If you haven't read this post yet, please note that everything has now changed. If you have read it, please note that everything has now changed.
If you're like me, you approve of events like Race for the Cure (which is American and not the same thing as the Canadian "Run for the Cure") because it promotes an awareness of breast cancer and raises money to fight breast cancer, but wish it didn't also create such a showy spectacle of... togetherness... camaraderie... tolerance. All those people pulling together to fight a common enemy, drawing strength from one another, etc...etc... Nauseating. How can a sensible person combat evil while simultaneously excluding and disempowering people?
Thankfully, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, that charitable behemoth, has once again proved that it can rustle up both funds and controversy. A few years ago, it trademarked its pink ribbon and started telling other charities they couldn't use the phrase "for the cure" in any way, ever. They set lawyers on charities with initiatives like "Kites for the Cure" and "Cupcakes for a Cure" who dared either a) raise money for a non-breast-cancer cancer cause, or b) raise money to fight breast cancer for an organization not called the Susan G. Komen for the Cure. It's also been partnered with companies that engage in "pinkwashing", a name for what happens when companies use pink packaging, announce that proceeds from their product will go to breast cancer research, and then never actually reveal how much money was involved or where, precisely, it will be going. And it's partnered with companies like KFC which (although we know they're simply a victim of "crispyfatwashing") have been associated with general unhealthiness.But Komen recently decided it had set it sights too low - that it was, in fact, possible to be more ambitious and alienate more people. It emerged yesterday that Komen will no longer be giving any money to Planned Parenthood. This money - hundreds of thousands of dollars - was primarily devoted to the subsidizing of breast exams for low-income and at-risk women. Komen claims it put a stop to the grants because Planned Parenthood is currently being investigated by the U.S. Congress. Of course, that investigation was instigated by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla) at the behest of pro-life groups, and most Democrats claim it's stupid and senseless. Oddly enough, a woman named Karen Handel was recently appointed senior VP of public policy at Komen, and she ran as a Republican for governor of Georgia two years ago (unsuccessfully) on an anti-abortion platform and is chums with Sarah Palin.So bravo, Susan G. Komen for the Cure! You have made it possible to run for a cure, while also running away from people who as a result might not know in a timely fashion that they're in need of one. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
 When I grow up, I wanna be righteous,/ I wanna be holy,/ I wanna be a Christian. You may already have heard about the eerily eager, fervently faithful, God-loving children who have become an internet sensation by God-ding up some almost-still-current popular songs. They cleverly transform Fergie's "My Humps" into "My Faith" and risk improving the Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me?" by redoing it as "Don't Cha Wish Your Saviour Was Right Like Mine?". They have created a storm of controversy amongst people who a) don't appreciate musical proselytizing, or b) hold that lyrics such as "I'm a get, get, get, you drunk,/ Get you love drunk off my hump" should never be taken in vain or adulterated. But wait! I know it's difficult not to be filled with indignation, not to revel in the kind of delicious outrage always inspired by tiny, preaching, Jesus-praising children. In this case, though, you would be better off putting that indignation on hold and saving it, say, for a re-watching of Mike Huckabee's 9/11 cartoon for kids, because the whole thing is a bizarrely-convoluted gag. The "Praise Bop" videos were produced by an outfit by the name of "Manka Bros." It has a website, albeit a disorienting and murky one, and claims to be "the world's largest media company." For the world's largest media company, it has a suspiciously low-rent site, and some suspiciously low-rent products, and so it's not entirely surprising to discover it's some complex and, to my mind, profoundly unsuccessful attempt to lampoon media conglomerates. Or something. A guy from Warner Studios thought it would be hilarious to parody the bombast and delusions of a production company by creating a fake one. Maybe my problem is that I just don't think he's done it very well. I don't think it's so funny. It's like a badly-organized website version of a sub-par Christopher Guest movie. So that all that righteous, pop-culture-deformed-into-Christian-propaganda-related anger won't have been rustled up in vain, here's some high-quality, creationism-themed edutainment for kids. As far as I know, it's on the level.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
