A New Way To Help NewAgers: No Breaks At All

Swing Girls - some great Jazz from Japan at the link. Music is a way out, people - but only the good stuff. Don't listen to those who don't know, or don't advocate for, the difference.

Why Naturopaths Should Not Be Licensed by Kimball C. Atwood IV, M.D.:

"Irrational, unscientific beliefs and practices abound in naturopathy, likening it more to a cult than to a valid form of health care. These beliefs and practices are not merely at the fringes but are the standards of the field. They are advocated by the leaders themselves.”

Irrational + beliefs + a cult + leaders. Take your time, those of you not familiar with the NewAge.

You'll figure it out,...

I thought Scientology made you perfect?:

Are Kirstie Alley and Maksim Chmerkovskiy cursed on the dance floor? A week after her partner tumbled to the ground after pulling a muscle, Alley’s shoe came undone during her performance on Monday’s Dancing with the Stars.

“I’m not doing a sitcom. I’m actually doing a dancing show!” the actress told reporters afterwards. “I’m tired of having to recover. I would just like to do something right.  I don’t feel like I’m jinxed, but I feel like I need to get my sh– together. When people are accident prone, there is something going on with them. There is something going on. Our rehearsals were swell. We’re bitchin’ in rehearsals. If you could just sort of tune into the rehearsals…”

“Look, I’m supposed to be Swan Lake out there, la la la la la,” she continued. “Instead I’m like, la la la la and he’s supposed to come out to me but he comes up and I’m like, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe is off, what do I do? I don’t know what you do in these situations! I’m going to write a book about this. I just feel like I want to be the people who dance well. First week, we were the people who danced really well. And somehow along we’ve become the freak show. The freak show is good but we need to take the dancing up a notch.”

A member of "the world's most dangerous cult" is on American television and this is all anyone cares about. The murders, kidnappings, brainwashing? They get nothing. Kirstie Alley loses a shoe and it's everywhere.

This country has changed.

Why do so few of us see this before it happens?

It might seem strange to link global warming and the futility of wind farms with the ongoing collapse of the euro. But in several directions at the moment we can see the unfolding of one of the hidden patterns shaping human affairs, which years ago I called “the fantasy cycle”. It is a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history – and in storytelling.

When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.

We're falling apart, people. And - if you're an American who, say, recycles - you've been dreaming,...

California in the balance:

We calibrate California’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country’s near bottom; teachers’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.

We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.

What's going to happen when California falls? Even I don't know that.

I've said this more times than I can count - always leading to an argument:

It may be a key Christian principle but forgiving too easily can be dangerous, the Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested.

Rowan Williams has warned that easy forgiveness can make suffering appear not to matter.

In BBC1’s What is the Point in Forgiveness?, to be broadcast on Good Friday, the Archbishop also concedes that it is not fair to expect victims of abuse, rape or torture to turn the other cheek with ease.

Sorry everybody, but what you're doing ain't cutting it,...