How NewAge REALLY "Works"

Our ex-wife's best friend, Nadia Eisen, has irritable bowel syndrome. She, along with a psychic, talked our ex into leaving us for a Homeopath.

Now we hear that Homeopath, Robert Wohlfahrt, has been charging Nadia for the "magic water" she uses to treat her irritable bowel syndrome.

The idea Nadia will die a long slow death in horrible pain, while paying the sinister quack she herself invited into our lives, is hilarious.

Because that's how NewAge "works".

It doesn't bring peace, or joy, or truth, or any of that immature crap into our lives. If you're strong enough to survive whatever it is they unleash on you, NewAgers leave you with cynicism and a sickening, maniacal, laughter at the folly of idiots who always think, just like the Nazis, they were actually getting away with something - until it's too late.

Nadia's a Jew, so it will come as a shock to find herself on the wrong side of that divide.

Welcome to the real world, kid:

Now that you've crossed over, there's no coming back, ever.

The Big Bang (Part IV: The Halloween Edition)

"This, I thought, is crazy. If true, it is evil. But surely it is too crazy; it implies too gross a violation of ordinary human behavior, to be true. If it was true, there was something totalitarian there, something like the atmosphere of a Stalinist show-trial, the demand that privacy and dignity be ripped away to appease,...apparent emotional derangement,.."

- Hal G.P. Colebatch, in The Spectator, commenting on the public displays of emotional blackmail during Princess Diana's death.

(I'm only using the quote, above, as a launching-off point because it captures, perfectly, what I thought about the occult - and the behavior of it's practitioners - as I slowly discovered the metaphysical underpinnings of my wife, Karine Brunck, being taken advantage of by Robert Wohlfahrt, Wissimbourg, France's homeopathic village quack who had just euthanized her mother, less than a month before:)

[Segments I, II, and III, can be found here, here, and here.]

Well, it's Halloween, a day that will never be the same for me, because it means it was three years ago, today, that I first heard the name "Robert Wohlfahrt" and - for the rest of my life - this man's "beliefs" and actions will haunt me daily.

I found the "homeopath's" name on my mother-in-law's death certificate, only knowing my ex-wife, Karine Anne Brunck, had been sleeping with a man named "Robert". She had come back to America, after burying her mother, and then claimed she to had run back to Wissembourg, France after informing me she and "Robert" had "mystical powers" and they were, both, "students of the occult". (Spooky, huh?) I didn't know what to make of any of it.

Wohlfahrt means "Welfare" in German, but "Wolf Heart" in English, so when I first saw the name I just stood there - stunned - taking it in, holding my mother-in-law's death certificate in one hand and a huge new cell phone bill in the other, madly putting two-and-two together after a frantic period of in-house detective work; trying to sort out what had happened to my wife. "She's sleeping with the doctor - who euthanized her mother?" It was just too much - and too morbidly creepy - for my mind to comprehend: some self-proclaimed Mr. Amazing, with a wolf heart, did not have our welfare in mind at all.

From the moment Karine had returned from France, after she had been away for six months caring for her mother, she had been behaving strangely. Our greeting at the airport was stiff and overly-formal. She told me it was "culture shock", which I understood, having stayed in Wissembourg and returned to America to see a grimy, and sometimes threatening, San Francisco with new eyes.

Karine was nervous, and fidgety, and demanded not to greet any of our friends who were excited to see her after so much time. I chased them all away with half-hearted apologies. We then made small talk, with Karine telling me about the funeral and the doctor, who she described merely as "nice".

Sex that night was awful. Since I didn't know she had just had sex with Robert hours before, I also didn't know how to interpret Karine's awkward responses, and blamed myself for what was a less-than-stellar performance. This set the tone for the next four months we were together: Karine, acting in a cold and distant manner, and me wondering how long her "culture shock" would last and what I could do to bring us back together.

Karine's bizarre behavior started affecting everything, turning our home life very dark, like the atmosphere in the movie, The Exorcist. She'd stay away from the house for almost entire days, only to return and glower at me. I found her masturbating constantly - in the bathtub, the bed, and even the kitchen.

At the time, I had been working as music director for a wonderful internet music start-up, Better Propaganda.com, and trading stocks (successfully) online, but with such a weirdly gloom-and-doom scenario at home, I couldn't seriously focus on either and my music work suffered - and I started losing money on trades at a rapid pace.

