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Monday, October 19, 2009
Jon Stewart's Call: "That Sounds Incredibly Reasonable - GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!!!"
Cry: How Oprah Giveth And Oprah Taketh Away
"FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — A Minnesota woman who was hospitalized with damage to multiple organs after she was overcome in an Arizona sweat lodge ceremony died Saturday, sheriff's officials said."-- The Associated Press
"[James Arthur Ray] has become a self-help superstar by packaging his charismatic personality and selling wealth. Those who first attend his free seminars hear a motivational mantra that promises that they can achieve what he calls 'Harmonic Wealth' — on a financial, mental, physical spiritual level.But his technique is not just motivational speaking. It's a combination of new age spiritualism, American Indian ritual, astrology and numerology. The sweat lodge experience was intended to be an almost religious awakening for the participants.
Ray uses free seminars to recruit people to his expensive seminars, starting with $4,000 three-day 'Quantum Leap' workshops and moving on to the weeklong $5,300 'Practical Mysticism' events and the $9,000-plus 'Spiritual Warrior' retreats like the one that led to the sweat lodge tragedy.
About 50 people attended the retreat near Sedona, the center of the new-age movement where practitioners draw energy from the surrounding Red Rocks and various vortexes to heal others.
He soared in popularity after appearing in the 2006's Rhonda Byrne documentary 'The Secret,' and he later was a guest on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' and 'Larry King Live' to promote it. His 2008 book 'Harmonic Wealth' made the New York Times bestseller list.Whether Ray manages to maintain his success in the wake of the deaths depends in part on his supporters, and how long the tragedy dogs him as he goes from city to city recruiting paying customers for his wealth creation/spiritual harmony philosophy.
Critics point to the Sedona events as yet more evidence that Ray is a huckster, who, like other motivational speakers, present their philosophies as a magic bullet to all of life's problems.
'It's honing in on peoples' needs, their hopes and desires, telling them what they want to hear,' said Rick Ross, founder of a virtual library of information on controversial groups and movements. 'That's how any good con man makes his mark.'"
-- Felicia Fonseca and Bob Christie, never actually explaining how "practitioners draw energy from the surrounding Red Rocks" or whether those "various vortexes to heal others" are real - never mind: Oprah doesn't either (nor is she ever pressed to) - though they're getting a pretty clear picture of the NewAge huckster business, for The Associated Press.
Isn't it funny how Oprah promotes James Arthur Ray, and The Secret, and they both turned out to be bogus? There's also the people who suffered from using the Oprah-promoted 30-Minute Face Lift, and, of course, James Frey - and those other recent lies in publishing, about the Jews and the apple during the Holocaust, and Oprah's promotion of that white supremacist book - and also that Newsweek article about the harmful quackery on her show. Where's the follow-up on all that? I mean collectively, in light of deaths and people getting maimed and/or kids being raped simply by being associated with Oprah-directed or endorsed activities, it's a pretty damning record. Shouldn't society be calling her on it?How much money do you think this one woman, Oprah Winfrey, was driven into the hands of con men and criminals? The Secret alone has to be in the billions. How much trust, goodwill, and gold, has she almost single-handedly directed into the clutches of bald-faced liars? How many lives has Oprah helped destroy - and in how many ways? She helped talk the country into backing Obama, need I say more?
Not Enough Glenns:We need another Glenn Beck (or, at least, someone else who can see where the action is and - damn the laughter from the self-appointed smart set - dig into this shit) because it's pretty obvious Glenn "Mr. New Media" Reynolds ain't gonna be of much help.
Shit, after watching the way he distracts people with his obsessions, I'm almost starting to regard him as the "Oprah of the internet" myself,...
They'll Diss Everyone With An Answer (And Play Stupid Whenever Someone Calls Out It's Name)
"I keep hearing that Glenn Beck is just a blowhard opinionist, contributing nothing but hot air. If that is true, why do we keep learning news from him? About Van Jones, about ACORN, about Anita Dunn . . . I mean, isn’t that the New York Times’s job? No? What a strange era we’re living in."-- Jay Nordlinger, probably left out of the loop - this is the NewAge, not a NewEra - but still correctly identifying the details, for The National Review.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Some People Really Know How To Live
"Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the spiritual leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which gained notoriety in the late 1980s for its followers' elaborate preparations for nuclear Armageddon, has died. She was 70.Prophet suffered from advanced Alzheimer's disease or dementia for years, and was at her apartment when she died Thursday night, said legal guardian Murray Steinman. Steinman said he was not aware of any other complicating health issues.
'She just kind of wound down,' Steinman said.
Prophet led the Park County church that once boasted 50,000 members. In the late 1980s, church members amassed assault rifles and armored vehicles in preparation for a nuclear missile strike that Prophet predicted was on the way. The plan brought national notoriety and a federal investigation.
The church's beliefs combined icons from the world's major religions, mixing western philosophy and mysticism. Despite her disease, videos and writings of Prophet continued to dominate church teaching, transformed into a New Age publishing enterprise and spiritual university.
