Mary Wanna (And You Can't Stop Her)

Exonerated man who spent 16 years on wrongful conviction shot dead by deputy during traffic stop 

    

Louisiana district attorney carjacked with his mother 

   

 A nun grapples climate protester to the ground as eco-mob try to stop a new church in France

We need to stop enabling Dylan Mulvaney 

   

 Schiff, Porter urged to drop out of California Senate race because they're White

Pro-Trump Pastor Announces Huge 'Occult Burning' for Halloween

Pagan authors impacted by AI services

NewAge Is NOT The "Self-Improvement" Tool You'd Think (Unless You're A Nazi)

As difficult as it is to imagine (but TMR always said) the woman who'd fuck TV's talking-to-the-dead guy is, also, proving hard to get along with at work.

Just like that woman who believes her fame was predicted by a "psychic".

Or the woman who believes her own "royalty" is based, in-part, on her mom's role as a yoga instructor.

Never forget that famous photo of Germany's "Happy Nazis". They, too, somehow thought they were "special": standing by astrology and the occult, taking their homeopathic concoctions - even performing a daily yoga practice - all while overseeing the round-up of Jews for the ovens.

NOT the easiest bunch to get along with, if memory serves.

 

I Can't Stand It

"We can view Steiner Schools not as educational establishments, but as places of spiritual midwifery."

Revealed: Midwives in probe over up to 60 baby deaths

Ted Cruz & I Will Never See Eye To Eye Because I Don't Think That I'll Ever Need Ted Cruz To See What I'll Need

 

I can see why you wouldn't understand how, Mr. Chosen-By-God, but - rather than public spectacles staging your (and our party's) loss of political capital - I'd have used Hitler's psychic against him. 

"The significance of Hitler's astrological researches was not whether they were productive of the truth but that Hitler believed in them."

You keep going with that, setting yourself on fire thing, though:

I know we can do much more damage with NewAge,...

 

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.

Getting A Whipping With The Transmission Belt

It looks like, thanks to Jared Lee Loughner, reality is finally descending on the "smart set" that, so far, ain't provin' to have been so smart:

If you've ever gone browsing in an occult bookstore (and you really should; it's like browsing in a science fiction bookstore, only the authors really believe the stories they're writing, or pretend to), you may have seen a shelf labeled "conspiracies" right alongside the sections marked "astrology" or "Tarot." People who write about fringe politics often miss the extent to which New Agers serve as a transmission belt, allowing ideas from the left, the right, and the counterculture -- not to mention more outré folks like the UFO buffs -- to slide from one subculture to another.

Not to mention the folks who make, and many who go to watch, movies like 2012. And the beliefs of Oprah. And don't forget the money funneled into PBS by Louise Hay's cult empire. The NewAge is all around us, and it's very happy few realize it's influence. Otherwise the public would be all over them for killing people. And nobody wants that, right?

Let's go ask Gabby Giffords how she feels about it,...

Oops - Looks Like The Train Just Left The Track!

"Woodstock resident Marta Szabo's memoir, 'The Guru Looked Good,' tells the real-life story of a young woman pulled out of her hip New York City life to join an internationally known yoga movement headed by a glamorously beautiful female guru. The memoir follows its narrator as she moves up the hierarchy to become secretary to the guru herself, privy to a dark and secret world the public never sees. Readers get an inside look at a cult-like world in which hundreds of thousands seek solace, including the rich and famous."

-- The Poughkeepsie Journal

Um, this is a memoir - not a fictional story,....so shouldn't somebody (like Marta Szabo AND those "rich and famous" - but especially the famous) have some 'splainin' to do about "a dark and secret" but "internationally known" cult "the public never sees"?

Hmmm.

Here - let me help to get the ball rolling:

HEY TEA PARTIERS - HAVE I GOT SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU!!!

