where the irrelevant and the opinionated slap the unbelievable upside the head and make it cry
It’s a month of Good Things in The People’s Republic of Pandemia, which is, like Toronto, a soulless state of mind you can’t escape. Our crazed boredom makes us seek out what we previously might have ignored as trivial or bizarre.
Facebook Videos Are Killing Me
I am addicted to videos of cute animals—which I relentlessly anthropomorphize—interacting in Facebook videos. Recent examples:
A squirrel smiled while being stroked by its rescuer and I pretended the squirrel was like a grateful human, not a nasty squawking rodent that would chew my arm off if it thought there was a chestnut somewhere in the lining of my sleeve.
A puppy met a kitten and was adorable. Who knew? I think they may have sung something from “Phantom of the Opera”.
A kitten met a puppy and did the same in reverse, so like, “I Got You, Babe.”
A dog in Shanghai, who refused to leave his home even though his owner died six years ago, was brought to his senses by a new owner who followed the advice of a wise vet.
“Record your voice,” he said, “and let him hear the recording while you’re not here. Dogs attach to people, not places.” It worked. As the dog followed his new owner out of the courtyard he turned around and paused, wistfully, as though saying a final goodbye to this place of anxiety, grief and torment. Then he fairly leaped into the car.
I have a heart murmur as a direct result of this video. If one day I feel I just can’t take it any more and life has no meaning, I’ll watch it again and restore my faith in a loving creator. Which won’t really help, since at that point my aorta will have exploded.
In contrast, another video compiled scenes of wild animals tearing each other to shreds, but one lady was appalled at the brutish reality of the African savannah and said we should stop watching, or at least enjoying, the crimson horrors of nature.
Someone responded to her with the comment, “People like you are the reason we support partial birth abortions.”
This is, I guess, an example of how the Internet enriches our lives and puts us in touch with people so brim full of uncirculated bile, we would gladly walk up fifty flights of stairs to avoid being in the same elevator with them.
Mainstream Media
Elsewhere, a man had a fight with his cow (it was not clear who won) and a four-year-old girl took her pet chicken for a walk.
Dr Seuss was “cancelled,” according to the tut-tutters of the Right, but you know that anything from the Right is a poison pill buried in a spoonful of bullshit to help it go down more easily. The truth is that the estate of Theodore Geisel simply marked for removal six of his least popular books which contained racist imagery. Horton will still hear a Who, Green eggs still go with ham, the Cat in the Hat will still come back, and the Republican party is still considering The Grinch for 2024.
The former Mister Potato Head, that die-hard avatar of identity politics, will henceforth be known simply as “Potato Head” (they, theirs). The future looks bright, be it as trans ambassador of a more inclusive society, or just served beside a pork loin chop after being mashed with salt, pepper and butter.
Speaking of which, in Canada, homemakers of every conceivable gender and sexual expression rose up in arms about unusually hard butter, the result, it turned out, of feeding cows palm oil. This is how the pandemic has encouraged us to focus on the important things in life, like our morning toast, and not sweat the small stuff, like the desecration of native land by Keystone XL and homeless families living in tents in the snow.
A study commissioned by the Institute for Propagation of the Obvious showed that the Capitol rioters belong to a class of people who do not process information correctly.
Texas was ravaged by blizzards, and Republicans not only misidentified Governor Greg Abbott as a Democrat, they blamed the extreme weather and the resulting total breakdown of infrastructure on the Green New Deal, which hasn’t actually happened yet, and wind turbines, rather than a century of fossil fuel production and dependence, climate change denial and inaction, and privatization.
The class of people who do not process information correctly believed them.
In fact, wind-generated energy provides about seven percent of Texas’s power, and the private companies who own the turbines took no precautions to make sure they would work during severe weather conditions, because, well, that would cut into the companies’ profits, and require thinking with compassion about people’s lives and needs, both of which are illegal in Texas.
The former governor, Rick Perry, comforted Texans by telling them they should just put up with their unheated homes, empty supermarket shelves, and tainted water, because at least they were free from the tyranny of federal regulations; but, inevitably, a few recalcitrant, unpatriotic Americans thumbed their noses at him and froze to death.
DID YOU KNOW? WELL, I NEVER…! :
During his 14-year tenure as governor, Perry restricted access to abortion in Texas, and at one time issued an executive order mandating that Texas girls receive the HPV vaccine, thereby thanking Merck pharmaceutical, who contributed generously to his political campaigns; and proving that conservatives actually love big government as long as its goal is keeping young Texas pussy healthy and ready for access on demand, like Jesus said.
Perry, a social conservative who compares gay people to alcoholics and supports the state execution of intellectually disabled prisoners, has weird flashes of decency and common sense, which are able to sneak through his religious bias when he mistakenly relaxes his anal sphincter; but as soon as he’s clenched up again he gets on with the normal Republican business of stripping people of their healthcare and screaming about socialism.
Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden had their first bilateral meeting, virtually. They issued a joint statement committing to human rights, equality, financial aid, and strong management of the pandemic. It was like the world was not only normal, but progressing. I am over the moon and chortling so much I may crush a kidney with sheer joy at how Biden has proved that voting for a “sleepy” centrist is the only way to get your radical socialist agenda implemented; and also revealing that getting old is not a bad decision that we make.
It just happens, youngsters, and we do know more than you after all. There’s no moral high ground in bucking the system when the system is all there is to work with.
Trudeau backtracked on his promise of a Canada-wide Pharmacare program, saying it was a provincial responsibility, in order make his backtracked promise on election reform into a matching set.
Facebook had a huge pout when the Australian government tabled a bill that would force it to pay news services for the content that they currently steal. Google fell in line—Google!—but Facebook shut down all news on Australian Facebook, and in the process denied access to Covid-19 information, a host of other essential government programs, and its own Facebook page.
Trump has rightly been condemned for inciting riots at the Capitol through disinformation, but Facebook, proving that business is much more efficient than government, has outshone that performance in myriad ways.
That certificate of excellence includes: inciting riots in Asia resulting in minority persecutions and deaths; colluding with Russia in its campaign to destabilize the US and interfere with the 2016 election; illegally providing our private, personal data to Cambridge Analytica for the purpose of performing, without consent, a secret social experiment on us, Facebook’s users.
That tiny, well-publicized sample probably represents just the tip of the iceberg that HMS Democracy is foundering on—for what about the breaches of ethics and illegal activities that we haven’t discovered?
Is Mark Zuckerberg still at large? When are we going to stop looking at him as a genius entrepreneur, and start seeing him for the nasty, profiteering, psychopathic brat he actually is? The more we’re miserable, the more Mark makes and the more powerful he gets.
I used to think that Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison. But I was wrong.
Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison in a dress.
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