Getting Educated

"Venture Beat recently published a blog post titled '$4 toast: Why the tech industry is ruining San Francisco,' citing a $4 piece of toast at the Mill on Divisadero."

-Heather Knight, Jill Tucker, The San Francisco Gate, 2013

“I call them the Dotzies. 

They’re blowing the smoke of the new economy up your ass….”

- The Crack Emcee, Davy D's Hip-Hop Corner, 2000

 

Chopra Studied Under The Master (Of Illusion)

It's hard to believe - anything - but especially how badly the lowly Derek Lowe is allowed to talk about the major thinkers of our time:

Well, no sooner do I speculate about whether Luc Montagnier has lost it then he makes headlines with a "water memory" story about teleporting DNA. [Enter a bunch of "sciencey" stuff about how stupid homeopathy is - Crack.]

Well, Montagnier himself says that he thinks that this experiment will be replicated by others, so I'll hold my fire until that's tried out. Until then, I note that this experiment has apparently made Deepak Chopra's day. It's hard for me to imagine that anything that has inspired such a fuzzy-brained column from such a fuzzy-brained man could lead to any good.

This guy just doesn't get it:

Deepak Chopra is going to make a fool of you!

One day, just you wait. One day, you're all going to eat your Maharishi-hating words! Deepak's in The San Francisco Chronicle, bitch - with Mark Motherfucking Morford - dropping the real "sciencey" science! You. Just. Fucking. Wait:

One of these days, these two geniuses are going to rock our fucking world.

Downward Dog: Mark Morford Gets Low - Again

It's hard not to laugh but, like Andrew Sullivan, the crazy ass funnel that is The San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford, is still out there, trying to sound sane and reasonable, but - as always - completely blowing it:

Look! Here are some scientists. Are they not cute? Are they not totally adorable like angry pfffting kittens as they scoff and furrow their brows and make many dismissive sounds with their pursed mouths, all in the general direction of the very idea of ESP, or psychic ability, or pretty much anything related to the mystical and the weird, the unquantifiable and the supernatural? Man, they really hate that.

Here they are, in the New York Times just recently, all aflutter that an esteemed fellow scientist and scientific journal -- Daryl J. Bem and The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, respectively -- wuld dare to publish a paper on the more than likely possibility that the beloved New Age chestnut known as extrasensory perception (ESP) might, just might, actually exist, in some tiny way, maybe, if we all just quite whining about it and opened up to the idea a little. The horror! The humiliation! What will happen to our funding?

If Morford had funding (his salary was cut, remember?) it would go straight up his yoga-teaching Mangina, is where.

Seriously, not only can't it be good for any scientific paper to have this balloon head for a supporter (He actually goes on to "defend" dowsing,...) but it's not lost on us that we've never seen Morford come out for any other kind of science but the crazy, mystical, quack-filled, never-has-a-chance-in-a-million-years-because-they-falsified-their-data kind. For instance, what's Morford been doing and saying during the entire Andrew Wakefield/Jenny McCarthy/Jim Carrey/Oprah Winfrey-promoted anti-vaccine fraud? Nothing and nothing - except teaching yoga and claiming things were swell - that's what. Imagine:

Children were dying - literally dying - and Mr. Compassion kept as quiet as a mouse.

But, let ESP get some (negative) attention from scientists, and then it's into the breach he flies - with a two-pager! (Watch your back, guys, he'll also try to fly into your britches,...)

Look, we could could go in forever (and we mean forever) about all the reasons why this POS is a liar who we don't like, and also don't think should be allowed to write for any publication, anywhere - not even for the crazy San Francisco paper he "works" for now. But we think (gay put-downs and everything else aside) the absolute very best reason we have for disliking Mark Morford, his work, and his "beliefs", is the one he's, thankfully, put in several articles - including the one we're criticizing him for now - and that very best of all reasons to dislike this particular person is one stated by Morford very clearly - more clearly than probably all the other words he's ever written, combined, and he says it exactly like this - pay attention now:

You certainly do not have to believe me.

No, and we never have, because in all the years Mark Morford's been putting pen to paper - and after all the years of saying silly things like Jesus did yoga - he's never given us a single reason to do otherwise.

So, it is on the basis of those words, Ladies and Gentlemen - words that form his own statement about his column's and his own personal validity - that we feel confident we are all free to finally leave this particular NewAge nincompoop's permissively pliant punk ass alone to himself, and his analyst's couch (because you know he has one) hopefully for the rest of all time.

A Mouth Nothing Good Has Come In Or Out Of

The horrible reign of Gavin Newsom - the politician, and "spiritual devotee", who slept with his best friend's (and campaign manager's) wife - is over, so The San Francisco Chronicle is sending the NewAge mayor off to his new job as lieutenant governor with a series of quotes that serve only remind to us why the alcoholic (and perpetually drunk) wine store owner was, and is, so unfit to hold any office. And, also, why California has become the state that's fallen and can't get up. Here are a few:

"What does the lieutenant governor do? For the life of me, I don't know."

