Just Be Glad Republicans Can't Lock All The Doors By The Use Of Telekinesis

“'Our brand is toxic...That’s the bottom line'...'The Party needs new leadership now'”

It's weird to hear Democrats saying THEY'RE "toxic" - it's ALWAYS been someone else with them. But beware: It's a trap. Democrats don't accept advice. They ask, only so they have permission to rip your head off, before demanding you do as they say. Don't fall for it. They had it coming.

Just smile and say you know how much it hurts.

Whites Take A Long Time To Admit Problems They Make

The prices are all that's more "whole" about your food, bitch!

It's been almost 10 years, but they're starting to get NewAge:

We need to step on the idea of 'toxins.' We need to step on it until it's dead. We're not going stop people from blasting woo at us any time we eat anything that's not kale or live anywhere that's not the windswept peak of a mountain, but with concerted effort, we can at least make them sound ridiculous when they do it,…"

Considering they've been raising the price of food for everyone - but especially the poor - they should be getting more than that,...

Unbelievable

Skeptics - always demanding the impossible:

“The minimum sellers of detox products should be able to offer is a clear understanding of what detox is and proof that their product actually works.

The people we contacted could do neither.”

In other words, NewAgers are like Ted Touched-By-God Cruz, trying to stop ObamaCare:

I knew there was some connection,...

 

I'm Glad I'm So Poor (I Can't Afford High-Priced Insanity)

Knowing Adolf Hitler was a NewAge, vegetarian, occult-worshipping type, I can't grasp how - after years of kindergarten, elementary, jr. and senior high, and maybe even a college education - The Hitler Youth still grow into adulthood, hearing their master's call:

"Toxins are like cholesterol clogging an artery, except they block the path to woo-woo transcendence instead of the left atrium. Or, as Vanessa Grigoriadis puts it in New York magazine, “Food is the focus of an enormous amount of modern moralism ... One wants to be skinny because one wants to be healthy; one wants to be healthy because one wants to be good.” As religion declines among elite urbanites, a new scripture—“sprouting and enzymes and whatnot”—is swirling into the void.

The problem with this way of thinking is that food and weight are not matters of morality. Thin is not “good,” carbs are not “bad,” and in a world of actual pressing political and social ills, your dinner plate should not be the ground zero of your ethical renewal. Don’t call me evil—or “toxic”—because I’ve never quested after the liquid sublime. (Also, your breath smells like dandelion root.)

But the cleanse mentality is more than just judgmental and irritating: It’s dangerous. Making each meal a drama of discipline, deprivation, and control? Floating along on a superior high that isn’t really about how much weight you’re losing (but actually kind of is about how much weight you’re losing)? Seeking to express your achievements, be they moral, social, or financial, in the most visible terms you can manage? Does anyone else think this sounds a lot like an eating disorder?

Yep,...

 

Melted Maserati: When You Want To Get Nowhere - Fast

I don't know what year, day, or time it is, because those kinds of things don't matter: 

Making progress is all.

A woman recently tried to turn a dinner party against me over homeopathy. A gay man attending "massage college" attempted to get me fired from my job (harassment, he said) after corralling me into a discussion about how the "toxins" he absorbed at school were affecting his work performance - demanding he pretend to work - but discovering to his shock, anger, and surprise, I disagreed with him.

(Luckily enough, there was a witness to that incident, though how anyone saw anything with everyone's eyes closed is anybody's guess. Some have a "Third Eye" I'm told. No fair.) I've heard of whole towns being out for revenge. You better tell somebody.

We'll all be better off when this is over,…

 

Martha Marcy May Marlene: A Cult Watcher's Dream

WHOA. I've finally had the honor of watching director Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene - the first of the recent releases on cultism - and I'm pretty sure (since I understand the subject matter better than most) I saw a very, very different film than other reviewers. Maybe even different than Durkin himself. You see, while Martha Marcy May Marlene has been described as Elizabeth Olsen's breakout performance about a young woman who escapes an abusive cult, it's much more than that:

It's really a film about a woman in desperate need of a deprogrammer's snapping.

