More from ann coulter:
where ‘we’ refers to good-american-christians
and ‘they’ refers to ‘godless liberals’
“We believe in populating the Earth until there’s standing room only and then colonizing Mars; they believe humans are in the twilight of their existence.”
….I don’t even…like how is she not a satire of herself? standing room only and then populating on mars?…and it’s actually printed in her book?!?!
2 comments November 30th, 2006
I had a breakdown yesterday.
It had been coming for a while, and I was in denial about it. I was working on this paper for my Celtic Culture class. I had all sorts of research done, and a pretty solid outline which even went as far as detailing what points I needed to communicate in each paragraph. But I couldn’t write it. I didn’t know how. I didn’t feel comfortable trying to communicate my thoughts in a manner which would be appropriote for this paper and so everytime I tried I froze.
Teusday was the day after it was due, and I’d promised myself and my prof I would get it in Wednesday morning. Teusday I was a little crazy. I would yell, and bang on the table, and sulk and whine, and then finally I started to cry and eventually I went to bed. ….but I was sure it was just the paper–that I couldn’t do it. That I was “out of my element”.
Yesterday I still could not work on it. Yesterday I called my boyfriend (the most wonderful guy ever) and snapped at him for anything he said. Yesterday I wanted to throw the phone, throw my books– so I put it aside and went to edit my psych paper. And yesterday I couldn’t do that either.
For a couple of days Gabe had been trying to help calm me down by saying, “Don’t stress about this paper. Just relax and work on staying happy.” And I would think “Shuttup, I am happy. I’m fine. My light therapy is working. It’s this stupid (explicitives removed) paper”.
I was not happy.
Yesterday I admitted it to myself. I had been fending it off for a few days-but the truth was I was angry, frustrated and on the verge of tears most of the day for three days in a row–I was not happy at all.
So as planned I went to talk to my prof about the paper, but contrary to the plan I ended up admitting all about this S.A.D. thing. And she was so understanding. We had already talked about the penalties involved in handing it in later, or after exams and they were big (and I was soooo okay with that), but when I got to the S.A.D. bit she melted and said “ok, Padraigin, then we’re dealing with something different. This is medical. I’ll tell you what. Do not do your essay. Focus on exams. Enjoy Christmas. And get me your essay in the new year”.
I cried for about an hour. First in a parking lot behind her building folded over in a ball. Then walking to somewhere I thought would be more private. Then sitting up against a wall in a hallway on campus. I felt guilty, and worthless, and releived all at once and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Plus I worried about what it meant for me. Would I have to consider meds all over again? What if my light isn’t working? I messaged my roommate, and prepared for a night of brainless vegging with the T.V..
Then I realized my psych paper wasn’t due for another hour and I still had time to edit it. So I got up, went to the library and edited that paper. Which may not seem like a big deal–but it was. It was me proving to my body that I could do it.
Then I was o.k. The depression was gone. I ate some food, got energy–and was motivated all night.
So does that mean it wasn’t real to begin with? I really don’t think so.
I think it means that my light is working, but it isn’t magic. This time last year I was sleeping all the time, I had dropped one of my courses and I wasn’t ever showing up to work. I’m doing a lot better. But then I added an essay that I didn’t have a clue how to write to the mix, and it extended past its deadline and started threatening to need attention during exams–that’s stressful for absolutely anyone, and I’m in a time of year where I have to respect and be nice to my body.
This light and my shakes are not all-powerful. I’m not supposed to be able to do any and everything I want to do. I need to get to a balance between what I would like to do and what my body can handle.
I’m not proud of having an open-ended extension (for the record). I feel pretty guilty about it, because I was raised to think that you can’t get down from the table until you’ve eaten all the food you put on your plate. I signed up for all these courses–that was my choice…
But I will learn. I will learn what I can handle and I will work within it. It will be a process, but it’s a process that is well on its way…
Add comment November 30th, 2006
“Environmentalists want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living, and vegetarianism. The core of environmentalism is that they hate mankind.”
-ann coulter from her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism
I’d heard the name before but never looked into her. Infanticide and vegetarianism together on a list. ….I’m so confused. I wish I thought she was joking or something.
If you scroll down the first chapter of the book is there. It’s pretty frightening.
Add comment November 29th, 2006
One thing I will never understand is the societal choice we have made to begin medicating our children.
The individual choice as a parent? –I get that. It’s what is done now. It’s what teachers and doctors tell you is necessary. You want your child to do well and succeed–and in today’s day and age, this is the accepted way to make that happen.
