Elizabeth Taylor Was A NewAge Headcase

Jesus Christ, is there anyone walking this planet who doesn't have a psychic running their life?

Her life was filled with more drama than a Hollywood movie and now, a month after her death,  there has been yet another plot twist.

Elizabeth Taylor was forced to give up a secret love child, it has been claimed today.

The late Hollywood legend gave birth to a baby girl called Norah, according to psychic and self-proclaimed Taylor confidant John Cohan.

Cohan claims that Taylor had been a client of his since the 1960s and told him he could not reveal the secret until after her death.

Did Elizabeth Taylor have a secret love child?

No wonder Taylor's life was such a mess. And why Michael Jackson and she got along - or why Michael lived and died as he did - seeing how he was always surrounded the likes of frauds and quacks like Uri Gellar and Deepak Chopra.

It seems to me this so-called "love child" probably caught a break, not being around. Except for all the money, of course. Liz was a bitch for depriving her child of that.

My Sister's So Cool/Anguished Bellyaching/60s

My beautiful sister, Marva, has a great ear for music, which isn't surprising because we come from a musical family and she and I both have music careers. But what gets me right now, and the reason I wanted to do a post, is that her music selections can make me practically travel back in time to the '60s, without making it seem like that generic acid-tinged day-glo poster everyone else attempts to conjure.



This is the '60s as I remembered them, when I was a boy, aware beyond my years but with a view that was limited in scope. I didn't know what a hippie was, and though sex showed up early, drugs were still a long way off. Men drank beer, or whiskey, and the women wore sun dresses. Black people were so concerned with their image we dressed up to go to the supermarket. "Funky" was a really bad word.



Martin Luther King was alive and many men wore coveralls as a uniform of the Civil Rights Movement. The insurance man was a "very important person", warranting the dispersal of children and displays of silverware. We hid in silence from Jehovah's Witnesses. We took naps to Billy Graham.



Collard greens were grown next to rose bushes. I thought an iguana was a dinosaur. There were 13 kids in the foster home, with 5 dogs, several chickens and ducks, and a rabbit. We caught an opossum, and stared at his ugly ass all day, but he "played possum" and escaped that night. My foster mother ran down armadillos skittering from the gutters. She caught snakes with her hands and killed them with a gardening hoe.



(I'm only including this song, above, because it's co-written by my sister's good friend Jimmy (OO Soul) Holvay.)

Everyone kept plastic on Living Room furniture, and kids were forbidden to enter there except on special occasions. My Auntie Bessie's was considered extremely glamorous because she decorated it in blue. It was rare that we'd enter her home through the front door, and when we did it felt like someone had died.



One of my sisters had a crush on Elvis which seemed very weird. My cousin Ricky, who was lighter than the rest of us, owned a 45 of The Beatles that nobody would let him play. The old man had nude pinups of white women in the garage. We were forbidden to look at them and thought they were very exotic.



Everybody loved Bobby Kennedy and there was a profile of Abraham Lincoln in every house. Jesus suffered, hauntingly, on his cross at the top of the stairs. We kids ran by him as fast as we could, just to avoid his gaze. It never worked because we looked.



The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, and I Love Lucy seemed to always be on television, interrupted occasionally by I Spy (with Bill Cosby) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Lawrence Welk. I don't remember when Petticoat Junction came on, but Bonanza came on Sundays. Cartoons started at 7AM, on Saturdays, and occupied a world of their own.



A family friend, Chester Moore, thought it extremely important that all the foster kids learn how to shoot pool, so he'd take us to the billiard parlor and teach us to aim. He got our Christmas tree cheap by saying we were orphans. He said he never saw a woman as beautiful as Cher. Chester drank too much, but he was the only one.



Momma R. made an outstanding peach cobbler, and, if you were going to McDonald's she'd ask you to pick her up some "hambuggies". Taco Bell sold "Tacahs". Jack In The Box just sold Jack In The Box.



My foster mother knew one dance, The Shotgun. She'd use her fingers to make pistols and when she "shot" us we'd laugh. She once fell off a Merry-Go-Round that had started moving while she was trying to secure me to a horse. I never got over the guilt and brought her gifts until the day she died.

"Race Music" Appreciation,...Done In Reverse

I love all that drama hanging on, and swooping around, that simple-assed beat - it's hardly a "song" at all. More like a slice of life, or a feeble construction that, somehow, attains power. And the way two separate vocals start at once, each one distinct yet complimentary, setting up a pattern for the others which overlap throughout. Wicked smart. Simply amazing. A "masterpiece" of deception.



