Bad News

 

  They left family, joined a cult, vanished,...There’s still no trace of them. So, all good.

   

  France outlaws practices which expose patients to a serious health risk: "An important step [in] the right direction [that] could put an end to much of so-called alternative medicine that endangers the health of French consumers." Not that French consumers care, which is why alternative medicines need to be outlawed, much like racism in America: They just can't stop on their own, because that's what reason would dictate. No way. They must be stopped. Because reason is not enough. Life, itself, is not enough. Because they're so smaaart.

    

Lunatic: Bill Ackman Says Our Names Determine Our Fates, Promptly Screws Up 

   

  What is ‘looksmaxxing?’ Young men are justifying extreme physical transformations with pseudoscience, and a real healthy dose of unrestrained narcissism.

   

  Hardly any plastics can be truly recycled, and producers have known for decades, or, at least, since the NYT article "Recycling Is Garbage" was published in 1996.

 

You Were Worried About Your Weight

Description: Quite possibly the craziest cult ever, Heavens Gate was founded by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. Heaven's Gate members believed that the planet Earth was about to be recycled (wiped clean, renewed, refurbished and rejuvenated), and that the only chance to survive was to leave it immediately. While the group was formally against suicide, they defined "suicide" in their own context to mean "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered," and believed that their "human" bodies were only vessels meant to help them on their journey. In conversation, when referring to a person or a person's body, they routinely used the word "vehicle". This documentary investigates an incident in 1997, where thirty-nine members of the San Diego-based cult "Heaven's Gate" committed mass suicide. They intended to reach an alien spacecraft which they believed to be following Comet Hale-Bopp, which was at that time brightly visible in the nighttime sky.

Sounds Like Somebody's Going To Have To Get Serious

I'm still down. Not really fighting today, just getting through it. But, in my dark mood, I am enjoying the show:

The man known as President Obama left the building after his Syria speech. What’s left in the White House is Barry Soetoro or whatever he goes by now: a shrunken, confused husk surrounded by court jesters, second-rate ideologues, and sycophants. And while it may be tempting to gloat at his reversal of fortune, the truth is that the collapse of the presidency represents the most dangerous moment in America since the September 11, 2001 attacks. 

Olympus has fallen. America’s leadership is functionally impaired in the face of a thrusting, fast-moving, and possibly brilliant opponent. Of course, the fact that Putin was up against a broken reed made it easier for him. Yet however one may admire Putin’s skills, it must be an admiration tempered by fear, of the kind felt by the British 8th Army in the face of Rommel, of the sort with which Gamelin regarded Guderian. Nothing can disguise the fact that Putin is the enemy and America is less-than-competently led in its contest against him. Something must be done to stem the tide. But what?

"Less than competently led"?  And this is a new phenomena you say? Interesting. "Court jesters, second rate ideologues, and sycophants"? 

You're missing Mitt Romney again, aren't you?

I don't understand what's happening, that's my "problem". I was sure our nation's highest concerns were always recycling, gay marriage, American Idol, and "fun". Anyone who didn't think so was an asshole. I heard it said at the alternative medicine store and it's really popular. Like a celebrity. That's how we judge things, you know:

By how popular they are,...

Hypnotized (By The Cult Of Enviro-Mentalism)

"Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with 'Ecotopia,' a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known."

 

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called 'recycle bins' sit on trains, along with 'hanging ferns and small plants.'

A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. 

'You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.'

...Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. 

 

And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. 

...'Ecotopia' has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their 'natural' aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)

 Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: 

 

Most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world.

Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. 'Ecotopia' is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.

Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. 

Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere 'Walden.'

“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. 'This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.'

But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, 'Ecotopia' is a blueprint for the future.

'It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,' he said. 'But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.'

'And we’d better get ready,' he added. 'We need to know where we’d like to go.'"

-- Scott Timberg, on the '70s cult novel that has been discovered as a cultishly philosophical blueprint for American society's current manipulation, in The New York Times.

It's The Little Things

This is a photo of an aborted child. Why am I showing you a photo of an aborted child? Because we never see one, do we? We're forced to talk about them all-the-time, but we never see what we're talking about. Is this that "clump of cells" I hear so much about - or a dead baby? 

Looks like a dead kid to me.

So - along with my truck conking out - I'm in about as much pain as a man can be. But I don't feel any of it, because of pain killers. They're not only masking my physical pain (and putting me somewhere between "Whee!" and wanting to vomit) but, emotionally, I'd be hard pressed to have ever been more ambivalent. Political activists, especially, will get nowhere with me right now - not that they ever have:

"Those who set themselves up to raise the public’s awareness are not just providing information; they’re also making a statement about themselves, about who they are. They, unlike those who require their support, are aware. Awareness is presented as a state of being all of us should aspire to attain. In its common usage today, the term awareness resists any clear definitions. It is not simply about knowing or understanding. So AIDS awareness, for example, is not reducible to knowledge of that disease; rather, it implies the adoption of the values of safe sex and the lifestyle associated with its values. People who are aware are likely to demonstrate this fact publicly, by wearing the right-coloured ribbon or bracelet or T-shirt and using the appropriate language. To be aware is to be on the morally superior side: not eating meat; not practising unprotected sex; not smoking; exercising regularly; riding a bicycle; recycling… these are just some of the rituals that signal that a person is aware."

Isn't there something ethically wrong with appointing yourself as morally superior? So aren't, say, Whole Foods and NPR actually citadels to evil? They certainly seem like it. That's why they both spend so much time and effort, smoothing over the edges, trying to make the ugly attractive:

"Recycling does sometimes makes sense -- for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space,...there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups -- politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations -- while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources."

