Everyone's A God (Who Drank Too Much In High School)

Maine man sentenced for ‘cult-like’ sexual misconduct 

  The TwinRay mystery: A spiritual group in Ashland raises eyebrows and worries

 

 THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: 

Indian state says yoga guru misled public with COVID, other cures

AMERICAN IDIOTS: 

Green Day's DNA is literally in the next generation of Bay Area pop-punk

I Swear To God

Earth's 'last cannibal tribe' butcher people 'possessed by demons'

Germany will remove the option for health insurance companies to include homeopathic services

How Nazis invaded Silicon Valley’s writer utopia 

   

 Bill Ackman ‘losing it’ over plagiarism allegations against wife 

   

 Celebrity food critic abandons Bay Area trip because it's too DANGEROUS

Coast To Coast (AM)

New Yorkers are ditching therapists for psychics

Bay Area restaurants institute penalty for brunch vomiters

You're Never Ready (For The Fall)

Man dies after fight on Bay Area hiking trail 

 

"When you get in trouble, you find out who your real friends are. And, it turns out, it's black people."

Mormon leaders double down on gender and marriage

Why Kylie Jenner And Jaden Smith Were Linked To A Cult While Dating

Disney sued over massive wedgie

Fish oil supplements are basically worthless

Paris is crawling with bedbugs. They're even riding the trains.

The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards Names 2 Music Genres He Can't Stand

How Important Are Five Years To Knowing The World?

"'California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco,' is what? Another NewAge 'power spot', filled with 'rich people', just like Sedona, Arizona. Stupid, gullible, and easily-led rich people - if you ask me - and they're all hurting other people by acting on their NewAge beliefs." 

 - TMR, October 23, 2009

"Sedona, Arizona has been kind of a magnet for groups called cults,...Demographically, there are a lot of people there who have extra money.  They have money to spend.  It's an affluent area and there are a lot of groups that are set up there, most notably James Arthur Ray,..." 

 - Cult expert, Rick Ross, Apr 28, 2014

 

Something To Talk About? What Is There To Talk About?

Let's see, rifling through my Rolodex of traditional white answers (probably shouldn't use the word "rifling") what comes up, first, are "Don't Care" plus "Playing The Race Card" and "Playing The Victim" together:

“Black students constantly negotiate racialized and racist constructions of their everyday interactions.

Something [is] terribly wrong with the experience that African-American students are having at San Jose State.”

O.K., based on the fact they're "playing," whites have shown enough disinterest to conclusively find blacks are just going to have to live with it:

Let's move on,….

 

They Don't Call It A Nanny State For Nothing,...

My favorite San Francisco Bay Area reporter, Henry K. Lee, has another great story of the lunacy that goes on:

Marin County has agreed to pay $1.9 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who accused sheriff's deputies of shocking him with a Taser when he refused to go to the hospital after he fell.

Marin settles Taser-shock suit for $1.9 million

Absolutely hilarious. Or shocking! Or crazy. I'm settling for crazy.

How about you?

Well: The Rolling Stone Gathers Moss After All

Here's how the people who broke up their marriages, determined to change the world, spent the last ten years - and take note of how the word "we" is used:

Remember the '90s, when we all thought we were crazy? Everyone ran out and got a shrink (New Yorkers got analysts — not just for Woody Allen anymore!). Couples' therapy became a widely chosen ritualistic precursor to divorce, aimed at clarifying for each party exactly when and how their spouse became reprehensible. The middle-aged departed on healing retreats en masse to learn about centering and recovering their inner child. The most fragile souls wound up in stuffy hotel conference rooms under the banner of Werner Erhard's Forum, where an authoritarian patriarch urged them to simply sweep away their "rackets" like so many dust bunnies.

And here they are now - their inner child still insisting on some ethically-challenged, organic, recyclable, utopia of nonsense - hoping someone will feel sorry for them after all the trouble they've caused, the money they've thrown away ("I was a shopaholic") and the lives they've destroyed:



Beating the homeless guy to "the good stuff"?

As Bob Dylan asked, how does it feeeeeel?

The Bottom Line (The Very Bottom)

"Gore 'has become a laughingstock. The glaciers have not melted. If his advice he gives to Apple is as faulty as his views on the environment then he doesn't need to be re-elected.'"

