It’s been a crazy, inspiring and wildly educational time, and as parents, we’ve discovered things about one another that we never imagined might be true. For instance, I’ve learned that I am AMAZING with babies, and as this parenting stuff is such a breeze for me, I’ve decided to open a daycare.

The Spartan Way: Mike’s Daycare

Welcome to The Spartan Way: Mike’s Daycare! This cutting-edge centre is based on ancient principles and is dedicated to sculpting children aged two weeks to six years to become dominant Alpha leaders in the unpredictable dystopia of tomorrow. We believe that modern daycares are over-certified, and our philosophy is that both infants and the free market will always work things out on their own.

“Sinite illos esse , suus ‘iustus a sanguine vulnus.”

The SWMD is committed to providing a level-playing field for all our little warriors, with special favours or attention being granted to none! Our teachers (Rob L. and Donnie C.) are skilled mixed martial artists, have an unyielding love of strong, predatory children and educations that just cannot be taught in a class.

Need more?

Here’s what hockey superstar and political commentator Wayne Gretzky has to say:

“Hi, I’m Wayne Gretzky! During my hockey career I was known as the “Great One.” Let me tell you, when it comes to daycare facilities, The Spartan Way: Mike’s Daycare is the true Great One! It’s always a shot on goal!”

Wayne Gretzky is just one of our many celebrity supporters!

You should know that we develop our lesson plans based on ancient Spartan childrearing techniques, mixed with some modern, libertarian practices. We provide each one of our little Spartans with experiences that will discipline their young minds and bodies, turning their hearts to cold, unflinching steel. Games and competitions are a big part of our curriculum.

In short, we at The Spartan Way: Mike’s Daycare, make strength and discipline fun!

Still, not satisfied?

“Hi, I’m Colin Powell, American statesman and retired four-star general in the US Army. Mike’s Daycare doesn’t simply provide a safe and encouraging environment for your children, no, it teaches that the world is a dangerous and hostile place, and that the child must learn to kill or be killed. This is an invaluable life plan as we head into a future where anarchy and civil war will be unleashed upon a dying planet.”

We have tremendously competitive rates, and provide one meal* a day for each child who finishes amongst the top three in the daily assignments.

Give us a call, find out if your child is right for The Spartan Way: Mike’s Daycare!

*No dietary changes, regardless of allergies, religion, etc, are made to our meal plan as we believe in absolute, unflinching equality.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen a video of this kind, and each time that I do have the same visceral, almost emotional response. Instinctively, like my primal core has suddenly been activated, I know that something’s wrong. I know it in my bones.

The stripped and ruined landscape, stretching endlessly around you, is awesome in the worst sense of the word. It’s a sincere horror, and looking down at it you feel like you’re viewing a crime scene where acts of unspeakable cruelty and evil have taken place. It’s like that lofty view, which grants such scope and perspective, completely alters one’s view, orienting it toward the eternal. I know that I’m coming in at a pretty high pitch here, but it’s truly how it makes me feel.

The oil being extracted from the tar sands, as I’m sure you know, is very costly to process, with the emissions created from developing it being 12% greater than conventional oil. It couldn’t be dirtier, and each barrel of oil requires three barrels of water to produce it. The question of whether oil is more valuable than water is a fundamentally ridiculous one, and that this question was even open to rational inquiry will be seen as a tragedy in 50 years.

The Athabasca Tar Sands are utterly massive. Covering about 140,000 square kilometres of boreal forest, it’s larger than countries like England, Greece and North Korea. The land will be obliterated, as if from a nuclear apocalypse, and the equipment and structures that are used to mine the oil are so large that they command their own weather systems. It’s a dystopian vision, as if a predatory alien culture had descended upon the planet and began to ruthlessly drain it of all resources while maintaining absolute indifference to whether the host organism lived or died. (There are two smaller Tar Sands, Peace River and Cold Lake, each about a fifth of the size of Athabasca.)

The Prime Minister of this country has said that he won’t do anything to address climate change that would cost Canadians any jobs. The Tar Sands, ruinous and retrograde in so many ways, is a job creator, and so in the face of all other reason it goes forward. However, one glance at the razed, apocalyptic world it inhabits, this kind of Mordor, and even a child can cut through all the rhetoric, economics and complex global politics to see that what’s taking place is plainly wrong.

In an effort to bolster awareness of this and to encourage it’s citizens to help in creating a “city within a forest,” the city has mapped out all of it’s 70,000 trees, given each one a unique ID number, and invited residents to write the tree of their choice, with the tree actually writing back.

