A guest post by A. Nonymous

Most of us are not doing God’s work trading credit derivatives at
Goldman Sachs.   You may be stunned when I tell you this, because I
sure as heck was when I it found out:  the TARP program covers none of
our credit card bills.  Like, zero.  All of that means another tough,
tough Christmas, money-wise.   The desperate economy calls for
desperate measures to economize at Christmas.  Here are twelve ways
for the twelve days:

1.      The first thing to do is to keep doing more of what you’re already
doing:  bitching and complaining.  Cry poor mouth to everyone.  Tell
everyone you know how tough it is.  Make a Bill Clinton face while you
share people’s pain and make them feel yours.  Next you say,  “You
know, let’s make it easy this year, you don’t have to buy me
anything.”  Of course, that means you don’t have an obligation to buy
them anything!  That works with everyone except your kids.

2.      Tell your young kids Santa’s not real.  Kids as young as four are
old enough to get real in this day and age.  In Indonesia and Pakistan
kids are out sewing soccer balls to support a family at that age!  So
just explain to them that it’s all a scam meant to con them into good
behavior, tell them how much you know they wouldn’t want to connive in
such a fraud, and assure them you know they’ll behave perfectly well
without bribery.  They’ll thank you.  Someday.

3.      What about the older kids?  They’re all so eco-conscious these
days, and that’s an opportunity for the canny cheapskate.  Just tell
them instead of lame games for Wii and Xbox this year, you’re saving
the planet on their behalf by planting a tree with their name on it in
the Amazon!  You can even work up some kind of authentic-looking
certificate on the computer!  People in the carbon-credit business are
becoming billionaires doing just that, by the way.

4.      You still feel you need some real gifts?  Well how about re-gifts?
You’ve been given things you never opened — herbal soap, crème brûlée
mix, thermal bags for keeping wine cold — pass the parcel!  Just try
to remember not to give it to the person that gave it to you!

5.      Books are such a popular item at Christmas.  So many books can be
had for free!  Libraries put out boxes of new, unread, unmarked books
that they want to get rid of.   These include books about business,
money, and investing that are still very attractive and were timely
when they were published last year, but are entirely irrelevant under
current conditions.  Also look for container-loads of books about the
Bush and Clinton administrations, and anything by Dick Morris.   I
don’t normally advocate illegal behavior, but one exception could be
Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals.  Bookstores are full of this one –
it’s the Obama playbook!   Somehow it just seems right to go in there
and liberate a copy or three, comrade!

6.      One of my cheap-ass friends used to always joke, “I wanted to buy
you a big plant for Christmas, but GM wouldn’t sell.”  What a laff
riot, and it got him off the hook for ever buying anything!     Of
course, now GM desperately wants to sell all its plants, so the 2009
revision of that joke is, “I wanted to buy you a big plant for
Christmas, but the Chinese bought them all!”  Ha ha!  Your friends
will be falling over, and they won’t even notice you didn’t buy a
round of drinks!

7.      Speaking of drinks, ‘tis the season to bend the elbow, so herewith
some recommendations from Chateau Wang.  First, drink cheap beer.  The
cheapest stuff in my local is also the original and greatest . . .
it’s Miller at $3.99 a six-pack, compared to $5.29 for Miller Light.
That make any sense to you?  Me neither, they take stuff out and
charge you more?    Forget that!  Next, drink cheap wine.  André’s
Cold Duck is back, it’s $4.99, and it’s as good as it was when you
were fourteen and sneaked it in the kitchen after the Thanksgiving
dinner was cleared away.  (You know you did.)

8.      As for food, the trick to economizing on food is not to cook any.
Instead, head over to your brother’s house and scrounge Christmas
dinner there.  You need to go unannounced, early in the day, in case
they have the same idea of coming over and scrounging from you.  If
that was the plan and your sister-in-law makes no move to put a turkey
in the oven, give her one of your Miller’s and she’ll at least come
through with some Dinty Moore.   Note:   If you were to show up on the
doorstep at 7:00 AM, there are secondary benefits – you can reconnect
with the Christmases of your childhood, when you punished everyone by
getting up too early, and you’ll get breakfast too.

9.      Here are the hard liquor recommendations from Chateau Wang.  You
want to drink cheap, cheap liquor too.  The venerable and cheap
bourbons and ryes from Old Huckaby, Rebel Heaven, and Elihu Walton
lack the sophistication of  single-malt Scotch, but they have all of
the wallop!  Also consider cheap and nasty tequila like Don Cheech and
 Señor Pepe brand – they mix great with green Gatorade!

10.     You don’t feel you can scrounge 100% at your sister-in-law’s
house?  Try this recipe that will cost about 25 cents:  Mix two cups
of flour with a quarter teaspoon each of baking power and salt, and
add up to two cups of water to make a heavy dough.  Add a few raisins
if you have any, tie it up in a clean handkerchief, and boil it in
water until it’s time to go home.  Then discard it.  Tell them it’s
the dumpling Oliver Twist had in the workhouse at Christmas.  Your
brother’s family doesn’t read!  They won’t know!  Ha ha! Give them a
copy of Rules For Radicals.

