HELP! (I Need Somebody) HELP! (Not Just Anybody)

Just so we're clear: Bill Clinton is OK.

But Russel Brand is NOT OK. Which is NOT OK - but OK:

Utah mayor spit on, punched by attacker who has beef with him

Americans woefully uninformed about their own rights

Naked man proudly strolling through Dallas-Fort Worth airport: ‘My man!’ 

   

 How to make someone think you can read their mind

World Health Organization Under Fire for Promoting ‘Pseudoscientific’ Medicine 

   

 Lana Del Rey Forgives You

How Conservatives Try Dodging The Ideology's Racism

To know, know, know them, is to hate, hate, hate them - and I do

They hide behind political partisanship, as though we don't know it was conservatives all along:

"Frankly, it makes no sense to me why Republicans should be defending a symbol of Democrat Party racism, hatred and treason."

Of course this loser hangs on Althouse (going by the handle "Real American") and so, like many over there, is a fine example of someone trying to sound honest and sane, who can only be revealed to be anything but. Check out Bill Whittle trying the same gambit - which once worked on me:

 I will never forgive him - or the rest of the Right - for the deception,...

I've Begged Whites To Stop Blogging About Race Online & They Didn't Care (Now Most Of Their Contact Begs Me)

"Free LibriVox audio recording of Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup."

"Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy’?"

"I think you can feel pride in the legitimate accomplishments of your ancestors. But I don't think you can feel pride in the fact that they owned slaves. I don't think you can feel pride that the wealth and prestige was accomplished on the backs of people who were not free, who had no say, who were subject to your whims.

We are very shy in this culture about calling out the great wickedness of slavery, and we should not be. We must not be.”

"Traditional models view forgiveness as a social process oriented towards reconciliation, but for the people I spoke with, reconciliation was very far off the radar, and in many cases not even feasible,...

These people tended to resent the prescriptive nature of traditional models, often comprised of steps that you follow to return to a positive place, and felt forgiveness was often pushed upon them.

While they all moved towards forgiveness, it was personal – resolving the intense psychological weight of dealing with the event so they could survive – and had very little to do with the offender."

I Really Don't Think I've Asked For Much & So Will Again

Watching how the world warps and sags around him, Barack Obama's not coming off too badly as president now, in my CrackdeBlackstimation. But still - when it comes to presidential style - so far, I've preferred the "Earthy" guys. Give me your George Ws or Lyndon Johnsons:

“Is this the White House? Oh, sorry. The White House? Sorry. Bird! Come over here and get me the White House,..."

My reasoning? Simple - same as any white guy's:

It's easier to forgive someone I understand.

Speaking of things I understand, conservatives get how ObamaCare's playing, all wrong.

They live in a world of media hype.

Like every other "scandal" the Right has had on Obama lately (Benghazi?) it's a, manufactured, mountain out of a molehill.

They're talking about a website - an insurance website at that.

Isn't the point, as most see it, that a lot of people never even had insurance before?

Then doesn't it figure, in the real world - which is almost everywhere but in the media - nobody will really care about this topic until they themselves get hurt?

Here, further, let me play Karl Rove and explain the psychology of entitlements - especially, especially massive ones:

People will wait, to get the website right, as long as the Dems care (and/or appear to) for those who can't.

The other party - my party - that insists on looking and acting like it's filled with stupid white racists, who want women in the kitchen and everybody in church, has nothing to compete.

But Chris Christie.

Add Scott Walker to the ticket (if he realizes what a lack of charisma he has and takes the veep spot before, foolishly, deciding to challenge) and we're "in".

Otherwise, forgetaboutit.

I do like watching the Right, going nuts over nothing, though - they look great on TV.

But then, so do cheerleaders in an empty stadium,...

 

A New Way To Help NewAgers: No Breaks At All

Swing Girls - some great Jazz from Japan at the link. Music is a way out, people - but only the good stuff. Don't listen to those who don't know, or don't advocate for, the difference.

Why Naturopaths Should Not Be Licensed by Kimball C. Atwood IV, M.D.:

"Irrational, unscientific beliefs and practices abound in naturopathy, likening it more to a cult than to a valid form of health care. These beliefs and practices are not merely at the fringes but are the standards of the field. They are advocated by the leaders themselves.”

Irrational + beliefs + a cult + leaders. Take your time, those of you not familiar with the NewAge.

