Baked In Politics: Eating The Cake Doughnations Create

 

On the face of it, I still like the law, though my estimation of lawyers has fallen considerably. 

 

Science, too, can still turn my head - like J. Howard Marshall's first gander at Anna Nicole Smith - but scientists? Forget 'em.

   

But, when I think about it, religion and it's offshoots seem to be one of the few areas of life that I dislike the practice - and, eventually, many of the participants - in equal measure.

   

A big reason for that is because, like a pipeless hashish smoker, one of the few ways to capture the "spiritual" smoke they're blowing is under glass:

Transactions involving millions of dollars, an unsolved murder of a table member, a mysterious severed animal’s head seen as a threat, a lying witness, a secret recording and the destruction of lifelong friendships.

 

 It's much easier with the others, though not much different, except in scale. If I ever needed an example of how fools will instinctually follow their own worst enemy right over a cliff, I've got one - from the world of politics, The American Interest Magazine:

Instapundit maestro Glenn Reynolds has been saying for some time that from where he sits, the Carter comparison looks like a best case scenario for this President.  For all our sakes, I hope Glenn is wrong,….

 

 Nope - according to The Laws Of Quantum Failure - it looks like my own personal Dr. Evil (or is that Inspector Clouseau?) finally got something hilariously right:

President Barack Obama expressed gratitude last week to former President Jimmy Carter's grandson, who had a role in leaking secretly-recorded video of Mitt Romney's infamous "47%" comments, James Carter said Thursday on CNN.

 

And what, BTW, does Jimmy Carter's Grandson do? Oops - WORST CASE SCENARIO!!!! - He's just an opposition researcher! I've said it before and I'll say it again:

   

 Folks, Glenn Reynolds is just another in a long fucking line of history's smart-sounding idiots.  

 But - since he spared us Mitt Romney - he's one I'm currently grateful for.  

 But not the only one:

   

With this revelation, in a way, it can be said everybody's two favorite "conservative" law bloggers - Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds - are, both, partially responsible for the course of Obama's presidency!

   

 Which brings me to something I find weird:

   

 Just as I discovered, pre-election, I couldn't vote for either presidential candidate because I knew better than to accept what I either was saying, I also found I could no longer read what are, ostensibly, his two greatest online supporters - for what I suspected was exactly the same reason!

   

 They said they were for brains, but it's all about seeing the narcissistic reality, baby, which - from them all the way up to Obama - is, now, obviously the same when it comes to the rest of us:

   

 You will pay the price for their folly,…

Charlie Sheen & Sarah Palin Can't Be Defeated

Keep it up, people - it doesn't matter who you are - they're rubber and you're glue:

It was a cold night in Toronto, Canada when reporter Saphia Khambalia prepared for a live shot outside the city’s Massey Hall theater where Charlie Sheen had just wrapped a performance of his “Violent Torpedo Of Truth Tour.” What happened next viewers couldn’t have predicted,...

Unless you understand the LQF,...

The LQF Strikes Obama Again: The Chevy Cruze

Oprah brought us Obama. Oprah and Obama are NewAgers. Obama took over General Motors. The new Chevy falls apart - on the freeway.

It looks like the Law of Quantum Failure has certainly struck again.

Boom! Bam! Biff! Pow! (How You Like Me Now?)

So it looks like straights have been snookered:

How many gay men and lesbians are there in the United States? Gary Gates has an idea but acknowledges pinpointing a solid figure remains an elusive task.

Gates is demographer-in-residence at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank based at the University of California, Los Angeles. For the institute's 10th anniversary this week, he took a scholarly stab at answering the question that has been debated, avoided, parsed and proven both insoluble and political since pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey said in the 1940s that 10 percent of the men he surveyed were "predominantly homosexual."

Gates' best estimate, derived from five studies that have asked subjects about their sexual orientation, is that the nation has about 4 million adults who identify as being gay or lesbian, representing 1.7 percent of the 18-and-over population.

That's a much lower figure than the 3 to 5 percent that has been the conventional wisdom in the last two decades, based on other isolated studies and attempts to discredit Kinsey.