I like the idea of the self-appointed morally superior NewAge hippies, working in cahoots with the politicians they claim to loathe, only to screw the rest of us.

To an artist, that symmetry is practically a pain killer all by itself,...

 

No Bowing - Even If Warranted (That Would Be A Biggie)

These people are so damned s-l-o-w. Not only is it long past time for nation-wide in-sync traffic lights but, if I were Lord Of All I Survey (stay with me, I'm mulling it over) we would also adopt Utah's grid system for street addresses. Of course recycling would be eliminated, along with homeopathy, because those and other forms of fraud would finally be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And I'd probably even legalize drugs once I saw signs America was mature enough to take them.

Kind of a "reward system" thing, maybe, I don't know.

 Like I said, I'm mulling it over,...

Reality: It's A Tough Sell But,...Man, What A Great Idea!

Sure, I've used this Penn & Teller episode before, but it's the best. And, while I don't agree with a lot of this post, this much is true:

"Lets call recycling what it is - a fraud, a sham, a scam,..."

It's only when we start acknowledging things like this - and acting on them - that we're going to find relief for what ails us (like China looming in the background). But - since that calls for some (who were seen as wise) admitting they were wrong - it's not likely to happen. And isn't it shitty we can all get screwed over something like that? Because some Leftist can't bear to admit they're wrong?

 Ask a Romney supporter and get back to me,…

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,...

Kota Ezawa's "Beatles Über Alles"

Don't forget the world described here is the NewAge cult hell you fucking moron meditating hippie freaks are trying to create, with your goddamned recycled Whole Food organic health trip obsession, you fucking losers - you even brought Jerry Brown back (and people are calling Obama's term "Carter II") you fucking idiots. Click the tags at the bottom of the post to see how many other ways you've already willingly gone down the road to becoming as much like Nazis as possible:

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president…

Carter power will soon go away
I will be Führer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school

California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face
Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay

California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California

Now it is 1984
Knock knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece

Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower…

DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown

California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California

Completely Out Of Touch (So Just Get Out)

These fools are NewAgers - and they're completely insane:

A group of Democrats complain Styrofoam cups in the House cafeteria could contain carcinogens. 

In a letter to Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and other Republican leaders, the nine Democrats say the Styrofoam cups and other dining materials could hold chemical components that could cause cancer. The Democrats are upset with the switch to Styrofoam from recyclable materials put into place when Democrats ran the House. 

The letter asks Boehner to reconsider the switch away from recyclable to polystyrene-based foam containers, and warns that the health of visitors to the Capitol could be compromised. 

These folks have gone recycle crazy. Bring a thermos to work, if it bothers you so bad. Why should we have to pay three times more because you're a wimp about styrofoam? Get a grip.

Even better, get out of politics.

Look And Learn (We're Trying To Make It Easy)

Since we know reading environmentalist bullshit is boring, we're putting it with pictures of pretty girls to keep you interested:

Why you need to use your ‘environmentally friendly’ cotton carrier bag 131 times to be green:

Cotton bags offered by many supermarkets may be less 'green' than plastic carriers - and may cause more global warming, according to scientists.

As a greater amount of energy goes into making a cloth carrier than a polythene one, a cotton bag has to be used 131 times before it has the same environmental impact than its plastic counterpart.

And if a plastic bag is re-used as a bin liner, a cotton bag has to be used 173 times - nearly every day of the year - before its ecological impact is as low as a plastic bag on a host of factors including greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime.

But most of us only use the bags around 51 times before they are thrown away, researchers found.

But, still, those that use them act as if they're morally superior to the rest of us.

Speaking of the we're-morally-superior clique:

San Franciscans not as green as they think:

San Franciscans have an over-inflated opinion of themselves? Say it ain't so!

It seems to be the case, at least when it comes to our ability to know which trash goes where. To help gauge how well city residents are complying with the mandatory recycling and composting laws, the Department of the Environment conducted phone surveys and focus groups testing our knowledge on the subject.

Fifty-nine percent of people said they're doing absolutely everything they possibly can.

"People said, 'I know what I'm doing,'" said Mark Westlund, spokesman for the department. "I know absolutely everything about what goes where."

But considering a third of what we send to the landfill could be recycled and another third could be composted, we're not as diligent as we'd like to think.

And they definitely "like to think" that.

O.K., since they're using the word "third" so often, here's more bullshit:

The gangs dumping your recycling in the Third World: Why that effort separating your rubbish may be a waste of time:

Thousands of tons of recycling carefully sorted by families in  Britain is being dumped illegally in the Third World.

A three-year investigation by the Environment Agency has uncovered a multi-million pound trade in shipping waste out of the country.

Investigators are now bringing prosecutions against 30 criminal gangs, with five cases already going through the courts.

The revelations come in the week it emerged that nearly 140 councils force householders to sort rubbish into five or more containers – with some insisting on as many as nine.

They are likely to raise concerns about EU recycling laws, which are blamed for creating the illegal trade. They also risk fuelling public cynicism about the value of recycling.

The value of recycling? Nine containers? Now where have we heard that stuff before?



And here's that The New York Times story they mentioned.

As for how much money we're wasting on this nonsense - during a recession - here's some good news that should give the tree huggers nightmares:

House votes 244-179 to kill U.S. funding of IPCC

Just before 2 a.m. on February 19, the war on climate science showed its grip on the U.S. House of Representatives as it voted to eliminate U.S. funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Republican majority, on a mostly party-line vote of 244-179, went on record as essentially saying that it no longer wishes to have the IPCC prepare its comprehensive international climate science assessments.

So - while we know that won't be the end of it - in this one area, at least, we like what we're seeing.