Hooray!: "James Randi - An Honest Liar" Is Now Online For Everybody To Watch

If America, and it's people, were who we say we are, this man - and his work - would be much more famous. As it is, he's known just well enough to be my hero.

Sexy Time

"It's not like the signs weren't there. It's just I wasn't wanting to put them together and understand them, because I just wanted to keep doing it."

I'm Just Going To Let This Comment Sit There A While For Your Personal Perusal

Everything Seems To Be Up-In-The-Air At This Point

Boy - for a time and place that's said to have been going fine and dandy - I sure can find a whole bunch of "looks like a cult" newspaper-type columns out there:

"The video is weird almost beyond belief, and it makes Google appear like a cult in the rigidity of the doctrines held and inculcated by its leadership. At one point, everyone is instructed to hug the person next to him, as at a human-potential movement weekend. It’s enough to make a reasonable person of moderate temperament gag."

And - Hey! - I'm now "a reasonable person of moderate temperament" - while y'all are weirdos, still awaiting your "Oh shit, it's a cult!" moment. Now THAT'S new!

A New Movie About The Oregonians Sacrificing Kids To Beat Death Or Good Men Trying To Do The Best They Can To Please Their God For Their Heavenly Reward

You've Eventually Got To Learn You Must Take It (If There's Nothing Pinned Down)

What happens in a country that knows psychics don't have powers, but lets them operate anyway? The authorities start to make it really easy for others - like a company of NewAge bullshit artists who became worth half a billion dollars:

Goop to Pay $145,000 Settlement for 'Misleading' Claims About the Effectiveness of Vaginal Eggs

Ouch. That's not gonna hurt. I can see how this plays out elsewhere in society:

One reason the break-ins have become so common is that almost no one is ever arrested in these cases. Back in January, the San Francisco Chronicle reported there had been 81,000 reported break-ins over a period of seven years, but only 13 cases resulted in arrests.

So, the NewAge is a criminal heyday. But that's what happens in a country that knows psychics don't have powers, but lets them operate anyway. So now what?

A Little Breeze

I wanted to make sure I recorded that I saw these words, in print, somewhere else:

This is insanity.

That is all. You can go back to pretending now.

"I Hate Your Face!"

GOOP: Stephen Don't Know, Gwyneth Don't Know: Nobody Knows, But The Hoes

Once I Discovered The Matrix I Was Doomed To A Lifetime In This Dystopian Hell

Almost two decades later, this sounds like kind of a familiar - rather than unique - experience, for some overseas at the time (as I soon was) watching 9/11 unfold:

I had just gotten back from a year in France....In the weeks that followed, I watched the American news with one eye, and its European counterpart with the other....The one time my country could side with the U.S. was when America was on its knees, but when it refused to stay down it quickly went back to the smug relativism of World War II, the icy efficiency of a country never having to fight for either ethics or its existence.

Soon enough, the narrative was clear....Bush was a moron and a puppet. America was killing innocent people for oil. It went on and on, and all I could think was that if I know that these things are not true, then what other lies have I accepted as truth throughout my life?

So I pulled at the thread of my ideology, and it all unraveled before me.

If, instead of "a European Upper-Middle-Class Radical", this woman had been poor and black - here or in France - then she would've really had a problem.