When asked why the public was hungry for personal advice from a public person, she proposed that an increasingly mobile society had heightened feelings of isolation.
"There is a lot more searching for answers these days," Brothers told the Washington Post in 1979. "And a lot more answers too. But we're missing friends and kinship roles. So you rent a friend. Like Dr. Joyce Brothers."
...One demographic that did not seek her advice was her own family.
"She totally loses her objectivity," her husband told UPI in 1985. "With her family, she's abysmal."
Readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat,...
I've got two stories here that seem to go together. First, there's this one:Tax day comes three days late in 2011 on Monday, April 18th, instead of April 15th. But even after the deadline to file your taxes comes and goes, there will be hundreds of thousand of Americans who haven't fully paid what they owe to Uncle Sam. The annual tax gap is estimated at about $350 billion. That's the difference between what is owed in taxes every year and what gets paid on time.I won't make a comment on that, except it seems to jell nicely with this headline:
So who isn't paying? Scientists, it appears. A recent study looked at tax cheats and found that one of the best indicators of who is likely to try to get around paying their taxes in full is their profession.
The UN ‘disappears’ 50 million climate refugees, then botches the cover-upOf course, I gave you some background on that story, and it's NewAge clowns, last week. Unfortunately, today's scientists working with them, and also sharing their values, no longer surprises me.
Correct answer: It's open season, assholes.Many people on various parts of the political spectrum are expressing a sense of disappointment with Obama. But I have not felt the least bit disappointed.Yessirreee, I'm inspired anyway. Deeply moved. But then, I didn't vote for him, so I'm not crazy.
Once in office, President Obama has done exactly what his whole history would lead you to expect him to do — such as cutting the military budget and vastly expanding the welfare state.
He has bypassed the Constitution by appointing power-wielding “czars” who don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate as cabinet members must be, and now he has bypassed Congress by taking military actions based on authorization by the United Nations and the Arab League.
Those who expected his election to mark a new “post-racial” era may be the most disappointed. He has appointed people with a track record of promoting race resentment and bias, like Attorney General Eric Holder and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Disappointing? No. Disgusting? Yes. The only disappointment is with voters who voted their hopes and ignored his realities.
Didn't I tell you "Once You Know They're NewAgers You've Got Everything They Think Pretty Much Figured Out"? 
Well, The Village Voice's Nick Pinkerton has written a review of NewAger Julian Schnabel's new film (that I referenced in that earlier post) and - needless to say - it's about what I expected:
A U.N. premiere! A Vanessa Redgrave cameo! Zionist hoodlums! Distributors the Weinstein Company and director Julian Schnabel overcome their well-documented aversion to media attention to address the Israel-Palestine question, pleading peace, compromise, and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian state. While Jewish advocacy groups swarm to Schnabel’s bait, it bears noting that Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style.
...Falling far short of the intuitive scene-to-scene storytelling the freewheeling camera implies, Miral is fussy checklist filmmaking, a scavenger hunt for the issues and representative characters that one simply must include in a panoramic survey of its subject.
...These are pictures of people we scarcely know, suffering under circumstances we barely understand, and only further obscured by travelogue impressionism. For closing catharsis, Schnabel imports some maudlin Tom Waits caterwauling—a sure sign that this is the mediation of a sentimental American Boomer countless fathoms out of his depth. Hasn’t Jerusalem suffered enough?
Screw Jerusalem, haven't we all? 
Wasn't I just saying, earlier today, that it's time for the Baby Boomers, specifically, to exit the stage? 
And what gave Harvey Weinstein the impression a director with a pet psychic had anything relevant to say about,...well, anything? Least of all, anything having to do with Israel? Julian Schnabel's steeped in 
What-everrrrr. As long as the rest of you have learned that - if I tell you such-and-such a person/artist is a NewAger - you'd better take it as a warning. Not to avoid their work all together (though you might want to) but to know what you're probably getting yourself into:
A denunciation of all that's good, coupled with an elevation of (and/or a rationalization for) all that's bad. And usually created by a fragile mind that's so confused the artist, once engaged in the act of creation, will almost always think attempting to hide his/her confusion is ultimately more important than actually entertaining anyone.