As I mentioned (in The Big Bang, Part I) Karine took to wearing headphones at home, intently listening to a silly NewAge radio program about angels, while wearing me down with a hate stare. I became seriously concerned for the state of her mind. Wasn't her head-strong belief in NewAge supposed to be so peace, love, and happiness could be brought into the world? If so, it certainly wasn't working for us. My wife had become an evil bitch.

After months of this, I was happy when her best friend, Nadia Eisen, had arrived from Luxembourg. Nadia and I had always gotten along, and though she suffered from Crohn's disease (which would leave farts floating around the house that could peel paint off the walls, and forced me to shoo some visitors away with lame excuses) I always looked forward to Nadia's visits, because they always featured the three of us together, laughing, eating, and drinking around our table like family.

But it wasn't like that this time. This time, Karine and Nadia were always whispering in French, conspirators with a secret they would not divulge. They watched me closely, like I was an animal in the zoo, and arranged weekend trips away without inviting me along.

Nadia's presence, accompanied as it was by her nuclear bomb excretions, just made a an already unsteady situation much, much worse. And when it was time for her to leave - as I happily drove her to the airport - she did what struck me as the most crazy thing: she started confessing how lonely she was since she broke up with her last boyfriend, and looking at me expectantly.

I wanted nothing to do with Nadia sexually. I had met her former boyfriend, and (even though we didn't agree politically) I thought he was a really nice guy she had ridiculed for nothing - because she didn't think he was "exciting" enough; not enough of a go-getter or a risk-taker, when the man was nice, smart, extremely kind to her, had a really good job, an apartment, and a wonderful house he loaned to Karine, Nadia, and I when we visited. He was even able to travel through his work. I thought, since he didn't find Nadia's "master blasters" overly-offensive, she should have felt lucky to have him but no - she decided he was a "loser" for not being willing to jump through her hoops of selfishness. Anyway, when Nadia made her sly overtures - which I now regard as her testing my fidelity in light of what Karine had done - I was repulsed, wanted her out of my car, and back on a plane to Europe.

After Karine's lies stacked up to the breaking point and The Big Bang occured, we had such a terrible fight that our friend and neighbor, Lloyd, came over and, concerned, told Karine to go to his wife while he stayed with me. Shaking his head, he listened to Karine's panting confession of an affair on that horrible Doti Boon "psychic" tape with me, watched me cry, scream, and make terrible animal-like sounds until, basically, I became so exhausted I passed out.

I woke up screaming, my throat raw, from doing so even in my sleep. That first horrible night, three years ago, started a pattern that continues to this day: I start to gain conscienceness, reach over to pull my wife to me, and once I realize she's not there, I wake up not knowing where I am. Then reality hits me with a palpable force, and in order to go on, I respond to it like I'm in the jungle with a machete: I've just got to keep hacking away - keep moving forward - tear apart all her bullshit until I reach a clearing. Until I understand the madness loving her had me trapped in.

On the day after our fight, I jumped out of bed and immediately called Lloyd's, asking if Karine was still at his house. He said yes and put her on the phone, but our conversation kept quickly descending into open warfare. It was like she only had three settings now: lie, deny, or defiance, and I wasn't having any of it.

Knowing Karine had been lying to me already, I asked Lloyd to mediate for us, and listened as Karine threw out one lame excuse after another - lame excuses for a wife, in a 20 year marriage, trying to explain how she could take off her clothes and have sex with another man. She was saying things like it was my job. But she had pushed me to take the job at Better Propaganda.com, saying she thought it would be good for me. "You told me to take it!" I yelled incredulously.

We went on like that for about half an hour: Karine, studiously avoiding (in front of Lloyd) any mention of the delusional mental framework she had told me she and Robert shared, throwing out one diversionary issue after another that I batted down with the facts and evidence of our lives. With Lloyd mediating, it soon became clear that Karine wasn't trying to divulge the whole truth, so, rather than admit anything more, she bolted for the door, and to our car, and disappeared.