The other night, my husband and I were on our annual drive to collect what turned out to be an only-marginally-deformed Ikea Christmas tree (last year's was truly defective, but this one has only one funny empty patch that can be camouflaged by way of strategic bulb placement), and we were listening to that radio station that's been playing Christmas music since June (the one that features DJs who sound increasingly exhausted, rattled, defeated and drunk).We were driving along, happily criticizing some familiar Christmas standards, when we heard a song. A song unlike any other song. A song that was released in 2000 and that I somehow missed until now. A song that caused us both to lapse into a stupefied silence and then dementedly and desperately struggle for words as though trying to speak English for the first time in the middle of an emergency.The song is called "Christmas Shoes", and it's by a Christian group called New Song. It may well be the most stunningly appalling song ever written. If it were only half the song it is, it would still probably be the most appalling song ever written. And it keeps getting worse - that's the most amazing thing about it. You hear one verse and think, "surely that has set a new standard of awfulness and the next verse cannot be any more astonishingly awful" and then you hear the next verse. And it is worse. You start with a poor and raggedy child who wants to buy shoes for his mother. Then you find out his mother is very sick. Then you get the raggedy child looking forward to his dying mother MEETING JESUS. Then you get the narrator claiming that God has made this urchin's mother terminally ill to help the narrator appreciate the true meaning of Christmas. Then, when you think your brain can hurt no more, there is a children's choir. Here's a link to the youtube video. It's actually worth going to the website itself to read the comments section and to realize that you are on one side or the other of a great and unbridgeable divide. You will either be one of those people who questions why a young ragamuffin would want to buy his dying mother footwear, why the be-turtlenecked (I was going to go with "en-turtlednecked", but decided the "be" sounded more sophisticated) singer is sitting on a giant tree, and why anyone, ever, would listen to such a song by choice, or you're one of those people who can barely type your response to the video through the tears you're crying over that poor, poor boy who wants to make sure his mother is well-shod for Jesus. You will be, if not in good company, at least in company whichever side you're on. Patton Oswalt has transformed his amazed horror into a Christmas stand-up routine. And if you're one of those people who can think of nothing more moving than a man in turtleneck and blazer singing Christian things about death and a terrifyingly didactic and heartless God, you might enjoy both the BOOK AND MOVIE based on this song. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
It's a regrettable and undeniable fact of childhood that other children often suck. They are mean, and intolerant, and critical, and stupid. Some adults seem surprised by this, and say things like: "But children are so innocent and small! I find this implausible." Other adults say things like: "Young people are less able to understand and process their emotions. They are probably insecure and confused." I propose, however, that some young people are heartless, bullying sadists not because they are unformed and inexperienced, but because they are, after all, little people, and big people are often heartless, bullying, and sadistic. And, because school should be as terrifying a place as possible, sometimes the big people bully the little people and nobody cares.A fourteen-year-old developmentally-disabled girl in Ohio told her parents that she was being bullied by her teacher and a school aide. Her father complained to the school, and the district superintendent determined the girl was lying and in an email explained that "it came to a point where I had to remind the man that his continued false accusations were bordering on harassment and slander."Her parents, who unaccountably insisted on believing their daughter, fitted her up with a recording device, and what that device recorded should make everyone entertain