More Rye Observations (From The Blog With No Bread)

Rock, rock, the planet - ROCK - Get It? No? Really? 

This morning, the first private email in TMR's box was a joy, and it contained a warning for others - listen to TMR:

"For what it's worth: I really appreciate your commentary. I also remember your history. 

Back in the Day (around 08 or so), you gave two very good pieces of advice, one of which I followed, the other of which I didn't (to my detriment):

1.) Watch out for urban kebab places: I did that. What you said about how dirty they could be was totally correct. I found decent family restaurants, which were couscouses that served kebabs; never a standup kebab place. 

2.) Beware of New Age. Now, back in the US, I'm dealing with medical issues due to "homeopathic" quack treatment that I took in France, because I was in pain, and it was August. (Oy.) 

I wish the best to you. Wish I could support you better.”

TMR is now an Afro-desiac to whites on race

Not much to add to that (TMR wrote back privately) except - to understand quackery AND to build up the proper level of skepticism - readers should check out: 

He's white, and English, with a German name - Maybe Crack's right!

Dr. Edzard Ernst. For instance, his topic today is "Another dodgy study of homeopathy," which is how the English talk - the shit's "dodgy" - which makes it sound kind of cool. But it's not. 

Life is filled with things that "sound kind of cool" but it's not.

Remember "The Artful Dodger"? (Not remember, remember, but remember?) It's like that. But bad art. Really, really badd. 



If a man owns a pocket comb he's probably a Republican - Good to know!

 Another great resource is Penn Jillette's (?) "What's The Harm?"  There readers can get a glimpse at the worst - before it happens - and head trouble off at the pass. 

Here to help - 100%

As far as "support" goes, it's not all about money. Write - let TMR know it did you some good - which does TMR good:

Some will only be impressed, by displays of originality, over time

There was a time when very few thought The Macho Response would ever be seen as correct, on anything, because - they said - the topics being taken on, like NewAge, were "too big."

This was the very first time TMR was glad to see Dr. Oz on television

That hurt - a lot - right up until the tide started turning. But it did.

Yeah, you heard me - You're the white one.

So now the topic is race - specifically the white one.

Whoa - this blog's about problems arising from cultish thinking - Wait a minute!

IT'S JUST TOO FUCKING BIG!!!!

"Too fucking big" leads, naturally, to a picture of Dirk Diggler - that's all you get about art - Think

So check it, shout to someone there's a blog they can trust, whether they'll like the style (or positions taken) or not. That alone *might* bring TMR something more, some day. You never know.

You don't have a country unless somebody's got your back

Right now - at this very moment - just hearing of someone else's actual benefit (yes, even a white person's) is more-than-enough to keep going,...

"Snake Told Me,..."

I don't entirely agree with Penn here, but I still got a kick out of his "snake" speech,...

 

I'm Digging, Digging For Gold - Oh Look: I Struck Fraud!

It ain't a couple of gold plates with messages from God, but this will have to do:

He has spent the past 40 years transmitting messages from the dead and reading people’s fortunes, but now professional ‘psychic’ Mark Edward Wilson says it’s time to draw back the curtain on his act.   

In a new tell-all book called ‘Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium, the 61-year-old medium, who goes by the name Mark Edward, reveals the tricks of the trade that he has been using since the 1970s to make people believe in his ‘supernatural’ powers. 

While Edward’s memoir does not reveal any shocking secrets of the profession, it effectively drives home the point of how easily people can be duped, according to the New York Times. 

For example, the 61-year-old psychic describes the old-fashioned trick in which he would talk to a member of the audience before the show, who would mention that his father’s name was Louis.  

Then during the performance, Edward would find the man he spoke to earlier in the crowd and say, ‘The name that comes to my mind is Lou. Who is Lou?’ More often than not, the targeted spectator will forget about his earlier encounter with the medium and be amazed at his ability to gaze right into his past.  

Edward’s desire to come clean about his supernatural machinations 40 years into his career is rooted in his claim that he belongs to a special cohort of magicians, among them the duo Penn and Teller and James Randi, who both perform tricks and debunk them to teach people how not to get hoodwinked in the future.   

In an interview with the Times, Edward said that after years of sympathizing with the skeptics while capitalizing on people’s gullibility, he felt he had to choose sides.

"He felt he had to choose sides." Now THAT's a problem most people don't seem to have.

And I'm glad he mentioned "capitalizing on people’s gullibility," because few will admit that's what's going on - including supporters of certain presidential candidates who listen to "prophets" and "spiritual" celebrity talk show hosts.

