking a completely different tack:

The new bill, called the Reverse Woke Act, flips the gender transition movement on its head by requiring employers that provide coverage for gender transition procedures also to provide coverage for de-transitioning. It even puts employers on the hook for de-transitioning coverage for people who are no longer employed by the company if they worked there when they transitioned.

“An employer that covers the cost, directly or through benefits, of gender dysphoria treatment for employees must also cover the total costs associated with treatment that reverses the gender dysphoria treatment, regardless of the rate of coverage provided for the initial treatment,” reads the proposal introduced by Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia.

“An employee who received gender dysphoria treatment through coverage provided by an employer is entitled to full coverage by that employer of the total costs associated with treatment that reverses gender dysphoria treatment if the employee later determines that the gender dysphoria treatment was not appropriate for him or her and wants to reverse the treatment, regardless of whether the person is currently employed by that same employer at the time of such determination,” the bill continues. “An employer’s obligations under this section are not affected by whether the initial treatment is provided in this state, and an employer may not make coverage of subsequent treatment contingent on whether the employee receives such subsequent treatment in this state.”

So if you’re a woke employer or corporation coving Transgender transition to show just how moral you are, you are on the hook to take care of the person who changes their mind, even if the person in question no longer works for you. You could be stuck dealing with such cost years or even decades later and subject to civil suits if you don’t pay up.

Can you say “Cost prohibitive?”

Or to paraphrase Sherman: We cannot change the hearts and minds of those woke people in the medical profession, but we can through the courts & legislatures make the financial risks of the transgender industry to hospitals so terrible that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.

This is the first step in a long march, may legions follow.

To steal a meme from the good folks at Instapundit:

How it started:

So it doesn’t matter that Politifact crowned “death panel” its Lie of the Year in 2009 – the phrase has staying power. It’s easy to see why: “death panel” evokes an image of faceless bureaucrats rationing health care and sentencing the elderly and the infirm to death.

Ben Cosman The Atlantic: ‘Death Panels’ Will Be Sarah Palin’s Greatest Legacy 5/30/14

How it’s going

In a recently reported horror story from The Associated Press, Alan Nichols, 61, was successfully killed after a quick one month waiting period as he was suffering from hearing loss. Nichols was an otherwise decently healthy guy, but his brother claimed he was railroaded into killing himself. Nichols’ family said that hospital staff helped him request euthanasia and pushed him to do it, a story that has been repeated many times by other disabled or sick Canadians

…Canadian federal data shows that 10,064 people died in 2021 by medically-assisted suicide, a massive 32% jump from the year before. 

Douglas Blair: The Daily Signal Canada Is Euthanizing Its Sick and Poor. Welcome to World of Government Health Care. 8/24/22

I’m old enough to remember when the motto of “Do no harm” from the medical profession referred to the patient, not to the Hospital or the government’s bottom line.

I’d like to think that the folks who decided to edit the Hippocratic oath last century didn’t realize what it would do to the practice of medicine, after all you don’t lose a lot of money presuming human foolishness, but the longer I’ve lived the more I’m coming to the conclusion that this was the desired endgame, because the reality is there are only two sides in the fight vs right and wrong and I know who is in charge of the other side and there are and always have been plenty of folks who at best are his dupes or at worst are his allies.

Palin was never either.

By John Ruberry

After a long day at work earlier this month I clicked on the “Surprise Me” feature on Netflix. What popped up was Mike Myers’ new vehicle, The Pentaverate.

“Well,” I said to myself, “this might be pretty good.” 

In fact, The Pentaverate doesn’t even measure up to “pretty bad.” The six episode limited series is one of the worst shows I’ve suffered through. Oh, somehow I managed to view a couple episodes of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. I know about awful.

Warning: There are numerous spoilers and some rather disgusting things that I will mention in my review of this Netflix series.

The origin of The Pentaverate dates back to a throwaway line from Myers’ second film, So I Married an Axe Murderer, where the father of Myers’ lead character, also played by Myers, claims that a secret society, the Pentaverate, a five-man cabal, which at one time included Colonel Sanders as a member, rules the world. In this series narrator Jeremy Irons tells us, the original members of the Pentaverate discovered in 1347, contrary to the belief of the Catholic Church, it was fleas that spread the bubonic plague. 

