Get Cynical

Link of the week IMO.

(via Kottke)

From Gazette.com:

Because of a weak economy and cash-strapped donors, Focus on the Family said it is eliminating 202 jobs, the deepest cuts in the 32-year history of the Colorado Springs-based Christian nonprofit. The ministry laid off 149 workers, and cut another 53 vacant positions.

The cuts announced Monday slash Focus’ local workforce by nearly 18 percent – from about 1,150 to 950. Twenty percent of the cuts are in management.

The layoffs come just weeks after Focus announced it was outsourcing 46 jobs from its distribution department. Focus also laid off 30 workers and reassigned 15 more in September 2007.

The organization also cut its the budget from $160 million in fiscal 2008 to $138 million for fiscal 2009 in anticipation of tough times.

From The New Humanist:

Struggling to choose the top religion? Can’t decide between Bible-thumping evangelism or benign, gentle Buddhism? Make the process fun and easy with God Trumps, our cut-out-and-keep metaphysical card game for all the family.

(via Pharyngula)

Just finished reading “The School” about the Beslan school hostage crisis from here.

Yep, the ole Nigerian email scam still works:

SWEET HOME, Ore. — An Oregon woman who is out $400,000 after falling for a well-known Internet scam says she wasn’t a sucker or an easy mark.

Janella Spears of Sweet Home says she simply became curious when she received an e-mail promising her $20.5 million if she would only help out a long-lost relative identified as J.B. Spears with a little money up front.

Spears told KATU-TV about the scammers’ ability to identify her relative by name was persuasive.

“That’s what got me to believe it,” She said. “So, why wouldn’t you send over $100?”

Spears, who is a nursing administrator and CPR teacher, said she mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car, and ran through her husband’s retirement account.

“The retirement he was dreaming of — cruising and going around and seeing America — is pretty much gone for him right now,” she said.

She estimates it will take two years to clear the debt that accumulated in the more than two years she spent sending money to con artists.
Her family and bank officials told her it was all a scam, she said, and begged her to stop, but she persisted because she became obsessed with getting paid.

(via Bifurcated Rivets)

From Vanity Fair:

Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, extends his purview to motion pictures with this week’s release of Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, an inspirational holiday pastiche based on one of his paintings. Produced by Lionsgate, the film stars Peter O’Toole and Marcia Gay Harden. But not even a name cast could stop it from being unceremoniously dumped to home video a year after its planned release.

One reason might be that Kinkade, a postmodern Norman Rockwell for the evangelist set, instructed the crew to adhere to an aesthetic code that wouldn’t have flown in a first-year film class. The list of 16 “guidelines” on how to create “The Thomas Kinkade Look” on film, which was circulated to crew members in memo form, has been obtained exclusively by VF Daily. (The whole memo can be found at the end of this post.)

The art world has never exactly embraced Kinkade, though in the last 16 years his company and its partners have reportedly made more than $4 billion selling his signature renderings of idyllic settings, which employ diffuse light sources, aggressive pastels, and a domineering religious worldview.

“Putting Thomas Kinkade in an art-historical context is like trying to put Jack Chick in the context of the illustrated comic strip,” says Peter Frank, associate editor of The Magazine Los Angeles and senior curator at the Riverside Art Museum. “In the age of Photoshop, anybody can do this kind of crap.”

(via Kottke)

What’s your favorite Christmas movie?