For me, the confusion and horror - and the terrifying screams from the night before - returned with a frightening power. I grew up as a foster child, so, as an adult, she alone was the only real family that I loved, and though it happened many times when I was a child, I wasn't prepared to unexpectantly face my world coming apart again. My wife may have been loony, but damn it she was my loon, and I hadn't ever considered how I'd go through life without her. Wasn't that what our marriage was all about?

But now I had no idea where my wife was. I also didn't know if her mind was right. All I knew was she was planning on returning to France (because she had told me a series of lies about why she had bought a ticket) but I had no idea if she was leaving immediately.

I started frantically calling her girlfriends, each one by turn feigning ignorance or giving me the cold shoulder. I started getting paranoid: what was going on? And who all knew? Then I thought to call Nadia, because if anyone knew what was going on, it had to be her,....

O.K. - enough - this is hard stuff to write about, but it will be continued, because doing what's hard is the essence of:

A Lesson In NewAge Lies (And How They Affect Everything And Every One They Encounter)

In the world of politics, rare is the candidate who passes on a chance for publicity. The campaign's explanation for stonewalling, moreover, struck me as dubious and at times evasive.

I had come to the Edwards' videos in a haphazard way: the byproduct of a story I was writing on new technology and politics. The webisodes were not, in any regard, a secret. Edwards' "behind the scenes" portrait had earned rave reviews in the blogosphere and even a small feature in Newsweek. But nothing had been written about the films since Edwards announced his presidential aspirations, and I wanted to know how the footage would play on the campaign trail.

What followed was a lesson in the profound irritations of political reporting. A call to Edwards' press shop led to an email to his One America Committee representative, which led, in turn, to a mind-bending exchange about campaign finance law, which culminated in a separate conversation with Edwards' deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince. Each time I was told that the One America Committee could not use "material that could be considered promoting the presidential campaign," and that Edwards' camp "no longer had access to most of the content."

Thwarted, I tried my hand with the movie's producers. A search for the filmmaker, Rielle Hunter, proved that Google does, in fact, have its limitations. No hits. The same held true with Facebook and Myspace - a bizarre level of anonymity for someone in the movie business.

The production company responsible for the webisodes, Midline Groove Productions, had a minimalist website. Through it, however, I was able to email Mimi Hockman, Rielle Hunter's partner, to ask if I could screen the tapes. She directed me to a Business Week website where the last remaining webisode link still functioned. But beyond that, I was rebuffed. Once again, the reasons seemed strangely artificial.

"Our contract expired last year," Hockman emailed, "and the Edwards camp owns all of the webisodes and footage."

(Hmmm.... The campaign had said it couldn't access the footage.) Could we at least talk off the record about the filming process?

"Nope," she wrote. "Not a chance."

My reportorial curiosity thoroughly piqued, I decided to dig further.

Who is Rielle Hunter? The Newsweek item said Edwards met the aspiring actress and filmmaker in a New York City bar. A call to the Screen Actors Guild elicited the following exchange:

Screen Actors Guild: "This performer chooses not to list her contact information in the membership database."

HuffPost: "So if I wanted to contact her about her work with web video?"

SAG: "Well, I don't know what to tell you. It's up to the performer to choose whether they are listed or not."

A check of the movie database IMDB.com listed her as a director and actor in the short Billy Bob and Them. And an Internet write up of a 2005 interview she apparently gave to Breathe Magazine described her as a "formerly hard-partying girl who claims that she found enlightenment."

How much did the videos cost? According to campaign finance reports, the One America Committee made four payments of $12,500 and two of $25,000, for a total of $100,000 to Midline Groove Productions in the second half of 2006.

Who else was involved? Credits from the webisode still on the Business Week site listed three additional production assistants. One of them, Sam Cullman, said he could not talk to me but lauded Edwards for his openness. Another assistant, Nick Chatfield, said on the first call to my editor that he wished the movies were available because he could use the publicity. On the second call (having evidently checked back with Hunter or the Edwards campaign), Chatfield said, "Don't call me again."

Most important of all: Was there, in fact, a legal reason that prohibited Edwards from showing the webisodes? One campaign finance expert told me that, "if used by the presidential campaign, the videos are considered an in-kind contribution, which is limited at $5,000 in value... Still," he added, "this is an abundance of caution." Others didn't tread as lightly. "Bullshit", "baloney", and "malarkey" were the words used by three eminent experts in the field to describe Edwards' stance.

