Dead Eyes Open

Trump calls Howard Stern a ‘broken weirdo’ while never mentioning Transcendental Meditation

In U.S., 47% Identify as Religious, 33% as Spiritual: "the 18% who say they are neither religious nor spiritual is twice the proportion Gallup measured when it first asked this question in 1999".

Mom Gets 30 Days for Waterboarding Infant Son and Putting Him in Freezer because - just a guess - she thought he was a member of Al-Qaeda.

Hillary Clinton receives leadership award from Westchester Parks Foundation, because that's how running a successful five-year Russia hoax aainst the President of the United States, your fellow citizens, and the world, is supposed to work

Doomsday cult leader who says he is reincarnation of Jesus is turning 1,500 children into sex slaves on remote Philippines island when he could be putting them to work in Subic City bars.

Jason Whitlock tells Shannon Sharpe: ‘Don’t be a woman, be a man’ and, somewhere, Dylan Mulvaney just got his wings.

 

There's A Reason (Brains Will Beat Brawn Every Time)

"Now, in his explosive autobiography, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, published today, he has revealed that he spent the weeks leading up to that sentencing, traveling round the country ‘romancing’ his various girlfriends. 

And where legal measures had let him down he had turned to ‘divine intervention,’ to bring him a light sentence. He visited a, ‘hoodoo woman’ who said she would cast a spell to keep him out of jail if he put five hundred dollar bills in a jar, urinated in it and kept it under his bed for three days. 

He sought out a voodoo priest who turned out to be a fraud, ‘I knew that guy had nothing,’ he recalls.

And he followed the instructions of a Santeria priest – going to the courthouse one night with a pigeon and an egg which he dropped on the ground as the bird was release and he yelled. ‘We’re free!’

He almost believed it would work. Because he felt invincible. ‘In my mind,’ he says, ‘I had no peers. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.’

He was sentenced to six years and served three."

Buck Shot / Buck Wheat: Only One Is Good & Nutritious

It takes years for these people to catch up with me. In 2008 (and calling him "an angry Buddhist") I wrote Sam Harris Doesn't Speak For Me, but here's an article just released today:

Sam Harris's books "The End Of Faith" and "Letter To A Christian Nation" have established him as second only to the British biologist and author Richard Dawkins in the ranks of famous 21st century atheists. The thrust of Harris's best-sellers is that with the world so crazed by religion, it's high time Americans stopped tolerating faith in the Rapture, the Resurrection and anything else not grounded in evidence. Only trouble is, our country's foremost promoter of "reason" is also supportive of ESP, reincarnation and other unscientific concepts.

That's 5 years, which means - atheists or no atheists - "late" doesn't even begin to describe these people,...

 

"Whizzing And Pasting And Pooting Through The Day"

We're NEVER going to get out of this NewAge Hell hole, as long as journalists keep throwing silly beliefs into stories:

“For James 'Whitey' Bulger, a Lifetime of Bad Karma Comes Back Around”

So THAT'S what they go to journalism school for - learning how to reveal NewAge propaganda:

“Karma serves to explain why good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. The injustices of the world, the seeming random distribution of good and evil, are only apparent. In reality, everybody is getting what he or she deserves. Even the child brutalized by drugged adults deserves the horror. The mentally ill, the retarded, the homosexuals, and the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis deserved it for evil they must have done in the past. The slave beaten to within a breath of death deserved it, if not for what he did today, then for what he did in some previous lifetime. Likewise for the rape victim. She is just getting what she deserves. All suffering is deserved, according to the law of karma. 

Despite the fact that there could be no evidence for a metaphysical belief in karma, the idea of karma is popular among many in western cultures where it has become detached from its Hindu roots. The theosophists, for example, believe in karma and reincarnation. So does James Van Praagh, who claims to be a psychic conduit for all the billions of people who have died over the centuries.”

So, the printing of this psychologically harmfully nonsense for me to read, is my fault? Thanks. BTW - the NewAge loons who printed the Whitey Bulger/Bad Karma exclusive? 

