Animals

At least now they're noticing:

"When nearly the whole company right up to the CEO is on the partisan left (as we just saw at Google) you are risking your job to disagree."

When it's a whole city (like San Francisco or Berkeley) you're risking your life.

Asking The Big Guy

Tell me something good. Well? What do we have here? Looks educational:

New findings from researchers at UC Berkeley suggest that feedback, rather than hard evidence, boosts people’s sense of certainty when learning new things or trying to tell right from wrong.

These are "new findings," huh? So what exactly is "feedback"?

Developmental psychologists have found that people’s beliefs are more likely to be reinforced by the positive or negative reactions they receive in response to an opinion, task or interaction, than by logic, reasoning and scientific data.

They're saying, once the NewAge established a culture of saying "Don't Judge", elements - dangerous to that culture - were then free to flourish, because DUH.

Fucking "Ancient teachings" are more helpful to us at this point.

Look, it's easy: Stop pushing yoga and meditation (we've got P.E., thanks) and the paranormal (not because it's not real, but, because it's not real, and causes problems) start arresting frauds (people who make/sell bad products) con artists (like psychics) and quacks (and any others screwing up the medical field). And then, start openly questioning why celebrities are so into promoting them. These are almost all cult tactics and groups. Anyone can see what they're up to now - but can you think of a more sinister way to get and keep an audience - if that's what they think they're doing, at that point? The point of exploiting who loves you?

They're calling Africa Bambaataa a cult leader now. Madonna's one, and so are Gwyneth Paltrow and Oprah. Arianna Huffington, Shirley MacLaine. Dr. Oz - I've got tags for all of them, below. The Democrats got it goin' on! Hell, if you're not aware of who's in the NewAge cult, it's enough to make you wonder:

Are you? And who isn't? (Isn't it?)

As I Was Saying: The Press Plays Footsie W/ Rand Paul

This is a portrait of American civilization.

Slate's David Weigel caught it, the clumsy slight-of-hand accepted as brilliance at Berkeley:

 "What I find fascinating about the coverage is the ease with which Paul shaped it...

…Hillary Clinton spent eight years in the Senate and four at the State Department, but has to answer for her husband's actions in the mid-1990s. Paul, with three years behind him in the Senate, says he does not have to answer for what his father does right now.

…I expect the way the media handles this to change on a dime when Paul stops being a fascinating, bridge-building libertarian politician, and starts being a potential president.

Which is why it's a waste of time and money and can we stop now?

Blacks Fight For Justice - But It's Paul Rand Getting Help

If Rand Paul says it at Berkely, it's a rare revealing moment - but let a black Republican say it to Republicans and it's a hostility-infused blasphemy and a breech:

  “Remember Domino’s [the pizza chain] finally admitted they had bad crust? I think the Republican Party finally admitted it. OK, bad crust, we need a different kind of party.” 

 Yeah, one that - like Domino’s - actually delivers what it should and on time:

That would be "different",…

 

50 Years Ago Today Malcolm X Was Invited To Berkeley

The family of Malcolm X has launched a lawsuit to stop the publication of a diary of the late civil-rights leader's last year.

The Diary of Malcolm X, a reproduction of a private diary kept as he travelled to the Middle East and Africa immediately before his assassination, is due to be published this week, according to Third World Press, a Chicago-based company. The publisher lists one of the leader's six daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, as a co-editor.

But in papers filed to Manhattan federal court, according to the Associated Press, heirs to Malcolm X say Third World Press does not have the right to publish it.

Hypnotized (By The Cult Of Enviro-Mentalism)

"Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with 'Ecotopia,' a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known."

 

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called 'recycle bins' sit on trains, along with 'hanging ferns and small plants.'

A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. 

'You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.'

...Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. 

 

And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. 

...'Ecotopia' has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their 'natural' aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)

 Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: 

 

Most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world.

Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. 'Ecotopia' is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.

Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. 

Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere 'Walden.'

“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. 'This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.'

But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, 'Ecotopia' is a blueprint for the future.

'It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,' he said. 'But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.'

'And we’d better get ready,' he added. 'We need to know where we’d like to go.'"

-- Scott Timberg, on the '70s cult novel that has been discovered as a cultishly philosophical blueprint for American society's current manipulation, in The New York Times.

Hey - It Ain't Called "Berzerkeley" For Nothing!

If you've ever lived there, then you know what Zombie's talking about:

I call it “the Berkeley expression.”

Whenever I visit Berkeley — in particular certain upscale areas populated by academics and wealthy intellectuals — practically everyone I see has this creepy look on his or her face. It’s hard to describe, but once you’ve seen it enough times it’s unmistakable: a special kind of conspiratorial smugness, a faint “knowing smile” coupled with a glance that conveys a sense of not just personal superiority, but of mutual superiority. In an instant, the Berkeley expression communicates to everyone in the vicinity, “Isn’t it great that you and I and all of us here are morally superior to the rest of the world?”

Of course they're nothing of the kind, and if you continue to read the article, you'll discover what they really are - a bunch of entitled liars, and despicable cheats, who'll scream "raaacist" whenever they don't get their way.

Well, actually, Zombie's saying something else entirely. But it's for that, more than anything else, they think they're the shit. They practically invented behaving that way.

And, in truth, we actually don't know what Zombie's talking about,...

This Is A Normal Picture Of A Business Meeting (Or How Too Many Folks Seem To View Them)

Little-by-little, the world is closing in on - and warming up to - this blog's theme:

Please be advised: No updates on the health of Steve Jobs are contained in this article. Nor, despite its title, are there any in the piece being reviewed herein. Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," which opened Sunday at Berkeley Rep's Thrust Stage, is much more concerned with the moral health of a society hooked on the products of Jobs' company.