Presented with this record, the Edwards campaign finally relented. But even then they proved surprisingly guarded.

Jonathan Prince offered to let me and my editor, Tom Edsall, watch the videos - apparently unaware that at one point his campaign claimed not to have access to them. But there was a proviso: we could only view the videos in Prince's presence.

We accepted the offer. But oh, how the story and my interests have changed. No longer am I working on a piece about new media and politics - boring! Now, I just want to know why these webisodes are shrouded in such mystery.

Not lost in the matter is the irony of Edwards' stance. After all, the videos were made with the apparent goal of bringing transparency to the political process. "I've come to the conclusion I just want the country to see who I really am," Edwards declared in the one webisode still public, "not based on some plastic Ken doll you put up in front of audiences."

I'm still waiting to see.

-- Sam Stein, in (what seems to be) the first reported "problem" surrounding John Edwards and Rielle Hunter, in the Huffington Post

This reminded me, so much, of how I uncovered the NewAge reasons for my divorce, reading it gave me chills: My ex, and her girlfriends (Nadia Eisen, in Luxembourg, especially) outright lying - or saying things that just made no sense. That clear feeling that something was off-kilter that no one would cop to. A sense they were all determined to convince the one person who was telling the truth and living in this reality - me - that I'm the one off-base and/or crazy and they were being truthful and acting as protectors of the good. And the mind-warping hatred these "peace and love" types developed towards me when I wouldn't quit trying to discover what was going on.

Every one of them, a liar, and a bitch - and that goes for the New Age Dr. Robert Wohlfahrt, too - the quack in Wissembourg, France, who doesn't abide by professional ethics (or his medical training) and, instead, started my nightmares by taking advantage of my stupid, evil, mixed-up woman during the grieving period of her mother's death. He's as big of a bitch, and a faggot, as John Edwards. And, just like Edwards, he will be exposed. I'ma see to it.

Does anybody have a photo of this creep, Wohlfahrt?

No Job For Rappers

One night, back in 2005, I had the singular misfortune of listening to a badly recorded cassette tape. On it, I discovered my NewAge wife's best friend from Luxembourg (a school teacher, of all things, named Nadia Eisen, above) had been discussing her life with a psychic. Yikes!

As if half-baked educators talking to vicious bullshit artists wasn't bad enough, to my continued horror, I also heard my wife of 20 years, Karine Anne Brunck (above) asking the same fraud for advice. You see, less than a month after my mother-in-law (above) was euthanized - for what seemed, to me, an extremely painful bout of cancer - the attending "NewAge physician", Dr. Robert Wohlfahrt (a homeopath running his scam operation in France) heightened the drama of death by having sex with my (now-ex) wife right at the start of the grieving period. Without a care for our marriage - you'll notice hardly anyone in this piece cares about the social boundary of marriage - he called her his "virgin/whore" (words she would've found offensive coming from me) and encouraged her to investigate the cult of Ken Wilber.

The immoral scammer on the cassette - calling herself Doti Boon, The California Psychic - also offered encouragement, and - except to ask if I was into open marriages - without knowing (or caring) anything about me, proudly proclaimed "I don't see any problems here." Predictably, being a charlatan, that conversation took place long before Doti Boon could know what was to come:

They talked before the terrible arguments with my wife began. They talked before I discovered my wife was part of a cult (which is what lead me to the cassette that uncovered the affair). They talked before I discovered my ex was buying the homeopath gifts, and before I had ever heard of homeopathy, or understood what kind of scam it is; before I knew my wife had emptied our bank accounts, and, of course, before our divorce (which, I might add, was conducted only after I'd been forced to sell almost everything I owned.)

Their chat took place before I discovered my wife's other best friend, a maliciously stupid Belgian believer named Emmanuelle Taijmans (above) knew about the affair, and happily spent time in Europe with my ex and that kinkily murderous man. My wife talked to the psychic before I read the e-mails, between my ex and the man who gave her sick mother water, and completely fell apart.

They talked before I lost 80 pounds, practically, overnight, while fielding calls from cultists telling me, "Give up. She's with us now." They talked before I slipped into severe depression; before I was driven to attempt suicide (while on anti-depressants) and before I suffered a bruised disc in my neck from involuntary muscle spasms while screaming in my sleep. All of which caused me to incur huge medical bills.