A constant in the film is Martha's sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson) asking Martha what's happened to her, and Martha - clearly in the throughs of PTSD - saying, "I don't know." And the truth is, she doesn't. Martha has no idea she's been in a cult, and neither her sister or her English brother-in-law, Ted (Hugh Dancy) even knows how to ask - both are as unaware of cultism as Martha is! When it's finally determined Martha needs "help," I deduced it'll be in the form of doctors - with medications in a mental health facility - not a cult expert who can unpeel the uber-rude onion her mind has become:

Their best guess is that Martha has fled a dodgy boyfriend, and she herself releases no further clues. Her conduct, however, hints at more than heartbreak. It is one thing to ask them, “Is it true married people don’t fuck?,” which might be no more than the provocative pose of youth; to climb into bed beside the married couple while they are making love—as Martha, schooled in group sex, naturally does—signals an insolence of another order. “That’s not normal, it’s private,” Lucy cries, and her verbal confusion pulls us toward the clever core of the movie. The easiest option, which would have produced a nifty horror flick but little else, would have been to build an ideal, love-warmed nest of the bourgeoisie and then, as in “Fatal Attraction,” have it invaded by shrieking demands from without. The effect of “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” on the other hand, is to peck away at what Lucy and Ted would claim as their well-earned happiness. Even the tiniest gestures on Martha’s part—opening a can of beer and tossing the ring-pull aside, or trying on a dress and dropping the hanger for Lucy to pick up—are invested with something more warped, or more scornful of our regular habits, than simple sloppiness. Ted never makes a definite move on Martha, but you can sense the squirm of desire within him, and when he solemnly informs her, “We are trying to have a baby,” her laugh—rich, robust, and mad—slaps him into a look of wounded panic. She already has a family, ready-made. She may have slipped its grasp for now, but not for good. When, at a low ebb, she calls the number of the farm, speaks briefly, then slams down the phone, somebody calls right back.

Which brings me to something else that dawned on me as I watched Martha Marcy May Marlene - the disconnect many might have, as I write about cults or cultish thinking, imagining the "closed" secular cult depicted in this film is what I'm referring to when I, maybe, speak of an "open" religious cult like Mormonism (or even some other kind). Nothing could be further from the truth:

Sure, to me, a cult is a cult is a cult is a cult, all applying varying amounts of pressure in direct and subtle ways on those trapped (however) within their grasp. But the mindfuckers depicted in this film bear little-to-no resemblance to the cultish thinking we usually encounter (say, through Mitt Romney's Joseph Smith-inspired peddling of useless supplements) beyond talk of "cleansing," "toxins," and the nonsensical suggestion a drugged concoction is O.K. to drink because someone says it's "herbal."

This becomes most clear when the film enters Charles Manson's arena, though - unbeknownst to the uninitiated - contemporary Mormonism has entered that territory. A cult is a cult is a cult is a cult.

But what I most want you to know is, all that aside, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a truly fine film. Probably one of the best - if not THE best - I've ever seen on the topic of cultism, since it takes it's subject matter seriously, and doesn't fall into the typical sinister foolishness of The Devil's Rejects-type hyperbole, even as it descends beyond confusion and betrayal into wickedness and horror.

And while it may not be of much assistance if you're arguing with your sister about homeopathy, or fretting about a friend's participation in The Landmark Forum, hopefully Martha Marcy May Marlene might still convince some of you that even they need a higher level of comprehension and training than either you, or your average therapist, can provide. Yes indeed, this one is really special:

Check. It. Out.

 

Law Professors (Some Get It Right - Others, Not So Much - Or I Should Say, Really, They Don't Come Close)

I thought this episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! was worth posting because Ann Althouse did such a magnificent job on some Salma Hayek-inspired corporate NewAge bullshit she found in the NYT today:

See? People lapse into religion mode. Your childish take-my-bottle-to-the-park and going-poopie is now a cult. Congratulations, morons!

