Immaculate Reflections

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Hollywood up close and sexist

This is not your grandmother's or even your mother’s pregnancy wardrobe. Can anyone even picture Rihanna in one of the mumu, boat-shaped-with-a-neck-bow pregnancy outfits of the not-so-distant past? The mega-star-with-child is opting instead for some big time flaunting of the baby bump: silver mesh, mini skirts, strategic cut outs, gem-encrusted belly belts… a maternity fashion extravaganza by a woman who is celebrating pregnancy and the fecund female form on her own terms.   See also: Past their prime time & Sociopath versus the Pirate

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Grandparents against gloom and doom

In today’s battle between hope and despair over humanity’s chances of surviving climate breakdown, scientists are urging us not to succumb to ‘doomism’. In Canada, a powerful antidote to doomism is a growing movement of seniors prepared to fight for a future for their and others grandchildren.

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Ginny and the Judge on the couch

Famous couples are a perennial source of fascination. Bonnie and Clyde for their love-sick shoot ‘em up crime spree; Sartre and de Beauvoir for merging modern feminism and existentialism; Beyonce and Jay Z for manifesting the entertainment industrial complex: George and Kellyanne Conway for transcending his Trump loathing and her Trump sycophancy. And then there is today’s ‘it’ couple -- Ginni and Clarence Thomas for their codependent, extreme right-wing, conspiracy-fuelled lunacy.

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Leo and Jennifer tearing their hair out

Climate change has been eclipsed in the public mind by concerns about COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and fear of nuclear war and, oh yes, the Will Smith Oscars’ smack.

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Huff, Puff, and Bluff

Posturing during war seems to be integral to the practice. But it is hard not to get the jitters when world leaders at war start braying insults and threats at one another.

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U Da Man: Psychopath in Chief

Once again, we are confronted with the horror that the world’s fate is in the hands of an unstable and dangerous man. We are now in full thrall of the whims of another murderous strongman. With his invasion of Ukraine and warning that any attempted interference by the international community will provoke “consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” Vladimir Putin has set in motion a deadly template of cascading events.

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