-- Erica Ogg, quoting "Sheldon" ("a longtime and well-known Apple shareholder") as he urged Apple Computer against Al Gore's re-election to the board of directors - for reasons that are becoming obvious to everyone - and showing, even in the wooly-headed Bay Area, common sense is making a comeback, as reported by CNET.

UPDATE: The University of Tennessee is discussing giving Gore an honorary degree, with it's board vice chairman, Jim Murphy, saying:

"This probably would be the the most controversial honorary degree awarded so far, and it might not be the most controversial honorary degree we'll see. At the end of the day, it's all about is this going to help the university or is it going to hurt the university?"

Good question. Let's try to sort that one out. Giving an honorary degree to "a laughingstock" who tried to snooker his own country into blowing a trillion dollars on nothing, relinquishing it's sovereignty to the bozos at the U.N., and telling us a lie that the non-existent "science is settled" (and anyone who used common sense and didn't go along was the same as a Holocaust denier)?

Oh, I'm sure, backing all that is gonna help your school's image a hella lot,...

Guilty As Sin

Man, this James Arthur Ray story can just get to be too much. ABC News has an interview with an orthodontist, Beverly Bunn, whose roommate died in that Sedona, Arizona sweat lodge.

Bunn is a total NewAger - the very definition of the Mystic Bourgeoisie - even wearing the uniform: short boyish haircut, dangly earrings, several pendents of some sort, a light scarf hung just-so, over something purple from India or someplace "spiritual" and/or ethnic like that. Beverly goes on to describe the other sweatlodge attendees as really driven "rich people". Stupid, gullible, and easily-led rich people, if you ask me.

And let's not forget to close the 7th circle of Hell that is NewAge's presence in the medical field. From Wired Magazine:

"Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth)."

And "California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco," is what? Another NewAge "power spot", filled with "rich people", just like Sedona, Arizona. Stupid, gullible, and easily-led rich people - if you ask me - and they're all hurting other people by acting on their NewAge beliefs. (Wired says "almost 10 percent" of the children in California elementary schools "may already be at risk" because of these loons,...)

And how about the NewAge image of NewAge parents in NewAge power spots refusing medical care to their NewAge kids - which threatens other kids - while their NewAge physicians are leading others to their deaths in NewAge sweatlodges? True story.

That's NewAge.

Speaking of NewAge physicians hanging out in NewAge sweatlodges, let's get back to good ol' Beverly Bunn:

"Bunn, trained in CPR as part of her medical credentials, said she repeatedly tried to perform the life-saving measures on her friend, but was continuously rebuffed by Ray's employees known as the 'Dream Team.'"

So, is anybody going to ask Beverly why her training for those "medical credentials" - which had to include at least a bit of science - didn't prevent her from attending a NewAge retreat in the first place?

Didn't her training to get her "medical credentials" already teach her all this talk of "toxins" and "cleansing" is snake oil - supported by nothing in medicine - or does she go on babbling this incredible nonsense when she's at work?

Has it dawned on her yet that if she had used knowledge, easily-gleaned from her training to earn her "medical credentials", her roommate would be alive today?

Does she get that with the training she received to get her "medical credentials" she had everything necessary to prevent the tragic death of her roommate but, instead, Beverly and her NewAge "beliefs" egged it all on? At $9,000 a pop?

I mean, really, who is Beverly Bunn to be railing against James Arthur Ray when she's as guilty as he is?

San Francisco, Cafe' Gratitude, And The Grateful Dead: How America's Maddest City Is Serving Up Cultism - Raw - To Millions Daily

O.K., this is great - how slow are the people of San Francisco when it comes to the cultism surrounding them? Too fucking slow for words, or at least, the words on this blog. Let me explain:

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about a date I had at Cafe' Gratitude, a cult restaurant in San Francisco. I even linked to it, so everyone could know there was such a thing as a "cult restaurant", because (like all things cultish) it was a really weird marketing idea. "It was highly bizarre" I said. My point is, I knew it was a cult after one visit - that's all it took: one visit and - BOOM! - I knew a cult when I saw one. I even identified which cult it was: The Landmark Forum AKA "classes for crazy people". Nobody else seemed to mind or notice.