Here are some of the letters that people have sent in to trees:

“You’ve got to stop leaving your tree garbage all over the goddamn place! Every day you’re dropping crap on my driveway and I’m sick of finding it on my car and having to clean it off all the time. Knock it off or I’m going to chop you the hell down, I mean it!”

“For the last seven years you’ve stood outside of my front window. Each day I sat at my desk working and you were always there, my constant companion, and over time you became a symbol of my little house. Whenever I was really looking forward to getting home, and then would see you from down the street, I’d just relax, knowing I was almost where I wanted to be.  You always had a calming effect on me, and after all these years living in Melbourne I feel like you’ve been my best friend. I’m moving to London now, and I think I’m going to miss you more than anyone.”

“You happen to be at a really convenient location, in a park right between the pub and my flat. I must have pissed on you a hundred times over the years. Did it bother you that I did that? I never thought so. I figured you understood, and I always liked that moment or relief, leaning against you, my forehead and arm resting against your trunk, just the sound of my piss being absorbed into the ground. It was a timeout, you know? Anyway, I just wanted to thank you and let you know that you’re a bloody great tree!”

“My name is Randy and I’m in grade three. I really like trees and think they are important. You offer shade, help to make air and let animals live in your branches for free. Can you talk to the animals? Also, can you talk to other trees, and like in Lord of the Rings, will you be able to one day rise up and help fight against terror with the rest of the world? Thank you for all you do for the planet! You’re a hero!”

“Back in 1996 I carved my girlfriend and my initials into your trunk. He name was Marie Bell and we were just graduating from high school. Things didn’t last very long, as we both went our separate ways after school and lost touch. Anyway, I recently moved back to town to help look after my mother, and now I pass by you nearly every day. You always remind me of young Marie Bell, and so after nearly two decades of barely ever thinking about her, I think about her everyday. I wonder if she ever thinks of me, or even remembers that night I carved that heart around our initials.”

The attendees, the world’s financial and economic elite, are a small group but one that still manages to account for roughly 50% of the entire wealth on the planet. This is entirely mind-blowing, of course, and the fact that 1,700 private jets transported this precious cargo to their destination nestled in the Swiss Alps, where they were to focus their collective genius on income inequality and climate change is tragically ironic. The organizers of the meeting even went so far as to hire A-List actresses Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron and Jennifer Lawrence, as well as all-time Major League Baseball hits leader Pete Rose to work the coat-check.

Its no surprise then that the swag given to each person who attended the conference was impressive, to say the least. What follows is a list of the items and services provided in the official Davos Gift Bag for all who attended the 2015 World Economic Forum:

A stylish satchel with shoulder strap that proudly states, “Committed to improving the state of the world.”

A pair of Roots Canada winter mittens.

A 1.5 litre bottle of virgin glacial water, hand-melted by Greenland artisans who chip the ice out of the glacier, transport it home and melt it over a fire using a traditional stentøj.

An albino peacock.

Box seats at the 2016 NHL All-Star game.

A six-month personal services contract with a supermodel.

A permit to hunt the Amur Leopard of the Primorye region of Russia.

A lock of Ronald Regan’s hair.

An Academy Award.

Sarah Palin’s stolen cell phone pics.

A special guest appearance on Game of Thrones.

Embryonic stem cells from Roger Federer’s twins.

Time machine.

Actual torture hood used at Abu Ghraib.

Dear Iceland:

You know who I am.

I am Leonardo DiCaprio.

My resume speaks for itself. I am arguably the greatest actor of my generation (sorry Christian Bale), wealthier and more powerful than many small nations and have a Klout score of 88.2. I can make it rain.

You should know that I am a HUGE fan of your work as a weird island nation and am really impressed with your buzz. You’re punching above your weight, little guy, and you’ve got some great PR people in your corner!

I think that the two of us could do some great work together and with that in mind I’d like to attend the Iceland Writer’s Retreat this year in order to research a role for a film I hope to shoot in Iceland in 2016.

What is Leo DiCaprio’s project you ask?

It is to be the blockbuster of 2017. It’s to be called Written in the Ice, and I will star as an ex-CIA operative who has made a break from the dark world of Black-Ops he mastered in his past. Having been given a new identity, Leonhard Jónsson, now a fisherman and aspiring writer, is living a humble village life in Iceland.

He is crazy talented and charismatic, but he’s suffering a form of PTSD and has writer’s block. However, this lifts when he attends the Iceland Writer’s Conference and meets a quirky, hipster Icelandic woman (hotter and younger than Bjork, but suggesting Bjork) who believes she communicates with elves. They have sex.

Through one of her nocturnal communications with the elves, (she falls into an automatic writing trance but must be naked for it to work) she is given a secret for renewable energy that will save the world from global warming, but before Leonhard and her can get the secret out and save the world, evil government forces and big oil seek to kill them and destroy the information.