The reason I don't say to avoid all NewAge spectacles is because, if you're lucky, they can be quite entertaining about trying to accomplish that deception - but, unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case with Julian Schnabel. And I never thought it would:
I mean, come on, who really expects good art from a guy who uses a pet psychic?!?
Hugo Chávez, he of the televised multi-hour conspiracy theory rant - and Noam Chomsky-loving, necrophiliac, socialist cult of personality in Venuzuela - is at it again. Keep in mind, this is the guy who had Sean Penn and Oliver Stone, amongst others, hooked on his every word during the Bush administration. (He famously claimed to smell "sulfur" emanating from George W. Bush, back in 2006, when Chávez spoke after him at the U.N. in New York.) Oliver Stone even went so far as to make a documentary about him, claiming Chávez is "misunderstood". See if you understand this:Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.Got that? Understand it? I do - the man runs a cult - and it's "logic" like this that absolutely proves it. I don't care how high he's risen in politics:
"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.
Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton is singing that old Johnny Mathis & Deniece Williams hit, Too Much Too Little Too Late, and rightfully so:John R. Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations who is weighing a presidential run in 2012, accused President Obama on Friday of failing to address threats to U.S. national security and called the administration's approach to the crisis in Libya "pathetic."I'm not sure "it's over" for us, as the song's quavering refrain says, but, if you ask me, there's definitely no romance left.
Hours after the president warned that the United Nations was ready to launch a military strike to defend the Libyan people if their leader Moammar Kadafi did not halt his attacks on civilians and pull back from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi and three other cities, Bolton cast the president as indecisive, inconsistent and uninterested in foreign policy.
Speaking on the opening night of the state Republican Party convention in Sacramento, Bolton told fellow party members that had he been in charge, he would have moved far more swiftly and would have unilaterally declared a no-fly zone in Libya during the early stage of the crisis.
"Had we acted in those early days, we could have tipped the balance conclusively against Kadafi and this whole thing might be over," Bolton told hundreds of delegates over dinner in the ballroom of a downtown hotel. "Instead the president dithered, and he watched, and he waited, and he temporized."
"In the course of his ruminations, he said Kadafi has got to go — and then he still didn't do anything about it — thus exposing the United States to an enormous credibility problem with our friends and allies, as well as our adversaries."
In recent days, the United States and its allies at the United Nations have ratcheted up pressure on Kadafi to leave power. The U.N. Security Council agreed Thursday to use "all necessary measures" to protect the Libyan people, clearing the way for military strikes on Libyan aircraft and ground forces. The vote was 10 to 0 with five abstentions from Germany, China, Russia, India and Brazil.
"This is the great diplomatic successor to the Bush administration? Are you kidding me?" Bolton scoffed to laughter Friday night. In addition to his tenure as U.N. ambassador during George W. Bush's second term, Bolton also served as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in Bush's first term,
In a broad-ranging and well-received critique of Obama's foreign policy, Bolton said Obama was "still not qualified to be president" two years into his term. He suggested that the president had underestimated the threats in North Korea and Iran and "doesn't see the rest of the world as terribly threatening to American interests," while placing his faith in international institutions to provide security for the United States.
"He is our first post-American president," Bolton said, adding that he didn't mean "un-American" or "anti-American." "He's kind of beyond all that patriotism stuff. He's got a much broader view of what our policy should be."
"We don't need a president who looks out for the interests of the rest of the world over ours," he said later in his speech, to applause. "We need a president who is proud of America, who will defend American interests."
Ha! This is hilarious - and more proof these NewAge weirdos are always on the wrong side:One person who won't be attending the U.S. premiere of artist Julian Schnabel's new film at the United Nations on Monday: Long Island Rep. Pete King.I bet they are. And what was Schnabel going to do if King did show up?
Schnabel and writer Rula Jebreal had written to King after the kickoff of his controversial hearings about Muslim radicalization last week and challenged him to watch "Miral," which portrays a Palestinian woman who becomes radicalized against Israel.
But the Republican chairman of the Homeland Security Committee gave seeing the movie a thumbs-down.
