"This is the problem with civilians wanting to go to war: once you've been there,...once you've seen it,...you never want to go again, unless you absolutely fucking have to. It's like France."
"One of the ways that I describe these people — and it’s really quite unfortunate — is that they’re a bunch of unfuckable white dudes. I haven’t found a single black guy looking for Bigfoot. I’ve look high and large, and it’s all white dudes in their late forties and fifties. It’s all midlife crisis people. They’re not the happiest people in the world — and no disrespect — but they’re looking for things to be real that aren’t necessarily real."
I'm happy to report there's one less fraud trying to get the public to "believe" shit:
A man dressed in a military-style “Ghillie suit” who was attempting to provoke a Bigfoot sighting was struck by two vehicles and killed on U.S. 93 South of Kalispell Sunday night.
“He was trying to make people think he was Sasquatch so people would call in a Sasquatch sighting,” Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Jim Schneider said. “You can’t make it up. I haven’t seen or heard of anything like this before. Obviously, his suit made it difficult for people to see him.”
The Flathead County Sheriff’s Office identified the man as Randy Lee Tenley, 44, of Kalispell.
Schneider said Tenley’s motivations were ascertained during interviews with friends who were not in the immediate area but were nearby when the man was struck at about 10:30 p.m.
“Alcohol may have been a factor,” Schneider said. “Impairment is up in the air.”
If you have lived, as I have, as a non-Mormon in a place whose population is 70 percent LDS, you would understand the real dangers in mixing too much church with state. I was born and raised in Utah, and my entire family still lives there. Every time I go back, from the minute I wade past the missionaries in the Salt Lake City airport to my first watered-down beer, I am struck by the fact that, while inmates may be able to duck Chuck Colson, the average Utah citizen has no hope of escaping the Mormons.
It was an axiom of faith among church opponents that Mormon leaders created Mormonism solely "for the purpose of picking the pockets of the community." ... Anti-Mormons charged Joseph Smith, in particular, with an insatiable lust for money, and they occasionally reported his candid "admission" of the fact.,,, One need not be a republican ideologue to disapprove of swindling, but the common non-Mormon perception of Joseph Smith wallowing in his ill-gotten gain revealed a republican repugnance to the idea of decadent luxury.... When anti-Mormon writers moved their discussion away from the hierarchy to a more general treatment of the church as a whole... Smith did not so much corrupt the virtue of once good citizens as merely assemble those who had no civic virtue to begin with.
"[Hatch] is directly implicated in this affair," said Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC medical commission.
The IOC criticism was particularly biting given that Hatch's home state [hosted] the,...winter games in 2002, and that one of the games' major sponsors is, in fact, a supplement company. Utah had already produced a major Olympics bribery scandal; all it needed was a reputation as the world's steroid capital just as the IOC was arriving with its drug-test lab.
Hatch considers his 1994 law, DSHEA, a triumph on behalf of consumer health freedom. But a close look suggests that if anything, DSHEA (or the Hatch Act, as body builders call it) has left Americans "free" to serve as guinea pigs for a multibillion-dollar industry, much of which is built on a foundation of fraudulent claims, pyramid schemes, and lousy manufacturing practices.
Since DSHEA became law, substances as varied as paint stripper, bat shit, toad venom, and lamb placenta have all been imported from overseas, bottled up---often by people with no scientific or health backgrounds---and marketed as dietary supplements to unsuspecting American consumers.
Many supplements have been tainted with salmonella, arsenic, lead, pesticides, unapproved foreign prescription drugs, as well as garden-variety carcinogens.
And despite their New-Age health aura, a significant portion of these "natural supplements" are stimulants, depressants, and other mood-enhancers that some medical experts believe would be classified as drugs if they were synthetic. A surprising number of these products are addictive.
Thanks to Hatch, the U.S. now has standards as low as those in many Third World countries for the sale of many products with serious, pharmacological effects. The results have been deadly.
Mormons seems to have a peculiar--and prejudiced--fascination with tales of a large, ominous, ape-like, black-skinned "Bigfoot" (who, they swear, is actually Cain), condemned by the Mormon God to wander the Earth where he ends up scaring the faithful into invoking the Mormon priesthood in order to drive big, bad Bigfoot away.
Professor Bott is no outlier. Especially among older Mormons, racist rationale for the priesthood ban—linking it to Old Testament pretexts, or to moral infirmity in a pre-earthly life by the souls of Africans and African-Americans, and other racist apologetic mental gymnastics exemplified in Bott’s statement to the Post—persist and circulate, generally unquestioned and unchallenged.
For its part, the LDS Church has never authoritatively addressed racist theologies developed in defense of the ban in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, it has attempted to step quietly beyond its racist past, as it has with many other thorny and troubling historical matters.
On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”
Mercer County church league plays hardball with Mormons
"Most of our churches don't view them as Christians. We don't regard the LDS church as a Christian church. When you include someone in a group -- that's kind of like saying they're fundamentally the same as most people in the group. We don't feel that's accurate with LDS."
"Tim Miejan became the editor of a New Age magazine this year. And he found himself smack in the middle of the shifting, fractured New Age world — where beliefs change faster than you can flip a tarot card.
'We are about what it means to be human, in the metaphysical, holistic and spiritual realms,' said Miejan, of Woodbury, who bought The Edge magazine with a partner in February.
As the editor, Miejan has become a New Age gatekeeper, deciding which legitimate beliefs get into the magazine and which are too far out to be included.
It's not an easy job.
Chiropractors want out of the New Age movement. Channelers wonder if they belong at all, and pagans feel jilted. Organic farmers don't want to be near pet psychics. And no one knows what to do with the witches.
For a movement based on peace, love and understanding, New Age looks like a battleground.
'I have customers who completely believe in fairies and will laugh at you if you believe in Bigfoot,' sighed Teisha Magee, owner of the Sacred Paths Center, which describes itself as an 'organization celebrating earth-centered spirituality,' in St. Paul.
Lest anyone laugh at their beliefs, New Agers point to the tenants of mainstream religions that seem bizarre to nonbelievers — such as virgin birth, turning water into wine and rising from the dead.
'Is there a way to prove the afterlife?' Miejan said.
Until Miejan took over, The Edge was 'an airy-fairy New Age publication,' he said. But he is redefining the magazine's mission — and whipping up some Age of Aquarius acrimony.
Miejan favors articles on stress reduction and spiritual quests. He welcomes columns on astrology, written by 'Moonrabbit.' He recently featured an article which pleaded for a halt to construction of wind turbines because of the harm to life-force energy flows called 'prana.'
He says he would include stories about 'nature divas,' the politically correct name for fairies. 'We would never say those do not exist. We are one of the forums where people can share those ideas,' he said.
But even Miejan's open mind sometimes snaps shut.
Channelers — people possessed by spirits of the dead — are out. So is the belief that reptile-like aliens have taken over the bodies of celebrities, including Queen Elizabeth and — according to one Web site — former Minnesota U.S. Rep. Bill Luther.
Paganism? Out.
'I am not saying that because paganism offends anyone,' Miejan said. 'But it is a complete niche by itself.'
Other New Age leaders are appalled.
'He is excluding channeling? Yikes. Or pagans? He should not be doing that,' said Kathy McGee, editor of the Washington-state-based magazine New Age Retailer.
-- Bob Shaw, capturing the "debate", if you can call it that, on what NewAge is - other than a lot of politically-motivated people with severe mental problems - in the Pioneer Press.
