"I Have A Dream" (One Day This Nightmare Will End,...)

There are some mornings when I open my browser and everything's a reminder - NewAge freaks have the wheel - and, somehow, I must become resigned to it, simply because everyone else is:

"A Labour politician has spoken out about losing his virginity at the age of five to an alien holographic. 

Simon Parkes, a councillor in Whitby, North Yorkshire, says he has been visited and taken by extra-terrestrials ever since being in his mother's womb, and has no fear of them. 

The 53-year-old added that anyone who felt his beliefs made him an unsuitable representative for Stakesby should not worry, as he is never taken by the aliens during meetings since they do not like large gatherings of people."

Strikes me as convenient, but who am I to complain? Lies are now currency. At a certain stage in life - if you're really living one - you see NewAgers have to be caught killing, to be seen for what they are:

"People like that should be locked up and taught to respect other people and their families.    

Why is she allowed to walk away? If she’s done this to me and my brother, how many other people are there that she’s made up lies about?"

Not going to happen. The reality is, for all the talk of love, laws, traditions, society - and over a decade and a half of schooling to instill an understanding of them - there's really nothing holding the center together. We print our degeneracy daily:

"Adultery is on a moral par with slurping your soup". 

You're only guilty if you don't understand how you're supposed to work with this process of social self-deception - if you've never been informed of it - or the fact you're supposed to lay down for it:

"The controlling husband was unable to accept his wife had found a new partner,...'"

She "found a new partner"? AFTER they got married? The Daily Mail actually printed that like it makes sense. How many "new" partners is this "husband" supposed to "accept" before the term "controlling" is removed from his name? Does anyone else understand human nature anymore? 

Why (and how) was her "husband" supposed to "accept his wife had found a new partner" - along with his title (and his sacrifice) - so his life can have meaning? No comment. Just buy the lies. 

Then you're civilized. 

Forget about "meaning" - it doesn't exist. Everybody (and everything) have started to trade places. The people you thought were good become bad. The people you thought were bad become good - almost no matter what they do. 

The NewAge's moral quicksand (AKA "duality") swallows almost everything, leaving us to die with nothing but a head full of nonsense - and evil's laugh in our ears:

"A gay immigrant who was jailed for eight years after a series of 'extremely violent' attacks will not be deported because he is now straight.'"

This NewAge is to Civil Rights what slavery's been to blacks:

A timeless, unfair, ass-backwards, inescapable source of horrendous misery.

Like, once we've been forced, we'll be "happy" burning crosses on our own front lawns,...

 

Nobody Tell Oprah

You can always spot the guys who aren't aware of NewAge:

"The inability to tell right from wrong isn’t a “quirky” characteristic that could maybe help you build the life of your dreams – it’s an illness."

It's kind of sad to think, after all this time, a historian still has so much to learn about us,...

 

I Know This Subject Like The Back Of My Hand

I've had a problem with The New York Times' David Brooks for quite a while.

For instance, after telling us "Obama and Clinton were completely irresponsible,..." he backed Obama (and his Secretary of State) based on his feelings about the crease in Obama's pants.

Later, I noted that Brooks had gone NewAge on us (funny that no one else picked up on that) just after the other smartest guy on the web - Robert Stacey McCain - agreed with me that "David Brooks is a useless son of a bitch."

Now comes a Sp!ked review of Brooks' latest book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, where they, too, catch his NewAge tendencies in full flight:

Brooks’ argument against reason culminates in an attack on the Enlightenment. Following Gertrude Himmelfarb (The Roads to Modernity), he writes of a ‘French Enlightenment’ that is overly rationalist and violent and a ‘British Enlightenment’ that emphasises sentiments and is moderate. Three hundred years later, the research finds, ‘the British Enlightenment wins’.

But this is a thoroughly flawed understanding: Enlightenment thinkers on both sides of the English Channel were defenders of reason, from science to politics. Brooks quotes Edmund Burke approvingly, and cites him as a leading member of the British Enlightenment – even though Burke became the leading opponent of the Enlightenment. The concept of reason was central to the American and French revolutions: it provided the basis for widespread social cooperation and was inherently democratic, because it was considered that everyone had the capacity to act rationally and play a role as a citizen.

The implications of Brooks’ anti-rationalist views are drawn out in his recommendations for social policy. He believes that the state can mould emotions and culture for positive ends. What this means in practice is the state intruding into the most personal aspects of people’s lives. Schools need to take over from families that don’t instil the right values to learn; state policies need to inculcate ‘the habits, knowledge and mental traits’ for success. He wants to take the latest findings about the brain and use them to control people’s behaviour.

But, all this said, the problem with The Social Animal is not just that Brooks simply elevates emotions and denigrates reason. It is that (despite protests to the contrary) he sets up a false dualism between the two.

You can read the rest for yourself, but I will point out that, not only have I been reminding you of the NewAge concept - and threat - of "duality" since I started this blog, but that I choose my topics carefully.

You see, having been schooled in the NewAge belief system, I don't need to have the word "NewAge" mentioned, or the landscape explained - I spotted David Brooks as having gone over to The Dark Side a long time ago, and without him having said much - just as I know Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the others I cover are NewAgers.