Ahh - now THAT'S what I want to see from these law professor bloggers! (I swear, it makes a man feel good to get up in the morning, knowing somebody's got your back,...) Compare it with what Glenn Reynolds is serving up today NewAge-wise (or typically un-wise) and you'll get my point:

CULTIVATING “MERRY MINDFULNESS” with Laughing Yoga. Does saying “heh” frequently count?

Yeah, Glenn - in your case - it counts. I swear, that man is becoming a menace,... 

 

It's So Weird That We All Had To Take It (When Only Some Of Us Were Willing To Bend Over,..)

We've been telling you yoga is a cult for years now (check the dates on the links) but, of course, once the yogis lie and scream "No it's not - it's exercise!" enough, they've got most people fooled, which is the point:

If they go around letting people know they're participating in goofy cults, they'll also probably end up doing those stupid poses by themselves, and where's the I'm-cooler-than-you-normal-Americans cache' in that?

Come on, along with buying all the cult gear, claiming yoga as exercise is fine, in a fraudulent "you can fool some of the people some of the time,..." kind of way, except A) no one who understands exercise will agree with it, and B) the truth might slip out whenever yogis are caught talking to each other:

In her new memoir “Poser: My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poses”, Claire Dederer takes on the contradictions inherent in being a Westerner who dabbles in a non-Western belief system that comes lightly disguised as an exercise class.

Bingo, baby! That's Emily Gould, and her article in - get this - More Intelligent Life magazine (will these people ever stop flattering themselves?) is a hoot, filled with every cult buzzword ever written!

Just scanning the first three paragraphs of her piece, we've got such exercise-oriented phrases as "yogic philosophy", "meditation", "self-help", "Eastern asceticism", "Intuitive", "a Zen rock garden", and the always hopeful and greedy NewAge bastard's desire for "abundance”. (Kind of makes you miss the NewAge language of reps and checking their heart rate, doesn't it?) And all that's just in the first three paragraphs!

Who do they think they're fooling?

Part of what makes studying American cultism so fun is unraveling their contradictions, and Mrs. Gould is more than happy to lay some real head-scratchers out, from Yoga Journal, for our perusal:

Don’t get me started on the ads, a regular source of contention in YJ’s letters-to-the-editor section. I’m clearly far from the only person who finds it annoying that articles about accepting your body are always surrounded by photos of young, lithe, mostly-white women showing off skin-tight, expensive spandex. In other ads, Eastern asceticism meets Western commerce in discomfiting ways. The most recent issue had a quarter-page ad for a book called “The Intuitive Investor”, featuring an image of the book jacket floating over a Zen rock garden and the copy “Lovingly written for you … for a life of abundance”. A few pages later, an article about meditating in order to let go of desire nestled between half-page ads for retreats in tropical paradises. Wish you were there? No! Don’t wish for anything!

Yes, these yogis do love confused white people!

And the type who join the yoga cult are very confused, sucked up into every bullshit NewAge fad that's come down the pike in the last part of the last century. Mrs. Gould's writes of Claire Dederer:

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in a North Seattle community of locavore recyclers where, she writes, signs on her neighbours’ gates warn “be mindful of dog” (instead of “beware of dog”). Even still, Dederer had spent years feeling deeply suspicious of yoga: “I thought yoga was done by self-indulgent middle-aged ladies with a lot of time on their hands, or by skinny fanatical twenty-two-year-old vegetarian former gymnasts. I was also unsettled by the notion of white people seeking transformation through the customs of brown-skinned people.”  
 
Despite these well-founded misgivings, Dederer finally starts taking a Hatha yoga class, spurred by back pain from nursing her daughter.

Of course she did, because going to,...oh, we don't know,...a back doctor, was just too simple of an idea, right?