the possibility that schools might be as scary as sharks, plagues, and great heights.Aide Kelly Chaffins can be heard saying: "Are you that damn dumb? Are you that dumb? Oh, my God. You are such a liar...You told me you don't know. It's no wonder you don't have friends. No wonder nobody likes you. Because you lie, cheat...steal."Not to be outdone, teacher Christie Wilt chimes in with this observation about a test the girl had just completed: "You know what, just keep it. You failed it. I know it. I don't need your test to grade. You failed it."Chaffins, perhaps concerned that she will not emerge as the more abusive of the two, later asks the girl if she does chores, and when the girl says "no", comments: "Don't you find that a little ridiculous? How you gonna do a job? You should be embarrassed. I just am in awe. Makes you worthless." Oh, and when the girl "misbehaved" they made her go for pleasant walks on the classroom treadmill.When the tapes were made public, it emerged that this was not the appropriate manner in which to address a vulnerable young person. Chaffins tendered her resignation, and Wilt was forced to confront the unbridled wrath of the education system, in that her "intervention specialist" license was suspended for a year and will only be returned to her if she completes a grueling eight hours of bullying awareness and child-abuse reporting classes.Thankfully, the district superintendent seems to have learned a valuable lesson. He conceded that insulting and demeaning a developmentally-disable student "fell short of our mission" and pledged to "work very hard to never let that happen again." "We need to provide proper training and restate our expectations of how we treat children so that this never happens again", he indicated, suggesting that his pedagogical philosophy is based on the delightful premise that unless you tell teachers they're not allowed to call students dumb and lazy, they'll do just that. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
 "They think they have done me no injury,/ And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,/ Who make up a heaven of our misery." The Republican race is the gift that keeps on giving. It is a foul and reeking gift, and what it gives is cause for appalled disgust and amazed and appalled disbelief, but by God is it ever productive and persistent.There was Michele Bachmann and her "baby girls are being poisoned and made retarded by big-government torture medicine"; there was Rick Perry doing anything; there was Herman Cain being accused of sexual harassment and trying to remember having opinions about Libya; there was Mitt Romney being ignored in favour of people who believed in government poisoning and forgetting Libya.Now, once again, there is Newt Gingrich, who is being re-appreciated by Republicans because he has continued to not be Mormon. He has, of course, cheated on three wives, one of whom had cancer, but Democrats do that too, sometimes, so it doesn't work against him like being Mormon would. Recently, Newt indicated that if Newt gets his way, America's workforce would be changed significantly, in that it would be de-unionized and made up, at least in part, of children. While speaking at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Gingrich courted the lazy-child-hating vote by saying that the "core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization" were "crippling" children, in that they make it possible for grown-ups to have unionized jobs and for children to focus on school instead of working to make money to support their parents who no longer have unionized jobs."It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighbourhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid," he said. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they'd have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."Newt is right: the real tragedy of America's poorest neighbourhoods is that poor young people are not allowed to work for minimum wage cleaning their underfunded schools. His plan, however, might result in one small (child-sized!) negative consequence: children introduced to the rewards of honest work might turn resentful when they grow up and find the grown-up jobs they've been "rising" up to have been snatched away and offered to a new, fresh-faced crop of precocious fourteen-year-olds. Fourteen-year-olds, after all, can be paid less, have less need of the health insurance they won't be offered, and they're just the right size for chimneys. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
It is rare in life to find a consumer product capable of offering the consumer both spiritual and intellectual enlightenment.
