"...for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence... truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."
~Ludwig Feuerbach, preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity
People keep telling me some Buddhist bullshit about "'Anger' is another word for 'Fear'" but I don't see it. I heard in the video (below) but I still don't see it.
See, this is anger:
What are they missing? Other than a smack in the jaw?
Well, it's been over 12 hours, and still no articles on "overflowing landfills". Funny how that can happen, considering it's (apparently) such an overwhelming problem that many in the Bay Area feel the need to force guests in their homes to kowtow to their demands on behalf of the supposedly imperiled environment. Since I've never asked people to do such things (I even have ashtrays for smokers) I don't know how "good" that feels.
San Francisco's mayor says The City's doing "good". I know because I read it in today's paper, while watching two crack heads smoke rock on Market Street, about five feet away from a cop. No mention if Alex Tourk's family is doing any better after the mayor slept with his wife. But nobody in this "city of compassion" cares about Alex Tourk anyway. Loser. He doesn't even have "good" hair.
"San Francisco demonstrates that indeed the path to hell is paved with good intentions."
I couldn't agree more. That's why I'm working so hard to be such a uniquely mean-spirited asshole. Being as "good" as others seems to be working out as, um, problematic.
Lots of stuff in the paper today, including a huge mass of plastic in the ocean outside of San Francisco. (There's talk of putting it in our "overfilled landfills", don't you know,...) It's probably from all those Bay Area residents who drank bottled water to "protect their health". This, of course, was before they discovered they were drinking tap water all along. Bottled water's extra bacteria just tasted so "good", didn't it?
Paul Addis, the guy who set the Burning Man on fire early, tried to damage Grace Cathedral according to police, claiming "it was his religious right." Funny how bad things happen with religion or spirituality associated, isn't it? (They're supposed to be so "good".) Must be something about that "new paradigm" I keep hearing about,...
I once delivered a package to the home of Don Fisher, owner of The Gap (Message to "Anonymous": That would be called "a job") and, upon entering the huge entrance gates, was struck by the sight of a gigantic gold pyramid on his front lawn. Very "Eastern" you might say. Then I was struck by the sight of all the mexican workers tending the lawn, and the pool, etc. And, finally, by the maid, who was black as night, dressed just like "Hazel" on the old black and white TV show. Needless to say, it didn't look like any Gap ad I had ever seen before. Anyway, I loved this quote from one of the freed kids, after laboring for Bay Area clothes horses without being paid:
"I don't want my money anymore. Now I want to go home."
Sounds to me like that kid is finally "enlightened" - and that, my friends, is truly good.
Bully for him:
Don't get pushed around - and don't let anyone else have it happen either - these idiots are taking over everywhere, but they can't do shit about:
"Most of them end up in a charity donation bag (one hand washes the other?) or, even worse, the trash, adding to our overflowing landfills or our overburdened recycling centers."
So, to prove my point - that I'm not "confused" about cultish-thinking on the environment (or anything else) but most everyone else is being duped, making me live amongst people who remind me of that idiot, Timothy Treadwell, of Grizzly Man, bottom photo, who wanted to galantly "save" bears who were already protected) and our lousy Left-wing, New Age-influenced, newspapers are even assisting with the problem - I'm going to put (a little of) my Macho Money where my big ol' Macho Mouth is. Here's the deal:
If anyone can find proof of "our overflowing landfills" anywhere in the United States - links to articles about just two overflowing landfills will do it - I'll gladly send you $20.00, admit I was wrong, and publicly apologize for the error - and even reconsider my position on all this cult stuff. If no one can do it (out of all the readers who write in to say I'm the one that's crazy) then you guys, maybe, should reconsider your assumptions about the world of cultish-thinking I say we're swamped in - and also think about sending me money. Don't forget:
Cultish-thinking is usually about getting people to act on fixing a non-existent problem. Our government is now being pushed to raising our taxes, including putting taxes on roads and the like, and many other coming changes - basically turning our country into France - to fight all these supposed awful environmental catastrophes to come. I say they're lying - and cultish-thinking is behind it - and I aim to prove it. This is only the beginning of these kinds of offers if this idea works out as well as I think it will.
So that's it. The whole bargain. I'm sure, if we had all these "overflowing landfills" (which would indicate some need for us to recycle, change our ways, etc.) there'd be an article about them, right? (Many articles, actually, considering the "green" climate we live in.) So go to it, kids:
Two overflowing landfill articles and you win $20.00 and a public apology from Mr. Big Mouth.
Get your environmental freak on,...or help a brother out at:
"You're like a fly on shit for this Occult stuff, and, this morning, I turned on the radio and the first thing I heard was the word 'Occult'. I never heard that on the radio before - it's weird."