It's incredible how well propaganda can work, distracting everyone from what's important:

A core sample taken from the more than 70 features at this year’s Filmfest D.C. reveals films of even more significant and timely substance. This year the festival will feature two U.S. premieres: “Scientology: The Truth About a Lie,” Jean-Charles Deniau’s chronicle of L. Ron Hubbard’s organization and former devotees who spent millions of dollars before breaking free.

While “Scientology” doesn’t break any new formal ground, hewing to formulaic stock footage and talking heads, the film nonetheless provides chilling insights into a notoriously difficult world for outsiders to peer into.

Yeah, 69 films of crap, but the cult movie is "of even more significant and timely substance." I'm not surprised. Speaking of Scientology (kind of, since she's a supporter and popularizer of it) this is surprising:

When talk show queen Oprah Winfrey announced she was publicly supporting Barack Obama for president back in 2008, she shocked many TV insiders who had always thought it best for talk show hosts to keep their political views to themselves.

Now as the 2012 election process has officially begun, sources tell me this time around Oprah's support will be much more private.

"For 2012, much has changed for Oprah. She now has own cable channel called OWN that has been struggling to find an audience -- she isn't going to do anything to alienate them," a TV insider tells me. "Unlike in 2008, when a drop in ratings didn't matter as much for the queen of TV, Oprah is now fighting every day to get people to tune into OWN."

Oprah Winfrey's daily talk show ratings dropped in 2008 after her highly publicized political rally for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. An October 2008 Gallup poll before the rallies but after Oprah's public endorsement of Obama found that Oprah's favorable ratings had fallen from 74 to 66 percent while her unfavorable ratings jumped from 17 to 26 percent. Then came news that Oprah's TV ratings showed that her daytime audience, which was nearly 9 million at its height in 2004-05, had fallen to 7.3 million.

As much as Oprah may still love President Obama and may support him behind the scenes, do not expect to see the same public support you saw in 2008.

Yes, the Law of Quantum Failure has struck again. Good, because most conservatives blew it last time:

Don’t forget, her Obama endorsement came early on, in May 2007, just three months after he launched his campaign. She helped put him on the map against the Clinton machine when he was trailing by 40 points. I think conservative fans at the time probably gave her a pass because by the time the general election rolled around, the fact of her status as an O-bot had already long since been digested.

And speaking of clueless conservatives, Glenn Reynolds thinks this is an "interesting title for a book by an atheist":

Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity.

Yeah, like I, as a conservative atheist, haven't been saying that very thing for years. Of course, since I criticize him, Reynolds doesn't understand anything I say (while still posing as though he's informing his public of what the mainstream media leaves out. Conservative atheists defending Christians against liberals? Who knew?) Reynolds leads his readers to others, like S.E. Cupp, so he can link to them without worry. I think, as a Libertarian, he's spent too much time with the liberal opinions of so-called "new atheists".

I will not follow.

The Law of Quantum Failure: Scientology Is Phat

Isn't it amazing that, even though Scientology's celebrities are told, and tell others, how special they are and what "powers" they have (remember that embarrassing Tom Cruise video?) The Law of Quantum Failure keeps striking them, regularly, in public? John Travolta couldn't help but kill his kid (there were people who predicted it) or make the worst movie of all time, Battlefield: Earth. None of them can speak without saying something incredibly stupid, etc.

Hell, even with all that e-meter auditing, Kirstie Alley's fat ass can't even learn to keep her tongue in her mouth.

There Ain't No "Obama Curse" (There IS An LQF)

Just a quick reminder that while the Instapundit is talking about the "Obama Curse" - which one of his readers dates back to 2010 - I used my knowledge of NewAge to tag Oprah's candidate with The Law of Quantum Failure.....as early as 2008.

Obviously - like Wesley Snipes avoiding prison and Global Warming - Obama broke the law throughout the campaign, but it couldn't last,...

Lee Stranahan Is Being Mugged By Reality (And My Guess Is He'll Be A Conservative Next Year)

Poor Lee Stranahan. It's gotta be tough.