It will be the best movie ever, sweep all the awards and be a “Titanic” success for the Iceland tourism, but for me to properly play all the dimensions of Leonhard Jónsson, I will have to attend the Iceland Writer’s Conference, free of all expenses for myself and my staff of 28.

A few other requests:

For the process to properly work, I need to be in the presence of lots of beauty. Please ensure that the class is populated with beautiful women. I cannot stress the importance of this enough.

I will require a beach, and if it is off-season, then I will require that it is artificially heated so it simulates the tropics.

I will need a helicopter and a yacht.

I will only attend 45 minutes of the conference each day and will not be required to “turn in” any work for grading.

Legal immunity from the laws that govern Iceland will also be required.

Nobody is permitted to look directly at my man bun.

Looking forward to working with you, and my lawyers will be in touch shortly!

Regards,

Leo

I nodded my head, “ So what you’re saying is that since you can’t influence the weather, why bother worrying about it, right? Well, I guess that’s a pretty reasonable way to approach life, if you can pull it off. “

“Rain, no rain, who cares?”

We sat in a kind of prickly silence after that.

As he rounded onto Bloor at Spadina, he began to furiously pound on his horn. “Look at this, “ he yelled back at me. “The lady is taking up two lanes while she tries to turn!” As he was saying this he was driving past the SUV, but still honking his horn and sneering at the woman for good measure. Feeling slightly wounded by his response to my rain question, I said, “Ah, you shouldn’t worry about it! You can’t influence how she drives, so why get yourself all tied-up in knots?! “ Adding magnanimously, as if offering him a drink, “And besides, you’re already past her, relax! Traffic, no traffic, who cares?”

The driver exhaled loudly, looked back at me once and then looked back at me again before shaking his head from side to side.

“You think you’re smart guy, eh?” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“You feel smart right now?”

“I feel like a fucking Buddha.”

“You are no fucking Buddha.”

And for the rest of the fare we drove amidst a tense silence, one that was punctuated only by the sound of dispatch in the background.

M: I’m going to assemble our barbeque.

M: Yes, I am.

M: Yes, I’m serious.

M: No, Chris isn’t here. I’m on my own.

M: Really.

M: Just me.

M: Don’t be condescending.

M: All the pieces are spread out before me in the backyard.

M: No, I can’t put them back in the box.

M: Because I threw out the box.

M: And the instructions.

M: I don’t need them. It all looks pretty obvious.

M: I can intuit these things.

M: Yes, like I can intuit the presence of a ghost or when a waitress has a crush on me.

M: You’re very funny.

M: Do we have a screwdriver somewhere?

M: I don’t know what type of screwdriver, one that works, I guess.

M: Really? Screwdrivers have names?

M: Phillip is a funny name for a screwdriver.

M: Are you making that up?

M: Whatever.

M: I found it.

M: Geez, there are a lot of little pieces here.

M: And they all look kind of alike.

M: No.

M: No, I am not going to turn on the webcam.

M: You’ll just have everybody at work watching! I know you!

M: Remember how the pastor said you had to believe in me?

M: Well, he said something like that anyway.

M: Just believe in me, dammit!

M: Oh, hell.

M: Do we have any Band-Aids?

M: Very minor accident.

M: Wasn’t expecting the dog to jump up on me while I was attaching the black thing to the silver thing.

M: Really muscling it, you know, and then Heidi started to lick my face.

M: It all just kind of sprung back into me.

M: Knocked my glasses off.

M: Might have lost part of a filing, too.

M: No.

M: No, I’m not positive, it could have been an old piece of a peppercorn.

M: Actually, I think I would do well on Survivor Island.

M: Probably finish in the top three.

M: Fuck!

M: A squirrel just took off with a small black thing.

M: He’s sitting on the fence with it. Mocking me.

M: Mocking squirrel fled in the face of barking dog.

M: Small black thing now gone.

M: Feeling flushed. Hate global warming.

M: Going to lie down and turn on AC for a bit.

M: Yes, even if AC does contribute to global warming.

M: Return to project later.

As everybody knows, December 21^st, 2012 is the date the Mayans predicted as the end of time. Some are interpreting this to mean the apocalypse is upon us, while others see it as a time when the consciousness of the world is elevated and we move into some sort of different, perhaps even enlightened, phase.

Ridicule and nervous laughter abounds.

But could we actually be reaching a kind of tipping point?