Which is cool because it proves that, once you know about this shit, you start to see how pervasive it is. I was reading an article about Oakland, California's Glynn Washington (a possible new NPR storyteller, seen below) and it just popped out of his life story like this:
"A few years after moving to the country, radio transformed his family. His mother fell under the spell of an on-air evangelist, and she dragged the entire household into a group he described as an apocalyptic cult."
I guess, in time, it'll be part of my biography too:
I'm just gratified when I hear people finally noticing what I'm saying, or asking questions about it. Like when another friend (female type) was talking to me about her funky feelings one day, and said, "I don't know, maybe Saturn is in retrograde or something,..." Then, remembering who she was talking to, followed that with, "Or whatever those rich idiots in the hills believe." Now that was extra special, because women cling to cult shit like cashmere on sale, so I considered that a major victory, for rational thought, or something.
I went to a party recently (Yes, I got out of the house, finally, and away from the computer) and was even asked to explain the difference between 'closed' cults (single leader, creepy beliefs, nobody leaves - ever) and 'open' cults (maybe several leaders, creepy beliefs, people come and go with their creepy beliefs always in tow) and, then, all the different types of cults (political cults, medical cults, religious, spiritual, etc.) and was amazed to see how little people actually knew of this shit. Once they realize I'm normal (because the blog can make one think otherwise) it's really wonderful how people open up with all their questions, and tales of crazy friends and family, regarding how this crap destroys things.
I feel better anyway.
Speaking of noticing things, the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Dennis Harvey did a great review of the brilliantly-titled movie, How To Cook Your Life (poster below) a documentary about a Buddhist chef. Here's the capsule review:
"Her interest in Zen Buddhism already demonstrated by 2000's hit comedy Enlightenment Guaranteed, German director Doris Dörrie returns to the subject with a characteristic light touch in this documentary. It's a portrait of Edward Espe Brown, longtime tenzo (chief cook) at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Carmel. Following the teachings of 13th-century Master Dogen and those of Suzuki Roshi (seen lecturing in archival clips), Brown applies Zen principles of mindfulness and appreciation to everything from cutting carrots to making elaborate baked desserts. As he admits, though, he's not always the essence of serenity — Dörrie's camera catches more than a few cranky moods when he loses patience with the novice cooks who've paid for a course of culinary and meditation instruction. Larger questions of a "you are what you eat" nature are addressed in Bay Area–centric glimpses of fast food restaurants, the homeless scrounging for sustenance, organic farming operations, and so forth.
In typical Dörrie fashion, the film is wry, ingratiating, and ultimately ambitious in ways too low-key to announce themselves. However, viewers are advised to bring along at least a casual interest in Zen philosophy — the unsympathetic may find themselves rolling their eyes at the seemingly flat simplicity ("When you wash the rice, wash the rice") of the many wisdoms offered here."
So this asshole chef "applies Zen principles of mindfulness and appreciation to everything from cutting carrots to making elaborate baked desserts" but, when it comes to people, "he loses patience with the novice cooks who've paid for a course of culinary and meditation instruction." Great - where do I sign up to be abused worse than a fucking chopped carrot? And we're advised to "bring along at least a casual interest in Zen philosophy" (translation: be a budding cultist) to enjoy this lame-brain's "wisdom" - such as "When you wash the rice, wash the rice" - because, otherwise, it'll actually be revealed as the simple-minded bullshit it is.
I swear, I can't make this shit up.
Like this on-going story about psychic-friendly Ellen DeGeneres (above) and that dog, "Iggy". It seems this mother-of-the-universe has ditched dogs before. The woman who tells us about it, film producer Kerri Randles, says Ellen is "neurotic and crazy" and wanted Miss Randles to "tell the dog privately that she'd be going home with Ellen."
Well, if she's talking to psychics - while admonishing people on how to save the planet - talking to dogs ain't gonna come as a surprise:
Occultists are whacked in the head, Kids, and never live as they claim.
"As in earlier books, Hillary Clinton is reported to suffer Bill's infidelity for years and takes the lead, privately and publicly, in defending him and tearing down accusers. In Ms. Smith's account, both Clintons repeatedly dissemble or withhold information from their political, legal and media interrogators when forthrightness and honesty might limit the damage."
Whoo-hoo! They've got my vote! Along with the psychics, the channelling the dead stuff, the cult of Ken Wilber, working with Tony Robbins, the bio-electric shields to ward off "negative energy", the criminals that keep popping up to be hired as "consultants", and everything else - well, America can't do any better than New Age-y Bill & Hill, can they? Shit:
How can any of us ever get along without more of that?
