Bullseye

"When people started asking about the meaning of life."

-- Clint Eastwood, asked to state when America started to "go soft" and it's problems began, which would be the cultish hippie '60's - exactly the point TMR is continually making to YOU - while "Dirty Harry" was wasting it on Larry McShane for New York's Daily News.

Teach Your Children Well: Good Job, Hippies!!!

“American teenagers lie, steal and cheat more at 'alarming rates,' a study of nearly 30,000 high school students concluded Monday."

-- Breitbart.com

Baby Boom Cult Affecting The Kids? Surprise!

"[The] ambivalence between fealty and resentment is woven throughout 'Heroes.' The children must battle an evil organization known as the Company that was created by the previous generation, including Peter’s scheming mother, Angela (Cristine Rose), who in her salad days seems to have been something of a power-flower, a groupie in an idealistic cult that later turned monstrous. Yet even after learning of Angela’s culpability, Peter remains a loyal if somewhat surly son.

...Some of the most likeable characters are stuck mopping up their parents’ mistakes. In Season 2, after Peter manages to wrest back the vial containing the world-threatening virus and destroy it, his fellow hero Matt (Greg Grunberg), whose father was also one of the founders of the Company, is less relieved than disgusted. 'Your mother, my father, God knows what else they’ve done,' Matt says bitterly. 'How much longer are we going to have to clean up their mess?'

It could be a while."

-- Alessandra Stanley, who makes it sound like someone in Hollywood is finally starting to focus on the reality of dealing with American hippies who were in est, Landmark, Scientology, New Thought, NewAge, Buddhism, etc., for this paranormal drama, or so says the New York Times.

They Found Themselves By Losing Their Minds But Also Made The Statement They Were Crazy

"The Beatles posed as rebels against class conventions and the supposed stuffiness of their elders, but their appeal was always to nice boys and girls, who enjoyed the patronising sentimentality of Eleanor Rigby and When I'm Sixty-Four.

In New York they met Bob Dylan, who introduced them to smoking pot. Dylan was in every way a superior artist and performer.

His songs, rasped out in that distinctive snarling voice and interrupted by jerky mouth organ recitatives, truly did herald something new in the world.

The sung lyrics of Dylan are very nearly in the league of some of the great songs of the world, such as those of Robert Burns. The Beatles are pappy by comparison.

This fact, obvious to everyone else, was certainly not clear to The Beatles themselves, who, the moment they were famous, became invested with a risible degree of self-importance.

Lennon was the most pretentious and self-regarding, and the more he made an exhibition of himself, the more he seemed to believe himself to be some kind of poet-sage or philosopher.

Lennon's own self-importance, however, was as nothing to that of his second-wife, Yoko Ono.

When they married, they lay in bed being photographed and offering such useful advice to the world as 'stay in bed' and 'grow your hair'.

Going further, they suggested that the violence in Vietnam and the Middle East and between the super-powers of the Soviet Union and the United States would evaporate were the politicians involved only to remove their trousers.

...There was a mindlessness about the 1960s, a sheer silliness not to see the consequences of such vandalism."

-- A.N. Wilson, author, on when the world lost it's way, for the Daily Mail.

News Flash, Joe: NewAge Ain't "Moderate"

"Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort. They are trying to sell a big lie--that the election is about the social issues of the 1960s, or Barack Obama's patriotism or his eloquence, or the "angry left," when it's really about turning toward a more moderate path after the ideological radicalism and malfeasance of the past eight years."

-- Joe Klein, admitting he doesn't have a clue - as a Baby Boomer - why anyone (including a presidential candidate born before the baby boom and his chosen vice president born after it) would still be fighting the 60's effects on society, in TIME Magazine.

Here's a thought for you to mull around also: the Baby Boom was the largest demographic shift in the history of the world but it only produced two presidents - Clinton and Bush - which, if you ask me, is as big a statement of generational failure as any we've ever known. Not only didn't the Boomers produce many leaders but, of the ones we still know about, we don't want to see any more of them in charge - Hillary fans notwithstanding.

