Kathy Shaidle's Blog

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Following a tedious rendezvous with ovarian cancer, Kathy Shaidle has died, wishing she’d spent more time at the office. 

Her tombstone reads: GET OFF MY LAWN! 

She is relieved she won’t have to update her LinkedIn profile, shave her legs, or hear “Creep” by Radiohead ever again. Some may even be jealous that she’s getting out of enduring a Biden presidency. 

Kathy was a writer, author, columnist and blogging pioneer, as proud of her first book’s Governor General’s Award nomination as of her stint as “Ed Anger” for the Weekly World News. A target for “cancel” culture before the term was coined, she was denounced by all the best people, sometimes for contradictory reasons. 

Kathy did not lead a particularly “full life,” her existence having been comprised mostly of a series of unpleasant surprises. Her favourite corporeal pleasure was saying, “I told you so,” which she was able to utter with justification multiple times a day. A bookish movie-buff and agoraphobic homebody, as a child Kathy (as per the Roz Chast cartoon) “always preferred the little couch ride on the merry-go-round.” Yet Kathy managed to acquire a reputation for mouthiness, a side effect of her bullshit allergy.

Contrary to cliche, Kathy did not conduct herself with particular “grace,” “dignity” or “courage” in her final months. She didn’t “bravely fight on” after her cancer was pronounced terminal. All she did was (barely) cope, and then only with assistance from her generous employer, and some energetic and selfless friends whom she’d somehow managed to acquire over the years, much to her astonishment. Of course, the greatest of these was her stalwart beloved of over 20 years, Arnie, with whom she is now in the ultimate long distance relationship. They can all finally catch up on their sleep.

Donations can be made to the Dorothy Ley Hospice, Toronto.

and this happens…

Like my (late) mother before me, I’ve been diagnosed with Stage 3C ovarian cancer.

We won’t know precisely what type, or what the tumour grade is, until after surgery on November 15.



I’m mostly posting this to explain why I may be absent from Facebook on and off for a while, or not responding quickly to emails.

I may or may not use this blog as a place to dump good or bad news going forward. Haven’t made up my mind. You can always check my husband Arnie’s blog, which may (or may not) have updates…

And no, I’m not going to finally start allowing comments because I can’t promise I’ll respond to those either, and not responding would play on my mind.

I honestly don’t know what I expect anyone reading this to do with this information. Except to say that your prayers would be appreciated. Thanks in advance…

A thousand never-forgetters crawled out of the woodwork to wail, “Oy, once you compare humans to animals, once you dehumanize them, you make it easy to kill them.”

Bullshit. Once you demonize a people, then you make it easy to kill them.

The average human is far more easily moved to murder if he believes he is acting in self-defense against a deviously evil foe. (…)

Let ugly racism on the right freely and openly battle ugly racism on the left. And perhaps more important, for those of us who are not ugly racists of any stripe, we may just have to start engaging in acts of (I hate to use this word) “resistance” that we might find uncomfortable.

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

Come on: I’ve been at this since 2000 — I get bored with it sometimes…

These days, you’re more likely to find me on Facebook. 

Yeah, I know…

But frankly, thanks to browser “share” plug ins, it’s just that much easier for me to share stuff on Facebook and add a few comments there. And I’m busy with work, or just finding that I want to spend my non-work time doing other stuff.

But FiveFeetOfFury.com isn’t going anywhere:

I’ll use it to post longer stuff, or comments I don’t dare put on Facebook.

I may get back in the blogging groove at some point.

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

David Cole writes:

Now, you get that that’s Vice, right? “Current-year” Vice. SJW Vice. And they’re praising a guy who published white supremacists. Therein lies the Adam Parfrey mystique. Any one of Feral House’s books would be enough to get the average author or bookseller banned, shunned, kicked off social media, protested, picketed, and defamed. Yet Adam was respected across the ideological spectrum. He was lauded by the Huffington Post and dozens of left-leaning newspapers and weeklies, but he was also praised by National Review and Reason. Here’s a guy who could appear on the podcast of the staunchly alt-right Robert Stark, and the podcast of that most mainstream of comedians, Marc Maron (following Parfrey’s death, Maron reposted the episode, adding, “The books he published blew my mind”). #MeToo activist Asia Argento praised Parfrey as an “author and editor of forbidden knowledge,” regardless of the fact that some of his books would have gotten any other man tarred by the #MeToo crew as an enabler of “misogyny.” His releases were reviewed in major newspapers, and Hollywood continually looked toward his catalog for movie ideas.