War had this way of making the simple sound so complex, and vice versa, while also giving you the impression they came up with the shit while smoking on somebody's back porch. What are they laughing at? And whose idea was it to tell the story of the Cisco Kid and Poncho Villa in the first place? Doesn't the detail that they'd "eat the salted peanuts out the can" come across as bizarrely you-are-there authentic? (And can you imagine an artist, today, going that far off the boy/girl/sex plantation - this was the '70s! - to land a hit?) Genius don't follow no rules but to get there.



There had to be time when white folks heard what black people were doing and they were sure we were crazy. The don't-make-no-sense orchestration, the wailing, the sheer out-there construction, with a hint of slave songs, gospel, and doo-wop, all plopped on cheap plastic with the drunken Jackson Pollock-like abandon of a late night jazz session. Who cared what white folk thought? O.K., it's insane - insanely good, insanely original, and insanely effective. There was just nothing else like it. So it had to be made. We were finally free. And this was our music.

The Message: We Don't Have To Do This Again

Last night, while we were doing our usual reading about cults and cultish thinking, we ran across something we don't find often - an account, on the Quackometer blog, from someone who's broken out of the homeopathy mindset:

It is like living in a different culture.  Have you read some of these historical crime novels where they try to get you into how people thought then?  Margaret Doody is particularly good – Aristotle series.  Completely different assumptions and completely different ‘knowledge’. Homeopaths live in the same space as you but are in a different world, and they ‘know’. To come out of that world is a complete revision of assumptions, thought systems and thinking style.  It is very hard to do.  I think I’ve been trying to say that for a long time.  The larger the numbers have grown the easier it is for people to live in that world with others like them.

We've been saying, from the very beginning of this blog, that the homeopathy scam is, specifically, a cult, only to have it batted down by some of the best minds we've found online, but - when we're right we're right - so they haven't deterred us from continuing with it one bit.

Now, we've also said, publicly and repeatedly, that we may not be the best ones to bring this message, but what TMR has been saying has been becoming especially relevant in recent days, as we've seen the NewAge shooter of Gabriele Giffords and, now, the repeatedly unethical behavior of the teacher's union in Wisconsin. We can hear you now saying, "Wait a minute - what does any of this have to do with homeopathy and cultism?" Well, let's be more clear:

What scientists focus on, almost exclusively, is the fact homeopathy is water, so few have investigated why the believers are so obsessed with it and even claim it "heals" when there's nothing in it. But, as 'Wendy" on the Quackometer blog makes clear, these learned scientists aren't dealing with "a complete revision of assumptions, thought systems and thinking style", as they should be, to get at the issue - they're focused on the science! And, by doing so, they're missing the whole problem.

The same can be said for how we're looking at the teacher's union. Above is a photo of the end of The People's Temple, the deadliest cult suicide in American history. Those people didn't have to have homeopathy to do what they did, they were steeped in Jim Jones' Marxist/socialist rhetoric of the 60s and 70s, with a bit of spirituality, and nothing more. But what it did was drive them to make one unethical move after another until they found themselves backed against a wall far off in the jungles of Guyana. Anyone with a clear-eyed view of what the liberals in Wisconsin have been doing and saying can see the parallels easily:

They've run away to Chicago to avoid a vote. They've compared themselves to "freedom fighters" in other countries (when there's no connection to what they're doing) engaged in a number of unethical acts - playing hooky from school, exploiting the kids by bringing them into the fight, doctors writing bogus notes, bring the governor's children into the fray, etc. - and on and on and on, finally culminating in last night's "threat" on Ann Althouse.

What we're saying is, if everyone would do what the scientists should've been doing with the believers in homeopathy and cultism - shift your thinking, just the slightest bit, to seeing the "complete revision of assumptions, thought systems and thinking style" for what they are - and get out of focusing merely on the politics, we could finally have a chance at straightening out the many problems of this nation before we, somehow, end up with a situation Americans have seen too often, but especially in the 60s and 70s.

It's time.

Movies Are Make-Believe Like Life's An Illusion

Uh-oh, somebody better hurry and shut this director up, or tell him he's crazy, or something, because he's going "off the reservation" with his comments about the mainstreaming of cults:

PARK CITY, Utah — One of the hot films at this year's Sundance Film Festival is Martha Marcy May Marlene, though its alliterative title can be hard to keep straight.