As the Republican ticket makes clear, we on the Right want anything but Boomers. McCain/Palin is screaming we want to get back to basics, with some changes around the edges (McCain) as we chart a new way forward (Palin) and the politics of the 60's (Obama) and it's ambassadors (Biden) aren't even to be taken seriously. We know what that brings - relativism - and we in America who consider ourselves patriots have had more-than-enough of all that.

Like all Americans, we, too, want change.

Yea, I Guess You Could

“I guess you could argue that [Barack's] fancy Ivy League education was heavily informed by [the 60's]."

Michael Scherer, stretching to see what's right in front of his eyes, for TIME Magazine.

Oh Snap: There's A White Guy In My Mirror!!!

"There's a strange cloud that's settled over our modern society. It's a pervasive sort of bland contempt for an ingenious collection of lenses and mirrors that can reveal a giant ball of hydrogen, helium, methane and ammonia, billions of miles away, surrounded by untold millions of ice fragments in delicate orbit, yet one which will ascribe to the most banal unknown, a life-changing, quit-your-insurance-job-and-live-in-a-tree status.

For our entire history, right up until a hundred years ago, the idea of flying carpets and magic lanterns held people's imaginations in thrall. Now that we have everyday miracles like jet aircraft and electric lights, all some people want is to return to a time when the belief in magic was common, but the everyday blessings of magic - telephones, computers, antibiotics - didn't exist. Back in the anti-nuclear 80's lots of folks drove around with SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS bumper stickers, and I often asked myself, how much wood have these people actually split? I've done an hour in my 20's and I thought I was going to die.

It's sad, frankly - at least to people like me. I find it terribly, tragically sad that the more successful and comfortable we become, the more people pine for a time when none of these everyday miracles existed. Outdoor bathrooms on January nights and miserable coal stoves that need to be tended hourly just to heat a pathetic half-gallon of tepid water need to be experienced to be believed - and not just in a 24 hour adventure, but continuously. Death, hunger, cold, disease, infant mortality - we have fought them tooth and nail for millennia, for what? Apparently in order to so insulate people that they can long for "ancient wisdom," return to the "holistic tribal remedies" of the past, and hold up the most primitive and achingly poor cultures on earth as being the sole repository of "authenticity," while scorning every advance that they take completely for granted.

Magical thinking is everywhere today, and it is growing. It threatens the foundations of reason, individualism, science and objectivity that have delivered this success so well and for so long. It is dangerous. If we are to continue to thrive and progress, then we need to sharpen some sticks and drive a stake through the heart of this monster, and right quick.

I'll use the term "Magical Thinking" as a pretty big umbrella to cover a whole host of creeping intellectual chicanery: superstition, wishful thinking, pseudoscience, unsubstantiated claims, assertion, mysticism and anti-science.

Like so many of our other destructive tendencies, this whole mess really started in the latter part of the 1960's."

-- Bill Whittle, proving (not surprisingly) there may be intelligent life out there - and (surprisingly) some people, who may wear tuxedos, are waaay ahead of me - on the brilliant EjectEjectEject.com.

The Slow Poison Of A Sucker Punch

"Has any pop song evoked a generation’s romantic self-infatuation more hauntingly than Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”?

Sheila Weller, in her book “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation” (Atria Books), which weaves the biographies of these singer-songwriters into a post-feminist history, writes: “It was the first line of the chorus — ‘We are stardust, we are golden’ ” — that “conveyed the impression of hundreds of thousands of people speaking as one.”

Stardust-sprinkled, golden children determined to save the world was one way of describing the youth culture’s heady self-image. The generational axiom that all you need is love persisted into the 1970s during the so-called cooling of America, when soft-rock singer-songwriters like Ms. Mitchell, Ms. King and Ms. Simon and male equivalents like James Taylor, Jackson Browne and John Denver personalized the communal conversation.