Most importantly, their recorded conversation took place before I discovered 20 years of those tapes hidden in my wife's closet. I also found receipts for all the worthless "energy" crap, seminars, initiations, etc., she'd been spending our money on. That's when I started investigating the phenomena of cultism to the point where I started pondering the same question I'm pondering, three years later, as I write this:

Extrapolating from my experience, what price is society paying for journalism's propensity to play blind, pretending they can't see those living under the umbrella of cultish NewAge beliefs as actively hurting America, and in ways it's citizens aren't aware of, or can hardly process, in advance?

"Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn't need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to please—or at least not to offend—the worst tyranny of all, which is the safety-first version of public opinion."

- Christopher Hitchens, writing for Slate

For instance, after San Francisco's Mayor, Gavin Newsom, was busted for sleeping with the wife of his best friend (and campaign manager) rather than doing the decent thing - admonishing him to disappear - the papers dutifully trumpeted his statement of defiance ("I am not going away!") and kept the mayoral scumbag's silly back-stabbing mug in our faces until a landslide victory at the polls was tastefully manufactured. The cowards did this even after he further embarrassed the betrayed friend who could, almost single-handedly, take credit for all the mayor's accomplishments.

The press claimed this was a sign of The City's (and, presumably, their own) "sophistication", while others saw it as another example of the Paris of the West's cultural depravity, considering the mayor had "made his bones" by trying to make gay marriage legal because he cared so much about the importance of the institution in everyone's life. (Everyone but his best friend, that is.) All this hypocrisy was put on bright display for The City's ever-growing army of cynical drug addicts, presumably to make them more cynical, as they hide behind their ever-present pitch black sunglasses.

It also provided nice memories for the kids. You know, the ones raised on The Wire.

Following that outstanding period of rabble-rousing journalism, it was dutifully noted that "Gavie Baby" was dating an actual big breasted Scientologist from Hollywood for a while. That alarming bombshell was worthy of only one question-and-answer session, with no follow up questions, because the clearly sharp-as-a-tack mayor said he knew nothing - absolutely nothing - about "the world's most dangerous cult". I mean, what more could a room full of journalists have asked after hearing that? Come on, San Francisco is only the same city that put Jim Jones, the leader of the murderous People's Temple, on the board of it's Housing Authority, with the blessing of the entire political, religious, and "spiritual", establishment.

No - everybody keep moving - there was nothing worthy of further investigation here. Just as there was nary a peep when it eventually looked like Gavie's buxom beauty was part of the L. Ron cult's plans to recruit the mayor, or at least distract him, as they were sneakily trying to turn The City's North Beach section into another Clearwater, Florida. That plan was foiled by the Board of Supervisors, who may be a cookoo crew but, because there's so many of them, now and again may react to a well-applied elbow, followed by the words, "Did you see that?".

Anyway, since nobody in town was going to say anything weird was going on, Gruesome Newsom eventually got a note from America's cult expert, Rick Ross. Not for the Scientology shenanigans but for attempting to honor a yoga cult that had recently killed a black professor in New York. (Yea, yea, I know, yoga's a harmless exercise routine - not a 5,000 year old "spiritual" practice that causes people to abandon reality and walk around naked - got it.) Only one of The City's alternative rags, the S.F. Weekly, thought Ross's warning was worth a bit of column space, though they too didn't see anything so out of the ordinary to seriously press the issue of why there is so much cult involvement in The City. (All big city mayors get warning letters from cult experts, right?)

But how could The S.F. Weekly know anything was off kilter when they were so busy putting together a nice, shallow, write up - by a naked yoga enthusiast - for the local sex cult that operates downtown? I mean, a woman-friendly sex cult (as opposed to a male-friendly sex cult) is another normal thing for any American city to have, right? It is when you allow the Falun Gong to stage their creepy silent protests, daily, outside of San Francisco City Hall, and any other North American city they can get away with badgering.

No, except for one ass-covering editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle (just in case) it doesn't look like the local papers are ever going to openly wonder what's in The City's Kool-Aid since the mayor declared he's not a drunk anymore. Are you kidding? Why investigate the influence of cults when big brained journalists are studiously doing other things, like convincing their girlfriends that signing up for women-friendly naked yoga classes is work?