Just Saying It Plain

As much as I like taking a weekend to empty my link folder, I still want the blog to carry on as usual - dropping quotes on relevant subjects and having a say in things - so, before I get to the last installment of "TMR's Weekend Linkfest", let me get a few things off my chest right here:

Barack Obama. Don't like him. Except for his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, I've neither seen, read, nor heard anything about the man that makes him even remotely likable. Like most conservatives, not being racists, it doesn't matter to me if he's black. Sure, there's historical significance that he's the first black president, but I think he's the wrong guy to be the first black president, so it's kind of a wash.

So why don't I like him? Well, for starters, he's a NewAger. Now, I know, for most people that term implies I think he gazes at crystals and barks at the moon, but that's the superficial view of NewAge. As my regular readers know, I'm interested in anyone who's fallen under the influence of the NewAge Movement - the spiritually and/or politically active groups that many Americans seem to ignore, or don't realize are operational, because they hewn so closely to liberal causes - and, clearly, our president is in there, whether he regularly speaks of things like "healing energy" or not.

So how do I know this? Well, let's start with a quote from Liam Julian, of Stanford's Hoover Institution, regarding our president's way with words:

"Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t. He does not merely redefine words, in fact, but on occasion undefines them, wiping them of their meanings — say, by insisting that words such as conservative and liberal are insignificant. The liberal president surely knows better but, as Orwell wrote, 'the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.'"

Now, before I break this down, I'd like to point out there's nothing reflected in that quote to like. But just as with Oprah Winfrey (one of the president's main supporters, and another black, but much-more obvious, NewAger - and one with powerful negatives) the American public, raised on a steady diet of post-60s NewAge nostrums, seems almost compelled to overlook the obvious in order to adore anyone (Paris Hilton?) reflecting vapidity and an extreme lack of focus. That unwillingness - on the part of the public or (more importantly) the press - to pull back the curtain on what these two are up to, ala Toto in "The Wizard of Oz", is, both, Obama and Oprah's main strength.

But back to our quote: Mr. Julian finds that president Obama "relishes the vague metaphor", or what NewAge Godfather Timothy Leary liked to refer to as "thought-stopping language". A perfect example was president Obama's election year claim that "We are the ones we've been waiting for", a phrase with absolutely no meaning but which packed a strong emotional wallop, for those self-involved enough to flatter themselves, but not smart enough to think a politician might contrive the phrase as a way to con them into joining his campaign. I mean, if you're the one you've been waiting for, what were you doing in a Chicago park waiting for him to speak?

Next comes the president's love for "the illogical argumentative sequence", which the critical thinker in me doesn't even want to go into, because - once the word "illogical" appears - I think this nonsensical game should be obvious to anyone. Take president Obama's view on Americans, immigrants, and being bilingual:

"Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they’ll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.
You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It is embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beacoup, right?”

Talk about an "illogical argumentative sequence"! It seems to have escaped the "Messiah" that if Europeans coming here from across the Atlantic Ocean can speak English, why can't Mexicans from just across the border? Also, those Europeans go back to their countries after their visit, while we're expected to learn Spanish because Mexican illegals are refusing to leave our home. From a cultural context, or any other one for that matter, what the president said makes no sense at all.

And, finally, there's the quote from George Orwell:

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

I shouldn't have to tell anyone that, anytime the great man of "1984" fame steps into the picture, somebody's in trouble. Unfortunately, in this case, that "somebody" is us. Listen to him pontificate on those drawn to president Obama:

"A youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist,..."

He certainly isn't describing anyone that could be called conservative. Or how about John Lennon's take on the personality types now called "Obots":

"I'm sick of all these aggressive hippies or whatever they are, the Now Generation, sort of being very uptight,...you know, either on the street or anywhere, or on the phone, demanding,...as if I owed them something,...They come to the door with a fucking peace symbol and expect to just sort of march around the house or something,...They're under the delusion of awareness,...and that's what I'm sick of. I'm sick of them, they frighten me, a lot of uptight maniacs going around wearing fuckin' peace symbols."

Putting those two descriptions together, let's see what we have here:

A "demanding" group of people who think we "owed them something", who "march around" talking about "Awareness", as they're leaning towards being a "vegetarian", who's into "socialism", enthralled by one or the other "'Nature cure' quack," quite obviously a "pacifist", and a "feminist".