As Ms. Weller astutely emphasizes, the three singers in her biography belonged to the first generation of women to come of age with the pill. The belief in love as the answer coincided with the women’s liberation movement. An unvoiced question suggested by the book that has persisted through these women’s lives and their music is whether romantic love and promiscuity are compatible.

Having lived out your fantasies until “the heyday in the blood is tame” (to quote Shakespeare), what remains? In Ms. Mitchell’s newest album, “Shine” (Hear Music), love is barely mentioned. The stardust has turned to ash, and the gold has tarnished. As she surveys the ravaged planet, this disenchanted, 60-something ex-romantic throws up her hands and declares, “If I had a heart, I’d cry.” Passion has curdled into bitterness."

-- Stephen Holden, for the New York Times

It's Confirmed: You DID Get Fooled Again

"He thought he was about to lose [his baby]. But I recommended homeopathic remedies, and he recovered,...That's God's honest truth. Now I bet doctors would say, ‘Oh they'd have got better anyway'. But I can't believe that."

-- Roger Daltrey (far, far left, in the photo above - no, farther,...) lead singer for The Who, on the health advice he gave to a parent.

And no, he doesn't explain how Oliver Cromwell's Piss healed anything, but I guess - when you're talking to hippies about the nature of reality - asking for a reasonable explanation is going a bit too far.

LSD: Let The Sixties Die

"…like many teenagers tragically lost in the Reagan ‘80s, I had Woodstock dreams, imagining some perfect purple haze of love. By the time I got to college, the cult of latter-day hippies had become a marketing phenomenon: Urban Outfitters was selling tie-dye T-shirts and groups of us made daytrips to Walden Pond to drop acid on Thoreau’s acreage. Undergraduates lived in shanties, built in front of the university president’s office at Harvard Yard, to protest investment in apartheid South Africa; all around the campus, reprints of posters advocating the 1969 student strike were thumb-tacked on kiosks and telephone poles. I was there, one of many, in love with a dream I’d had as a kid.

Today, of course, I know what LSD really stands for: let the Sixties die."

-- Elizabeth Wurtzel, in a piece called "Obama's Other Radical Friends", in the Wall Street Journal

My Guess Is Because Most So-Called "Smart" Assholes Are Partisan Idiots Who Just Want To Make Jokes About It All (But That's Just Me)

"In the United States, there is no excuse for ignorance. With the sheer quantity of information freely available and widely distributed throughout the country, there is no excuse,...Why do we- as a species- permit this sort of anti-survival behavior?"

-- From the blog called A Dark and Sinister Force for Good, which was questioning why superstition is allowed to exist - especially in America

I can't say it enough: none of you, in my opinion, take shit seriously enough - for fear of witch burning, or being seen as racist, or (heaven forbid!) just appearing not to be P.C.. You've got no balls. And considering the strange bents I find most people on, in this cultishly NewAge culture, it is a fear of mine, too, that people (if they tried to attempt anything) would go overboard because - let's face it - you fools are mad. Cowardly AND crazy: not a good combination, no matter how you cut it.

Whether it's the religious, the atheists, Republicans or Democrats - or anything in between - the 60's have fucked up any idea of what's normal so much (for everybody but me, apparently) that you're a danger to others no matter what you set out to do. You're so unsure, about everything, that no one can fucking move - and Leftists, especially, criticize anyone that tries, so what's the point? You might as well be condoning the shit you hate because that's the result anyway. In so many ways, none of you have really evolved beyond the primitive - or decided to grow up:

You're still scared children, giddily playing with fire.

Abusing Those Who Could Hurt You (But Didn't)

"Looking back, I am struck by the shallowness of Sixties radicalism. Our ideas were relatively incoherent and unformed,... Many student radicals adopted an eclectic mix of future-oriented radical ideals alongside some backward-looking, anti-modern and anti-technology romantic sentiments,...What strikes me now, however, is the ease with which radicalism was able to proceed back in the late 1960s. The occupations and demonstrations we organised were part of what we labelled our ‘struggle’ – yet I can now see that very often,...we were kicking through an open door."