Meanwhile, right across the bay in Oakland, California, an actual serious journalist, Chauncey Bailey, was shot dead - in broad daylight - by the black-owned health food cult of Your Black Muslim Bakery. Though it's original leader, Yusef Bey, had been on T.V. for years, making every crackpot claim a man could make, he - and his successors - still, amazingly, had the support of Oakland's political establishment - including the mayor, Representative and anti-war activist, Barbara Lee, and even the Oakland Police Department - while Bey and his "soldiers" openly ripped the city off while they raped, tortured, and killed Oakland's citizens.

Here's a question: Why was only one reporter working on a story of this magnitude before Chauncy Baily's murder and - fuck the stupid Chauncy Baily Project - where are the rest of them regarding cultism? Probably still reporting on the problems of Wiccans.

Compounding my personal pain, while I was staying with a rabid environmentalist, I saw the Bay Area's Contra Costa County papers were also shilling for the magic water known as homeopathy (I'll mention here that it's also used in almost half of the homes in France. At the same time, England is providing the one source of light in this whole sorry tale by, finally, making headway in eliminating quackery. This is in spite of opposition from Prince Charles, countless celebrities, and many in the general public.) As a matter of fact, NewAge quack medicines are sold, across the country and around the world, in most Health Food stores, including those yoga-loving fonts of wisdom known as Whole Foods, and Trader Joes.

I hear Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, is about to start selling homeopathy as well. I'd think a reporter, somewhere, would be interested in why billions of dollars are going to criminal enterprises, wouldn't you? Oh - don't answer - I didn't notice that huge bottle of all-important supplements on your shelf there.

I've already mentioned that Nevada's medical board has been called "one of the five worst" in the country as they try to become the alternative medicine capital of the world. (I thought "What happens in Vegas,..." Oh, never mind.) The gamblin' state is doing this as SCAM practitioners are receiving government grants through NCCAM and other government sources (thanks to the support of crank politicians, such as Iowa's Tom Harkin (D) and Utah's Orrin Hatch (R) above) while NewAgers are infiltrating hospitals, and medical schools, being called fascists by actual doctors, and doing their damnedest to stifle online debate about their practices, which, in many cases, have been revealed as nothing more than outright medical fraud resulting in more than a few patient deaths.

But is the media capable of putting it all together? Nah. It's much more effective to let a poor black guy with a goofy stage name and couple of years of college do it. Yea, that's the ticket.

As I've said before, more than a few celebrities (who have been been very open about their cult connections) have joined in the fascistic Rule The World Campaign. Everyday at 3 (at least in my area) Oprah Winfrey is spreading The Secret, and other forms of New Age "spirituality", and quackery, on a massive scale, without any serious pressure from,...the,...um,...press. Again, we have another subject - Oprah's billion dollar operation - where the job of protecting the public good is being left to various individuals and science organizations.

I don't think I have to mention Oprah's also providing support to the airy-fairy presidential aspirations of Barack Obama, whose campaign is now being called a cult by such nut cases as those in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and a few other media outlets. But, as far as I know, they haven't asked him about Oprah's beliefs, nor pressured him to shut the cultish fervor down. Hey - it's a political campaign - and we all know people regularly swoon and feint at political campaigns. Just ask John McCain.

Hillary Clinton - who famously said "There are worse things than infidelity" when the (Thank goodness) former president, Bill Clinton, was on his way to being impeached for lying about his exploitation of Monica Lowensky - has talked to psychics and been involved in other cultish behavior. She did this while betraying her feminist credentials by taking the lead in attempting to destroy every woman that claimed her husband took advantage of them. (Somehow even feminists missed all that.) Now the "first black president", and his wife, are slowly being revealed as racists too - after years of wooing the black vote.

Bill Clinton's depravity, like Hillary's Nixonian vindictiveness, is typical, hypocritical, NewAge behavior, as well as a national joke (right along with questions about Hillary's own infidelities) but, as he's been touring the country with the likes of Tony Robbins - and openly quoting Ken Wilber - there have been no questions about cult cheerleading from the media when it comes to the Clinton family's desire for power in - no, scratch that - over America.