They don't have to openly declare it - as so many, wrongly, demand Obama should about Islam - it is revealed:

Just as I knew with Jared Lee Laughner, their associates, behaviors, words (evasions, really, which are another tip-off) and political positions, say far more about their occult beliefs than they ever imagine.

But, then, it's a lack of imagination that gets people into NewAge in the first place - and why the rest of you keep listening to them.

Why Is This Blog Always So Angry? (It Is Those "Shiny Happy People" You Have Got To Watch)

I really like reading your blog, though I'm still trying to keep up the same level of harsh that you do. It wears me out, man.
You are an inspiration, but an exhausting one.

--Anga2010

Love you, Anga! (So much like "anger"!) I have repeatedly made the argument that NewAge is Naziism and believers get away with their crimes because they seem "nice" to others (and I will continue to make that argument) but now there's a new book in France that makes my argument for me:

The history of French collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II is still a very sensitive subject in Gallic literary and political circles. Bestselling novelist Alexandre Jardin has learned this the hard way with the publication of "Des Gens Très Bien" (or "Very Nice People"), a startling exposé of his famous family's association with Nazism under the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Mr. Jardin's new book, published in January by Grasset and available only in French, mixes the confessional genre with biography, history and narrative, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its release. The author now finds himself accosted daily by perturbed readers desperate to unburden themselves about their own "collabos" ancestors. Yet critical reactions in the Parisian press have veered from occasional plaudits to often vicious attacks from across the ideological spectrum. The trouble for these academics and baby boomers alike is that in his work, Mr. Jardin not only denounces his respected paternal grandfather, but by extension all the other "very nice people" of wartime France.

NewAgers are proponents of the concept of "duality", where there is no right or wrong (as long as they're happy!) and they maintain this through delusion, or an escape from reality - but there is no escape:

"After 70 years I thought we could start to recognize the reality of our families and how they behaved during the war," Mr. Jardin tells me in an interview from Paris. "The core of the problem is that I have not spoken about monsters. My grandfather was not a monster. I have spoken about what 'very nice people' did in France when they accepted collaboration with Nazism. I did not realize I would provoke such anger. So long as we were putting authentic monsters on trial—like Maurice Papon for example—no one was worried. But to lift the lid on the question of the responsibility of people who were 'moral' during the collaboration has totally panicked French society."

The reaction to Mr. Jardin's book tells us as much about France as does the work itself. As Mr. Jardin observes, "It expressed something very powerful inside French society: the desire to protect the honor of our families, while in reality the large majority in France were behind Pétain during the Second World War. . . . With the liberation, France threw herself behind Gaullism with such fervor because we were ashamed of our behavior. He [de Gaulle] offered us his glory. . . it seemed to me that 70 years on we could tear up this pact and come to terms with reality. But this has provoked incredible emotion."

Most historians, and renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, remain unmoved, pointing to Mr. Jardin's lack of archival proof. But Mr. Jardin has at least one powerful supporter for his claim that Jean was fully aware of the atrocity of July 1942.

"A few weeks ago I found myself around a table at the Elysée with [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy, at a lunch with three writers and a journalist and a historian," Mr. Jardin recounts. "The historian suddenly said to me: 'But you don't have a lot of proof against your grandfather; [Mr.] Sarkozy got up out of his chair, cut her off and said 'Madame, I have had a lot of chiefs of staff.' He gave her a lesson explaining that a chief of staff was nothing like a government departmental head. It was evident listening to [Mr.] Sarkozy that the prime minister's chief of staff could not but be intimately associated with the decision.

All the same, in Mr. Jardin's telling, the historian insisted that "'that did not constitute proof.'" Then, "[Mr.] Sarkozy's temperature rose and he said something incredible which came from his gut: 'Madame if I asked [French Interior Minister and Mr. Sarkozy's former chief of staff] Claude Guéant to organize a round-up of 13,000 Jews next week in Paris, whatever the circumstances, I know Claude would resign. His [Mr. Jardin's] grandfather did not resign.' Then [Mr.] Sarkozy turned to me and said: 'I don't understand why there is a polemic.'"

As Mr. Jardin sees it, a certain moral code, exemplified by his "loyal" grandfather, was crucial to the Vichy machine. "In the end it was not at all necessary to be a monster to participate in the worst. There was an anti-Semitism of the state. Men like my grandfather were prepared to do absolutely anything to preserve a little fragment of national sovereignty," Mr. Jardin observes. "They preferred that the French police came to arrest Jewish families rather than let the German police do it. It is disturbing. In any case in my family there has not been any [feeling of] guilt after the war. My grandfather had the feeling of having done good. It is incredible."

Incredible, indeed. And this is what we live with today - with the Oprah's and the Ellen's, Huffington's and Knight's, the Deepak's and Hay's and the Ray's and Maclaine's - the unending idea that, no matter what harm they and their "beliefs" have brought to other's lives, they are somehow doing good. Hell, even psychics who are busted in crimes, red handed, claim as much. But, one day, this, too, will all be exposed as a lie.