How happy I was, therefore, to come across this new bag from Lululemon, purveyor of soft and expensive yoga clothes:
Those who know me, know I've been searching for an Ayn Rand-themed yoga bag for quite some time. There are very few things that go together quite so well as yoga and Objectivism.Thank goodness Lululemon founder Chip Wilson read and was immensely moved by Atlas Shrugged at a tender age (thus putting a stop to the tenderness associated with his age and to any urge I might ever have had to talk to him at a party). His feelings about the novel are described here, by a writer and Lululemon employee so casual and presumably underpaid she is referred to only as "Alexis."I feel that the time is now right to introduce the world to the following new, ground-breaking, heartlessly Objectivist, Rand-ian yoga poses:  The Laissez-Faire  The Rational Egoist  The Heroic Being  The Federal Reserve Chairman I expect this Objectivist "movement" to become enormously popular, especially with callow and disaffected captains-of-industry-to-be.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
 The Self is often misunderstood in Society. It's been an exciting week for disapproving of things. Many of the things offered up by the world for my disapproval were offered up at the CNN Tea Party GOP Presidential debate. When Wolf Blitzer, who always asks my favourite hypothetical-comatose-patient questions, asked the candidates who should pay for the care of an uninsured coma victim, and responded to Ron Paul's response with "Are you saying that society should just let him die?" a number of audience members I would very much like to meet and date cheered and someone yelled "yeah!"Michele Bachmann spoke piercingly about "little girls" (11 and 12 year-olds; still young, sure, but not the pig-tailed, thumb-sucking cuties she piercingly evoked) being given "government injections" (HPV vaccinations) and yesterday managed to up the ante on her own stupidness and lyingness by indicating that the vaccine might cause mental retardation (which it doesn't). When various people, among them quite an unsurprising number of doctors, told her she was wrong, she said, "I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. I am not a physician. All I was doing was reporting what a woman told me last night at the debate." She's referring to a random member of the public who came up to after the debate and told her the vaccine had harmed her daughter.So one is apparently allowed to report ignorant, unfounded claims about something as long as one has oneself no knowledge or expertise related to the subject. Except when that's not the case. There's an astonishingly discouraging story out of York University this week, for once not related to a faculty strike. Cameron Johnston, a York prof, was teaching a Social Science class ("Self, Culture and Society" - a staggeringly descriptive title) and stated that not everyone was entitled to have and express an opinion. "All Jews should be sterilized", he said, was the kind of opinion that was egregious and inexcusable. At that point, a student stormed out. I assumed it was some kind of free-speech defender, rushing out to fetch Noam Chomsky (who waits out in the car for just such an eventuality), but, no - it was a student convinced that Johnston had just asserted that Jews should be sterilized. Sarah Grunfeld immediately contacted a campus Israel advocacy group, and it immediately sent out news releases calling for his prompt dismissal. The best part of this whole story isn't that some poor man who'd really rather be thinking about your Self and its Culture and Society was plunged into controversy by way of a complete misunderstanding, but Grunfeld's response to being told that it was a complete misunderstanding: "The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”Actually, Bachmann and Grunfeld have at least one thing in common: both failed to consider the larger context surrounding the words they heard (i.e. some stranger at a public event with an unsubstantiated story not supported by science in the first case, and quotation marks and total condemnation in the second). What's so wonderful and inspiring is that it's the listener who decides whether something should be believed in with no cause or denounced for no reason. I'm so inspired, I might just ambush Hudak after a debate and tell him cuts to social services cause Muskoka cottages to spontaneously burn down. After all, there's a good chance he's no smarter than a potential presidential candidate or York university undergraduate. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
I'm pretty sure I've written something along these lines before, but I'm going to assume that either a) you never read it, or b) that you are so profoundly depressed that any memory of it has been squished out of your head.
If you're not depressed, here's why you should be:
1) Youths from an impoverished underclass (along with people finally seizing the opportunity to act like assholes in public) are rioting in London and Manchester (UPDATE: I've since been informed that the rioting has spread to Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leeds, West Bromwich, Bristol, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Gloucester, Oxford, Reading, Milton Keynes and Slough. Only slightly more places than I'd originally listed.).
2) Nations like the U.S. and England are teetering on the edge of some kind of yawning and distinctly unwelcoming abyss of economic disastrousness.
3) A generation of children in East Africa is in danger of being wiped out by starvation. Iman (beautiful, poised, articulate, and married to David Bowie) says that the whole thing was avoidable, but no one cared enough to avoid it.
So: we have metropolitan city-centres going up in flames, the prospect of Switzerland emerging as the source of trust-worthy currency, and children dying for no good reason (as opposed to all those children who die for great and unassailable reasons).
Because I'm alive now, and nobody alive knows what's going to happen, it's tempting to feel as though the world is in its death throes. That we're all just headed for a hellscape of underground bunkers for the Swiss and desperate, cannibalistic, above-ground scavenging for the rest of us (denied, even, the tastiness of the Swiss, regarded by many as the world's most delicious people).