As I said, this blog is written by a layman who has, admittedly, suffered greatly - I'm no kind of a journalist - but, considering all I've discovered in a very short period of time, is it any wonder so many average citizens are conspiracy prone these days? I think - starting from the experience of my own personal tragedy - the ability of average citizens to think critically, attempt defending their health, and to simply understand the larger forces arrayed against them (what the president called "The Evildoers" without, and what James Randi and many scientists are calling "The Endarkenment" within) has been seriously compromised.

There simply haven't been enough good column inches written in the world's newspapers, calculating the enormous personal and public destruction NewAge beliefs have wrecked on so many, in a multitude of ways, within the structure of the Western World.

Yes, once again, I'm looking for the help of journalists. I am only one man without the resources to do a job of this magnitude justice. Without delay, I think it's about time for actual journalists to begin to challenge the menace of the NewAge in society. To leave this battle to people like me, and the likes of Scientology's attackers, Anonymous, is a total abandonment, not only of journalism's role in society, but the welfare of our nation and the world.

Here's an outrageous proposal to get you started:

If Senator Charles Grassley can investigate Christian organizations for financial improprieties, then, damn it, the NewAge's operations can be tackled, seriously, by the so-called ink stained scribes of the Fourth Estate as well. As the San Francisco Chronicle's Marshall Kilduff said about The City's previous reaction to cultism:

"What have we learned,...Absolutely nothing."

And, I'm sure, more of us are going to pay if educating the public is a job left to Rappers.

The Big Bang (Part 1)

[Click On Photo To Read My Ex-Wife, Karine Anne Brunck, Explain In Her Own Words What Happened To Her Mind In A Diary Entry On The Reiki Cult Initiation Process.]

"This, I thought, is crazy. If true, it is evil. But surely it is too crazy; it implies too gross a violation of ordinary human behavior, to be true. If it was true, there was something totalitarian there, something like the atmosphere of a Stalinist show-trial, the demand that privacy and dignity be ripped away to appease,...apparent emotional derangement,.."

- Hal G.P. Colebatch, in The Spectator, commenting on the public displays of emotional blackmail during Princess Diana's death.

(I'm only using the quote, above, as a launching-off point because it captures, perfectly, what I thought about the occult - and the behavior of it's practitioners - as I slowly discovered the metaphysical underpinnings of my wife, Karine Anne Brunck, being taken advantage of by Robert Wohlfahrt, Wissimbourg, France's homeopathic village quack who had just euthanized her mother, less than a month before:)

I had been on the phone with Karine for 6 months, while her mother was ill in France, giving her support and telling her how much I loved her, while listening to her tales of my mother-in-law's intense, and over-whelming, pain. Never a word about pain-killers. Rarely a word about the doctor. Just months and months of agony. But that was France. I'd seen what Michael Moore calls the "gold-standard" of medical care before. It could be so medieval I once told my mother-in-law, when she was well, that I was scared for her. (She pointed out the hospital had a helicopter, to fly her somewhere for better treatment, if necessary.) Now, there was nothing I could do from the United States, but be supportive to my wife.

After the funeral, Karine came back to America acting very bizarre. Strange from the first day: She didn't want to see anyone who came by to see her. Sex was lousy (after 6 months apart.). Talking between us was minimal. Our life just went on, unadorned by each other. I chalked it all up to the stress of death, funerals, jet-lag, and culture shock. But, as time went by, she also became mean, and stayed out day and night, only returning to drive me further up the wall with her obvious, self-inflicted, disappointments.

Unfortunately, those disappointments started getting voiced through obvious lies: She had to go back to France to get a $5,000 check - a check that couldn't be mailed. She had to go back to France to see her brother - after just spending the last 6 months with him. She had to go back to France to see her 6-year old nephew. She had to go back to France to see her 3-year old niece. And on and on and on. Each new story - no, demand - less believable than the last. She had absolutely no interest in making plans together. And I started wondering why.

Then her girlfriend, Nadia Eisen, came to visit from Luxembourg. I liked Nadia but, this time, she brought an unusual nosiness with her. She started asking me probing questions, and, at one point, even tried to see if I'd sleep with her. I remember giving her, and Karine, a little speech over dinner, about what our marriage meant to me, and making it clear that Nadia wasn't in it. Nadia got seriously pissed at that and started claiming I was insulting her. I asked if crawling around in other people's marriages is a European thing, and she said yes, if they're friends. I informed her it's not customary in America. She and Karine, both, rolled their eyes at that one. This time, for once, I was glad when it was time for Nadia to go.