"I say this not to impress, but to impress upon you."

"I think I've said everything I was going to say and I think you heard I said everything I was going to say, so I respect your desire not to respect my opinions and respect my right to say everything I just said."

Like those who keep re-electing him, the man is a shallow, destructive, blithering idiot - but with very, very good hair - and in some places, we guess, that's enough.

It just shouldn't be so in America.

Click the tag "gavin newsom" below for more.

Hi, NewAge - I'm Reality - So Nice To Meet You

""Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment."

-- Mark Morford, Yogi and resident idiot with a column, June 6th, 2008, in the The San Francisco Chronicle.

"Hope met reality in Obama's first year

Skepticism has crept into [the] vast majority of Americans in the middle,...The upshot is clear: President Obama is not a miracle worker."

-- The San Francisco Chronicle, January 20th, 2010.

40 Years Later: It's Leather And Fishnets (Thanks)

These kids aren't hippies - they're seekers. Today was a serious religious occasion."

-- Allen Ginsberg, after the first "Human Be-In", in the book, "The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America" - getting that first obvious "spiritual" lie out before the even more dubious dissembling began - because NewAge falsehoods (and drugs) were all they had to sell, and - more often than not - all they needed, when speaking to The San Francisco Chronicle.

It's Just Like Starting Over

"They say it will take a powerful jolt to bring reality home."

-- C.W. Nevius, commenting on how the LQF has been working on San Francisco's NewAge Mayor Gavin Newsom - "the closer people get, the less they seem to like you" - and also making TMR happy, happy, happy, by announcing what-should-be-considered HUGE NEWS coming out of San Francisco: "they say" (of all things) there's this thing called "reality" and now, finally, they're thinking that to "bring reality home" might act as some kind of cure for healing whatever ails them, and, maybe, even The San Francisco Chronicle.

Don't Forget: He's Only Trying To Help

"Ask some out-of-towners to walk Market Street from the Ferry Building to City Hall. They'll tell you how beautiful San Francisco is, but it's too bad that the farther they traveled from the waterfront, the grungier, smellier and scarier Ess Eff's Main Street became. The problem? Too many panhandlers and crazy people living on the streets. Half way through the walk, the visitors were hugging their purses and hesitating before looking passers-by in the eye. It's simply not a sunny walking experience when you're trying to dodge people who want to scam you, hit you up for money so they can self-medicate or peddle the kind of sex that you suspect will require penicillin."

-- Debra J. Saunders, on the liberal standards Gavin Newsom, the country's most liberal (and NewAge) mayor, maintains for San Francisco - the most liberal city in America - as he runs for Governor of California, before the rolling eyes of The San Francisco Chronicle.

Inglorious Basturd

"Unbeknownst to most, I myself was felled by the ruthless SF Chronicle layoff ax not a handful of months back, yet another casualty of the newspaper industry collapse, laid off from this very company rather suddenly, only to be immediately re-hired as a freelancer (read: less pay, no benefits, set adrift after 12 years)."

-- Mark Morford, our old pal, the gay Buddhist journalism idiot, delivering the best news of the morning - not that he was re-hired but that he was let go to begin with - though I don't know exactly what to think now, since I read the yoga weasel's announcement in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Oh - I know:

FIRE HIM AGAIN SO IT REALLY HURTS!!!

Man, the scalps are piling up pretty fast these days,...

The Lyin' Of The Boomers, The Lyin' Of The Senate (And What They Were All Lyin' About)

"[Ang Lee] turns something that previously looked sloppy and drug-induced into something joyous.

Throughout, Lee aims for a feeling - that specific sense that sometimes comes over us when we're young, of moving through a golden moment and knowing it. And so the scene in which our hero, Elliot (Demetri Martin), takes LSD in a van with a hippie couple, seems neither squalid nor dangerous, but rather like some warm and cozy rite of passage."

-- Mick LaSalle, enjoying another telling, and reselling, of the story of Woodstock - a lie our nation can do without hearing again - in a movie review for The San Francisco Chronicle.

"Phillip Craig Garrido was already known as an oddball who said he could channel the voice of God through a makeshift box, but on Thursday, the eccentricity took on an aura of horror.

Eighteen years ago, authorities said, he kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard on her way to catch a school bus in South Lake Tahoe. Ever since then, they said, he kept her prisoner in a squalid backyard compound near Antioch, raping her and fathering two daughters by her - the elder of whom is now 15.

Phillip Garrido is a registered sex offender, and authorities inspected his house several times over the years but never discovered the backyard compound.