But as a people what are we doing? We are deeming it necessary to medicate children who are active and curious (aka ADHD “sufferers”) into being able to sit still for hours while teachers drone on at them. We are allowing a growing number of our children to take very powerful (in some case even life-threatening) medication which effects their brain while their brains are still developing. Whether or not they were actually fucked up in the first place is debatable, but they’re sure as hell likely to be when the process is over…
Can we please stop? Seriously. These are children. Whether you believe in God or evolution, or both: they have been designed exactly the way they are for a reason. Leave them alone. Let them be. Teach them. Work with the people they are and the people they are becoming. Embrace their moods, both positive and negative. Teach them to deal with their anger, or their excessive energy, or their depression. Learn how to deal with those things yourself if that’s what it takes to teach them.
We can do this. As a people we can raise the next generation without anti-psychotic medication. I swear we can.
“i’m not crazy cause i take the right pills ever day” –jimmy eat world.
3 comments November 23rd, 2006
“After he was rescued, Om set up a network that aims to give all children a birth certificate as a way of helping to protect them from exploitation”
I knew child labour was a very serious global problem. But somehow it never occured to me that children could be denied birth certificates. These children are being forced to work and there is no official record of their birth…. that is truly frightening. How far removed from those situations we are simply by being born in Canada.
I am aware of the conflicts this post could be taken to have with ones I posted with regards to Rememberence Day. Our country may well not have been such a wonderful place to be born if the World Wars had turned out another way. I would like to take ownership once again for a lack of clarity on this issue. On an ideological level I do battle with how I feel about the existance of nationstates, passports and birth certificates: Documents which seem to cage us in to one corner of the World of which we were born citizens. But one thing I do not lose sight of is that I am lucky to be Canadian, and I am grateful for the rights I enjoy as a Canadian, including of course the rights that allow me to think about and discuss these very issues, and indeed the right to be wrong when it comes to them, but to keep thinking and to keep going back to the drawing board.
Add comment November 19th, 2006
My dreams are close to the surface of my consciousness today, and I don’t know what that means.
Standing by a photocopier, sitting over my notes, working away at the lab I’ve suddenly felt and imagined myself in a setting of a dream I’ve had at some point in my life–not like deja vu: not as if where I was just then reminded me of the dream. The setting could be from any dream that occured in any of a million places. And one-by-one I have been overcome by the elaborate constructions of reality that each of those dreams held even as I’ve sat here in this reality we share.
Some were of dreams I’d forgotten about, that took place years ago–whose details I still don’t remember. I just remember what it felt like to be in them. And in every case it somehow felt differant than how it feels to be here in this life.
Add comment November 18th, 2006
**I apologize in advance to those who find my overanalysis of advertising frustrating**
“Need to get in touch with your kids? Want to send a quick message from work?”
Then you should download Roger’s new desktop text messaging system, apparently. Why? Well according to the website: “It’ll leave you speechless”.
Excellent. Cause who needs to actually talk anymore anyway?
Add comment November 18th, 2006
**This post is for girls only!**
No seriously guys you wouldn’t be interested. It’s not some sexy secret…honestly. You really probably don’t care to know.
Seriously. It’s about periods.
Now ladies: has anyone heard of the Diva Cup, or anything like it? I heard about it about two weeks ago and was shocked I hadn’t heard about it sooner. I would have posted about it right away but I wanted to try it first so I could give an actual review of sorts ;).
So what is it? Basically it’s a small silicone cup that you insert during your period instead of wearing tampons or pads. It collects everything for up to 12 hours, you take it out, clean it, put it back in for up to another 12 hours. It’s incredable: a. It feels totally clean. Like a tampon, you don’t even know it’s there. 2. It doesn’t leak. At all. Even overnight. Even if it’s getting full (it will just get heavy, you’ll notice, you’ll take it out).
For me it has three huge amazing benefits, each of which is a big enough deal to convince me to use it.
Environmental
Do you have any idea how many tonnes of pads and tampons end up in landfills every year? OK me neither. But it’s alot. Like ALOT. You don’t throw these things out. You use them for up to 5 years. That’s saving an unimaginable amount of waste.
Cost
Did you read that bit about using them for up to 5 years? Ya I was serious. And they’re like $35 dollars. The savings involved there over a lifetime: incalculable as far as I’m concerned. Mostly just cause I’ve never calculated how much I spend each month: cause it’s depressing. And it’s not like it’s a cost I can really cut back on: “hmm…low on budget this month, I’ll just use less tampons *coughcough*”
General Feeling
It feels clean. I know cleaning it out might seem gross, but it’s not really at all. It’s not all cotteny and soaked in and nasty, you know? Yuck. Ya. It feels clean. Like normal. mmm.