First-time director Sean Durkin's psychologically probing film about a girl who escapes from a cult in the Catskills had many people talking about the powerful performance of 20-year-old lead actress, Elizabeth Olsen, who plays the titular multi-named girl.

"I did lots of research into cults," said Durkin. "I wanted to do something about a cult that was contemporary, since so many times movies about them are set in the '60s and '70s."

In his research into a wide variety of cults, he found similar methods of manipulation and abuse, he said.

"It just seems there's a sort of consistency," he said. He also drew upon actual experiences of a friend who had left a cult and said it took her seven years to speak of her ordeal.

This film is about the difficult adjustment in the first couple of weeks after Martha (Olson) leaves the commune led by the creepily charismatic Patrick (Winter's Bone's John Hawkes).

"I know that it's not that this fictional, exaggerated thing," Olson said after the film's premiere. " I know a few people who told me their parents had been in a cult and I know someone who was born in a cult. It's everywhere. It's not this crazy, outlandish idea. It's rooted in something that exists."

Durkin had made a short film called Mary Last Seen exploring the various methods used to draw people into cults. From there he worked on the script at Sundance screenwriter's lab last January and the director's lab in June, shooting the film over six weeks in August and September.

"I've always been fascinated about why people feel the need to be in a group" said Durkin.

They're "everywhere"? You've questioned "why people feel the need to be in a group"? Yea, yea - whatever - get a blog, asshole. We've heard that stuff before. (Based on these comments, we bet this guy probably thinks he's smarter than everyone else, too!) Somebody better step in and set him straight before his movie starts convincing the NewAgers into 2012 or reiki of this "conspiracy theory".

His film's even got somebody from "Winter's Bone" in it. Jeez, what a loser.

"First-time director" Sean Durkin's a fucking fruitcake, if you ask us.

Brian Williams Gets It: I'm Surrounded By Idiots

The veteran newscaster's face gives it all away, as he's listening to Mr. I'm Married But I Screw My Interns talk about someone else needing psychological help, right before another weirdo celebrity who needs psychological help (Paula Abdul) comes on the show. What an honor! And what a shame. We betcha it'll be a long time before he accepts that invitation again.

And here's one thought a rational person probably hasn't had to ponder since the French Revolution, and then the 60s:

Once again we're back to a day and age when someone being sane is made to feel this way.

Now'a'days Having More Than Two Years Of College Is Enough To Embarrass Yourself

Man, the longer we glance at Glenn Reynolds' little collective the more we understand Shakespeare's directive to "first, kill all the lawyers." Actually that's not true, but our image of lawyers - and especially those who also hold the title of "professor" - has definitely come down sharply. Sharp enough we're almost glad we didn't finish college.

See, we know we're smart but (contrary to what others think) we've never considered ourselves "all that". We've always known there are others out there who are supposed to be much, much smarter than any rock and roll artist with a hang-up for reading. But, now that we've met some of these top-of-their-class types online, we're not always so sure.

We expected brilliance and we get "meh". We wanted fighters for the American way and we get Reynolds' repeated woe-is-me interjections about trying to buy a Nissan Leaf and his fetish for the whores at Frisky. Ann Althouse's various unhinged NewAge observations in favor of feminism, special privileges for gays, and "Dancing With The Stars". And now this from Classical Values' Eric Scheie:

Perhaps I came across as being too fair to Andrew Sullivan.

Perhaps? Perhaps? Jesus, for lawyers you guys can be s-l-o-w.

We were asking back in 2008 how it was possible Sullivan even held a writing job - a fact we still don't understand. Well we do, kinda, now that we're familiar with the mindset of those who hold the unique position in American business known both as "management" and/or "Human Resources", but - other than that - no, we don't get it.

If we're losing you here (as we're also feeling kind of lost) then let's get this puppy back-on-track:

Attempting to be fair to Andrew Sullivan is wrong.

Why? Because Andrew Sullivan is a NewAger (What else?) and, as Glenn Reynolds' friends Jonah Goldberg and Bill Whittle have noticed, NewAgers are old wine in new bottle Nazis.

By the way, we can also add Neil Davenport of Spiked Magazine for writing:

"There is a peculiar paradox that while Nazi Germany is held up as a symbol of evil today, many of the core ideas and beliefs associated with Nazism, such as the mystical worship of nature and hostility towards Enlightenment modernity, are increasingly commonplace amongst today’s radical middle classes."

Fascinating, huh? Especially when you consider Reynolds' recent comment that:

Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest. They should not enjoy the consequences of their behavior.