The Atlantic Magazine:

Another strong Glenn Reynolds favorite - next to Twitter,...

Ancient Teachings (From The Here And Now)

When it comes to maturity, some of us are practically walking tree rings:

"You cry and laugh like a child. I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”

Based on that criteria, I've practically been George Burns - reborn - a few times already,...

 

My Take: We're Being Driven To The Point Of Madness

It's funny, all the effort the West makes to "nudge" us away from things that are normal - smoking, for instance - while they make none what-so-ever towards eliminating superstition, so that stories like this aren't common:

'Evil' Nigerian people smuggler used witchcraft to terrify girls into sex slavery."

Alright, it's not funny - it's weird. (No belief in witchcraft, no problem, right? Seems simple enough.) But even weirder is how the only portion of society anyone seems even a *little* concerned about protecting from such nonsense is gays. Why? What about the rest of us? What makes it O.K. to bombard us with bullshit? Are we not deviant enough? Or - speaking as a black American who, I hear, everyone's been so concerned about - has the United Negro College Fund's slogan "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste" now been put out to pasture, in favor of hysteria over someone's new kid on the block?

And is my country, America, the engine of The Enlightenment, really "The New World" (as the rest of the planet thinks it is) when - in the year 2012 - we have grown men asking "Should we thank Satan for being here?" while others bring up God in political debates, and preachers act as overseers to our elections? Why are there horoscopes in our newspapers? People getting away with claiming to talk to the dead on our television screens? Hit movies about reincarnation? Why do I have to read "Young exorcists conquer demons" when I know there are no demons? And why isn't anyone else saying to, finally, cut it out?

I'm almost sorry to say it - because I know it's not all of them - but I think I know,…

 

"Everything Is Connected" (Nice Try)

Buddhism's A Belief Right Out Of Sesame Street

How a supposedly atheist country can continue to play this game is beyond us:

It’s probably best not to even try making sense of Beijing’s pronouncements on the 14th Dalai Lama and other Tibetan spiritual leaders: you’ll only make your head hurt. Last week the officially atheist Chinese government’s State Administration for Religious Affairs disclosed plans to enact a new law forbidding the 75-year-old Buddhist deity to be reborn anywhere but on Chinese-controlled soil, and giving final say to Chinese authorities when the time comes to identify his 15th incarnation.

That might seem to pose a dilemma, given the exiled leader’s earlier promise that he will never again be reincarnated in Tibet as long as his homeland remains under China’s heel. Still, no one seems too concerned just now about the Dalai Lama’s next life.

Considering no one in the history of mankind has ever been proven to have reincarnated, that last line is the only thing in the entire article resembling a connection to reality. Here's a fun fact about why the Dalai Lama's staying in India, though:

The Chinese say he’s merely on a quest to retrieve a black hat said to have magical powers,...

A magic hat? Suurrre. We think he's also traveling with an imaginary friend. Whatever.

There's some other nonsense in there about him somehow magically acquiring $1.6 million dollars, but who cares about that? The man's reincarnated and looking for a magic hat!

Look, call us whenever those guys in the orange robes decide to grow up, o.k.?

England, You're Getting Pretty Dotty In Old Age

Well, at least we know how many of the cluelessly gullible types are out there:

More  than half of Britons believe in life after death and two in five believe in angels.

Some 53 per cent believe in psychic powers and the possibility of life after death, a survey reveals. One in five say they have seen a ghost or felt the presence of a spirit while two in five believe in ‘guardian angels’.

Many people believe they have seen the ghost or felt the spirit of a close friend or relative who has passed away.

Two in five say they want to speak to dead relatives and one in five has visited a medium or psychic to help them do so – spending an average of £31 per visit.

Almost two in five adults believe someone in their family is gifted with psychic ability.

A third of the nation describe themselves as ‘spiritual’ but only a quarter claim to be ‘religious’, according to the study carried out for the Clint Eastwood film Hereafter.