The Information Age has accelerated our world in unprecedented ways. I think it’s fair to say that our civilization has changed more in the last 15 years than in all the millennia stacked before it. And as I sit at home in front of my computer with streams of information flowing through me from limitless channels, I find myself in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. It seems that almost all of the inherited cultural beliefs that shepherded me into the mainstream of North American society seem tragically flawed, even deceptive.

There are simply too many examples to cite, but after the murders in Connecticut, who in their right mind could possibly oppose stricter gun control laws? The only reason a rational (if selfish) person would do so was to protect a financial interest above a human one, or because they valued the reassurance and confidence they received from having their weapon of choice at the ready over the proven actuality that innocents are going to be slaughtered in order to achieve this (perceived) liberty. (Adam Gopnik put this much better in the New Yorker)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html )

As far as I’m concerned, anybody who trots out the 2^nd Amendment as rationale for owning an AK-47 is mad and should be seeing a mental hair care professional. And really, shouldn’t people who feel a need to own guns (without any obvious necessity for them) have to see a psychiatrist every week? Isn’t there something delusional and potentially destructive in that desire to be armed, something that suggests an anti-social character waiting to emerge in the worst possible way?

We all know that guns are not just part of American culture, but bound and smothered by politics are a part of the economic machinery that governs the nation. Politically, such elephants in the rooms as Global Warming and Gun Control, matters that need to be addressed with utter urgency and sincerity, weren’t even spoken about in the US Presidential debates. Is that not crazy?

Still, the fact the President Obama went on TV and spoke about gun control is a good sign. Hopefully, this suggests a tipping point may be at hand, and what is truly important will no longer be held hostage by political and economic interests. Maybe something like the Overview Effect is happening to all of us, and we’re starting to realize that not getting shot is a civil right and that all living things are mysteriously bound, obliging us to serve the whole rather than the self.

“For dogs, eh? So instead of you throwing the ball, this thing throws it for you?”

“ She just loves it.” I told him. “She jumps about, all excited yet totally focused, her tail beating like a propeller. It’s just about impossible to imagine a creature as perfectly alive in it’s own body, you know?”

He smiled and nodded.

I was going to move on but I didn’t.

“Can you remember anything that made you feel as alive in your body as fetch does to this dog? For me I think it was playing hockey as a boy. It was like being free of from the limitations of my body, almost from gravity, and I loved it so much that I would play for hours and hours and hours, finally walking home in my skates with frozen feet.”

The man didn’t say anything and I felt I’d gone on too much and was being weird and was about to move along again, but then he started to answer my question.

“I wasn’t much at sports and I guess I liked being alone– I didn’t have the best home life– but what I loved was kites. I had a Superman kite and I would go out into a field when I was about 8 or 9 and just see how high the wind could take it, imagining myself to be the kite, to be up there like Superman. So like you said, it was being free from your body, and those were the greatest moments of peace and happiness I think I ever had in my life.”

I’m walking along the Serengeti like any normal day and suddenly my spots begin to fall off. I’m freaked-out, of course, and I try to roll around on the ground to get them back on me but it just makes it worse and they continue to fall off, but at a faster rate now. I start to run away, but as I’m doing this I realize that my spots have become a trail that will lead my enemies to me.

Lobster

I am just walking along and then I find myself in some sort of trap. It’s like everything is in slow motion and I can’t get back out the way that I came in. I’m in a real panic and then very slowly the trap, with me in it, begins to rise up through the water and I just know that something horrible is going to happen, and that’s when I wake up.

Woodpecker

It’s always the same tree. I’m pecking away, trying to find some grubs or ants to eat and then I break through a barrier and I’m looking into a big room that’s in the middle of the tree where my mother is having sex with my uncle.  My beak is stuck in the tree and I can’t look away. It’s horrible.

Butterfly

I am flying along and then something happens and I’m only able to fly in a straight line. I’m doing everything I can, but still, just a straight line. I feel so out of control, so lost.

Kangaroo

I’m looking in my pouch for my Joey and I can’t find him. I’m frantic and just keep digging deeper and deeper, but all I keep pulling out are tufts of hair and then I’m completely bald and I know, I just know that the Dingo got my baby and that it was my fault.

Squirrel

I’m getting ready to hibernate for the winter and I’m collecting as many nuts as I possibly can. I can’t stop eating them and I’m just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then I start to float up into the sky and I feel like I’m going to drift away into the vast universe and never be seen again.

Seahorse

I’m floating around and everything is very calm. I don’t feel threatened at all and in a flash there are Sea Monkeys everywhere. The chattering is horrible and there’s nothing I can do to get away, and then they all pile on my back, whistling and teasing, and I try to buck them off but I can’t.

Penguin

I am on an ice floe alone in the middle of the ocean and the water keeps getting warmer.