As the first episode begins, the newest member of the group of five, Dr. Hobart Clark (Keegan-Michael Key), a scientist, is accepted into the Pentaverate after he is kidnapped. Apparently, he is the first non-white fellow of the all-male group, replacing a member who mysteriously died. The other members are played by Myers. Lord Lordington, an elderly Englishman, Bruce Baldwin, an Australian media mogul, who of course is based on Rupert Murdoch, Shep Gordon, a manager of various rock acts, a real person who is the subject of a documentary directed by Myers, and Mishu Ivanov, a Russian oligarch and Vladimir Putin crony.

Warning! Not-safe-for-work language in the trailer.

But Myers isn’t done with his roles. The lead character of The Pentaverate is Ken Scarborough, a television reporter who wears plaid sportscoats; he is a quirky throwback from the 1970s who does man-on-the-street interviews of other oddballs, while overshadowing them. Scarborough works for, wait for it, Toronto-based CACA news. Yep, caca. 

The other four Pentaverate members manufacture a story that Dr. Clark, who was invited into the secret society because they believe he can reverse climate change, is dead. Clark’s phony passing occurs while attempting to mimic an internet video fad–kissing your own anus. Clark’s room at Pentaverate headquarters is guarded by a sasquatch, who immediately defecates outside the scientist’s door. 

In addition to a Shrek cameo, Myers plays two other characters, internet personality Rex Smith, a stand-in for Alex Jones, and Anthony Lansdowne, a conspiracy theorist from New Hampshire. 

Besides being an assault on good taste, The Pentaverate is an attack on right-wingers, with the implied message that all conservatives are conspiracy whackos like Lansdowne. He is a believer, or has been a believer, in QAnon, Pizzagate, and the Illuminati. His last words as he falls to his death is, “But what about her emails?” 

Lansdowne, in his bumper-sticker laden van, which not surprisingly has a malfunctioning portable toilet, drives Scarborough and his pre-woke Doctor Who-like young female companion, Reilly Clayton (Lydia West) to New York City, which looks nothing like today’s NYC, but more like your standard Doctor Who “future metropolis.” Scarborough, recently fired by CACA, is convinced by Clayton and Lansdowne to infiltrate Pentaverate headquarters, and he does so after a painful penis tug initiation. 

Clark, following an intimate evening with the Pentaverate’s executive assistant Patty Davis (Debi Mazar) in the Moon Room studio–did the Pentaverate fake the moon landings?–suddenly dies, this time for real. He is promptly replaced by casino billionaire Skip Cho (Ken Jeong). Oh, I have never thought Jeong was funny. Jeong recently showed his true political colors after childishly storming off the set of The Masked Singer after Rudy Giuliani was revealed as a contestant.

Myers seemingly hasn’t emotionally moved on from being an 11-year-old. Flatulence jokes are among the things that ruined his cinema take on Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, a children’s film, by the way. Scatological so-called humor also undermined another Myers movie bomb, The Love Guru

Outside of Myers’ fading fame, why did Netflix greenlight this debacle? Could it be that woke Netflix executives fell in love with The Pentaverate’s snide attacks on conservatives, who they probably believe are personified by Smith and Lansdowne? I have liberal friends. Really, I do. And many of them insist that I take marching orders from Alex Jones.

Here’s a tip for Netflix and Myers: the first rule of comedy is that comedies need to be funny.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Its stock value plummeted 35-percent last month. Yes, when you go woke you go broke. And I can’t think of a single Netflix dramatic series that is aimed at conservatives. Longmire was the closest show I can think of, but production of it ended in 2017, and Longmire was originally an A&E offering. And as I wrote in last week’s review of Ozark, that otherwise quite enjoyable show contorted itself to find ways to attack Republicans.

Over 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. That’s a lot of viewers, Netflix. We don’t live in vans with clogged toilets. We own televisions. 

Cloying use of easter eggs, that is, references to other works that do nothing to advance the story or add laughs–assuming of course there is even one laugh in The Pentaverate–is also another problem here. Winks to other Myers’ works, along with yet another tired replay of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as Game of Thrones, are simply annoying. Rob Lowe, a veteran of several Myers movies, makes an unnecessary appearance.