-- Frank Furedi, former Marxist (and the man who introduced me to the phrase Age Of Unreason) on his '60's radicalism

Forever Pointing At Everyone Else

"While I personally have nothing against torching buildings and brawling under appropriate circumstances, I can't understand why Paul Auster simply can't say, "I ripped out the fence because I wanted to. I rioted because I decided to." The idea that a 61 year old man might act irrationally because the mere thought of US policy in Iraq deprives him of reason is a pretty disturbing,...there's a whole population,...of seemingly normal people out there just waiting to go berserk at the mere mention of politics they disapprove of."

-- The Belmont Club (in response to Paul Auster's '60's recollection, in the New York Times, "The Accidental Rebel") writing for Pajamas Media.

Go Away: We're Open-Minded (With Ourselves)

“Americans lost their sense of a nation,...in the sweeping economic and cultural shifts that took place after the,...1960s.”

-- Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort, which documents the way Americans are balkanizing themselves into communities that all think alike

NewAge (Rhymes With Sewage)

"Much of what we associate with the Aquarian sixties was in fact old hat,...but if the pattern was visible to those with a sense of history, it wasn’t to the New Left, which,...'imagined itself radical pioneers, discovering a new world of ideas that had eluded all who had lived until the present.' Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) founder Tom Hayden, like many of the members of MoveOn.org today, exulted in his dismissal of all that had come before. 'In formulating our vision and ideas,' explained Hayden, 'it was most important to draw lessons from that same experience instead of relying on the textbooks of others.' There was no past, just a glorious future. In short order, the New Left had created its own version of the Nazi-Stalin pact by embracing both the leather-clad fascist thuggery of the Black Panthers and the Maoist version of Stalinism.

The sixties ended with SDS’s morphing into the violent Weathermen, leftists with wealthy backgrounds who tried to 'smash monogamy' through group sex and 'smash capitalism' with pipe bombs. It was all very nineteenth-century,..."

-- From Fred Siegel's review of A Conservative History of the American Left, by Daniel J. Flynn, in City Journal.

It's All About How You Look At It?

"These killings are shameful and distressing to our society."

-- President Jakaya Kikwete, of Tanzania, in his recent State of the Nation speech

Yes, yes, I know - many of you were hoping that quote was from President Bush commenting on Iraq - but no, it's actually in reference to what African witch doctors are doing to people for,..well, I'll let President Kikwete explain it further:

"Sometimes, word spreads around that body parts of people with certain physical attributes like bald people or albinos contribute greatly to attaining quick prosperity."

"Quick prosperity". Great. Can't Tanzania just get Bill Clinton and Tony Robbins to arrive and do their motivational dog-and-pony fire-walking medicine show? Fire-walking should have even more appeal in Africa.

But how embarrassing is it to know a President of the United States is involved in that nonsense? I mean, look at the pictures I'm using to accompany this post. Now, I don't care if he's wearing a suit-and-tie - these might as well be pictures of our former president - and, no matter how you cut it, that's pretty fucking "shameful and distressing" in itself. Here, try this one for a more accurate reference:

That asshole just announced he made $109 million pulling that crap - and that's mostly American money he took from gullible people. Yea, he can "feel your pain" alright - in his wallet. I swear, Bill Clinton is a fucking low-life on a personal journey to discover where the bottom is. But, hell, I have to admit, I'd pay 'em myself to stop African witch doctors from pulling this Tanzanian body part scam.

Bob Geldof says we Americans don't pay attention to Africa unless the "odd horror" occurs (which is true: I don't even pay attention to what's happening down the block) so it's not like I want to pile on, just because. It's just that, this story got me to thinking about all this nonsense I cover (or un-cover, as the case may be) and what'll be going through my mind when I die.

See, when I die, I imagine I'll be trying hard - really hard - to think of something "good". (I used to think, if I was lucky, I'd be staring into the eyes of my wife but that imagery won't fucking work anymore,....) Now, knowing all that I know about cultism, etc., I'm sure it'll be particularly difficult to come up with *anything* positive to focus on - and especially under duress.

