Let's Not Get Too Gushy About Rob Ford

I get it, he's got cancer.  With the sludge that guy has pushed down his gullet and snorted up his nose, quelle surprise!

As our friend, The Salamander, pointed out, where's our concern for other cancer victims like the natives in the cancer villages near Fort Mac on the Athabasca river?  Those are people who have contracted terrible cancers and deformities that others, mainly very well to do just like Rob Ford, could get ever richer.

Unlike Rob Ford, those cancer victims of Athabasca are blameless for their plight.  The shit that got into their bodies wasn't of their doing.  Yet we write them off as collateral damage to what Ignatieff called "the beating heart of the Canadian economy."

As a society we are desperately in need of a recalibration of our moral compass.

New Fish for Chipewayn - Yippee!

Fort Chipewyan, just downstream from the fabled Athabasca Tar Sands, seems to be raking in a lot of "firsts." For one there's the incidence of cancer among the local natives. But wait, there's more!

Now there's Petrofish, a new type of Goldeye - with two mouths.

A Parks Canada official from the Woods Buffalo National Park had a look at the mutant before handing it back to the Mikesew Cree nation. A report has been sent to Alberta's Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program (RAMP), a cooperative that includes the Harper Department of Fisheries and Petrobucks, the Tony Clement Department of Dirty Needles, the Alberta environment department and silly walks, oilsands corporations and a few natives thrown in for good measure (those who haven't already contracted cancer).

Local natives are treating the mutant fish with alarm but, then again, they would, wouldn't they?