First, for merely asking the right questions, he gets banned from Markos' scummy astrology website The Daily Kos, and now he's quitting Rosemary's Baby:

I’ll keep this short. As I wrote this morning, writing for the Huffington Post has been one of the great joys of my life for the past few years and I’ve been proud to be associated with them.

But as a writer, this latest move by The Huffington Post of banning Andrew Breitbart from their front page (because of comments he made to a different website) is both unprecedented, arbitrary and deeply offensive to the intellectual openness that Arianna Huffington has purported to believe in.

Oh dear - he's catching on that Arianna's a liar - that can't be good.

For Lee, not Arianna, because the more dirt she commits to, the more everybody seems to want to reward her.

I'm not sure how that works exactly - it goes, totally, against The Law of Quantum Failure (so far) - but, according to Lee, she's still going for the gold:

One very loathsome  aspect of this story is something that Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff told me in a long phone call about Andrew Breitbart several months ago. Roy knows and worked with Andrew and when the issue of Andrew Breitbart being a racist came up, Roy told me “No, of course Andrew isn’t a racist.”

Roy went on to say that while both he and Arianna Huffington knew that the charges of racism being hurled at Andrew weren’t true based on their years of personal dealings with him that they were in a ‘bad position’ to say anything about it.

Politics is a contact sport, but not defending someone you know personally and know the truth about is pretty poor conduct. To stand by and watch their reputation ruined and do nothing when all you have to do is say ‘I know him and that’s not true” is shameful.

Yeah, how hard is that? You know, to say and do the right thing?

Well, for anybody who knows Arianna's history, the right thing is exactly what she ain't gonna do:

Arianna is also friends with Van Jones so I’d apply the same standard there…and, in fact, Arianna HAS publically defended Van Jones at length. The problem is that defending Breitbart would be much less popular among her liberal friends then defending Jones.

Ahhh yes, and that, as they say in NewAge Gold DiggerLand, is all that truly matters,...

Distracted

"I wanna be dead, in bed: Please kill me, 'cause that would thrill me!"

I was absentmindedly driving along, with the iPod going full-shuffle, when I heard that line and started cracking up - it snapped me into the realization of why I was absentmindedly driving around:

I've completely lost touch with everything - a son of pure anomie.

I was motoring on autopilot, just as I'm living on autopilot now. I don't want to visit with anybody, there's no place I want to go, nothing I need to see: I just wanna be dead. I mean Frank Zappa is, and we don't hear any complaints out of him, now do we?

The idea that "life is precious" when so many, who would say that, make a conscience mess of it for others is a joke. It implies that the malicious are all we have to live for - which makes sense once you notice how, as a society, we celebrate and enshrine those who adhere to betrayal and crime as reasons and ways for living. Everything's upside-down now, making death the only welcome alternative to such a "life".

But that's NewAge and the politics (and "reasoning") that follow from it: They claimed thinking that way would bring Peace and Love and Hope and Change and all that, but what they left out is, in order for all of it to happen, everybody has to accept NewAge. If you're not constitutionally fortified to get with the program - as I am - then (also for everybody) NewAge leads to Madness and Malaise and Depression and Death. That's The Law of Quantum Failure. Sorry, ladies.



Not that my life is all doom and gloom just yet:

Last night I stopped by my local market to pick up some tortellini salad and a couple of chef-made meatballs for dinner. The woman behind the counter filled a container with my salad and then spritely said, "O.K. now I'll grab your balls - they're really big tonight!"

We laughed.

The Power: Double-Dipping On Delusional Dips

Here's a NewAge event you may have missed while I was away:

The sequel to The Secret is out. It's called The Power - as in the power to get NewAgers to shell out another $30.00 to read the same crap all over again.

Really, if a NewAger bought The Secret - and attained the knowledge of how to get everything they wanted by just thinking about it - why do they need another book? Maybe because the first one was bullshit?