So here we are, two years later, and this very-popular San Francisco establishment is finally being outted by The East Bay Express - which ain't even a San Francisco newspaper!!! (The best San Francisco newspapers can do is wonder aloud if there isn't something *strange* going on here-and-there,...oh, and spread the NewAge cult outlook and propaganda around, like it's "old wine in a new bottle" is some "hip" and trendy thing I'd never heard of. You know, like being a hippie,...)

So anyway, now a blog called Mission Mission is asking:

"What happens to Café Gratitude from here?  Will it become another empty storefront because people are rational and will not support a brain-washing cult?  Or will Café Gratitude become the next FIJI Water: in spite of all its abuses, it’s still trendy to eat grass on a cracker?"

Here's my prediction: Absolutely nothing will happen because there are so very few "rational" people in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's how a cult restaurant was allowed to flourish - right in San Francisco - in the first place. I've already pointed out they've got a cult mayor - who allows cults to do their thing, freely, victims be damned. There's also a women's sex cult, there's been tons of cult "churches", and a cult bakery, yoga cults, and on and on - all with strong political backing from "open-minded" Democrats - so anyone who suggests this might not be the best way to run society is only looking for trouble. I know:

I've been talking about it for years now, at San Francisco City Hall itself, and anywhere else I could get a forum, and it's changed my public profile, from a popular "genius" level artist, thinker, and entertainer, into a pariah.

See, as my old friend Tony Sparks likes to say, "here's the thing":

San Francisco is so well-indoctrinated in cultish thinking, it's so well-surrounded by these clowns and how they "think", they ignore the obvious signs of it's mental illness and social corruption. While the rest of us are trying to "get all of our ducks in a row", they revel in contradictions and get excited by backstabbing. How else do you explain a NewAge mayor who defends gay marriage - while he's cheating with his best friend's wife - and then, after his betrayal and hypocrisy are exposed, garners a 75% approval rating for his efforts, propelling him to a run for the governorship of California without anyone seriously making a peep about his, ahhh, judgment? There's no explanation for it. Or there isn't, unless you take into account what else is going on in San Francisco that no one's really interested in openly discussing:

It's long-standing love affair with cultish thinking, cultism, cults and their supporters.

Harvey Milk is big again. Here he is, writing to then-president Jimmy Carter, talking about The Peoples Temple cult leader, Jim Jones, and some of the people who were trying to get their loved ones - including "Tim and Grace Stoen, who were trying to get their son--that Jones claimed as his own--out of the cultist's murderous hands" - and out of that soon-to-be murderous cesspool:

"There are some facts you should be informed of,...Rev. Jones is....a man of the highest character, who has undertaken constructive remedies for social problems which have been amazing in their scope and effectiveness. Timothy and Grace Stoen, the parties that are attempting to damage Rev. Jones' reputation, and seriously disrupt the life of his son, John, have both already been discredited by the media here,.....the life of a child is at stake....Mr. President, the actions of Mr. Stoen need to be brought to a halt. It is offensive to most in the San Francisco community, and all those who know Rev. Jones to see this kind of outrage taking place."

[Underlined emphasis TMR's.]

Funny but none of that made it into the movie on Milk. It also hasn't made it into any of the media coverage on him personally; Sean Penn has never mentioned it, nor Jimmy Carter, and nobody else is going to talk about it either - though Jones' cult was a major reason why Milk, the politician, was so popular. If you ask me, it's no surprise that he and Jones, though many miles apart, would ultimately die so close together.

It's also no surprise, after my experiences in San Francisco, that very few seem to want to investigate the cult connections laced all around that city. It's a NewAge cult haven - practically a coven - with almost everyone trained to demand we "move on" from anything incriminating or troubling, when what reporters ought to be doing is digging in, to see how much influence they have, who's involved, and, maybe, to end their particular form of insanity.

But that, surely, ain't gonna happen,...because, despite all their talk of "spirituality", there will be no soul-searching going on there: The cliche' is "only in San Francisco" - but they don't plan on keeping it that way.

P.S.

A big shout out to Henry K. Lee: you're doing a great job!