We should point out, here, that it was this comment that brought Andrew Sullivan to Eric Scheie's attention, because Sullivan answered Reynolds' quote by asking, "What does that last sentence mean? Is it some kind of threat?"

Only to you, Andy, only to you.

Now we get that, for some, this NewAge = Nazi thing might seem to be a bit much, but we think we're on pretty firm ground with it, and the illustrious group of names supporting it (Goldberg, Whittle, Davenport) makes us think we're right, though we came to the conclusion on our own. The problem for most, we think, is the fact that when Naziism is mentioned, their minds go immediately to The Holocaust - the mechanized mass slaughter of the Jews - and not to what led up to that horrible event.

Let's back up a little bit and we'll show you what we mean:

After Eric Scheie considers that playing nice with Sullivan might not have a been a good idea, he tells us he's treated Andrew in such a manner because his commenters (rightly) wanted The Macho Response:

What would people have me do? Indignantly level personal attacks on Sullivan? He is a blogger, and even though he is a lot more prominent and influential than I am, it seems like a cheap shot for me to hurl insults his way. (As regular readers know, hurling insults is not my style.) But it seems that now that I am being criticized for mentioning him at all, by someone who thinks I am being a weenie for treating him as if he is sane.

What is the lesson here? To either launch a vituperative attack or just remain silent? That would leave me with nothing to say at all. 

If I see something that strikes me as worthy of criticism, I will try to address it logically.

Ooh, bad form, dude.

Trying to be logical is a major problem when confronting either NewAgers or NewAge itself. As a matter of fact, the more one tries to be logical, the more NewAgers take it as a sign you're weak and willing to be taken advantage of. They're fascists who only respect power, and (because of the peculiar make-up of their mental state) the only way they understand opposition is when it's directed at them in the some illogical manner - i.e. you must "indignantly level personal attacks", take "a cheap shot", and "hurl insults", or else you are "a weenie" for treating them as if they are sane.

How do you think we got this gig?

Sorry but it's the only way:

We didn't make the (kooky) rules.

For an example of how logical Scheie can be, he then takes on American Family Association leader Bryan Fischer, saying "Fischer is one of those 'Hitler was gay' believers, and he has gone to great lengths to tie homosexuality to Nazism." Scheie follows that by saying:

I hate to be a party pooper, but the above is not accurate. While there was a homosexual clique in the early days of the brownshirts, Hitler (using Himmler as his henchman) had them uprooted and killed in the notorious Night of the Long Knives. That was in 1934 -- years before the savagery and brutality that the Nazis inflicted on the world, and on the Jews.

Now, we think we should add that we agree with Scheie here - we don't think Hitler was gay or that gays were responsible for the Holocaust - but we would like to use this quote to suggest there were various forces put into play that came into being "years before the savagery and brutality that the Nazis inflicted on the world, and on the Jews." And, as Goldberg, Whittle and Davenport have noticed, all of them are popular in today's NewAge/Leftist/Progressive culture.

We've mentioned before that, when our ex-wife's murders happened and we were shunned by the other NewAgers around us, it was mostly our Jewish friends who stuck by us. Except for the "progressive" sorts, the Jews didn't question our ravings about cults and the like, as others do. They said this was old news to them because - specifically mentioning WWII - they had seen this all before, and have been keeping an eye on it since, as these influences continue to crawl through Western culture.

As far as the rest of you, in our opinion it's only those already under it's influence (Ann Althouse) or those too "sophisticated" to entertain that NewAge is anything but "harmless" (Glenn Reynolds) that are the biggest problem to stamping out this threat. They don't understand what a race-based government, the spread of environmentalism, the occult, divorce, quackery, etc., actually means. They appear to think these are all signs of some new liberated post-60s ideal of "progress." Nonsense.

This is where democracies go to die.

We Fear That Fear Is Something We Don't Fear

In case some of you are missing it, we seem to be in a minor war of words with Mrs. Ann Althouse - not Ann Althouse herself, but her "second husband" (replacement husband?) Meade - and one thing he/she said made us stop and think, once again, how often we've heard this same tired hippie/buddhist/Maharishi Mahesh Yogi post-60s riff on the subject of fear:

The Crack Emcee, when you finally reach the dead end of your New Age witchhunt, and you search all around for a new hobby horse to ride high on, let me suggest researching the strange phenomenon of machismo - exaggerated male pride and honor - the peculiar females it attracts, and the damage done by hyper-aggressive men who haplessly try to hide from their own anger, fears, and hatred toward women.