" I'm not going," King said. "I've got a lot of things to do. I've got to get back to Washington. "
Schnabel, a Golden Globe winner, and Jebreal were outraged by King's hearings.
Other than "Al Gore and his ICPP henchmen should be put in prison", this article from the Investor's Business Daily should be the final word on Global Warming/Climate Change:Climate: Nothing makes fools of more people than trying to predict the weather. Whether in Los Angeles or London, recent predictions have gone crazily awry. Global warming? How about mini ice age?We don't know. We just don't know. We do know our idea sounds kind of far-fetched, but maybe, just maybe, it's a cult?
The sight of confused and angry travelers stuck in airports across Europe because of an arctic freeze that has settled across the continent isn't funny. Sadly, they've been told for more than a decade now that such a thing was an impossibility — that global warming was inevitable, and couldn't be reversed.
This is a big problem for those who see human-caused global warming as an irreversible result of the Industrial Revolution's reliance on carbon-based fuels. Based on global warming theory — and according to official weather forecasts made earlier in the year — this winter should be warm and dry. It's anything but. Ice and snow cover vast parts of both Europe and North America, in one of the coldest Decembers in history.
A cautionary tale? You bet. Prognosticators who wrote the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, global warming report in 2007 predicted an inevitable, century-long rise in global temperatures of two degrees or more. Only higher temperatures were foreseen. Moderate or even lower temperatures, as we're experiencing now, weren't even listed as a possibility.
Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.
Karl Popper, the late, great philosopher of science, noted that for something to be called scientific, it must be, as he put it, "falsifiable." That is, for something to be scientifically true, you must be able to test it to see if it's false. That's what scientific experimentation and observation do. That's the essence of the scientific method.
Unfortunately, the prophets of climate doom violate this idea. No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It's global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.
Nothing can disprove their thesis. Not even the extraordinarily frigid weather now creating havoc across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the region's strangely wet and cold weather, paraphrases Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert as saying, "In general, as the globe warms, weather conditions tend to be more extreme and volatile."
Got that? No matter what the weather, it's all due to warming. This isn't science; it's a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed.
Why do we continue to listen to warmists when they're so wrong?
"So 'the vast majority of climate scientists' don't think the debate is over? Someone had better tell the IPCC, Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and most of our colleagues in the media, who have long been insisting otherwise--and indeed, who continue to do so.-- James Taranto, commenting on an interview with Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who denies "the debate on climate change is over" for himself or other scientists - making liars and con men of everyone who insisted otherwise - and making it possible for the rest of us to finally relax, and go back to reading The Wall Street Journal.
There are, no doubt, lots of true believers in global warming--not scientists, but people, including many journalists, who have embraced global warmism as a political and quasireligious doctrine based, they have been led to believe, on the authority of science.
Even Phil Jones acknowledges climate science is rife with uncertainty, but global warmism's popularizers refuse to brook any doubt or acknowledge that the 'consensus' they have touted is a sham.
And they used to call us deniers."
"The doctors and EMTs in our party headed straight downtown to start working. The Scientologists had nowhere to go, and nowhere to put up the big yellow tent they’d brought for touch healing people in. They went to the UN, and managed to get on to their list of approved NGOs somehow. That meant they could set up in the UN grounds.-- Gawker
But they had no-one who spoke Creole, and they brought the weirdness of touch healing into a very superstitious society. They’d leave the tent and come into the general hospital downtown, and try healing people. One of the doctors and one of the nurses told me that the wounded started coming to them to tell them they didn’t want to be treated by the people in the yellow shirts.
One nurse told me that the Scientologists actually caused harm — they gave food to people who were scheduled to go into surgery. That then led to complications in the operating theater."
"The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it 'cannot rely' on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own Nobel prize-winning scientist Dr R.K Pachauri."-- Dean Nelson, continuing another story that's proving who the rubes are - let's all have a good laugh at their expense now - still acting like the ability to receive information, and understand what it means in the modern era, hasn't advanced beyond The Telegraph.
"It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as 'deniers.' The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
"Doing nothing might seem to be simple and easy. But there are many varieties of nothing, and some kinds of nothing can get very elaborate and complex."