11.     Christmas trees are $60 at the VFW, and wreaths are $20.  That
make any sense to you?  Me neither, so here you have many ways to go.
You could wait until 4:30 on Christmas Eve, by which time the guy
working at VFW will have gone home and abandoned whatever Charlie
Brown Christmas trees he has left.  Freebie!  Option two, you may live
in a place where trees are plentiful all around – neighbor’s yards,
parks, and so on, if you “catch” my “drift” (wink wink!)  Freebie!
Another idea, if Border’s Bookstore actually survives far into this
Christmas season, you may be able to buy one of the jokey artificial
trees they had there last year – these things were some kind of
intellectual joke, made with like a few bare wires covered in tinsel;
this choice shows a certain post-modern hauteur which goes very well
with Dinty Moore and Cold Duck.  It’s about $5.99.  But you can make
it yourself, using wire coat-hangers, spray adhesive, and metallic
flock or confetti.  That’s a good thing!

12.     Finally, we have to get control of this holiday again.  Twelve
days my wonderful arse!  Our Jewish neighbors get by with just eight
nights for Hanukkah, and even that is way too much noodle pudding.
Let’s do away with this business of Christmas as a 3-month long retail
opportunity.  The retailers have been unloading container loads of
useless crap from Yiwu, China into their Christmas displays since just
after Labor Day!   With the cheap and nasty Christmas I have outlined
here, we can let them know that that is just not the way we want to be
living anymore.

Have a happy.

Spare a thought for our boys serving in the Sandbox this Christmas.

God Bless all of you, my readers, for riding out this terrible year with me, and for extending a helping hand when I needed one so badly. The next one will be better. And thanks to James for guest blogging while I take this much needed break!

Merry Christmas everyone! Love and lascivious kisses,

RightGirl

We are of course at the end of the year and thoughts and wishes turn to 2009 and what that year will be like for each of us. Most thoughts of course are naturally personal. Happiness love and prosperity. For many of us, its political. What will the environment be like in the western world. I’m going to guess most readers of this blog already recognize there are problems with western liberal democracy. Massive ones. Earth shaking ones as the experiment in equality and freedom fails. I’m going to guess that few know what to do about it as our politicians over all seem more worried about the illusion of stability rather than the true maintenance of liberalism as Thomas Jefferson saw it.

I believe right to my heart and bones that the only thing that can be done is in fact individual acts of defiance. But defiance of what? Of ill^liberalism. Of imposed tyranny by the intolerant left, Islam, all who would tell us what we are allowed to say think wear and do.

History has a few consistent messages for us. When we submit to tyranny more will follow. Even when its something benign and seemingly for the public good such as no smoking sections in bars and restaurants by legislation which violates larger principles of freedom of property and individual rights it leads to absurd laws such as we have for patio’s now where any outdoor patio which has any degree of fixed cover or even too many umbrellas may not allow patrons to have a cigarette and a beer in the same place.

I ask you especially who despise cigarettes and ask yourselves if this loss of freedom is worth it to you.

When Ezra Levant and the Western standard were taken to the Human rights courts for 900 days of investigations and what would amount to about 5 years salary for me in costs to defend himself from accusations of racism for publishing the Danish cartoons, the center of a storm which was the largest news story on planet earth for months, one has to ask what the cost to all of us was for the submission by everyone else to not publish.

Once we agree to not say or do anything that might offend Muslims we are in fact living as second class citizens or ‘Dhimmis’ under a form of proxy sharia law. In this spirit I ask you for your defiance. The T shirts available here are a great statement. but not the only one possible. The distinction between deliberate offense of a religion for its own sake such as the ‘art’ piece which was proudly displayed at the National Gallery of Canada, ‘The Piss Christ’ which was merely a Catholic crucifix in a jar of urine was celebrated by the art world. The art world needs to know that under Islam art is forbidden altogether short of a few decorative lines on clay pots.

Additionally, most modern thinkers would have us believe that daring to confront the religious authority, any religious authority would be the work of the artist, the consummate renegade, the social malcontent or the plainly retarded. But defiance at it’s best is the domain of all thinking men and women; those whose refusal to submit to the workings of irrational codes of conduct ensures the natural progression of the creative, human mind. It was no coincidence that Hitler’s regime sought out first and foremost to capture and destroy artists; Pol Pot was no different in his culling and extermination of the most dangerous minds to him and the Iranian regime first murdered over one hundred thousand people in the arts, the very people the Ayatollah used to overthrow the Shaw and install the Islamic regime in Iran. But the artists now here as then are merely the useful idiots for the new tyrants of political correctness and ironically Islam.

So wear a T shirt which shows non submission. With an image of Mohamed or whatever. Maybe showing the stone Buddhas that the Taliban destroyed as a signal to the world. Collectors offered to buy the statues at the time and move them but the Taliban wanted to be clear that Islam would not tolerate images of other faiths nor even any image of something god made as they see it to merely exist . No images of people or animals as we see in Bangladesh where Muslims are busy destroying works of art depicting flocks of birds and frankly of anything at all.

