As IF Times

link Youth anxiety on the rise amid changing climate – The Globe and Mail.

The number of “youth” who are naturally “consumed” with anxiety surrounding climate change can be counted on one hand.  Actually on one thumb… at most.  This is the same level of preposterousness as kittens having anxiety about the paucity of good cable channels.  No normal kid wakes up in the morning wondering about the fate of penguins unless they’ve been brainwashed like Moonies by their idiotic parents and teachers about something that is every bit as abstract and fake as the bogey man.  Show me a kid that runs around bleating about global warming and I’ll show you the atomic wedgie winner of the month.

It’s amusing to see cute stories of precocious pre teens doing their little bit in the cause of preventing global warming.  Riding bikes to the mall instead of having mom drive them.  Drinking water drawn from a local well instead of from evil plastic bottles.  Wearing hemp clothes made by the local garment marm instead of shopping at Tommy Hilfiger.  Using megaphones and tin cans to shout messages instead of using power hungry Iphones.  Oh wait, that hasn’t happened yet.  And don’t hold your breath. The chances of  youth giving up their cushy lifestyles to save penguins and snow owls is as close to zero as finding shrimp at the buffet table after Al Gore’s been there.

The only place you’ll find anxiety in front of youth is in the dictionary unless there’s rumors of a new Iphone release.  Their minds just aren’t wired towards expansive thought beyond getting the newest Apple gadget.  Within the linked article, there’s a passage in which the little girl whose house had been swept away by a river now has developed fear of rivers which somehow translates into global warming anxiety.  It’s as if you witnessed a car accident involving a Toyota and in the aftermath, have anxiety about Japanese people. The entire manufactured industry of global warming exists only in the world of those unable to logically reason for themselves on just how preposterous it all is.  Or, propagated by modern day wise-men in the guise of lawyers, lobbyists and now psychologists.  If there’s anxiety to be shared, it should be about the proliferation of lawyers, lobbyists and psychologists.

link Chinese workers revolt over 2-minute toilet breaks – Yahoo! News.

Theoretically, as the most intelligent species on earth, we should enjoy some very basic freedoms available to all in the animal world.  Sure, sitting at the top of the life form pyramid has some drawbacks, such as dealing with lawyers, bureaucrats and other idiots trying to control our lives.   But overall, humans should be better off than wild animals and insects. The very notion that people should have a time limit on their bodily activities is not only dehumanizing, it’s unnatural.

We are accustomed to ongoing propaganda from ‘well meaning’ people on how to conduct our very existence as human beings.   The entire diet food business is predicated on the notion that people don’t know how to eat properly.  This, despite a million years of human existence as evidence to the contrary.   The food industry is in cahoots with the clothing and beauty industries as that prey upon the kernel of insecurity ingrained in most people, particularly women, but increasingly, gullible men.  In addition, excessive drinking is frowned upon and smokers are pariahs.

But all of this stuff is merely annoying and involves personal choices.  We can still choose to be fat, to be slobs, drink or eat too much or smoke excessively.  As we know, these liberties are being encroached upon increasingly as “people in authority” push for legal means to force people’s behavior.  Usually, this is packaged in the shiny wrapper of health benevolence and the collective good.  They want to implement laws on how and what people should eat because apparently people are too dumb to figure it out for themselves.  Is it really the purview of government to feed kids arugula and legumes instead of cheeseburgers and fries?  My take on it is that if cheeseburgers and fries are bad for you, why do they taste so good?

The line has to be drawn at putting a time limit on one’s bathroom activities.  This may be starting in China, but it would only be a matter of time before the idea spreads here.  The control freaks can brainwash us all they want about what kind of food  to ingest, the type of water to drink, but placing controls on the most fundamental of human activities is way out of bounds.  They may control what goes in, but what comes out and when, is OUR business.  For many people, ‘cleaning house’ is the very first thing they do at birth, leaving a meconium souvenir to the attendant doctors and nurses before ever taking a first nipple.  There has never been a time element to voiding.  There are no Guinness world records for bathroom prowess.   There has always been the universal acceptance that going to the bathroom is an activity everyone is allowed time for; even hostages are allowed bathroom breaks by their captors, untimed as far as I know.

For most of us, that time in the bathroom is welcome refuge, an almost torporific sanctuary from the every day buzz of activity that we endure, however brief it may be.   People may bug you on a smoke break or while you’re eating lunch, but nobody bugs you when you’re in the bathroom.  It’s usually a benignly pleasant time and it’s no coincidence that these sessions are usually punctuated by sighs and aahhs.   The Japanese, ever the civilized people,  have created elaborate toilets with mechanical and electrical accessories to enhance the whole experience.  Two minutes is not enough time with those devices.  Of course, this is to say nothing of the educational value of reading magazine articles or even books, depending on your constitution, while you’re in there.  And let’s face it, without long bathroom visits, women wouldn’t be able to go on dates.

There’s enough encroachment into our every day lives by all manner of idiotic dictates both political and cultural.  Why would we add the pressure of time on a biz break? To quote Moses from a few thousand years ago, “let my people go!”