Think about it: right after Rhonda Byrne came out with The Secret, we find ourselves in an economic depression - brought to you by Oprah's candidate for president right after she endorsed the first book- is that what NewAgers were hoping for all along? Was that really their dream? If so, I think the rest of us should kick their asses. Granted - I think that anyway - but now we've got another reason!

I don't know, but it sounds more like The Law of Quantum Failure is still in full effect, to me.

Some people will just never learn,...

Exit question: NewAgers, dumb as they can be, are still people, aren't they?

Jonah Goldberg Has Forgotten His Own Meme!

Almost exactly one month ago, I wrote:

"Can't others - especially in politics - see something's odd about this picture and address it?"

Now here comes Jonah Goldberg - of all people - the author of Liberal Fascism, wondering "When Did The Rules Change?"

"I'm beginning to wonder if the political moment is much, much, more significant than most of us realize. The rules may have changed in ways no one would have predicted two years ago. And perhaps 10 years from now we'll look back on this moment and it will all seem so obvious."

Many may do just that, Jonah, but they don't have to, because the "why?" and "how?" are already being documented and answered by people like yourself.

But, just as Edward Hugh learned before the euro zone's collapse - and financial investigator Harry Markopolos discovered long before the Bernie Madoff Scandal broke - most of today's power brokers (including your fellow commentators) are not only in love with the sound of their own words and voices, but wearing blinders to that which they think of as silly.

Seriously, isn't that, kinda, how Liberal Fascism was received?

NewAge is received the same way. But not by you:

"Many of the progressive and holistic ideas that lie at the heart of today’s lifestyle Left, the environmental Left, and the New Age movement share numerous unquestioned philosophical, emotional, and practical similarities with the intellectual and cultural currents that fed into and sustained Nazism."

Except for the words "progressive" and "Nazism", the other subjects you've mentioned seem hardly political at all - they're spiritual - but now embedded in our culture and seeping everywhere. As you said:

"The Gulf oil spill should be a Gaiasend for environmentalists,...."

Yes, "Gaia" - see, you get it.

Now, before you think "uh-oh", let me point out that liberal author, Barbara Ehrenriech, describes the same "New Age Wingnuttery" in her book, Bright-Sided.

It's about NewAge in the world of medicine.

But find me a popular progressive cultural meme - almost any popular progressive cultural meme - and I can probably find you a popular progressive modern NewAge connection.

Unfortunately, few allow that NewAge - a spiritual practice -could be playing a role in our politics, though, as you point out, it's part of what-seem-to-be some of the most pressing issues of the day.

One of the reasons Liberal Fascism got snickered at in some quarters (along with any other modern references to the Nazis in American politics) is because we Americans tend to focus on the end result of the Holocaust:

The slaughter of the Jews.

But the beginning of the saga, when such things as the spiritual underpinnings of the Nazis - or, more accurately, the occult underpinnings - were coalescing, is ignored.

Again, you identified them as exactly the same as what we see today.

And, in so many ways, you're not alone.

Reporter Oliver Burkeman was so kind as to give a warning:

"New agers are often unfairly maligned: look at life through a slightly different lens, and you instantly get associated with a tiny handful of crystals-cure-cancer maniacs. But if they want their preferred candidate to win, they might consider keeping quiet for now."

Conservative columnist Mark Hemingway once observed:

"I think this country is ready for a black president, though that’s a separate question than whether America should vote for Barack Obama. In fact, at the moment chief among my questions about his fitness for office is why he would want to stand on a stage next to Oprah Winfrey."

How about Orac, the online cancer surgeon, commenting on that all-important healthcare overhaul:

Ugh,...This is not what I want to hear from a new President. I realize that I won't like everything Obama does, but this pandering to unscientific health care modalities does not bode particularly well."

I could go on. And on and on and on.

So, when did it all begin, in the modern era?

I'd put it right around the time of the Harmonic Convergence, and what we are currently witnessing - putting the political scene into terms a NewAger can understand - is The Law of Quantum Failure.

The American culture - especially in our politics - is in the grips of NewAge cultish thinking.

I would've thought you, Jonah, could take aim at this better than most.

There are few more qualified to address it.