"Mrs. Clinton is the tea bag that brings the boiling water with her. It's always high drama with her, always a cauldron--secret Web sites put up by unnamed operatives smearing Barack Obama in the tones of Tokyo Rose, Chinese businessmen having breakdowns on trains after the campaign cash is traced back, secret deals. It's always flying monkeys. One always wants to ask: Why? What is this?"
- Peggy Noonan, the very-perceptive columnist for the Wall Street Journal
"Flying monkeys". Nice choice of words for the Clinton many consider The Wicked Witch of the West, no?
Speaking of seeing weird things around presidential candidates, according to recent reports on a new Shirley MacLaine book, Dennis Kucinich (above) saw a U.F.O. while at MacLaine's house. (Hardly surprising for the likes of him, seeing how he's always making such a big deal of his goofily-bad poetry writing, and the insistence he's so "different".) So - if I've got this right - Kucinich sees U.F.O.s, and Hillary Clintontalks to the dead, amongst other things. And both are, still, considered presidential enough to be regularly invited to debates. Oh-K.
I'm just asking but, has anybody noticed, this kind of stuff doesn't pop up on the radar of the other presidential candidates? I mean, sure, they say John Edwards was boinking a New Ager,but nobody ever said he was one - not even me - since I'm only trying to tell you about confirmed fruitcakes. What's up with that?
As far as I know, comparatively few Republican candidates have been found to be part of the New Age - except for, maybe, unknowingly taking cult money. Any quick look around the blog will show I've had reason to talk, almost exclusively, about Democrats in the pocket of one group of cultists or another. Not because I hate Dems but (surprise!) that's who is, almost exclusively, into cults and cultish thinking. Maybe Republicans are just too tied to the concept of "individual freedom" to let any kind of guru lead them around by the nose for too long?
Hillary, especially, has a long list of New Age stuff in her history while claiming she's merely a Methodist Christian (Notice that none of these so-called "brave" folks can handle being an atheist?) but did you know Arianna Huffington (above, of the politically influential Left-wing Huffington Post blog) is also a follower - of the cult leader John-Roger? I didn't, until the stuff about the Daily Kos and astrology came out, which gave me a reason to start rooting around in the "netroots" phenomena.
Really: So much of the in-house anti-America rhetoric is coming from cult sources, it's truly amazing - makes one wonder what else they're lying about, doesn't it? It does for me because, seriously, I can't seem to find any escape from it.
Bruce Springsteen once said (speaking of this time of war:) “what’s true can be made to seem like a lie, and what’s lying can be made to seem true.” But, really, who's doing the lying? The Right or the Left?
These days, in what Frank Furedi calls The Age of Unreason, I see tons of opinions being treated as facts by the Left, and just as many facts being disregarded as opinions merely because they come from the Right. Seriously, forget about the war for a moment, and ask yourself how much you really know about some other things the Left is pushing on us - things that you can actually nail down - that you can check for yourself? How much of it is true, and right, and really "good"?
Like, is recycling (something which everyone I know insists on) really "good for the environment"? Not according to the facts.Penn and Teller's Bullshit! even won an Emmy for showing "the reality behind recycling, a supposedly pro-environment activity that in actuality creates pollution, has to be subsidized by the government because it's cost ineffective, and is completely unnecessary."
Now, if the Left can be that far-off about good ol' recycling, as they're going out of their way to accomplish it (and fascistically demanding others follow suit) how right, or wrong, might they be about what's going on half-way around the world with our boys lives and, possibly, the fate of our nation on the line?
Admit it: Any of these serial protesters can be that exact same distance from the truth and never know it. And, all the while, screaming their heads off that the president of the United States is actually leading a nation of murderers, when it's they who may be destroying the best chance for peace and prosperity someone else may ever have, leaving only dead bodies in their wake.
I swear, once this shit is cleared up - and it will be - this blog is gonna be worth big bucks one day,...
"The Church of Global Warming (CGW) is a cult. A cult has a number of definitions, among them this one from dictionary.com: "A religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader." Cults wish to control others. Global warming fundamentalists wish to do the same through the power of government.
CGW members would reject cult status -- which all cult members do -- and Al Gore has never been accused of displaying charisma. But the CGW confers charismatic status on him because he tells them what they want to hear: salvation is available through the reduction of one's carbon footprint,...Cultists never allow contrary evidence to challenge their beliefs. Last week, a British judge found nine scientific errors in Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" and ordered British schools to mention them and to teach the other side of global warming,...Despite evidence from NASA and other scientific sources, which rebut Gore's claims of pending climate disaster, CGW members have the kind of blind faith displayed at a Benny Hinn healing service."