Myers’ acting, outside of his sympathetic portrayal of Scarborough, is subpar. In his review of The Cat in the Hat, Roger Ebert noticed that at times Myers sounded a bit like his Linda Richman “Coffee Talk” character from SNL. The use of convincing accents is supposed to be one of Myers’ strengths, but his Lansdowne character’s accent, rather than sounding like what you’ll hear from a rustic New Englander, varies from a Canadian to a New Yorker style of speech–that is, when Lansdowne isn’t coming across like Wayne Campbell from Wayne’s World.

Oh, when there is a crack within the five members of the Pentaverate, who do you think is behind it? Why of course! It’s the casino billionaire and the Murdoch stand-in. 

I hated The Pentaverate. Hated, hated, hated. If you have any sense of taste or decency, you will hate it too. 

You have been warned. 

Oh, if you think I am just a grumpy old man with a minority opinion on this actual sh*t show, as of May 15, the average critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is just 20 percent. Only once in the last week have I noticed The Pentaverate ranking as a top-ten most viewed program on Netflix. And based on the CGI and the A-List (to some people) cast, I imagine Netflix wasted a lot of money on this fiasco.

The Pentaverate is rated TV-MA for full frontal (possibly with use of prosthetics) nudity, animals engaged in sex, violence, suicide, adult situations, foul language, and scatological references. Well, at least no one smokes in it. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

I must confess I didn’t think Putin was going to be going beyond the moves into the two breakaway regions but then again given both Biden’s feckless response and the knowledge that the polling in the US is looking bad for the Democrats who enable him I guess he figured he better grab what he can now before the leadership in the US changes.

And you thought stealing a US election was going to bring back normalcy.


A lot of people are thinking Taiwan is next on the menu figuring that China might see things the same way as Putin, move while America is still weak. Of course it’s a lot harder. You’re talking a D-Day like invasion against a well armed foe that realizes it has nothing to lose by going all out. Additionally such a move is going to have an electric effect on Japan and I suspect China is not all that anxious for either a rearmed or a nuclear armed Japan deciding to calculate if a first strike is necessary.

And please don’t insult me with the “Japan doesn’t have nukes” stuff. Japan has all the technology and expertise to have nukes any time they want them. If they decide on Ash Wednesday (Mar 2nd) that they need nukes they’ll have them before Easter Sunday (April 17th). Of course they would be likely to go the Israel route of not admitting they have the bomb but rest assured if China scares them they will.


There have been a lot of dumb takes on Ukraine from their government asking people to send Russia mean tweets (yeah like Russia cares) to John Kerry worrying about the effect of climate change of this war to worries about the vaccine status of people escaping bombs, however if you had to pick the single most ironic it was Justin Trudeau grandstanding on how Canada would stand firm against Authoritarianism.

Given his actions of the last month this broke irony meters everywhere but I suspect Justin was delighted to have the eyes of the world someplace other than Canada.


Apparently Trudeau’s had picked Senate (70% Trudeau appointed) was going to reject his emergency extension that every member of his party voted for just a few days ago. Additionally the harm to Canadian banks by the freezing of assets of those who dared expressed dissent put a bad taste in people’s mouths.

I think Canada, Truedau and the Banks that backed him up will discover it’s a lot easier to throw away trust and faith then it is to get it back once you’ve tossed it out the window.

Personally I think Any person who keeps money in a Canadian bank is a fool.


Finally let’s point out something that any person should know. Biden provided the funds for Putin’s invasion. As Walter Olsen (via Insty) put it:

Because fuel exports are the basis of the Russian economy, Putin’s war-making capability depends critically on energy prices being high, as they are now. The most effective step countries like the U.S. can take in response does not require sanctions, let alone military action. It’s simply to remove artificial constraints on energy production, especially on relatively clean natural gas. That means removing roadblocks to fracking, pipelines and LNG export facilities that could supply Europe.

The Biden’s Administration’s reaction to this invasion is basically a paraphrase of the episode Yes Prime Minister where the Israeli ambassador tells Jim Hacker that his foreign office in response to an invention by east Yemen: will “make strong diplomatic representations but do nothing” except our diplomatic representations will be weak.

I’ll give the last word to Glenn Reynolds:

 there’s more reason to think that environmentalists and other energy-deniers are on the Russian payroll than there ever was for Trump.

I’m sure Joe & Company got their cut.