Showing posts with label the times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the times. Show all posts

Friday, March 5, 2010

Wait - Lying, Cheating, Exploitation, Violence, Prostitution - Didn't Spirituality End All That?

"Angry villagers have ransacked the headquarters of one of India’s most famous 'swamis' — or Hindu holy men — after local television stations broadcast footage that appeared to show him cavorting in bed with two women.

Paramhamsa Nityananda, who claims two million followers in 33 countries, was not present when the villagers stormed the sprawling retreat about 19 miles from the southern city of Bangalore on Wednesday, according to local police.

They said that 100 officers had been deployed to protect the ashram, which is home to many Indian and Western devotees, and has been visited by several prominent Indian politicians.

Nityananda — whose Life Bliss Foundation was founded in 2003 and now has 11 ashrams around India and 26 in foreign countries, including one in London — appears to have gone into hiding.

The attack came less than a week after police in Delhi arrested another Hindu guru on suspicion of using his ashram as a front for a high-class prostitution racket involving airline hostesses and college girls."
-- The Times of London

Monday, February 22, 2010

The Left Is Learning: Your Heroes Aren't Heroes

"The meltdown of the climate change movement is entering a new phase as the European left turns on the UN climate change office and the IPCC.

When the British press attacked the IPCC, the US media insofar as they noted the British attacks at all, dismissed newspapers like the Telegraph and the Times as right wing outlets — Fox News in print.  What do they say about this latest inconvenient truth: that left wing papers on the Continent increasingly believe that the movement to get a global climate treaty is dead and that the follies, dilettantism and errors of the climate change advocates rather than the churlishness of their critics is to blame?

Nothing.

The blogosphere has shamed some leading US newspapers into paying perfunctory attention to one of the biggest stories in several years.  But there’s still no sign that the US press is ready to pursue this still unfolding story with anything like the determination it deserves.  Until then, Americans will have to rely on the internet to watch this story unfold — and every day that goes on, the mainstream US media lose readers and respect."
-- Walter Russell Mead, discussing the negative reactions in Germany, France, and England to the farce known as Climategate - "the 'biggest scientific scandal in history'” - while our own papers carry on as normal, doing nothing in The American Interest.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

It's Time To Grow Up

"The time has come to wean ourselves off this fatal addiction to mythology. We should learn to distinguish between entertainment and reality, to separate fact and fiction, and to understand that real life is more than just a video game for adolescents. In short, we should learn to grow up."

- Magnus Linklater, on the "sinister" developments believing in things can create, in The Times.

"We're not given the tools to be discriminating anymore."

- Leslie Griffiths, former KTVU news anchor, who (obviously) didn't get the memo that to judge one view of things as better than another makes you "an asshole" in the San Francisco Bay Area,...