Oh man, if you want to see a picture of what is easily the ugliest "psychic" on Facebook - yes, even uglier than Silvia Browne! - look no further than our personal favorite, Doti Boon, "The California Psychic".
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"The U.S. Geological Survey is blaming day-to-day seismological changes for Sunday's 7.2 earthquake along the U.S.-Mexico border. But Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine practitioner and transcendental meditation guru, is pretty sure he knows what really happened.-- Katie Drummond, causing Glenn Reynolds to suggest somebody ought to sue the guru - yea: let's see him explain away that one - which would be a true "miracle" worthy of me becoming a "follower", an event big enough for AOL News.
'Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California,' Chopra wrote to his nearly 179,000 Twitter followers shortly after the quake.
And then, to clarify: 'Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake,' he tweeted. 'Sorry about that.'
Chopra might want to apologize directly to those in California, who haven't suffered significant infrastructure damage but are still bracing for more temblors, and to those in Mexico, where two are dead, hundreds are injured and thousands are still without power."
I had another one of those awful nights, justa rollin' and tumblin', dreaming about Karine Anne Brunck (which sounds too much like Lisa Druck for me to handle). Let this be a lesson to all you NewAgers, who insist a person can just "move on" from tragic events:
You can't "move on" from your dreams.
I was all fired up yesterday, looking forward to blogging all day today (haven't felt that way, or had the opportunity, in a long time) but instead, now I'm all blah and what the fuck? and just want to go back to sleep. But I can't sleep - because then I might have another twisted dream about my ex-wife: great.
So I'm blogging anyway, thinking that, by telling you all the Good News going on out there (yes, that's one for the Christians) it'll cheer me up, get me back in the groove, and I can go back to enjoying it as well. I mean, these subjects are my babies, right? 
People have written to me, saying they think the blog has no coherency, but, it seems to me, that's only because I love our country so much, pretty much as it is, that I see my job as only about recognizing where we've been led astray and trying to get us urgently back on track. And, as I said before, it seems to me we've actually made a right turn somewhere. So, today, Good News all around - whether I feel like it or not:
First up, as I told you yesterday, the much beloved NewAge con man of The Secret and Oprah fame, James Arthur Ray, has been arrested for manslaughter in those Sedona, Arizona sweat lodge deaths. Some people are saying Ray shouldn't be punished because being a NewAger is, by definition, self-destructive. 
Though I agree with the assessment of NewAgers as a group, that's still looking at this all wrong: James Arthur Ray was committing fraud - he's a con man, not a true believer - sort of a Bernie Madoff in different clothing. And, like Bernie Madoff, things got out of hand. Ray is a guy who spent a lot of time thinking (and Tweeting) about death - he knew the risks. I've read it even happened once before on his watch, but our boy James don't give a damn about nobody but James, and nothing but money. "Harmonic Wealth". The name alone screams "bullshit!" That he, and his followers, can think anyone but themselves can be taken in by such B.S. is an insult to our intelligence. On the other hand, people did fall for that other loser Oprah gave us,...
Anyway, for now, I'm happy a jury will once again get to see some NewAge issues, presented in the context I think they should be seen in, and I'm also pleased those who "believe" in The Law of Attraction can finally witness how it's working out for it's purveyors, as a business and a concept. (Last I heard, Rhonda Byrne ain't been doing too well with implementing it, either. I wish her all the best.)
O.K., I'm going to get some me some sunshine and then be right back. I just want y'all to know I can see something happening now,...
"He'll say, 'Let's just forget about this and move on.' And you can't just forget and pretend like the last few years didn't happen."Wyntergrace Williams, talking about her absentee father, Montel Williams - and how he employs typical NewAge strategies when she does see him - which (surprise, surprise) don't appear to be working, in The New York Daily News.
"He is a liar, a con artist, a physical abuser of women and children, a psychological and emotional abuser of human beings, a thief, a dope pusher, a kidnaper, a child stealer, a pimp, a rapist and a child molester. I can attest to all of these things with my own eyes. And he was all of these things before he was a murderer."-- Susan Atkins, Charles Manson's once-bloodthirsty, and wild-eyed, killer - who just died in prison - finally determining Mr. Race War probably wasn't such a fun guy, or very wise, on her website (yes, she had a website - and even gave birth to Manson's kid) according to CNN.
"‘Hubris-laden charlatans' was the way a recent e-mail from a reader characterized the Obama administration. That phrase seems especially appropriate for the Charlatan-in-Chief, Barack Obama, whose speech to the joint session of Congress was both a masterpiece of rhetoric and a shameless fraud.