But people can't have felt wonderful at any point in history. I'm sure the Huns weren't always optimistic and sanguine (two qualities popularly associated with the Huns) or the Allied powers jolly.
Which just means that instead of being in the middle of some dire and dreadful world-ending, epoch-ending epoch, we're just, as we always have been, in the middle of an epoch that feels that way. The world probably won't end; it will just go on feeling like it's about to.
Unless, of course, it does end. Just because it never has before, doesn't mean it won't.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 "I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty the Press, her editors and reporters, regardless of the law. So help me God." Canada is not very good at scandals. Not very good at all. There was the time Brian Mulroney went for a helicopter ride with a German (or something like that), and the time the Liberals gave a lot of other Liberals money, and the time that Stephen Harper became prime minister, but other than that, we've got nothing. Politicians don't tend to get caught doing anything interesting with prostitutes and the worst thing the Canadian media has done is to repeatedly employ Peter Mansbridge. The U.S. gets a lot of credit for its explosive and tawdry goings-on. They've had adulterous presidential fellatio, and all kinds of secret wars, and congressional boxer shorts running amok on the internet. But now the Brits, always a dark horse in the race as they sporadically come through with rich gentlemen getting caught in Nazi fetish scenarios, are really pulling ahead and putting the Yanks to shame with their near-unprecedented levels of shamefulness.The News of the World violated the privacy rights of royals and celebrities, and hacked into the voice mail of a murder victim. Staffers seem to have made a habit of paying off the police and alternately terrorizing and attending the weddings of politicians. The relationship between the media and the political elite appears to have been exceptionally incestuous, corrupt, and mutually rewarding. Indeed, David Cameron's former communications chief, Andy Coulson, was once editor of the News of the World, and he is now the subject of a police investigation. So what could add a touch of the surreal to this stunningly repulsive situation? Why, an axe murder, of course. One of the private investigators who rustled up material for the paper was recently acquitted of the murder of another P.I. who was found in a pub parking lot back in 1987 with an axe through his head. He was acquitted, it seems, only through of a murky mixture of police corruption and incompetence. He did spend time in prison for trying to plant cocaine on someone, although Andy Coulson happily rehired him after he was released.
Greed, graft, moral bankruptcy, and now a good, old-fashioned axe murder. Britain's currently leaving the rest of us in the dust. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
We all know higher education is inherently left-wing. Professors drive Volvos and subscribe to the New Statesman, and students flirt with homosexuality while performing in experimental theatre productions put on in their friends' loft spaces.Or so I always thought.
I spent much of the day reading articles about Michele Bachmann, the Republican presidential candidate with the plasticized face and unshakeable Christian values. Much is made of the fact that she is a lawyer, and so must be marginally more intelligent than a shoe-horn. I wondered whether law school had obliged her to at least feign the appearance of critical thought. And then I discovered what I should already have realized: if you're Christian and don't want to mix with heathens or Volvos or women's studies majors, you don't have to. You can, like Bachmann, attend Coburn Law School at Oral Roberts University, an "interdenominational, Bible-based, and Holy Spirit-led" institution in Oklahoma. Or, like her husband, a Christian counselor, you can attend Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson) and become educated and insightful enough to say things like this when discussing homosexuality: "Barbarians need to be educated, they need to be disciplined, and just because someone feels it or thinks it, doesn't mean we need to go down that road."Bachmann was profoundly influenced by a Presbyterian minister named Francis Schaeffer, who argued, according to journalist Michelle Goldberg, that "our entire perception of reality depends on our worldview, and that only those with the right one can understand the true nature of things". Which is sad, when you think about it, because that means people with the wrong worldview will find it difficult to adopt the right one, because what they see will always be skewed by their wrongness. And people with the right one can always discount the opinions of those who disagree with them because they are grounded in a flawed worldview.
Of course, that's what I do with Michele Bachmann's opinions. I can only conclude that the habit of smug self-assurance can also be learned at godless institutions of higher learning. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
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