From where I'm sitting now, it'll just be a lonely ordeal with nothing more pleasant to look forward to than this nightmare - started by my ex-wife - finally being over: No more NewAge. No more betrayals; no more gullible idiots; no more dealing with people, like the Clintons, who are out to do nothing more than swindle another sucker.

There's one born every minute, right? Sure, but - while I can understand the impulse to fleece 'em - damn it, no one can convince me it's the right thing to do. And the idea of a president engaging in it is just down-right depressing. I really don't like thinking about it. I don't like thinking about any of it. And I know I won't want to "later".

But "whatever" for now: one of these days this war will be over, and I'll be able to take down my poster of Osama bin Laden (authentic, right from Pakistan) and replace it with a picture of President Bush - my president - much the way people (during WWII) used to display a map of Europe, and eventually replaced it with a photo of FDR - their symbol of strength, courage, and integrity, through tough times - while, for me, President Bush's picture will represent the official end of the madness of the 60's: a thought that has always brought a smile to my face.

So, if I should die alone, I'll (hopefully) have to look on President Bush. Which, I'm sure, to many people probably seems like a strange thing for me to write. But, to many of those same people, it's gentlemen, like those in these photos, who have always been seen as a comfort: as long as (rather than killing albinos and bald guys for body parts) they were ripping off Americans to the tune of millions,...just "making a killing",...but doing it in a suit-and-tie.

*Thanks to Elizabeth Mika for the Tanzania story. No thanks, to the Clintons, for the rest.

Leave The Kids Alone

So we've got two terribly cultish stories, both involving kids, making the rounds:

First, teenagers are killing themselves at an alarming rate, in a single English village, in what people are calling an "internet suicide cult". ("But how can that be?", you ask, "There's no cults around, it's just some black guy ranting", right?) And, second, the great Orac has a report on a children's hospital, in Chicago, that claims to heal kids using "integrative medicine". Great.

I just commented on kids and the effects of spirituality on Steve Salerno's SHAMblog. Why adults don't understand that rejecting reason, for "other ways of knowing" will damage kids is beyond me. It seems fairly obvious that, if kids can see that you don't adhere to reason, they won't want to either - and, well, what's left in life then?

I know that, once I discovered the dangerous idiocy of cultism around me, I wanted to die - but, somehow, decided to fight instead. Expecting kids to do the same is probably asking too much:

This is a battle for the adults.

But what good are the adults when they, obviously, can't tell reality from bullshit? That children's hospital story is a perfect example:

Orac discovered it because James Randi, and I, were arguing with Avery Comarow (above) of U.S. News & World Reports about "alternative medicine". Now, here's a guy whose job it is to check healthcare facilities for "quality" and he's musing on, idiotically, about there being little "risk" involved in our hospitals catering to nonsense - including the one in Chicago that's openly preying on kids to make money.

It's just the blind leading the blind and at this point, if you ask me, should probably be thought of as criminal. I mean, it's one thing what idiots with money will do with to their pets, but with their kids? Come on! Parents are supposed to protect their kids from shit like this. This is fraud, by any definition of the word, or the law. Cruel as hell, too.

The problem is that, since the 60's, most Boomers have been raised to question anything but post-modern nonsense and can't see their way out of it - don't know how to live without it. So they try passing it on to the kids but today's kids (not being fully indoctrinated and, ever so slowly, becoming painfully aware of the contradictions in the adult's behavior) they can see right through it.

But then, unless they read a blog like mine, they have nowhere to turn for answers. And, believe me, they want answers. I know because I talk to 'em. But everybody else keeps sending them back to the same bullshit, over and over, like yoga and meditation is going to, somehow, make them smarter. Hell, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were smart as can be and, both, rejected this form of sloppy thinking, out-of-hand. (If religion or pagan spirituality is the answer, how did that happen?) Fuck, I could go on, and on.

But, really, who am I fooling?

You people may never learn,....