You'll figure it out,...

I thought Scientology made you perfect?:

Are Kirstie Alley and Maksim Chmerkovskiy cursed on the dance floor? A week after her partner tumbled to the ground after pulling a muscle, Alley’s shoe came undone during her performance on Monday’s Dancing with the Stars.

“I’m not doing a sitcom. I’m actually doing a dancing show!” the actress told reporters afterwards. “I’m tired of having to recover. I would just like to do something right.  I don’t feel like I’m jinxed, but I feel like I need to get my sh– together. When people are accident prone, there is something going on with them. There is something going on. Our rehearsals were swell. We’re bitchin’ in rehearsals. If you could just sort of tune into the rehearsals…”

“Look, I’m supposed to be Swan Lake out there, la la la la la,” she continued. “Instead I’m like, la la la la and he’s supposed to come out to me but he comes up and I’m like, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe is off, what do I do? I don’t know what you do in these situations! I’m going to write a book about this. I just feel like I want to be the people who dance well. First week, we were the people who danced really well. And somehow along we’ve become the freak show. The freak show is good but we need to take the dancing up a notch.”

A member of "the world's most dangerous cult" is on American television and this is all anyone cares about. The murders, kidnappings, brainwashing? They get nothing. Kirstie Alley loses a shoe and it's everywhere.

This country has changed.

Why do so few of us see this before it happens?

It might seem strange to link global warming and the futility of wind farms with the ongoing collapse of the euro. But in several directions at the moment we can see the unfolding of one of the hidden patterns shaping human affairs, which years ago I called “the fantasy cycle”. It is a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history – and in storytelling.

When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.

We're falling apart, people. And - if you're an American who, say, recycles - you've been dreaming,...

California in the balance:

We calibrate California’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country’s near bottom; teachers’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.

We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.

What's going to happen when California falls? Even I don't know that.

I've said this more times than I can count - always leading to an argument:

It may be a key Christian principle but forgiving too easily can be dangerous, the Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested.

Rowan Williams has warned that easy forgiveness can make suffering appear not to matter.

In BBC1’s What is the Point in Forgiveness?, to be broadcast on Good Friday, the Archbishop also concedes that it is not fair to expect victims of abuse, rape or torture to turn the other cheek with ease.

Sorry everybody, but what you're doing ain't cutting it,...

Blaming The Wrong People, Asking The Wrong Questions, Forgiving All The Wrong Acts: You People Can't Seem To Do Anything RIGHT!!!

"OUCH: Workers say Obama treated autos worse than Wall St.

DETROIT (AP) — Many assembly line autoworkers reacted with skepticism and anger Monday to the Obama administration’s tough tactics, which stoked long-simmering feelings that the people who put the country on wheels get treated differently than the wizards of Wall Street. . . . Many workers — not generally known for their affection toward executives — even sympathized with Rick Wagoner, who was forced to step down as chief executive of General Motors Corp. He was by turns called a 'sacrificial lamb,' 'scapegoat' and 'fall guy.'

And Rick Wagoner was fired not because he did a bad job, but because Obama wanted to look tough. Is that the kind of management that will get us out of this problem?"

-- Glenn Reynolds, still asking the stupid questions - while Ann Althouse is demanding another loser be forgiven for ripping off the public - which, apparently, is how you win today's online popularity contests known as president, blogger, or Instapundit.

Wail Away, Dude: It's A Good Thing!!!

“The urge to take revenge or punish cheaters is not a disease or toxin or sign that something has gone wrong. From the point of view of evolution, it’s not a problem but a solution.”

-- Michael McCullough, professor of psychology at the University of Miami and author of the book “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct,” defending The Macho Response - and dissing NewAge ways of thinking (using it's own language) in the New York Times.

I Forgive Nothing

"The whole Christian, 12-step mentality has permeated our culture, and the emphasis on forgiveness is part of that,...For many,...forgiveness is a double-whammy: First someone screws you, and then it's your fault you don't want to embrace them in heaven. I'm not against forgiveness; I'm against compulsory forgiveness with no choice."

-- Jeanne Safer, a New York psychoanalyst and author of "Must We Forgive?", dissing the majority of advice I've been given on how to deal with my personal pain.

I concluded, a long time ago, the people who give advice to forgive are misguided, insensitive, unthinking assholes who think people are created from cookie-cutters. Or in cults.

But what else is new?