Sure it is, when she's the daughter of a woman who left "her husband for a much younger man during the dawn of feminism" (Dederer, to her credit, does admit "it’s possible" that event made her "a less stable young adult” - you think?) and now she's part of a equally lame-brained and wasteful recycling community that can't even admit dogs bite.

Seriously, where the bullshit begins and ends must be hard to figure out - especially if you're an American so sucked into a series of belief systems that you'll accept simple phrases like "full splits" have to be referred to as "hanumanasana". Or fearfully living with "the organic baby food and toxin-free lifestyle".

We'd never make it there without killing somebody.

We first began studying NewAge cultism after the killer ex left, and we started reading her books to see just what in the FUCK had gotten into that woman. One thing we clearly remember is the deeper we got into the cult experience, the more our head would hurt and a voice would rise up in our mind that would scream "NO!" and, on occasion, we'd fling a book across the room involuntarily. Not these women. These women are "seekers". They're "on the path" to madness, so there are no books being flung anywhere when the shit gets crazy.


And, if there's one thing they're NOT after, it's exercise:

About yogic philosophy, too, Dederer is at her best when she’s describing her own struggles to make sense of texts, like the Sutras, which at first seem impenetrable. “They were brief, yes, and looked aphoristic, but reading them was not like reading Oscar Wilde. It was like reading bread, or grass. Impossible.” Most Westerners who’ve tried, like Dederer, to swiftly assimilate a new belief system will relate to her confusion and frustration: “I mean, it was one thing to read about stilling the fluctuations of consciousness but another thing entirely to do it. Beyond that, I liked the fluctuations of consciousness. I made a living off the fluctuations of consciousness.” Dederer concludes her brief tour of her local bookstore’s Eastern Religions section by deciding that she will persevere in her classes, even though she “couldn’t be bothered to learn the right way to do yoga.” Her approach to yoga, she decides, will steer clear of research and focus on experience, specifically: “submission, trust, transmission from teacher to student, imperfection, the release of the ego.” 

Oh, geez - here we go with the "release of the ego" crap again. (We ARE finding this in the arrogantly-titled More Intelligent Life magazine, right?)

Even worse - and more revealing of how little "ego" these people are releasing - compare her notion that reading the Sutras "was like reading bread, or grass" with this description of how cultists absorb occult writings and quackery:

“The more convoluted the explanation, the more unintelligible the practitioners are, the more people may be inclined to believe them. It makes it appear as though it is privileged knowledge, like real medicine and auto tech.”

Kind of hard to resolve releasing your ego with feeling privileged, isn't it?

Our favorite part of all this malarky is when the discussion turns to Dederer's husband.

Like a lot of NewAgers, Dederer "is unsparing in detailing her marriage’s weak points" - a main one being what's described as her "unsympathetic" husband's "depressive episodes". Her man doesn't sound depressive to us but - heaven forbid - rational when dealing with an "unsympathetic" fruitcake:

“How am I supposed to keep my career going without any time to do my work?” she asks him. “I don’t know, but I do know that I can’t take time off from my job so you can write BOOK REVIEWS for YOGA JOURNAL,” he shouts. She storms out of the room,...

Yea, she's released her ego alright.

One of these days, probably after the Baby Boomers are long gone and most of their kids are finally leaving this mortal coil themselves, the truth of this time will finally come into focus, and all the various cult beliefs and influences will finally get the hearing they deserve, and nonsense like "yoga as exercise" will be revealed for what it is - a bald-faced lie. A lie swallowed whole, and spread by people too insecure and proud to admit they got snookered.