The neighbors and other acquaintances said Garrido conducted religious revivals in a tent, claimed to hear the voices of angels and God, and said he had developed a device through which he could control sound with his mind. He propounded this all in a business he called 'God's Desire.'

In a telephone interview from jail with Sacramento TV station KCRA, Garrido said, 'In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story.'

In recent years, he said, 'my life has been straightened out. Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house. You're going to be absolutely impressed. It's a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.'"

-- Demian Bulwa, Jaxon Van Derbeken, Henry K. Lee, and Kevin Fagan, who seriously ought to check if Phillip Garrido knows Ang Lee or Mick LaSalle - or attended Woodstock - since they're all telling the exact same story, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

"Ron Garrido said he always knew his younger brother was deeply troubled.

There was, he recalled Thursday, Phillip Garrido's damaging use of LSD as a teenager in Brentwood and his talk of sexual compulsion. There was the escape from fellow drug dealers after high school, the federal conviction for rape and kidnapping and his prison marriage.

Still, the latest news - accusations that his 58-year-old brother had snatched a child off a street, held her in his backyard for 18 years and fathered two of her children - was a shock for Ron Garrido.

He said in an interview with The Chronicle that he was surprised at his only sibling's alleged crimes - but he didn't doubt the story.

'It just seems so bizarre, but I can believe it,' said the 65-year-old Brentwood resident. 'I know my brother, and I can believe he did that. ... He's a fruitcake.

'My thoughts are with the poor little girl,' Ron Garrido said of Jaycee Lee Dugard, 29, who was abducted in 1991 near her family's South Lake Tahoe home. 'She was held prisoner there. She had two children with this idiot. Now she's got to start a life.'"

-- Demian Bulwa, on the real post-Woodstock backwash the rest of us have been made to endure - probably until the last Baby Boomer is dead - glad only that we made it out alive, with our country still here, but without Mary Jo Kopechne (be sure to click the link and read that spin) while still trying to make sense of what we can glean, from reading The San Francisco Chronicle.

And The Whole Wine Thing? It's Bullshit, Too,...

"Q: Do people have souls?

A: I definitely thought a lot about it, and I tend to think people don't."

-- Paul Giamatti, top left, the sad sack actor made popular in that stuck-up Napa Valley movie, "Sideways", kicking another big-assed hole where your soul is supposed to be, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

He Made A Lot Of Money Ripping Out Tonsils

"Why yes, I believe he was a dentist in a past life."

-- Jill Lopate, someone who was "skeptical" about visiting a pet psychic - but not so skeptical she didn't do it anyway - quoting the unnamed fraud, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Apologies to Ann Althouse - and especially Meade - for the photo appropriation:

It was just too good to pass up,...

Another Really Bad Case Of Crystal Healing

"When someone removed thousands of frozen specimens from a cold-storage tank from a national laboratory in Menlo Park earlier this month, the vandalism left people puzzled: Who destroyed the protein samples by letting them melt, and why?

Now, federal authorities say they have answers: They're blaming a Palo Alto woman who had recently been fired from the lab and allegedly wrote mocking notes that made it seem like a man was responsible for the damage.

Silvya Oommachen, 32, who felt overworked and believed there was 'bad karma' between her and her supervisors, admitted to removing more than 4,000 crystal samples from cold storage at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy, authorities said.

Oommachen was charged Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco with willfully injuring and depredating U.S. property.

Authorities said she had caused an estimated $500,000 in damage.

Oommachen did not immediately return a call for comment today.

Oommachen stopped showing up for work June 17, FBI Special Agent Matthew Quick wrote in an affidavit. The lab fired her after officials repeatedly tried to contact her, without success.

From July 17 to 20, someone removed 42 cassettes, each containing 96 crystal samples, from three cryogenic containers and placed them on a lab table. The tops of each of the containers had Post-it notes on which was written, 'Performed by X Black,' a reference to a sex act and the date of July 18, the affidavit said.

'A hand-drawn smiley face was also on each of the Post-it notes,' Quick wrote."

Oommachen admitted to destroying the samples, believing that doing so would 'reverse some of the bad karma she was experiencing,'....

-- Henry K. Lee - who seems to have a good eye for this kind of thing - showing why NewAge and science don't mix, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Voices? Schizophrenia? Naw, You're Psychic!!!

"She was sociable and happy in high school. But in college that changed abruptly: Depressed and withdrawn, some days she couldn't get out of bed.

And that wasn't all.

'I had really odd thoughts,' recalled the woman, now 21, who asked that her name not be used. While walking across campus at the University of Southern Maine, 'sometimes I'd feel like people were just right behind me (who might) jump me or something.'

She knew it wasn't true, but she couldn't shake the feeling.

Sometimes, while driving, she saw imaginary, shadowy people on the sidewalk. And now and then, out of nowhere, there would be a woman's voice in her ear during class, or random soft noises like knocking or the fizzy hiss of a newly opened soda can.