The church was still prepared for Armageddon in recent years, and kept a bomb shelter stocked for 750 people deep in a forest near Yellowstone National Park. Gone are the weapons amassed in the late 1980s that got church leaders into trouble with federal authorities.
The church declined in the 1990s, after a doomsday prediction never materialized and Prophet's charismatic presence faded, but lived on with a smaller group of adherents and workers."
-- The Associated Press
Shhh: We Got A Little Jihad Going On Here
"This is the point: last November, the American people thought they were electing a 'post-partisan,' 'post-racial' President who would work to restore unity and self-confidence to the country. They woke up on November 5, however, to find that they had elected someone who was deeply ambivalent about America, who distrusted its founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and local responsibility. Like his radical friends — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Anita Dunn — Barack Obama wishes to transform the United States according to a model whose basic shape was supplied by the utopian schemes of the 1960s. That’s why Anita Dunn said that Mao was one of the thinkers she most often turned to for wisdom about big-think political problems. It’s not that she admires his penchant for industrial strength homicide: rather, she admires his success at fomenting an egalitarian revolution. It’s not what we bargained for when we elected Barack Obama. But that’s what we’ve got. The question is how much worse will things have to get before the penny drops, before the scales fall from the collective eyes of the electorate? When will voters begin that long countermarch through the institutions in order to take back the country? If not now, when?"-- Roger Kimball, kinda calling for conservatives to *start something* - what that *something* might be, exactly, escapes most - but then, they're probably too busy posing as hardcore revolutionaries, to be reading anything from Pajamas Media.
The Complete Package
I gotta get Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion Of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, if only to bookend Steve Salerno's SHAM: How The Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. Both, though only looking at isolated aspects of the problem, are still acknowledging NewAge culture as causing harm to our country, right under our noses, and even to our applause. 
Ehrenreich's title even mentions "The Relentless Promotion" of NewAge; the inescapable indoctrination producing this profoundly evangelical fanaticism for nonsense, so ingrained, many Americans aren't capable of grasping the concept of (much less seriously considering it's) NewAge that's driving the country off the rails. NewAge is seen as so flakey - even as more and more are so shamelessly drawn into it that it starts to define our nation - it's just gotta be something else that's messing things up, right? By my estimation that's highly unlikely, and Ehrenreich seems to have gotten a similar big-picture outlook into the head of Reason Magazine's Kerry Howley, found pontificating on the blog Double X:
"If we fail to see positive thinking as part of a unified belief system, we run the risk of passively absorbing these ideas as they seep into our lives, gently diminishing the sense that some circumstances really are beyond our control.Ehrenreich is a great believer in community activism, so I hope her book starts a movement among the Debbie Downers of the world. Call it pessimist pride. There’ll be placards, parades, manifestos, a Bill of Realist Rights. We can all meet up and talk up about how our respective attitudes, positive or otherwise, have nothing at all to do with nuclear armament in Iran. With any luck, we can expose smile-pushers for what they really are—not villains or warmongers, just smirking bullies long overdue for a smackdown."
O.K. - what NewAgers are, exactly, she still needs some work on - but Howley's solution to those with this "unified belief system" ("smirking bullies long overdue for a smackdown") is as clear an endorsement of The Macho Response as it's gonna get from outside my drum circle. Barbara Ehrenreich's doing something right: I'm buying her book.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Too Late - And Don't Forget: You Started It
"I admit it. I want my reality back. I don't know when it went missing. But I want it back."-- Nick Gillespie, upon noticing Glenn Beck's take on The Macho Response "suddenly seems less insane than sane" - indicating the further rise of populist conservatism - which, from a liberal perspective, probably appears to be far, far beyond Reason.
Look At The Democrats (And They Get Smaller)
Follow these links and watch - that's all I'm saying.Warning: Liberals who don't think I debate well will hate them. Give 'em enough of these break-downs and liberals will, both, understand why I prefer to just call them stupid and will probably start to prefer my style themselves.
Enjoy.
Death, Death, Death: All NewAge Has For Others
"In a pact guaranteed to raise both eyebrows and hackles, Gus Van Sant has teamed up with Brett Easton Ellis to write The Golden Suicides, based on the true story of the double suicide of artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan.Blake and Duncan were popular New York Artists who, for reasons unknown, became increasingly paranoid that they were being conspired against by the US government and the church of Scientology. Duncan overdosed on Tylenol in July 2007, and Blake is believed to have drowned himself in the Atlantic a week later.
The film stems from a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales, and the subject seems to fit perfectly with Van Sant's 'Death Trilogy' of Gerry (David Coughlin), Elephant (Columbine) and Last Days (Kurt Cobain) although at this point he's only attached as a writer and not as a director."
-- Owen Williams, with another great cult story - and another one featuring tons of "friends" who, when it mattered, were more capable of being assholes than being of assistance - further helping to build a NewAge Empire Online.
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