Why even the candidates themselves are a *little* shy on THAT point,….

New Age Promise: There Will Be No Left-Overs

This year, before the across-the-table, politically-partisan, intra-family laughter begins, TMR would like to give thanks for the slim-and-trim NewAgers who will be attending as the butt of our jokes.

After having provided us fatties with a year's worth of non-stop entertainment by ignoring the obvious (NewAge "thinking" is stupidity writ large) and going for it anyway, we want to remind NewAgers we tried to stop them for a long, long time, but it was they who insisted on going down this "path":

Houdini died of peritonitis in 1926, at the crest of his fame. Yet long after that final disappearance, he inspired works by a slew of painters and sculptors....Still, Houdini’s most valuable legacy is not for artists or magicians like Penn and Teller, James Randi, and David Copperfield, who do their own great escapes, obviously influenced by the Master. It is for the credulous public.

Throughout his professional life, Houdini had no illusions about his talent. He always assured onlookers that no matter how miraculous his tricks appeared to be, they were actually earthbound, consisting of muscular contortions, lock-picking skills, inventive gimmicks, and misdirection. He did his best to expose charlatans who claimed that their magic came from occult sources. One of his colorful posters is succinct: DO SPIRITS RETURN? HOUDINI SAYS NO—AND PROVES IT. In an epoch when programs like Paranormal State and Psychic Kids are watched by millions of naive viewers, healthy skepticism is in short supply.

Yes, Sir. Since 1926.

By 2010, for waaay too many believers, black was white, up was down, left was right, and there was nothing - absolutely nothing - anyone could say to change their minds, because (as we personally discovered) NewAgers had ruthlessly self-programmed themselves to "change" only the politics of others:

It seems that whenever you hear about a "rightwing" hate crime nowadays, it turns out the the perpetrator turns out to be a leftwinger...much to the disappointment of liberals who continue to maintain the fiction about a violent Tea Party movement.

This was, of course, predicted by the former KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov, after the Soviet Union sent him to study the (now very-popular) effects of yoga and meditation on the American Left. He was very clear about what they were up to - and how these contradictions would manifest themselves now:



So today, just as he said, we've been blessed with the spectacle of idiots calling Sarah Palin stupid, while giving balls-to-the-wall support to Oprah's "brilliant" choice for president who (surprise!) can't seem to do even the simplest things correctly.

And let's not forget, all this comes after 8 years of the Left being repeatedly outsmarted by a president NewAgers insisted barely possessed the brains of a "chimp".

Good times.

Yes, for all their self-implanted mantras about their own self-awareness, and the billions they've spent on Self-Help (which, for any thinking person, would be a clear sign of a problem) it's self-reflection that's so obviously in short supply, one can't help but be laughably appreciative of their efforts to look brainy when, quite obviously, their brains are the only thing they haven't been taking much care in stretching - while the rest of us were growing our guts.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

All that time at the yoga studio has really paid off:

This year, you insure that every American table you grace has at least two turkeys for us to feast on.

Now let the laughter begin.

Egyptian Pyramids, Chinese Medicine, And Indian Spirituality, Can't Hold A Candle To The Awesome Power Of American Ideas

Penn Wants To Tell You He Met A Good Christian Man (After Making Fun Of Those Psychic Frauds)

See? It's the moderates, of atheism AND Christianity, who are currently the "radicals" - so let's not blow it - we good folks need each other, now, to turn this country around:

The battle against NewAge is coming,...

Simply Amazing (So Few Listen To Him)

New Age Equals Very Bad Manners

"The concept that civilization is inherently corrupt, but Nature inevitably benign, is particularly popular in earthquake- and flood-ridden California. The natural approach to human relations presumes that to know any person well enough is to love him, and that, therefore, the only human problem is a communication problem. It refuses to admit the possibility that people might be separated by basic, deeply held, genuinely irreconcilable differences--philosophical, political or religious. Thus, the effort to trivialize etiquette as being a barrier to the happy mingling of souls, actually trivializes intellectual, emotional, and spiritual convictions by characterizing any difference between one person's and another's as no more than a simple misunderstanding, easily solved by frank exchanges or orchestrated 'encounters.'

Many forms of etiquette are employed exactly to disguise those antipathies that arise from irreconcilable differences, in order to prevent mayhem. When I was president of a school board, a member with whom I disagreed on every possible educational issue suggested that we could resolve our differences if the trustees all went off on retreat and got to know one another better. 'You don't understand,' I had to tell him. 'The only reason I haven't murdered you is that I really don't know you all that well, so I feel I have to give you the benefit of the doubt. Do you want to remove that doubt?'"