What type of "movement" does all that sound like to you? NewAgers, maybe? And must I remind you - again - that before they marched under the "mind/body/spirit" banner, NewAgers is the term they demanded to be called? But, before that, they were merely known by what they are - "occultists"? All fully enthralled to this one man with the murky past, who possesses a weird way with language, but no credentials to support the exalted position they want him in.

U.S. News and World Report reminds us (in their special issue "Mysteries of History: Secret Societies") that:

"Almost as soon as the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower, Americans began their centuries-long love affair with breakaway sects and cults. In the 19th century, Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism joined the Gnostic, millennialist and esoteric influences that had arrived earlier from Europe. By the 20th century, psychotherapeutic techniques joined the mix, as New Age mystics and messiahs created their own personal religions and cults. As a result, the phenomenon of the "personality cult" became a part of the zeitgeist, sometimes with alarming and even dangerous results."

In the same issue, Phillip Jenkins adds this:

"Though modern observers tend to assume that the idea of cults is relatively modern, in fact it has deep roots in American history. Extreme and bizarre religious ideas are so commonplace it is difficult to speak of them as fringe at all,...Some eras are particularly fertile for religious innovation and, hence, for the formulation of groups a modern observer might describe as cults. The combination of occult, mystical, Masonic and pseudoscientific views with esoteric Christianity would have been instantly comprehensible to Americans of the 1830s, 1880s and 1970s, while as far back as 1730 there were regions where a synthesis of this sort would have been regarded as perfectly familiar, if not already old hat."

So, as has been said many times, there is nothing "new" about this "NewAge" except for how they put the old wine in a new bottle, the means used to disseminate their message - and, of course, hide their intentions.

But those are becoming clearer all the time, aren't they?

(To be continued - maybe,...)

That's "Mr. Fudge" To You, Buddy

"All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a theocracy inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war."

-- Roger Cohen, finally talking like a grown-up (took him a while - anybody want to discuss when NewAge was "occulted" here?) as chronicled in Commentary Magazine.

Why The Mainstream Sucks: They Ignored NewAgers (Who Are Everywhere - Including In Government) And Went For Satanists: You Ever Seen A Real Satanist?

From "The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years" by Reason Magazine.

Insanity Rules (They Will Never Be Explained)

I do not want to make Janet Fraser's grief any worse. But some things must be said,...

This case is,...symbolic - of a demonisation of Western medicine (the flower of Western civilisation),...

And of a growing tide of irrationality,...

Just the most extreme manifestation of a cult,...

...This unreason has spread,...

We've had a Sydney coroner investigate why a girl dying of infection was treated by her parents with homeopathy rather than Western drugs that would have saved her.

In Melbourne, a coroner investigated the death of a toddler whose epilepsy was likewise treated with homeopathy,...

And then of a Melbourne man who sweated to death in a "North American Indian" purification ritual.

Again you'll object: every society has a few irrational people, so what's new?

Yet what is new is that we institutionalise unreason now,...

Pandering to what we must resist.

Take the homeopathy favoured by Fraser.

The Lancet medical journal says not one study has proved the worth of a "therapy" based on a theory that a little of what kills you makes you stronger.

Despite that, taxpayer-funded TAFE colleges teach homeopathy as science.

Victoria University until recently offered bachelor degrees in naturopathy and homeopathy,...

Covering "vibrational medicine" and "the metaphysical".

EVEN crazier, VicHealth gave women in Ouyen $7000 to hold a naked rain dance.

And home birth activists, even interviewed mid-way through a tragic labour, still get a good press.

Just pray now that the,...government's maternal services review will at least refuse demands that home births be covered by Medicare.

But when unreason is so on the hoof that millions of us believe man is heating the world to hell, despite no rise in temperatures since at least 2002, what hope that reason will triumph?

What hope, when even children now die of our superstitions?

-- Andrew Bolt, with a must-read column about "perhaps Australia's most ferocious advocate of home births", how she killed her baby, and why TMR does what we do, along with Australia's Herald Sun.