It will finally be known that from the election of Barack Obama (with Oprah Winfrey's NewAge help) all the way back to the arrival of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (with Jane Fonda and The Beatles) these fools were BSing themselves, and the rest of us, until little by little their grip weakened and America's conservative way of life could return to some semblance of what it was before anyone had ever heard of hippies and the stupid "path" to nowhere they took us on:

She acknowledges that her search for meaning and purpose has been inconclusive, that her life, like her yoga practice, is a work in progress. And she always maintains just the right amount of irony about the inherent cheesiness of such an acknowledgment. Describing her struggle not to feel ridiculous while doing “lion”, a breathing exercise that entails making a very goofy facial expression, she writes about “the hippie laugh. You know the hippie laugh. It says: I’m light of heart! Yet aware of my foibles! Also free! Very, very free!” That someone can be this self-aware, yet is capable of sticking her tongue out, rolling her eyes back and roaring in tandem with a classroom full of fellow adults, is endearing.

No it's not. It's not endearing. That's not it at all:

It's immature and childish, and that's what it should be called, just like yoga should be called a cult belief system - not exercise - and the sooner everyone comes to grip with all of this, the better off we'll all finally be.

That will be endearing.

This One Guy Quacks Louder Than A Duck Farm

Unbelievable. Some of these quacks want attention soooo bad - check out the supposed "credentials" of this fruitcake:

Dr. Sir Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), D.D. (Doctor of Divinity), Diplomate of American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, Diplomate Ayurveda, a physician of the soul, teaches and lives the sevenfold peace. To the process of awakening and healing, Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), weaves a background as a holistic physician, medical researcher, world-recognized live-food nutritionist, psychiatrist, family therapist, homeopath, Rabbi, acupuncturist, Ayurvedic practitioner, expert on green juice spiritual fasting and detoxification fasting, ecological leader, Reiki master, internationally celebrated spiritual teacher, author, lecturer, culture-bridger, world peaceworker, to give a unique holistic approach to nurturing the hungry soul.

Man, this guy's got it all (Reiki? Homeopathy?) and he's also a bullshit artist, an asshat, a gullibility specialist, a dangerous deceiver of dopes, a cunning cultist, and a bald-faced liar who pulls about half of his titles straight out of his butt - or does anyone seriously think there's a degree for "physician of the soul"?

And speaking of your soul - which we're sure he wants to own for a small, never-ending fee - whenever you're ready to join his cult, we're positive they'll eventually get around to explaining whatever "the sevenfold peace" is, too.

Being sevenfold, you know it ain't gonna be nothin' like the normal kind.

Setting It All Straight (One Gay Post At A Time)

We wish you people would make up your minds:

Does Harry Potter open the gates to evil or not?

(We always thought the gates to evil were J.K. Rowling's "special girl spots",...)

Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore have major environmental regrets. Unfortunately, being idiots isn't one of them.

And there's still no word on when we're getting back the money they've wasted. We know Al's got a lot of it.

Somebody ought to start demanding it.

It's about time: "The Northern Territory Department of Health has warned the Church of Scientology not to give people medical advice on how to detox from drugs and alcohol."

Great. Now if we can only save John Travolta from himself we'll be all good.

And finally, this is an educational opportunity that's worth exploring further:

In court papers filed Friday, a former high ranking officer of NXIVM depicts the cultlike group as a self-help and ethics school that is secretly a place for its leader to explore opportunities for sex and gambling money.

Susan Dones, a trainer who ran the Colonie-based company's former Tacoma, Wash., center, told a bankruptcy court last week that Keith A. Raniere, the creator of the teachings used in NXIVM's self-improvement courses, may have motives beyond the education of human potential.

Dones said NXIVM presents Raniere "as the most honest, ethical, Nobel (sic), man who had the answers to mankind's problems" yet his training sessions are "used as a venue to stalk their students ... who might fit into Raniere's profile of sexual conquest and who might be willing to 'give' Raniere money to feed his gambling problem."

Raniere, who uses the name "Vanguard," and NXIVM President Nancy Salzman, Dones claimed, acted maliciously toward members who were "sold on Raniere being someone he is not and that NXIVM 'mission' is something it is not."

"I was informed and believe that Raniere/Vanguard was having sexual relationships with multiple women, sometimes with more than one of them at the same time (many of these women were told that they were the chosen one; several of them were members of NXIVM's executive board which is a per se conflict of interest and all them had to keep their relationship with Raniere a secret from the NXIVM community because it was feared that many members were not 'evolved enough' to be able to deal with this information)," Dones stated in her court declaration.