After Nadia's visit, Karine took to wearing headphones when she was home, listening, I assumed, to a new age radio station. She glared at me as I worked, killing me with her eyes when she walked across the room. She started talking about taking "a class", which I assumed meant she wanted to go back to college. That sounded like a good idea - for both of us - and I was glad she was thinking about the future again. But weeks went by and she didn't say another word about it. When I finally broached the subject, she revealed it was a Reiki class costing $500.00 a day - and it lasted for seven days. (She'd been going to "meetings" with the hand-wavers for a while.) Her saying I couldn't take the class too - a major concession, on my part, I thought - led to a big, ugly, horrible, screaming fight.

This was followed by more of her maneuvering: She claimed that I was holding her back "spiritually"; and she felt "oppressed", and maybe we should try some time apart. We started to talk about that, in light of her recent, unhinged, behavior, and things started to cool down. (I might be able to get more work done, I thought. I was barely getting anything done this way,...) Then she became tender. We both voiced deep-and-meaningfuls, had decent sex, and declared our love once more. I asked what's up with her: her moods were so chaotic and wild these days; but she wasn't revealing anything, just staring at me like she could see right through. Especially when I told her she should get some real interests. And new friends. Smarter friends. Like, maybe, doctors or something. She said she'd been thinking about doing just that.

That night, I couldn't sleep. Something was wrong but I didn't know what it was. But I did know I hadn't held my wife back spiritually. (She'd been into all kinds of goofy shit for years -more than I knew by a long shot - and all I ever said was I wasn't interested, and didn't want to come home to a dark, candle-lit, house full of incense because it made me nauseous.) And I also knew I'd never "oppressed" her - she'd always gone where she wanted, when she wanted; and all I ever asked, when she got back, is if she had a good time. No, something was really wrong, and, whatever it was, it wasn't letting me lie next to her and rest. So I went to the computer and looked up "Reiki".

Why I'd never researched Reiki before still eludes me (I didn't know why I was doing it then) but, over and over again, as I found one, goofy, pastel-colored new wage site after another, it made me sick to think my wife was so gullibly airy-fairy. I started to wish she would read more. Something other than magazines, anyway. Oh well, I thought, you picked her, and you love her more than yourself sometimes. Together we laughed, in surprised recognition, when Bruce Willis and Maria de Medeiros (playing his french love, Fabienne) turned up as a couple in Pulp Fiction. My wife and I, we could get that same dynamic, and be just that damn cute - just that damn complicated. We'd been through a lot together. There's still a lot to go. Whatever.

Impatient, I started skipping deeper into Google, and that's when the dirt started showing up: Pages that I thought I could trust - pages that weren't all rah-rah - were either making fun of Reiki, or started talking about it as worthless, or involved in various forms of criminality, health fraud, evil and occult practices, or declaring Reiki as a "cult".

That word scared me: Cults were Heaven's Gate, Jim Jones, Charley Manson, and David Koresh, and they all flashed across my mind as I read. I was starting to get scared for my girl. What the hell had she gotten herself into? Claiming, previously in our marriage, that she could walk through walls - or cure AIDS with her hands - was one thing, but being indoctrinated into a cult? And - oh snap! - there were all those weirdly "nice" Reiki people who came by the house and just stared at me with the whites of their eyes all big - were they cultists? Were they trying to indoctrinate me? What was going on? What the fuck was happening here? Is that what all this trouble is about? I needed some answers - now.

I walked back into the bedroom and turned on the light, asking in as cool a way as I could, trying to mask my apprehension:

"Honey, are you in a cult?"

Karine didn't say "What are you talking about?" or "No" or "Are you crazy?" or anything a normal person would say. She just started shrieking, "It's not a cult! It's not a cult! It's not a cult!" over and over again, which, in my head, started the theme from Hitchcock's Psycho playing in time. The floor started dropping out from under me, and my stomach started sinking, and I was becoming aware of something ugly, and dark, and malicious, taking the place of air - and I began to get really freaked out - really, really, scared - about whatever was happening to my wife's mind. About whatever was happening to our marriage.

And for the first time in my life, I had no idea what to say.

To be continued by: