"Visibly angry, Holmes told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Balwani put it more bluntly: Anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should 'get the fuck out.'"What could be more clear - or less unexpected from the San Francisco Bay Area?
"Three hours south of San Francisco,...essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute. Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking...It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for 'science' containing next to no science."Is that not the very definition of Theranos? Is it not also obvious why - in 2007 - I once wrote:
"Whether it's the racism (which I've spoken about for years) the adulterous white bullshit mayor, or the adulterous white bullshit mayor's love for cults, or the general lack of respect for morals, or the general lack of any good sense - or, really, anything else - personally, I'm sick of the bullshit 'no one wants to touch' in San Francisco. That city's been hiding the fact that it's a sick, evil, and toxic place - filled with cults that are spreading their corrosive magic-thinking ('you can believe whatever you want to believe') and making normal people miserable - for a long, long, time.And I'd never even MET Elizabeth Holmes!!! But I'd married a woman who also risked lives for the cult's beliefs - and I'd lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 odd years - so, I'm more-than-willing to accept NewAge as their reasoning, when I hear it so clearly expressed.
It's no wonder blacks have been leaving, like Jews from Nazi Germany, for years.
San Francisco (the home of est and the Landmark Forum) is filled with white cultish bastards, and living there - especially with that sick, sick, woman - almost killed me. I'll never get over the horror. And I'll never stop talking about it. And why should I?"
In politics as in other walks of life, events often occur that seem in advance "hard to believe." Until approximately five years ago, we found it hard to believe America would ever elect a president as left-wing as Barack Obama. Given his record in office, we also found it hard to believe that he would be re-elected,...The latter one we didn't believe until the night we learned it had happened.
"Ms. Smith rightly protests the feminization of contemporary culture, and she rightly urges men—who, after all, built the civilization onto which feminism has latched itself—to start fighting back. But to win such battles she will need to construct arguments likely to persuade others besides the angry, alienated men who click onto her blog and mourn that their 'soul mate' turned out to be not much of a mate."
"Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions."
The forces of antiscience are strong and loud. One of them is the Wall Street Journal, which frequently publishes ridiculous OpEds baselessly denying global warming.
Kelly was a bright woman in her early 30s: whip-smart, well qualified, ambitious—and confused. Even a little frightened.
She worked for a female partner in a big consulting firm. Her boss was so solicitous that Kelly hoped the woman—one of just a few top female partners—might become her mentor. But she began to feel that something was wrong. In meetings, her boss would dismiss her ideas without discussion and even cut her off in mid-sentence. Kelly started to hear about meetings to which she wasn't invited but felt she should be. She was excluded from her boss's small circle of confidants.
What confused Kelly was that she was otherwise doing well at the firm. She felt respected and supported by the other senior partners. She had just one problem, but it was a big one. One of the male partners pulled her aside and confirmed Kelly's suspicions: Her boss had been suggesting to others that Kelly might be happier in a different job, one "more in line with her skills."
It's a particularly cheerful headline — "Stocks Hit 5 Year High" — with a picture of wine glasses splashily clinking, angled together in a position that parallels Oprah's hands in a picture just above and to the left. Oprah looks alarmed/outraged, but only because "He even lied — to Oprah?!" And how reassuring that is. The outrage of the day is Lance Armstrong, doping and lying, the same old thing, and it's something that only vaguely affects us. Thank God.
What was the headline I saw in my dream? I won't tell you. It's not that I'm superstitious, but ideas affect minds, and it's an image I won't put out there.
"Going Clear" is sometimes hard going on account of its subject matter. But it is an utterly necessary story even so. As "In Cold Blood" is now a monument to the age of New Journalism, "Going Clear" may wind up a monument to an age of enlightened corporate journalism, a time when powerful magazine editors and their book-publishing counterparts had the wherewithal to devote resources to vital stories of scant direct pertinence to their readers—stories told by full-time, expenses-paid writers backstopped by researchers, fact-checkers, lawyers and insurance companies.
The surprise isn't that Mr. Wright presents Scientology as a perplexing and alarming organization. The surprise is that he has managed to tell its story at all.
All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few, except the elect have seen it or at least taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me. It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.
If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle. Keeping awake while he did it, was at any rate. If he, according to tradtion, merely translated it from certain ancient and myteriously engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out of the way locality, the work of translating it was equally a miracle for the same reason.
Mr. Romney’s ads are mostly boring. It’s kind of an achievement to be boring at a moment in history like this, so credit where it’s due: That musta taken effort!
Obama's journalistic supporters live in a bizarre alternate reality in which a politician's actual words mean nothing. When the president says something foolish and offensive, he didn't say that. Meanwhile every comment from a Republican can be translated, through a process of free association, to: "We don't like black people."
Obama rose in 2008 as a symbol of racial aspirations--the black aspiration to be recognized as fully American and the white aspiration to redeem the sin of racism. That made it difficult to criticize him, much less to mock him. John McCain's campaign was hobbled by a fear of appearing racist, and Obama himself received a degree of deference that is excessive for any politician.I don't think the words "hobbled by a fear" can be spun into an expression of strength, do you? Plus he lost - no. Here, one more:
Romney and the Republicans, however, have moved on. This was best exemplified by the nominee's birth-certificate quip, which we wrote about on Monday. Birtherism, once mortifying to mainstream conservatives and Republicans, is now just a joke, although the left continues to take it very seriously.
To cause to experience shame, humiliation, or wounded pride; humiliate.
There was much speculating as to whether the Republican National Convention would shy away from using the “M” word and just generally avoid talking too much about religion, but I didn’t think that was the case at all. Quite the opposite, actually,…She then gives us FIVE examples of this oh-so-obvious Republican bravery - but only one of the five actually mentions the word "Mormon." One that didn't is by Mike Huckabee, who The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan explained "addressed the Mormon issue without ever saying 'the Mormon issue,'" because everyone knows never directly bringing up a subject is how you get to it's core, right?