We KNOW what submission brings. More demands for more submission. I ask for defiance. Eat a ham sandwich during Ramadan for lunch. Why is that defiant? In England governments are being asked not to serve food at all during daylight hours in meetings of city council so as not to ‘offend’ the muslims there.

What we in Canada especially consider an opportunity to be polite and show kindness by adjusting to the sensitivities of others no matter how irrational has become in fact the first step to actually mandating these acts of submission. They are simply no longer acts of kindness when they are forced.

This may be a good time to remind people how Galileo drew a cartoon of the pope in his courageous book on celestial mechanics for which he was jailed. One could argue that had he not ridiculed the church it may have slowed down the growth of reason in Europe a great deal. It was his willingness to personally sacrifice by ridiculing irrational religious authority that bought us all freedom beyond the understanding of most of humanity for most of our history. To be clear on this, its not merely a right to criticize irrational religious authority, its a duty and even a historical responsibility to do so.

We have become not only good at destroying every taboo in western classical society by questioning it out of existence we have become cynical about them. This as a stand alone thing, not so bad. But add to it a kind of fascination with primitive and barbaric even superstitious cultures and the notion that because we represent our own history as barbaric usually with little or no understanding of it, we somehow think that those culture’s current barbarism is somehow to be expected and accepted. Be warned, we are indeed truly on a precipice to the end of a golden age of liberty and individualism.

Ultimately I would like to extend to all liberals those who agree and those who hate me but choose to answer me by arguing and hopefully changing my mind, my favorite moments are when I am shown to be wrong and accept a new view by reason, a merry Christmas and all the best fruition of your hopes and dreams for the new year. To the irrational and authoritarian left, to those Muslims who believe I have a right to think and live exactly as you do, who would force me to submission of your values like the Human Rights Commission did to Rev. Boission, I offer you scorn. Scorn contempt and defiance.

James Cohen Dec 2008

All I want for Christmas is some percocet. Walking home with the asparagus, I took a dive on an icy patch and smashed my left knee and shin pretty hard. I am in screaming agony, with naught but a bottle of port to heal me. I’m supposed to be hosting dinner tonight, which I will somehow pull off, but if my guests are reading this: BRING DRUGS!

This actually made me cry at my desk:

Susan Dahl had been homeless for four months in Colorado and had just survived a harrowing 10-hour bus trip through sleet and snow. Hungry and broke, all she wanted to do was get back to family in Minnesota.

That’s when a tall man in a red coat and red hat sat next to her at the downtown bus station, talked to her quietly and then slipped her $100.

The man was doing the work of Larry Stewart, Kansas City’s original Secret Santa who anonymously wandered city streets doling out $100 bills to anyone who looked like they needed it.

“There was this fella named Larry Stewart,” he tells a man in the bus station. “He was an old friend of mine. He was called Secret Santa, and every year he would find a few people who might need a little money and he would ask that you pass on the kindness.”

People respond differently to the gesture. Some cry. Some scream. A rare few even say, “No thanks.”

Others take the money and offer their own gifts. like Robert Young, who was homeless and had only 20 cents in his pocket. When Secret Santa gave him $200, Young, 50, took out an old notebook and ripped out a song he had written.

“It’s yours now,” he told Secret Santa, who thanked Young, and carefully tucked the pages into his pocket.

There is no doubt that Larry Stewart will be at God’s table for Christmas this year.

Drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro have opened fire on a helicopter carrying an actor dressed as Santa Claus to a children’s party in a shanty town.

They apparently believed it was a police helicopter being used in a raid and fired at least two bullets into the fuselage.

The pilot was flying over the Vila Joao shanty town in Brazil’s second city when he realised he was under attack and was forced to land.

The undeterred Santa continued his journey by car to keep his promise to deliver his presents.

Note to Toronto traffic reporters - you may want to avoid flying over certain North York neighborhoods…

I LOVE this song. I think it’s likely my all-time favorite Christmas tune.

But the idiots at the BBC apparently decided that the words “slut” and “faggot” would be “offensive to some listeners”. Well, um, yeah: To sluts and faggots. But they really aren’t the Christmas market you’re after. Thankfully they came to their senses before ruining a Christmas classic.

Fairytale of New York, the raucous Christmas classic from the Pogues, is to be restored to its full, vulgar glory on Radio 1.

The station was derided for bleeping out the words ’slut’ and ‘faggot’ from the 20-year-old song, saying they could be offensive to listeners.

But last night station controller Andy Parfitt said: “After careful consideration, I have decided the decision to edit the Pogues song Fairytale of New York was wrong.”

A Christmas miracle.

You’re running out of time…

Wendy’s Wishlist

My Amazon WishList

Just sayin’.

I caught a few minutes of the tree-lighting ceremony lat night from Nathan Phillips Square while surfing channels. I happened to see the part where our erstwhile Mayor Miller came out to say a few words (and thank the sponsors). Did anyone else notice that he never once said the word Christmas, even with a gospel choir standing behind him?