So Slate magazine - are these things still "magazines" if they only exist online? - says The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone, using "we" in much the same way Kurt Andersen does in "Fantasyland": as though we're all guilty of a little yoga, meditation, and whatnot, so must all accept the blame for the lunacy. Nope, sorry, Bud, this is just on y'all. (Especially those supposedly in control. Bill and Hillary and Jen and Brad, etc., all consulting crazy Ken Wilber (above) - Oprah Winfrey will believe anybody about any damned thing - I can't think of any Americans who've been less in control than these celebrities who've been dominating our lives throughout the latter half of the 20th Century.) You Thunderbirds were go, go, GO!
Trump haters understand "flyover country" in the same way they do the president, using the same amount of information, and in equal amounts, because (as we've seen with more-than-a-few journalists trudging in to see "normal Americans" since Trump won) they've deliberately had no real experience with any of this. Notice it's the America "We Thought We Knew" - not the real one - they're lamenting seeing go. The fantasy they've held that never existed. The real America's still here - filled with "deplorables" - and they still hate it. Get it? The fact the "good guys" *might not* be America's haters occurs to them much less than it does Mitchell & Webb's Nazi SS Men wondering if, maybe, they're "the baddies".
Slate's writer is someone named Lili Loopbourow, and she's upset "a reality-television star who lost the popular vote by millions" gets to do stuff. That's odd because, if seeing Donald Trump make it to the White House - right after one-term Senator Barack Obama - doesn't mean the maxim "anybody can president in America" is true, then I don't know what does. And hating the game, after Hillary lost it, is just sour grapes.
"Don't hate the player, Baby,..."
There's no need to go on. (I told you I don't reason with the unreasonable.) I'm just glad to acknowledge the Left's fantasy world is falling apart. I hope they don't take being "really woke" too hard - it's for the best:
All that sleeping everybody was doing is what got us into this mess.
I rented this movie last night, above, thinking it was a fiction. But, instead, it was a "documentary" - and a brochure for Democracy Now! Once I knew I'd been tricked - and was not going to get my night of thought-provoking entertainment - I was stuck on-guard for two hours, absorbing a sad but too-manipulative bit of agitprop for two young "activists" who, to my eyes, discovered the perils of oikaphobia in wartime.
They almost had me there for a little while (Hey, I'm a sensitive guy) but the ending made it clear I needn't worry because - right after you see one of these losers get out of prison for his former protest activities - there he is, right back on the picket line, allowing himself to be used again for leftist propaganda purposes. Including this movie's leftist propaganda purpose.
I turned off the TV, shook my head, and thought of only one word:
Ooooh, not good. I swear it happened just like this:
I took a look over at the cow's and there's a link to a doozy of an article on Ann Althouse - something in Reason Magazine that I'd never seen before - showing she's pulled this crazy schtick before. In public. Like for realz:
"Once the topic had been broached over dinner, I turned to another tablemate who is a fervent Catholic intellectual to discuss some bioethical stuff. We had brought up transhumanism during one of the sessions earlier in the day. The two of us were having a perfectly civil conversation about the moral status of embryos. Anyway next thing I know, Ann Althouse is shouting at two of our dinner companions demanding that they prove to her (Althouse) that they are not racists! She kept asking over and over, 'How do I know that I'm not sitting at a table full of racists?' This was completely bizarre! It should go without saying, but I will say it: No one at the conference could even remotely be accused of being racist."
This guy, Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent (you can't make this stuff up) even nails her classic debating style - from all the way back in 2006:
"...Because she didn't want to appear to be hypocrite, she refused to answer and kept asking more and more abstract questions about their example. When she was backed into a corner, she lashed out, suggesting that people who disagreed with her feelings were racists. Eventually, she was so upset that she began crying. Of course, at that point the possibility of civil intellectual discourse completely evaporated.
I was also astonished by the poise with which my tablemates handled Althouse. Our companions did not raise their voices nor dismiss her (as I would have), but tried to calm her down. In fact, Althouse made the situation even more personal by yelling repeatedly at one of my dinner companions (who is also a colleague) that she was an 'intellectual lightweight' and an 'embarrassment to women everywhere.' In fact, in my opinion, with that statement Althouse had actually identified herself. Before Althouse stalked away, I asked her to apologize for that insult, but she refused."
Bingo. And she (and especially Meade) thinks The Macho RESPONSE is out of place, or even something to be mocked, when faced with that insanity. The truth comes in Bailey's conclusion, one that has to pass through the mind of any thinking person, observing Ann over time:
"I sure hope that Ann Althouse's behavior at the Liberty Fund colloquium is not example how 'intellectual discourse' is conducted in her law school classes in Madison, Wisconsin. In her bloggingheads.tv discussion with my friend Jonah Goldberg (who was a participant in the Meyer colloquium) she keeps telling him that he shouldn't be her enemy. I may not be her enemy, but given her outrageous behavior and completely baseless insinuations about intelligent humane people, I sure don't want to be her friend. As she said, 'I need to be more vigilant.'"
Shit, she needs to put Bailey's column in the "ABOUT" section of her banner,...
You have to wonder, at 60 years old, what decade (or century) Ann Althouse thinks she's living in:
"You took the opportunity to oppress when it was there, and now that it's gone, you want to say you are oppressed. Man up, losers."
Who is she talking about? Who "took the opportunity to oppress when it was there"? It's like me railing against slave owners (who delusional Ann more reminds me of) rather than accepting everybody here, now, found the world this way, too. I was a gay man's caretaker. Does that fit "the opportunity to oppress" narrative she's spinning about straight men today? Or will she ever understand A) she doesn't have a clue about us, and B) her stupid ass is part of the problem?
I mean, if you pick a fight, you get a fight. Is that so difficult to figure out?