How did the man do it? How did he manage to, for lack of a better term, get away with it? Well, for one thing, he was a nice guy. But when has that ever made a difference to the PC pit bulls? He was also somewhat of an “insider,” having been born into a showbiz family. But perhaps most important, Adam had integrity. He stood by what he published, and he never apologized. So he “got away with it” the same way Parker and Stone of South Park do. Produce solid work, and never apologize for it.

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

Read the whole thing, by Charles Norman:

Your words, thoughts, and beliefs are tools and powers unto themselves that can change reality. Trump, like hundreds of rappers (including the latest hitmaker Post Malone) and millions of Americans, believes in speaking things into existence. As the mystic scholar Manly P. Hall, who was read by Ronald Reagan, wrote: “Though the demonism of the Middle Ages seems to have disappeared, there is abundant evidence that in many forms of modern thought—especially the so-called “prosperity” psychology, “willpower-building” metaphysics, and systems of “high-pressure” salesmanship—black magic has merely passed through a metamorphosis, and although its name be changed its nature remains the same.”

RELATED: Gary Lachman, author of one of my favourite books (Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius,) has a new one coming out — Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump:

Did positive thinking and mental science help put Donald Trump in the White House? And are there any other hidden powers of the mind and thought at work in today’s world politics? In Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, historian and cultural critic Gary Lachman takes a close look at the various magical and esoteric ideas that are impacting political events across the globe. From New Thought and Chaos Magick to the far-right esotericism of Julius Evola and the Traditionalists, Lachman follows a trail of mystic clues that involve, among others, Norman Vincent Peale, domineering gurus and demagogues, Ayn Rand, Pepe the Frog, Rene Schwaller de Lubicz, synarchy, the Alt-Right, meme magic, and Vladimir Putin and his postmodern Rasputin. Come take a drop down the rabbit hole of occult politics in the twenty-first century and find out the post-truths and alternative facts surrounding the 45th President of the United States with one of the leading writers on esotericism and its influence on modern culture.

Oh, and he just blogged:

In other news, the latest issue of New Dawn has my piece on Jordan Petersonmania. In it I ask the philosophical question “What is Jordan B. Peterson Really Saying?,” and come to what I think are some useful answers. They may even help us get past postmodernism sooner than we think.

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

David Cole writes:

In a perfect world, planes would have special quarantine areas for small children and “petty social justice organizers”…although, to be fair, as much as I don’t care for children, I would never advocate being cruel to them, and such a coupling would certainly constitute child abuse. Immediately upon strapping in (with seat-belt extenders, I’m assuming), Phillips began chronicling her seatmate’s racist aggressions, which included “flipping her hair” (apparently it’s racist for a white woman to have long hair), “fastening her seat belt” (which is mandatory when taking off, but still racist when the white woman did it), and “crossing her legs.” (…)

And here’s the ultimate irony: It is they who are an existential threat to us. Elliot Rodger, in “defending himself” against nonexistent threats, ended up becoming an actual threat to damn near the entire community of Isla Vista, and he literally ended the existence of six innocent human beings. And Amber Phillips, though not a murderous criminal like Rodger, has nevertheless falsely accused people of being rapists, and she’s tried to rally an online lynch mob against a white woman who “threatened” her by flipping her hair and buckling her seat belt. We are the ones who need protection from the perpetually “threatened.” And to an extent, we have it. The Second Amendment can protect us from murderers like Rodger, and the First Amendment can offer protection against a public shamer like Phillips.

Which is why the left is working so hard to remove both of those safeguards.

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

A slightly contradictory (Joe, was it Wolfe’s “fault” or wasn’t it?) but still worthwhile assessment by Joe Bob Briggs:

(Don’t call it a roast, as some of Michelle’s defenders did. At a roast, the roastee speaks last. This was a comedy execution.) (…)

There’s nothing wrong with bringing in a professional comedian or an outsider journalist to host the event, but it has to be someone who knows what room they’re in. I’ve never seen a worse example of someone not playing to the room—and I’m speaking from the standpoint of a guy who has totally bombed by not understanding the room. The proper way to deal with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, since she was sitting ten feet away, would be to hit her with some soft jokes and then hug her, not nuke her with no chance of rebuttal. Michelle Wolf’s comments after the show indicate she was either totally unfamiliar with the traditions of the event or, more likely, just didn’t care. (…)

It was the fault of a generation of journalists who don’t know how to party, don’t know how to play the fool, don’t know how to accept the faults of their antagonists in government, don’t know how to rap or sing or dance or do any of the things normally done at these events—a generation of journalists who think it’s all about fact-checking and being right 100 percent of the time and keeping an all-business face to make sure nobody makes fun of them.

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.