And with the physical health of the labor that produces them.

Which is not to say that Daisey doesn't like Apple computers, iPhones, iPads and the rest. Or that he doesn't regard Jobs as a genius, with a particularly good eye for design. Quite the contrary. In one of the indefatigable raconteur's most tightly constructed, passionate and socially engaged monologues yet, Daisey's anger and biting comedy stem from his heartbreak as a former longtime "worshiper in the house of Mac."

Together with "The Last Cargo Cult," which Daisey is performing in repertory with this piece, "Agony" fills out a trenchant and funny critique of what might be the most deeply held, if unacknowledged, beliefs in our culture. In "Cargo," he visits an actual cargo cult in the remote South Pacific, juxtaposing its overt worship of material goods with a look at the depth of our faith in money. In "Agony," he takes on the worship of technology and its high priest, because religion is, in essence, "the way we see the world."

So, if "religion is, in essence, 'the way we see the world'" - and considering how shitty everything's been lately - what would happen if we stopped looking at the world that way? You know, dropped all the "spiritual" and "intuitive" nonsense and went with what we actually know?

Yea, yea, we're waaay ahead of you,...that's crazy talk!

Stupidity So Thick It's A Wonder We're Still Here

Hey, look what Sunday morning's been reduced to:

A bunch of out of touch has-beens talking nonsense with no basis in reality.

And who's the new talking British corpse?

Here's a bagillion word blog post that all adds up to "fuck you, liberal".

At this point, why do people insist on saying more?

Kids today - they need their asses kicked.

The typical woman is an easily manipulated idiot who can't wait to drop her drawers.

(Luckily, the Tea Party isn't led by typical women.)

Apparently, the only person who currently understands he's "not God" is a weatherman in Britain.

"Al Qaeda Promises U.S. Death By A 'Thousand Cuts'."

Can we nuke Mecca now?

And then there's this:

Dire or emotionally charged warnings about the consequences of global warming can backfire if presented too negatively, making people less amenable to reducing their carbon footprint, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.

Berkeley? Really? Well answer this then:

Why has it taken 20 years for one of the best universities in the country to figure out something we could have told them upon first hearing the phrase "you must save the planet"?

If We Say "Delusional" We Mean "Delusional"

We were talking to a liberal friend in Berkeley, California yesterday, and we asked him what he thought Tuesday's election meant. The answer - straight from the bottom of his oh-so-sensitive, cultishly Democratic heart?

"The rest of the country are a bunch of fucktards."

Sigh.

Hat Tip: Jammie Wearing Fool

This Is Actually An Add-Hominy *Grits* Attack

Remember back when France was yelling that America had to elect Barack Obama, or else we were racist?

I want you to remember it now. Because it wasn't so. France was being racist.

Suckers.

So what else can I point out, since I'm feeling all World-Cuppie today, that can top the very-unpeaceful NewAge spectacle of a French astrologist leading his team and his country to madness and ruin? Well, how about an entire country that's just one big cult? Where it's claimed the "Dear Leader" (this is my favorite) makes the sun rise. That's right: The One was going to "lower the oceans", but this motherfucker makes the sun rise. And, also unlike The Won, he runs a very tight operation:

"After the complete rout of North Korea by Portugal on Monday in their second match of the World Cup, some observers have seized on the opportunity to blame North Korean leader Kim Jong-il personally.



The license was provided by a claim by the team's coach Kim Jong-hun that the dictator 'gives regular tactical advice during matches using mobile phones that are not visible to the naked eye.' The coach added the fantasy device was invented by Kim Jong-il himself.



'Given the way the North Korean regime works, a football coach can't just mention Kim Jong-il's name and talk about him as he likes,' a South Korean official said. 'The invisible-mobile-phone part may be silly, but it's probably true that Kim Jong-il's orders are delivered to the coach.'"

Now that's hot. No, I'm serious, I'm getting off on it because,...it's hot:

The North Korean coach is speaking in code to the media.

That poor bastard might as well be blinking signals, or even holding up a big-assed sign saying "HELP ME", and all everybody does is stand around him, discussing how to interpret "the way the North Korean regime works". Didn't anybody hear? It works through invisible-mobile-phones.

Listen to me: North Korea works like homeopathy, alright? It works through invisible-motherfucking-mobile-phones. I'm pretty sure, if you had a talk right now with Kim Jong-il, he'd tell you the more invisible the phone the more powerful the signal. Shit, the coach got it. As he, too, led his team and his country to madness and ruin.

I think I'm in love with the whole idea of it.

Hey! James Cameron - definitely a NewAger - gave us his goofy, hectoring blue-peopled, got to "save the planet" movie, Avatar. I want you to remember that, too.

Suckers.

I can't help but dwell on the current popularity of Yoga (as exercise, mind you) without also thinking about the conmen and Nazis who were determined to bring it here.


With that background, is it any wonder that all the cool kids are the same people leading most of the wrong-headed - including anti-Semitic - movements today?

Like, maybe, they're getting more than just exercise from participation in those classes?

Like, maybe, a world-view is also being indoctrinated?

If it was, in this political environment today, no one would notice it, would they?



Nah - not in the currently idiotic political environment, that's for sure.

Nobody notices anything until it's too late.

Suckers.

Weekly Address: Jobs Creation from White House Weekly Address on Vimeo.

Hat Tip: Althouse