However, a third of the nation still believes in heaven and a fifth believes they will be reincarnated when they pass away.

One in five British adults would also love to have a conversation with the former Princess of Wales. Albert Einstein came second in the online poll of 3,000 adults, followed by Marilyn Monroe and Freddie Mercury. Seven per cent of us want to chat to Adolf Hitler.


Penny Sartori, an expert on near-death experiences and author of the study, said people are now less worried about being ridiculed for believing in spirits.

But one in five of us would still be too embarrassed to admit we had seen or felt the presence of a ghost.

Now why would anyone be embarrassed about something they believed was true? We'll tell you:

Because even the hopelessly self-deluded are aware there's a huuuge difference between believing things and knowing them.

Nix What's In Your Wallet? What's In Your Brain?

Australia's Sydney Morning Herald had a pretty good article about a woman named Carli McConkey and "how the unwary fall victim to mind control" (and isn't it strange we don't see more articles like that in America, where the phenomena is most prevalent?) We thought it was worth mentioning.

After 40 plus years of cult indoctrination, themes of NewAge mind control exist throughout Western culture already, so we're going to look at the McConkey story the Sydney Morning Herald presents and see how many of our regular themes are in this one lady's life story, and also how they form a matrix that's almost impossible for anyone to escape without critical thought. (Anybody else notice how NewAgers multi-task, with chiropractors promoting homeopathy and the like? That's an especially easy tactic.)

"Prison walls and chains are not necessary when one believes these things,'' says Clinical Professor Doni Whitsett of the University of Southern California, who has been working with cultists and their families for 20 years. "Carli's is 'a tragic textbook case', she says" and here's what was in Carli's textbook - and may also already be in yours:

The NewAge doomsday prophesy of Armageddon in 2012. (Read the book, seen the movie, right? Why?)

"New Age personal development" groups. (Thanks, Oprah!)

The concept of "Mind Body Spirit". (Brought to you by a nearby hospital or "wellness center")

Psychic readings. (There's one of these frauds found on almost every street corner,...)

"Metaphysical" beliefs and seeing Metaphysical ''signs''. (If you're seeing any of these, what you need is psychiatric help.)

Keep an open mind, or ''leave your logic at the door'', to avoid ''judgmentalism". (This is merely telling you not to think as they either pick your pocket or otherwise try to take something you've got - like your soul.)

Cleansing impurities. (Your liver does that already.)

''Intuition''. ("Guessing".)

Being told one can ''manifest'' (or make) things happen in the real world using your mind. (AKA The Secret scam and Transcendental Meditation.)

Encountering the "bait and switch" cult technique of saying the first course will fix everything, only to be informed that to become fully ''integrated'', there were no fewer than 17 other courses, all at considerable expense, to do. (Scientology.)

Hanging out on dating websites. (This is just a bad idea all around - can't you walk outside and talk to people?)

Communes. (Communism.)

Women wearing headscarfs to signify subservience. (Or anything other than it's cold.)

Attending "workshops". (Or "seminars", or "retreats" - they're always offering a fucking "retreat".)

Public nakedness. (We know, We know, but still - we don't know these people.)

Vegan diets. (Once they control what you eat, they can control your mind, and a diet with no meat means you're less likely to fight back.)

An apparently random reward-punishment system. (You know, like Obama tries to do.)

Reincarnation. (This is just stupid to believe in.)

The Intergalactic Council of the Universe. (This is even stupider.)

The city of Atlantis. (We're really dumbing down now.)

''Spirit guides". (Pain works better.)

Cult leaders pretending to have god-like powers. (Adults "pretending" at all.)

Feminism. (Female guards at concentration camps.)

Any outsider claiming to have a symbiotic relationship with someone already in a marriage is probably a cultist. (Why would anyone want to insert themselves into another's marriage anyway? Don't they already have a life?)

Don't be a sucker - none of these things are important to anyone's life or well-being:

Just don't go there - or get away from them now - because they're only propagated by the ugliest of people. If you don't believe us, look at Louise Hay above - gross!