"Like the panics of bygone eras, this one has the aspect of yet another re-enactment of the Big Con. The huckster arrives in town, tells all the rubes that disaster impends for them and their families, but says there may be one last chance they can be saved. But it will take a lot of money. And the folks should go about collecting it, right now."
How wonderful. How sweet. How sinister can you get?
To make this parenting dilemma easier, I - The Crack Emcee, M.D. - am going to offer my own suggestion to the San Francisco Bay Area's troubled parents:
Sri Chinmoy died the other day. Here's how the New York Times described him:
"The genial Indian-born spiritual leader who used strenuous exercise and art to spread his message of world harmony and inner peace, died Thursday at his home in Jamaica, Queens, where he ran a meditation center. He was 76."
"The genial Indian-born spiritual leader". Sweet, right? Check out this list of his followers, drawn from several articles on his passing:
Carlos Santana
Singer Sheena Easton
Olympic athlete Carl Lewis
Record producer Narada Michael Walden
Clarence Clemons of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band
There are many more names listed (Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Susan Sarandon, Yoko Ono, Richard Gere) but I want to be fair, so lets just regard them as people Chinmoy ran into, O.K.? (Sure.)
O.K., now let's look closer at this "spiritual leader" - and the New York Times - to get an idea of how credible they both are for delivering the truth to the public:
The New York Post says other papers are "gullible" for buying Chinmoy's message, and "have chugged down the Kool-Aid, then licked the bottom of the cup" about "the creepy Queens 'guru'", and that "a quick Internet search" (something I seem to be good at) reveals a "sleazier side - which includes claims from former devotees that he ran a 'cult'. The Post says Chinmoy caused 'disturbing personality changes' in members and also ordered his dreamy-eyed female followers to engage in exploitive sexcapades. How "spiritual".
In 2004, one former longtime follower of Chinmoy told The Post how Chinmoy summoned her for extended sex romps, then ordered her to have sex with another woman while he watched. Other women recounted similar tales, including one who said Chinmoy paid for her abortion after he got her pregnant."
Sweet.
A couple of papers quoted Carlos Santana as saying the man some called “Sleazy Sri” was "vindictive" and everything Santana had experienced with Chinmoy had “turned to vinegar” , adding, “This shit is not for me–I don’t care how enlightening it is.”
Rick Ross's Cult News site reported that "some tagged Chinmoy’s devotees 'spiritual slaves' and repeated allegations depicted the supposedly celibate holy man as a 'sleazy' sexual predator that preyed upon vulnerable female followers.
Benjamin Spector, once a disciple of the guru wrote, 'My one-time leader Sri Chinmoy encouraged many of us to work below the minimum wage and without benefits, at businesses owned by senior group members in New York and other locations. Many workers were illegal aliens.'
Spector explained, 'The followers of cult leaders are very frequently well educated, sophisticated and sensitive, but authoritarian leaders rob them of their ability to think independently as individuals and dominate them.'"
Now, as much as I want to delve into the subject of those "well educated, sophisticated and sensitive" followers, I'll stay on point and ask:
Why didn't the New York Times report any of this ugly stuff? They didn't even use the word "controversial" with this pervert.
Our so-called "paper of record" did two stories on this asshole's passing and there's not a word of his public wrong-doings in either of them. It's just like with Yusef Bey and Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery cult, where there's just a mention - years after the fact, and once a reporter had been killed - that Bey was, literally, using girls he adopted as a toilet, forcing them to drink his urine and semen, and all while he gleefully held letters of support from Left-wing anti-war Representative Barbara Lee and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums.
Seriously, folks, is the New York Times a newspaper anymore? Under the circumstances, I'd say it's as qualified to call itself a "newspaper" as Sri Chinmoy (or Yusef Bey) was to call himself a "spiritual leader". Both bastardize the very idea of what they claim to represent. The framing of every belief, and every story, is so slanted as to never expose anything - unless, of course, it's against the Bush Administration or one of his supporters - preferably conservative and almost never true as well.
The number of people who wholeheartedly believe what the New York Times says anymore is mind-blowing to me. (As mind-blowing as the idea that all those celebrities, listed above, could fall under the spell of a craven bald-headed old fool from India - only leading to more people, who aren't celebrities, giving their lives over to him.) People tell me it's because the New York Times is "well-written" but so what? Well-written lies are still lies.
None of us should ever forget the words my ex-slave foster mother used to say, to keep us kids on our guard around the world's charlatans and liars, because her simple words were never as true as when reading a story in the NYT - or listening to the words of a so-called "spiritual" type:
"...for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence... truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."