When she visited the university health service and talked about feeling depressed, a nurse practitioner saw another problem: a possible case of schizophrenia in the making.

This schizophrenia 'prodrome' — the early signs — involves a troubled mental state usually found in teens and young adults. It can lead to psychosis, the loss of touch with reality that marks not only schizophrenia, but also some forms of depression or manic-depression. The prodrome can linger for weeks, or years, before it gives way to psychosis — or mysteriously disappears without a trace."

-- Malcolm Ritter, who - clearly - hasn't been informed of this new set of "rights" we have, writing for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Mark Morford: Cosmic Corruption At It's Finest

"Let us ponder. Because once again and for the billionth time, a deeply sad and hypocritical conservative is now claiming that he will be turning to God not merely for forgiveness for his lusty irresponsibilities, but he is also claiming that, in order to set things right, God will now be actively stepping into his life to help put him back on track, fix his mangled moral compass, tell him the what-what and the don't-stick-that-there.

Isn't that terrific? Isn't it wondrous to hear that God cares so much, so specifically, for Gov. Mark Sanford? Is it not heartening to hear that God will now happily jump into the rather wretched role of Sanford's own personal therapist, helping the wayward governor bury his heart and nix his one true love so he may return to his unhappy marriage and unhappy job and unhappy life? Yay God! So good of Him to take the time.

I, for one, am utterly delighted at how Sanford has effortlessly reduced the grand concept of timeless, universal divine metaconsciousness down to a bit of a tool, essentially making God his own personal knave. What a fantastic conceit! What glorious gall! We should all try that someday."

-- Mark Morford, Gay Yoga Master and overwhelmingly silly NewAge columnist, once again - after all the asinine things he's been prone to "believe" and write - pontificating on how well he understands the failings of Republicans who believe in Christianity, without noticing the awfully large cultish mote staining his own (Third?) eye, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Time To "Move On"? I Don't Think So - Note To Skip And Bam: We'll Stay Right Here, Thanks

"It is time for all of us to move on, and to assess what we can learn from this experience."

-- Henry Louis Gates Jr., applying one of the phrases NewAgers always use when they've fucked up and no longer want to risk suffering the consequences of their actions - "Let's Move On" (Like the person who does the wrong gets to determine the length of the discussion about it) - in this latest attempt by the black V.I.P. and the First Black President to sucker-punch Gates' arresting officer (They've invited Sgt. James Crowley to be secluded together with them over a beer) after they've publicly projected him into - and wrongly-accused him of being - someone who uses racial profiling and is stupid, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Sgt. Crowley shouldn't fall for it. Hold the line.

"Ancient Teachings" That Are Worth Something

"Crazy just happens, and most anyone who needs the cautionary tale is already too far gone to be saved by the deaths of others. Cautionary tales? Only to people who don't date the pathologically unhinged.

...If you want a story, try this,...: Sometimes stuff simply happens, and the chances of stuff happening rise exponentially when the person in question believes in the concept of invulnerability. Not every event falls in the same tidy if-only-they'd-be-more-careful box, and not every person who needs a good talking-to believes in the virtue of listening."

-- Ray Ratto, the great and wise San Francisco Chronicle sports writer, saying the first thing I've read in a long time that I've found of any real comfort - at least since 2005, when I discovered my NewAge ex-wife, Karine Anne Brunck, was A) joining San Francisco cults, B) had been cheating on me, and C) killed three people including her own mother - and Ray did it (of course) in my old hometown newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Bravo!

Next Up: The iPod,...

"I don't hate the Prius, it's the Prius drivers I don't like."

-- Moto1, revealing the eventual effect of cultish thinking on others, and - given a choice between some smug asshole and his inanimate object - kindly identifying one group who's engaging in it, in the comments to The San Francisco Chronicle.

The Kind Of News That Makes Us Want To Cry

"Maggie Gyllenhaal is very funny as,...an unbearable woman who hides her towering hostility, even from herself, behind a veil of New Age piety."

-- Mick LaSalle, describing a very believable character - really: we'd say unbearably underutilized - reviewing the new Sam Mendes film, "Away We Go", in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Attention K-Mart Shoppers: There's A Sale On Political Foolishness Now Appearing In Aisle 9

"Remember the good old days? When the air was thick like curdled paste and the days were long like sad, lonely sighs and evil -- sweet, dependable evil -- was like some sort of predatory perfume salesgirl and we were all trapped in the same apocalyptic department store?"

-- Mark Morford - San Francisco's insane NewAge yoga instructor - still so lost in Bush Derangement Syndrome he's relieved that we're going broke, anti-semitism is now a public spectacle, political corruption is rampant, high-profile terrorism is back, and America is the world's 1970's whipping boy, in The San Francisco Chronicle.