So anyway. Obviously choices about things like this are extremely personal, but if you’re at all interested check it out. And either way please tell other women! Because while these choices are personal, they should also be informed and these things aren’t exactly widely advertised or available at your local shoppers drugmart (in part of course because they are not making a fortune like tampons and pads must). So let’s inform people!
Some places they are available in Toronto are:
Whole Foods
Essense of Life in Kensington Market
Grassroots Environmental Products
The Big Carrot.
Use the ’store locater’ on the website to see where you can pick one up or order one online.
Also, anyone who has heard about them, let me know how/when if you get a chance! Thanks girls :).
3 comments November 16th, 2006
So I got this letter from my dad. My address was scrawled across the front in a manner one might expect, but in the top left corner there was something a little strange. My father must have forgotten to put his return address, because it was nowhere to be found. Instead there was a helpful stamp from the “Post” which said “ALWAYS INCLUDE A RETURN ADDRESS ON YOUR ENVELOPE”.
I think it may be one of the most not-quite-relevant-but-good-thought kinda messages I’ve ever seen. Cause really I’m sure they only ever use that stamp when people forget the return address. …but the mail is getting sent on forward–in fact without a return address there really isn’t any way to send it back, that’s the whole problem. So why stamp it with a message clearly most suited to the sender of the mail, and then pass it on to the reciever?
I suppose they’re counting on my good will to relay the message back?
Add comment November 15th, 2006
K …I need to write another post with referance to my one from yesterday…
the topic I was discussing is a complicated and difficult one, but I think it is incredably important.
I was bouncing it around with a friend of mine this morning and I think(/hope) I can be a little bit more clear about what I am trying to say. What I mean to take issue with is the way we discuss war, and the way we are taught to look at it.
When it comes to the war in Iraq most Canadians I’ve chatted with are in agreement on the ulterior motives of the American government. Bush went on about the war on Terror and about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq–and we all knew Saddam was a bad leader. The genocides were well documented–we knew they’d happened. But the truth, we began to find out, was that the American government had been supporting Saddam for years, that many of his weapons had come from American sources…that the fact of the matter was America hadn’t cared at all about the freedom of Iraqis, and that if they were going to war in Iraq now it must be for some other reason.
Now this means something very tragic. This means the lives of young American men are being lost because of politicians making very questionable decisions. And in many cases these men believe* they are really going to ‘fight for their country’, to ’spread democracy and freedom’. They believe it because it’s what the media is telling them, its what their president is telling them, and it’s what they have indoctrinated into them once they join the army. So they sacrifice their life for this cause. And this cause is a lie.
Now, it could be argued that this war is differant from the ones that Canadians have fought in–and maybe it is. But there is a very big part of me that doesn’t believe that to be the case. When it comes to WW2, I wonder about the fact that Canadians turned a ship of Jewish refugees away. I wonder about American companies making huge profits off of the war (anyone know that IBM got their start by creating the record system of Jews in camps used by the Nazis?). I wonder about all the money in Swiss banks. And it makes me think that we didn’t go to war because of the atrocities the Nazis were committing. That it simply wasn’t that simple–that the governments were lying then too, and that the men who ’sacrificed their lives’ were being lied to, and it disgusts me.
I want to make it clear here that I am not simply trying to argue that war is bad. I know we all know that. What I mean say is that the way we are taught to look at war, and the way we discuss war is bad, and that there are political motivations even for that.
For example, when it comes to WW2 we discuss the fact that Hitler and the Nazis killed 6 million Jews. We learn about this atrocity in school and we learn that it was very important to stop Hitler. But we don’t learn about how many soldiers died fighting, how many Canadian, British, French, American wives were left without husbands, children without fathers, mothers without sons. And I do NOT mean to say that those lives were any more important–but they were still lives. So why don’t we all know offhand the number of soldiers who died? Why isn’t that a number recited as often as 6 million?
I would argue that it has to do with the politics of how we look at war. If we looked at the number of people who died fighting it would be harder for politicians to justify sending more people over. It would be harder to justify Afghanistan, for example.
I remember there was an argument when Harper was elected over whether the flag on Parliment hill should be lowered to half mast each time a soldier died…If I remember correctly it was decided that it shouldn’t be in times of war. That it should be lowered on Remembrance day to honour all lives lost, that these soldiers should be honoured together.
I believe that to be a convenient way for the government to gloss over just how many people are dying. Lower the flag for every soldier. Talk about every life. Then maybe we’ll start to take war more seriously. Then maybe we won’t just look at it as bad, maybe we’ll start to look at it as unacceptable.
To be clear: I will start wearing a poppy, if I can find a dove to wear with it. I take the lives of men lost very seriously, and I sincerely apologize if that was unclear.
Add comment November 13th, 2006
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Oct | Dec » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||