"The damage done"? Seems to us we've gotten better since we've indulged in our crusade, not worse, so we don't know exactly what the old boy's getting at. (Is anyone ever going to admit hippie "wisdom" on inner peace and the like, from those who grew up in the '60s, is bullshit?) Take this example, for instance, from a speech by his "second wife's" (replacement wife's?) brilliant presidential choice in October:

The question, once again, is going to be whether hope overcomes fear. Essentially, what the other side has decided is that they are going to try to ride fear and anxiety all the way to the ballot box on November 2.

See, we won - riding fear all the way to victory - so fear can't be all bad, or something we're afraid of. As a matter of fact, as this example proves (and as we've said) it can be a great motivator to get one's act together.

It's our experience that no man talks about fear in the manner Meade has unless he's bought into cult bullshit. We hang with some pretty macho guys and we'd be laughed out of the room if we ever started talking to them about attempting to " hide from their own anger, fears, and hatred toward women" since none of us are weak enough men to feel that way, or think dissing what feminism has wrought is a "hatred toward women."

Next thing you know, they'd be expecting us to invite them to a yoga class, and then we wouldn't have any friends at all.

People who are afraid of fear - or try to use it as a weapon in conversation - are merely parroting an old NewAge line that leads to people making major mistakes in logic. Only suckers try to avoid fear. The rest of us, if we've lived at all, know there's no guarantees and will face up to whatever we have to with something you never hear NewAgers lecture much on - courage. That's because it's they who live their lives scared to death that someone will catch them with their pants down, blabbering on about shit they don't know, like how to really live - and how to be a man.

If they did, they certainly wouldn't be copying other people's cliche'd NewAge refrains on life, and trying to pass them on as their own in the first place:

It's just not the manly thing to do.

I Want You To Go To Your Window, Lean Out, And Scream At The Top Of Your Lungs "I'm Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going To Take It Anymore!"

It's been really an eye-opener to discover how much damage not having the "right" attitude, and bit of swearing, can do to one's reputation and influence - throwing a cloak over any and all other accomplishments to the point where, even if one were capable of "saving the planet" (assuming it needed saving) the reaction of most would still be, "Not with that mouth, he won't!"

We can't help but think of this particular aspect of juvenilia after looking at Anthony Watts' assessment of the WikiLeaks cables relating to climate change, where he ends with this:

What really strikes us is the fact that all this Copenhagen/Cancun stuff has nothing to do with the Climate, or saving the World. It’s about political positioning, money, and plain old fascism cult promotion. But as referred before, this is only the tip of the iceberg. More is to come, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re going to be answered about who is behind Climategate, or Al Gore’s Nobel nomination, or the facts behind all the IPCC mess. Stay tuned…

Yea - you read that right:

Plain old fascism cult promotion.

Now, call us narcissistic but, after all these years, and having hardly been shy in our views about what's a cult and what ain't - and having, repeatedly, beat pretty much everyone else blogging (or in other media) to this conclusion in a number of areas - we'd think, by now, our email box (not to mention our phone) would be going crazy with people asking, "How did you know this?" as though talking to a mongoloid Nouriel Roubini about economics.

But nooooooo!

Not only does everybody ignore what we've been saying for years now, nobody else even reacts, like everybody's just been knowing it all along - and openly claiming it - as a matter of course. Or that, now that it's revealed a form of cultism was what this Climate Change bullshit was all about after all, there's no need for any further discussion, is there?

"Oh, it's been discovered that the Global Warming and Climate Change hysteria of the last few years was merely the entire fucking world being led by the nose by lying politicians, and their media accomplices, to blow trillions of dollars on the promotion of some kind of fascistic NewAge environmentalist cult? Very well then - what do you want to do for lunch?"

Move along, nothing more to see here, mister! Sure! Sure! Sure! Whatever you say!

Arrrggghhh!!! It's fucking incredible! This! Is! One! Of! The! Biggest! Fucking! Stories! Of! Our! Time! Forget the WikiLeaks relationship between Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi now - this blatant attempt to control our minds, as well as our vision of mediated reality, should be the centerpiece of the American journalistic world today!

And, I'm sorry - I'm sorry, I'm sorry - but how does Glenn Reynolds, the great Instapundit, inform his massive public of this nonsensical assault on our very lives, country, sanity, and freedoms? Check this out - and try not to yawn:

A WikiLeaks / Climategate Convergence?