And, like France, the entire society that protected and promoted them will be determined to be complicit.

So enjoy it while it lasts, people - smile! These are the good times!

Seen Your Country In That Sun Gone Shine?

"Barack Obama has long been known for his socialistic convictions and messianic tendencies. That he therefore wants to rule rather than represent and to dictate rather than debate is not hard to understand. And while he may not come right out and say it, he expects us to pledge allegiance to him. He said as much when he told Republican House members just three days after his inauguration that the quicker they quit listening to voices that run counter to his, the better for us all.

...Obama wants his judgments and convictions to be our guide in all spheres of life, even when his judgments run 180 degrees counter to the natural law that guided our Founders or the Bibles that guided the Puritans. Therefore, it was as easy for him to skip the National Day of Prayer on May 7, 2009, and open the door to the legalized killing of 'days-old unborn children for [stem cell] research' as it was for him to tell GM what type of cars they’ll be building in the future if they want to remain extant.

Obama has long been opposed to the traditional values that undergird this nation and has been wise enough to war against those values in the name of those values, thus disorienting those whom he can’t intellectually disarm. For example, when he discusses any of his personal positions that go against the Christian faith, such as his pro-abortion stance, he always makes certain to mention that he’s a Christian in the process. The implication being that Christianity’s chief characteristic is some vague acceptance of all positions as equally valid instead of the orthodox, historical Christian insistence on truth and justice, good and evil.

Ultimately, this allows him to dismiss Christianity’s ethical claims on the life of the believer altogether. This was clear when he spoke about the tensions between his pro-abortion stance and Christianity at the Call to Renewal Conference in 2006: 'Democracy demands that … religiously motivated [individuals] translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values.'

This is also how Obama sidestepped the implications of his support for abortion when giving Notre Dame’s commencement address. He made it sound like the pro-abortion and anti-abortion positions are just two viable positions that Christians can hold. While he admitted that these two positions flow from 'views … [which] are complex and even contradictory … [and] irreconcilable,' he wisely avoided the use of smaller but more important words such as 'right' and 'wrong,' and asked that members of the 'irreconcilable' factions 'honor the consciences' of those with whom they disagree on the abortion issue. Never mind that this tactic allowed him to continue down the path of supporting abortion without having to explain why he supports it or to justify his use of taxpayer dollars to fund the practice."

-- AWR Hawkins, "a conservative writer who holds a Ph.D. in military history from Texas Tech University", noticing Obama's obvious tactic of using of the NewAge concept of duality in American politics - which a lot of "non-judgmental" types love but expect the rest of us to ignore - probably because they don't read Pajamas Media.

The Macho Response: Rorschach (Wiping That Cultish NewAge Smile Off Everyone's Faces)

"The moral center of Watchmen, both the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the new, much-discussed movie based on it premiering today, is a curious and prickly masked vigilante who goes by the name Rorschach.

The surface meaning of the name is visually obvious—his mask contains swirling black blots on white that remind one of the psychological testing mechanism. But applied to his character, the name is both appropriate and ironic.

It’s appropriate in that the character is obsessed with stark duality—black and white—and ironic in that the mushy “it’s whatever you see” vagueness opposes his very definite vision of what’s what in the world:

There are good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys deserve to get it, good and hard. Rorschach’s mission, from which he will not diverge, is to give it to them, no matter what the demands of law, government, or social mores. He lives by his objective understanding of right and wrong.

...Rorschach’s sense of justice may make him hate most of humanity—he brags to himself at the beginning that if mankind begged him to save them, he’d justly say “no.” But by the end he sacrifices himself in the name of avenging the deaths of millions who he doesn’t know. He does it for another reason as well, one of particular holiness to the Objectivist: the truth, the facts of reality. Whether or not the villain’s scheme might result in some “higher good,” it did so at the cost of Faking Reality—a cost no Objectivist will bear. We don’t know if Rorschach’s attempts to set the record straight will do any good—but he’s willing to bear any burden, let the very heavens fall, to stay square with reality.

To be the kind of man whose highest value is to “have lived life free from compromise,” as Rorschach says, makes that man “unreasonable” in the colloquial sense—that is, you aren’t going to be able to talk them in or out of much. You are going to find them abrasive, aggravating, and in circumstances like those the characters in Watchmen find themselves in, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Rorschach seems driven to madness by his ideology; a radical Objectivism forges a character that seems obviously damaged in unpleasant ways.

Yet he’s also the only man around who stands up for everyone’s right to be judged individually on the basis of their character and actions, their right not to be a means to someone else’s higher end—no matter what one might think of that end. He knows what it means to be human—that’s why he has to condemn those he kills as having betrayed the essence of man qua man, relegating them to the status of dogs to be put down."

-- Brian Doherty, describing the crime fighting hero of these NewAge times, in Reason Magazine.

Duality Is Dumb

Hat Tip: Outhouse Rag

Just Evil Playing Dress-Up

"It's the sort of thing that you have to be an emotional adolescent, steeped in his own anti-social fantasies, in order to believe."

-- James Bowman, on the NewAge concept of duality, for The American Spectator