To tell us, with a straight face, that he can insure millions more people without adding to the already skyrocketing deficit is world-class chutzpah and an insult to anyone’s intelligence. To do so after an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office has already showed this to be impossible reveals the depths of moral bankruptcy behind the glittering words.
Did we really need CBO experts to tell us that there is no free lunch? Some people probably did, and the true believers in the Obama cult may still believe the president, instead of believing either common sense or budget experts.
"The multibillion investment fraudster Bernard Madoff did not stop at financial shenanigans, it seems. This weekend, to the list of those he cheated for decades can be added the name of his wife, Ruth.-- David Randall, once again exposing the damage of adultery - and why it's not a "private affair" - but something that affects everyone, because no one's The Independent.For 20 years, Madoff had an affair with one of his investors, and the lady in question is about to tell her story. She is Sheryl Weinstein, a mother married for 37 years, whose book, Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me, will be published by St Martin's Press on 25 August. A promotional blurb on the Barnes & Noble website says: 'After a 20-year intimate relationship with Madoff – she lost it all. In Madoff's Other Secret, she tells her story. Filled with personal details, exclusive documents, and photographs, her account will reveal a Madoff nobody knew, and it will shock and surprise readers.'
An attorney for Madoff's wife, Ruth, said his client did not know about the 'alleged affair'. The lawyer, Peter Chavkin, said that the allegations were a powerful reminder to those who claim Mrs Madoff knew about her husband's $65bn (£39bn) fraud 'that there are some things that some spouses, however close they are, do not share with each other'.
In the book, Mrs Weinstein says she met Madoff, now serving 150 years in prison for defrauding investors, at a business meeting when she was chief financial officer for the charitable women's organisation Hadassah, where she had a role in investment decisions. The charity was not one of the losers from Madoff's Ponzi scheme, withdrawing far more money than it put in. But suggestions that Mrs Weinstein was tipped off by Bernie's pillow-talk would be wrong. She herself was a heavy personal loser in the fraud.
At Madoff's June sentencing, Mrs Weinstein was among investors urging a long prison sentence for the financier, who admitted ripping off investors over at least two decades. She said she viewed meeting him 21 years ago 'as perhaps the unluckiest day of my life'. Mrs Weinstein said that her investment losses had forced her to sell her Manhattan home, had devastated her, her husband of 37 years, her son, her parents, her in-laws and everyone who depended on them. She called Madoff "that terror, that monster, that horror, that beast".
In her correspondence with the court, Mrs Weinstein made no mention of the affair, though she did write, in a request to speak at sentencing, that she wanted to address Madoff and the court because she thought 'the personal connection may be more difficult for him to ignore'.
Her husband, Ron Weinstein, said in a June letter to the court that all the money the couple had saved was lost and their marriage was strained: 'My wife has been a basket case, and we are both very depressed.' During the late June sentencing hearing, Mrs Weinstein was among those urging that the fraudster be sent down for a long stretch.
Madoff's lawyer Ira Sorkin's only remark on the book was that he hoped the author "was more discreet with her investment obligations than she has allegedly been with her sex life".The book has drawn fresh attention to Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organisation of America, which has said its principal investment with Madoff totalled about $33m, while another $7m had been entrusted to him after it was donated by a French backer in 1988. Hadassah did not return a telephone call for comment.
Stanley Epstein, a California lawyer married to a Hadassah member, said Hadassah's treasurer told him after Madoff's arrest in December that the organisation had cashed in between $120m and $130m from its Madoff accounts over the years. The profits could make the organisation a target for those seeking to recover money to be distributed to defrauded investors. Mr Epstein's wife, Harriet, said. 'The fact that this woman had an affair and was on the committee that made decisions about investments makes no sense. She obviously had a conflict of interest.'"
"There is a growing sense of a 'we’ve been had', bait-and-switch."
"As someone who's been following the Tea Party campaign since the beginning, it seems to me to be the most genuine outbreak of grassroots popular involvement in my lifetime. People have been turning out, in the tens of thousands at times, because they feel that Obama pulled a bait-and-switch and is moving the country much farther to the left than he promised during the campaign."
UPDATE:
"The Obama campaign and subsequent election represents the biggest, most successful political con of my lifetime."
"They were greedy and frankly dumb."
Today I was contacted by the Conseil Ordre des Médecins du Bas-Rhin about Dr. Robert Wohlfahrt, the man who destroyed my marriage, saying his medical practice had been suspended - finally - for endangering patients. There is a lot of information on him that I'll be posting, soon, once I can get it all in .html form for the web. (I know I said this before, but until now, there was not a need to rush.) I want to hear from others who have been affected by this quack - get in contact with me, whether you're in France or anywhere else.