That's it? THAT'S IT? Really? That's all one of the great minds of our time has to say about this? Laws have been written forbidding Americans to buy fucking incandescent light bulbs! The American factory that makes incandescent light bulbs has gone out of business! Is that all they get? The people have been bombarded with useless "green" public service announcements (AKA CULT PROPAGANDA) for years - and that's all they get? Journalists have been hounded by environmental cultists for daring to say this crap doesn't add up - some run out of business - and that's all they get? Are you kidding, Glenn? Please, say it isn't so!?! This is un-American! This - this is insane!

Now you listen to me:

We haven't been able to watch TV without these green cultists telling us what to do! We haven't been able to listen to the radio without these green cultists telling us what to do! We haven't been able to go to the movies without these green cultists telling us what to do! We haven't been able to read a magazine or a newspaper, or even a goddamn comic book without these green cultists telling us what to do! The goddamn Simpson's Movie was on the other night, and all it was, was Lisa-fucking-Simpson posing as a goddamn green cultist telling us what to do! When and where does this goddamn bullshit stop?!?

As someone whose life was destroyed by NewAge cult influence, this may affect us more than the average person, but, my god, it is lunacy what we've been forced to live with since that happened! Doesn't anyone else give a damn? The guy who wrongly lost a bar bet because the other side screamed they supposedly had a "scientific consensus"? The marriage that was destroyed because either the husband or the wife supposedly wasn't trying hard enough to "save the planet"? Look at that photo of the poor Polar Bear, right? The guy who stayed with friends only to be driven mad because of their mindless goddamn environmentalist demands while he stayed over?!? Doesn't anybody care that all that chaos and discord was orchestrated by these environmentalist wacko cultists who knew - from Al Gore on down, they always knew - all of it was over nothing?

We've asked this before, and we're asking it again, and we're going to keep on asking it - no demanding it - until we get a satisfactory answer out of you boobs:

Starting with, say, The Deepak Chopra/Maharishi Caper - what is it going to take to finally get you people to adequately address the vital issue of the continual, and wasteful, influence of post-60s Baby Boomer NewAge fraud on the Western World? Seriously, what in the hell is it going to finally fucking take?

A Breakdown Of Cultish Thinking In America

We watch things like this and wonder, not only how so many others miss it, but how ideas that are so patently wrong could ever catch on to begin with - to the point where they're the dominant thoughts in the corporate world. It paints a picture of a nation of idiots.

Your thoughts control the world? That's not Rhonda Byrne and The Secret - it's the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi! This is why we're always dissing baby Boomers and the 1960s - all of this comes from them being too stupid to see through it, and then inflicting it on the rest of us. (We've lost countless jobs because we wouldn't go along with this kind of thinking, and there was nothing we could do, and no one we could appeal to, to save our jobs because every imbecile in the organization "believed" in this NewAge nonsense.)

Another problem, here, is that Barbara Ehrenreich is a hardcore socialist. So, while we can accept her spot-on critique of destructive cultish NewAge thinking, we're also stuck enduring her gratuitous shot at George W. Bush which (as we have seen over the last few months) is nothing like his detractors have ever sold him as. Needless to say, when it comes to politics, we don't trust this woman and we suggest you don't either.

Otherwise, we think this video - and her book on the subject, Bright-Sided - are fine contributions to the emerging thinking on the perils of cultism in American society. We need more of it, and - as the Democrats continue to lose their grip on power - it certainly looks like we're going to get it.

Big thanks to Beth! Click the tags, below, for more on these topics.

Welcome To Our World (AKA "The Real World')

As many of you know, TMR has lots of friends who are police officers and lawyers now, so we don't get into gratuitous bashing of those professions. On the other hand, this blog was started because of a still-unresolved case of adultery that ended with a triple murder - that no one's gone to prison for yet - so this FRONTLINE expose' of, both, investigative and judicial fuck-ups kinda rang true for us somehow. And, because our personal story of such evil is wrapped up in the world-wide fraud of NewAge, so did this:



"God wanted us to have it." Sure.

As usual, it started in the '60s and nobody was willing to ask the hard questions, but - most importantly - those living through the '60s were unwilling to ask any hard questions of themselves. Which is also how Barack Obama became president, and the Mortgage Crisis got out of hand, and,...Oh well, you get the picture:

Bernie Madoff was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi/The Secret of Wall Street - except he got caught.

We're convinced all the fraud that's happening (and has happened) will eventually be revealed, and this illogical post-Boomer period will one day be given a historical name. But, until then, all we're left to do is endure and watch and wait - while protecting our own asses as best we can - and hoping the name we've given to our resistance will one day be found as adequate enough to the task. You know:

The Macho Response