- Miss Manners on why New Age (and other forms of cultish thinking) are hypocritical and undermine their stated goals of fostering "peace and love".

I mean, when Miss Manners is driven to saying she wants to murder you, your perpetually "nice" ass is fucking up pretty bad. Even Penn Jellette (of Penn & Teller fame) once famously said the behavior of New Agers "just makes you want to smack 'em". About the only people with New Age experience who aren't driven to want to hurt them, somehow, is the believers themselves.

Atheism

I See Dead People

"Mrs. Clinton is the tea bag that brings the boiling water with her. It's always high drama with her, always a cauldron--secret Web sites put up by unnamed operatives smearing Barack Obama in the tones of Tokyo Rose, Chinese businessmen having breakdowns on trains after the campaign cash is traced back, secret deals. It's always flying monkeys. One always wants to ask: Why? What is this?"

- Peggy Noonan, the very-perceptive columnist for the Wall Street Journal

"Flying monkeys". Nice choice of words for the Clinton many consider The Wicked Witch of the West, no?

Speaking of seeing weird things around presidential candidates, according to recent reports on a new Shirley MacLaine book, Dennis Kucinich (above) saw a U.F.O. while at MacLaine's house. (Hardly surprising for the likes of him, seeing how he's always making such a big deal of his goofily-bad poetry writing, and the insistence he's so "different".) So - if I've got this right - Kucinich sees U.F.O.s, and Hillary Clinton talks to the dead, amongst other things. And both are, still, considered presidential enough to be regularly invited to debates. Oh-K.

I'm just asking but, has anybody noticed, this kind of stuff doesn't pop up on the radar of the other presidential candidates? I mean, sure, they say John Edwards was boinking a New Ager, but nobody ever said he was one - not even me - since I'm only trying to tell you about confirmed fruitcakes. What's up with that?

As far as I know, comparatively few Republican candidates have been found to be part of the New Age - except for, maybe, unknowingly taking cult money. Any quick look around the blog will show I've had reason to talk, almost exclusively, about Democrats in the pocket of one group of cultists or another. Not because I hate Dems but (surprise!) that's who is, almost exclusively, into cults and cultish thinking. Maybe Republicans are just too tied to the concept of "individual freedom" to let any kind of guru lead them around by the nose for too long?

Hillary, especially, has a long list of New Age stuff in her history while claiming she's merely a Methodist Christian (Notice that none of these so-called "brave" folks can handle being an atheist?) but did you know Arianna Huffington (above, of the politically influential Left-wing Huffington Post blog) is also a follower - of the cult leader John-Roger? I didn't, until the stuff about the Daily Kos and astrology came out, which gave me a reason to start rooting around in the "netroots" phenomena.

Really: So much of the in-house anti-America rhetoric is coming from cult sources, it's truly amazing - makes one wonder what else they're lying about, doesn't it? It does for me because, seriously, I can't seem to find any escape from it.

Bruce Springsteen once said (speaking of this time of war:) “what’s true can be made to seem like a lie, and what’s lying can be made to seem true.” But, really, who's doing the lying? The Right or the Left?

These days, in what Frank Furedi calls The Age of Unreason, I see tons of opinions being treated as facts by the Left, and just as many facts being disregarded as opinions merely because they come from the Right. Seriously, forget about the war for a moment, and ask yourself how much you really know about some other things the Left is pushing on us - things that you can actually nail down - that you can check for yourself? How much of it is true, and right, and really "good"?

Like, is recycling (something which everyone I know insists on) really "good for the environment"? Not according to the facts. Penn and Teller's Bullshit! even won an Emmy for showing "the reality behind recycling, a supposedly pro-environment activity that in actuality creates pollution, has to be subsidized by the government because it's cost ineffective, and is completely unnecessary."

Now, if the Left can be that far-off about good ol' recycling, as they're going out of their way to accomplish it (and fascistically demanding others follow suit) how right, or wrong, might they be about what's going on half-way around the world with our boys lives and, possibly, the fate of our nation on the line?

Admit it: Any of these serial protesters can be that exact same distance from the truth and never know it. And, all the while, screaming their heads off that the president of the United States is actually leading a nation of murderers, when it's they who may be destroying the best chance for peace and prosperity someone else may ever have, leaving only dead bodies in their wake.

I swear, once this shit is cleared up - and it will be - this blog is gonna be worth big bucks one day,...