Ahh, yes, women:

Where would all these cults and frauds be without them?

Now & Forever More: Free Society From Fraud

Alright, now that the Tea Parties are getting politics taken care of - and are, rightly, warning politicians to stay away from social issues - it's time for the rest of society to get it's collective head on straight.

To that end, The Daily Mail is stepping up with some rules for How To Spot A Quack:

Rule One: They are very, very sensitive to criticism and are liable to reach for their lawyers should anyone pour cold water on their claims. Naturally, and fairly, companies will wish to protect their livelihood and reputation. No one should advocate uninformed criticism that is malicious, deliberately untruthful or personal. But criticising a claim, like criticising the cooking in an expensive restaurant, should come under the definition of fair comment.

Rule Two: the more extreme the claim, the less likely it is to be true, aka there is no such thing as a free lunch,...There are (probably) no creams which will give you bigger breasts, smaller breasts, firmer tummies, longer willies or rounder bottoms. There ARE creams which may tone your skin slightly, make it smoother and softer, perhaps even a little plumper. But that is the best you can hope for.

Rule Three: The more ‘scientific’ the claims sound, the less likely they are in fact to be true. Beware long lists of obscure chemicals with extremely long names, especially those involving Greek letters. Keywords to be suspicious of include ‘pathways’, ‘DNA’ and, especially, ‘quantum’ and ‘nanotechnology’. Many of the looniest products combine all these terms and more with effortless and shameless ease.


Rule four: water is just water. If it is not water, it is something else; a medicine, a soft drink, a harmless concoction - or a poison. Water on its own cannot restructure your genes, it has no quantum ‘memory’, and nothing that comes out of a bottle will be any purer or better for you than that which comes out of a British tap. We spend several hundred million pounds a year on still bottled water in this country - money literally down the drain.

Rule five: few things you smear on your skin will have much effect on your insides, and if they do they should be treated with respect. Your skin is there to keep the outside world away from your delicate innards, a job it performs with admirable efficacy. Plenty of chemicals can cross this barrier, but they tend to be the sort of chemicals you really want to avoid. And if not, they are drugs, and should be licenced and controlled.


Rule six: ‘Detox’ is a myth. You possess an organ, the liver, which is the most efficient detox system known. If you have eaten too much rich food, drunk too much hard liquor and smoked too many cigarettes, by all means cut down. But ‘detoxing’ for a couple of self-righteous days is no substitute for adopting a healthy lifestyle, and buying products which claim to help you do so is throwing money away.

Rule seven: ‘natural’ is not the equivalent of ‘safe’. Hemlock is ‘natural’, as are arsenic and Death Cap toadstools. And all three will kill you.

Rule eight: ditto for ‘pure’; Poor Socrates must have wished his hemlock was less than pure. Sadly it was first-class stuff, completely unadulterated.

Rule nine: obscure fungi and algae from remote tropical islands or forests may amount to the elixirs of life/youth/wellness, but rest assured that if they are, and it is known that they are, then they are far from secret and that a great deal of money is being invested in finding out how and why. There is a good chance that a great many of the medical breakthroughs of the 21st century will come from nature’s medicine chest; but wait for at least the preliminary results to be published in a scientific journal before throwing your money away.

Rule ten: if you hear about a product in an unsolicited email, ignore it (and delete the email, it’s probably infested with viruses). Too obvious to be worth saying? Perhaps. But remember that hundreds of people every year fall for the most outrageous Internet scams. There is one born every minute. Don’t be that one.

Got it? Don't be the one.

These people have "made a fool of everyone" since before the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived in the West. Now's the time to end their run, and for the people of the West to get the upper hand again.

Throw the book at all of them as we find them.

Shun these people. (Start with Arianna Huffington even.)

Clean house.

Make it so.