"Whatever happens happens" as Roger L. Simon said.
I've made the point if they demand we go there - the weak lose.
Are you starting to get it yet?
She says we should "Man up" but - for thinking and acting like men - we've also heard her bullshit. We're already used to women being "dissatisfied" but this is ridiculous.
What she's ultimately saying is America's a zero sum game to her - winners/losers - which is why I bag on her feminist ass. I don't buy her bullshit for a minute. She's an oikaphobe.
That lack of a connection to the country is why The Civil Rights Movement, which wasn't filled with venom, cynicism, or out for revenge, was different.
It was for America. America's why blacks marched.
Whatever his faults, MLK never aspired to defeat anybody.
He didn't, and wouldn't, lead a Black Power Movement.
It's only when Ann's generation - of all stripes - got there that everything went so wrong,...
Didn't I tell you Drudge has been fishing - for something to hype - for a little while now?
Looks like he got it.
Still doesn't make it news.
Isn't it fascinating how - even with all the *known* charlatans out there - they still decide to run with speculation? Assumptions. This "could" be true (could not) and this "may" have happened (may not) so much you stop listening because you may as well be getting your news from ghost hunters?
Day before yesterday, they were interviewing a vegan on NPR and he said the United States doesn't do anything well anymore, and I wondered how NPR can get a community service license when it actively chooses to broadcast such a twisted view of the world and our place in it?
Everybody's got their heads stuck so far up their own asses they can't see their way out.
I don't know if it's human nature, but I guess most people only seem to gain perspective in disaster, and then it's back to the bullshit. Remember 9/11? We're all Americans now? I think we're over it.
Major news stories? Come on. Do you really think this news gathering before us - right now - has somehow got you better informed than during the chaos of 9/11? Come on again:
They're "informing" you - about a "scandal" that isn't there - how "useful" is that?
As useful as becoming a NewAger because you didn't like religion.
O.K., this is good. A friend called me at work today to tell me about it. (Here, you have to picture me talking cultism on a construction site - with everyone listening in,...) Check it out - first, a quote from Virginia lieutenant gubernatorial candidate and pastor E.W. Jackson:
"When one hears the word meditation, it conjures an image of Maharishi Yoga talking about finding a mantra and striving for nirvana. . . . The purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. . . . [Satan] is happy to invade the empty vacuum of your soul and possess it. That is why people serve Satan without ever knowing it or deciding to, but no one can be a child of God without making a decision to surrender to him. Beware of systems of spirituality which tell you to empty yourself. You will end up filled with something you probably do not want."
Seems pretty clear to me, and I'm an atheist. An atheist who understands the Christian dialect. Here's what The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta has to say in response:
"Yoga has become so normalized in American life that this seems an extreme position (no pun intended). And yet Jackson's warning about on the spiritual dangers of yoga are not uncommon among Christian conservatives representing a variety of denominations."
Isn't it nice to know something completely alien to the American people and culture (except for the oikaphobes) is normal? And, of course, the preacher is nutty because,...well, he's a preacher. America's apparently unfamiliar with them. Unfortunately, Carl Jung wasn't a preacher (he was just kind-of a preacher) and he said something pretty close to what E.W. Jackson saidas well, calling yoga's torments "Hellish":
Funny how these American yogi's pumping this crap within the "yoga-industrial complex" never mention that - or studies showing a negative effect from yoga - in their yoga classes ("What you're doing can drive you crazy. O.K., let's go!").
Or articles supporting yoga (which is normal in America) by people who hate Christians (which is obviously some new faddish import from India or something,...).
It's just Rah-Rah-Rah, join the cult of stretching, and the other "ancient teachings" (that make you hate anything normal) that comes with it.
That indoctrination process is something else they don't mention, BTW. They "just do it" and then, you know what? "Going Green" and abortion and gays throwing shit in churches, and thinking the greatest country on Earth is it's ultimate problem - and just everything un-American - somehow makes as much sense, as "America", as stupid "spiritual" American tourists getting gang raped overseas says "India" and "spirituality".
Actually any sex says "yoga" (yogi's all over this country are being busted for it) but don't tell Glenn Reynolds, who both promotes and chooses to laugh about it all, the fuck faced idiot.
Here's another juicy morsel from The Atlantic article:
Anyone who has experience with what I think of as the American yoga-industrial complex knows that the pope's warning gets at an underlying tension in the way yoga is taught in the West. Either it's presented as an ancient spiritual practice conducted through the body -- and as such one that can conflict with the religious tenets of other faiths, especially their fundamentalist strains -- or it is assimilated into the competitive athletic cult of the body, shorn of its spiritual underpinnings and significance and turned into something like Indian pilates.
The "Cult of the body". Kinda has a nice ring to it, no?
Yeah, even if it does mean you're a self-interested jack-ass. And why do so many women take pictures that make them look like Satan's baby killers?
Anyway, at least somebody's admitting A) there's a "yoga-industrial complex", B) it's a "spiritual practice" that's "presented" as what it's not, C) yoga "can conflict with" the outside world (what's outside the practitioner's narcicissim), D) it's a cult - "of the body" or whatever else (as the preacher said) they want to "fill" it with, and E) it's definitely Indian - and definitely not American.
Wow - if The Atlantic was ever tortured for information, they wouldn't last a minute,...
Adhering to a western style diet lowers a person's chances of achieving older age in good health and with higher functionality, according to a news release.
The latest study, published in The American Journal of Medicine, states that a western style diet, which includes fried and sweet food, processed and red meat, high fat dairy products and refined grains leads to a greater risk of premature death.
I'd believe that if I'd never traveled and seen what lousy condition the rest of the world is in. This "news release" should also include one other major discovery in the west that's never mentioned:
