We're relieved to finally know, out of all the Hollywood Democrats out there, at least Tom Hanks ain't crazy:
After I left Capitol Hill, I had the great fortune of working as an arts-and-entertainment writer at the Washington Times. The gig included the unfairly fun duty of writing weekly movie reviews and, occasionally, interviewing the “talent,” as directors, actors, and writers are referred to in Hollywood-publicist lingo.
No doubt a highlight of those six years was the 45 minutes I got to spend in the company of Tom Hanks and the writer-director brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who were in Washington, D.C., to promote The Ladykillers, a not-terrible, but uncharacteristically flat remake of the 1955 Ealing Studios classic. (It paled in comparison to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coens’ audacious reinvention of The Odyssey.)
Hanks’ pious center-left politics are well-known, and he promptly ribbed me mercilessly about the Times’ connection to the cult led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. “Have you seen the reverend?” Hanks joshed. “Does he levitate in the lobby?” Hanks recalled the time he saw an ad for the Unification Church on the side of a bus in his hometown of Oakland, Calif. “If you’re really the new incarnation of Christ, would you need to take out advertisements?!”
After informing me that I would not be leaving the hotel suite--“We’re here to de-program you”--Hanks finally let up. The Coens laughed uproariously throughout (as, truthfully, did I).
We always liked Hanks. Good to know he's aware of what's up. We'd like to watch his films in peace, without the annoying subtext we have with other actors. “We’re here to de-program you”?
Poor Orac. The guy's a fucking cancer surgeon and he has to deal with the kookiest NewAge shit imaginable being rubbed in his face for shits and giggles. Seriously, if you ever thought adulthood isn't all you thought it was cracked up to be, put yourself in his shoes:
Years and years of training, study, and life-and-death experience, but more people would still rather listen to Jenny McCarthy - fucking brutal.
Hell, in relative terms, The Macho Response - a blog run by a crackhead artist with an anti-cult fetish - has more cache' than Respectful Insolence does, and RI's run by someone who can literally pull a life back from the abyss.
It shouldn't be that way. Orac should be able to speak and know the entire world is cupping it's ear to catch every word but, instead, it's TMR that's trying to advise Respectful Insolence on how to stop looking like a laughing stock every time some NewAger pops up and starts spouting off about some cult nonsense that any 5 year-old should be able to see through.
The worst though, from where we sit, is that dumb fuck, Orac, is too damned arrogant to accept the help when we offer it to him - and that arrogance is the same reason NewAgers have his type targeted for destruction to begin with. Does any of this sound familiar?
"You doctors think you know everything."
"You think you're God."
"You never listen to anyone else."
Well, if it doesn't, then you're not a doctor because even the nurses are saying it now - and many of the nurses are NewAgers, or do you think "wellness" has made it into hospitals because doctors thought it was "all that"? The NewAge has got the docs surrounded and, doing it Orac's way, there's absolutely no way out for the poor bastards:
Anyway, Gupta was on television talking to Susan Casey, editor-in-chief of O Magazine - that would be the editor-in-chief of Oprah Winfrey Magazine - about a faith healer who goes by the name of John of God:
Now, rightfully, Orac got upset at all the usual stuff a typical skeptic doctor would be upset about, starting with the fact that Gupta refers to "Western" medicine, as though what Orac does is part of some separate form of science than what's practiced elsewhere in the world. Lame.
What Orac should've said was "What in the fuck is Gupta doing talking to some plant from Oprah Magazine?!?"
See, it was just last month that Orac was screaming "about how Oprah Winfrey produced a despicably credulous shill job for faith healer John of God." And it was at the beginning of this month he reminded us of how little Oprah cares about the lives of her fans. It's not like he don't know what the bitch is about. But, like so many others, he ignores what Oprah is, and what her influence means, in favor of acting like Dr. Jeff Rediger, in the Gupta clip above, professional, competent-sounding, and useless.
And by the way, what were they recently honoring Oprah for, at the Kennedy Center Honors Gala, again? Her racism? Her weight-loss tips that didn't even work on her? Spreading quackery? Promoting The Secret? Promoting NewAge "beliefs" at all? Promoting the worst president in American history? For doing all that, for so long, on American television? Well oh goody.
As The Church Lady used to say on Saturday Night Live, "Isn't that special?"
Anyway, back to Orac. He ends his Gupta post with this:
I won't be alive 100 years from now, but I'd be willing to bet that "energy healing" will not be at the forefront of medicine in 100 years. I'd even be willing to bet that it won't be at the forefront of medicine in 20 or 30 years (when I should still be alive, accident or serious illness aside). Of course, Casey threw a nice bit of misdirection in there, didn't she? After all, what John of God does is not "energy" medicine; it's faith healing. I also can't help but notice that Dr. Rediger claims that he tried to verify some of the anecdotes of people who claimed to have found healing through John of God by looking at medical records and scans, but, strangely enough, he either can't or won't produce a single example of real healing by John of God. The best he can come up with is the lame observation that this sort of research is "complicated," which implies to me that he hasn't really found a convincing case. If he had, no doubt he would have trumpeted it to anyone who would listen.
Finally, I expect people like Susan Casey and Dr. Rediger to lay down a barrage of credulous excuses for John of God. It doesn't surprise me. What I don't expect is to see someone like Dr. Gupta wrapping up his report by saying that he is "honestly not sure what to make of this" and that this is something he should see for himself. This worries me. It sounds as though Dr. Gupta is planning on taking a trip to Brazil sometime soon to visit John of God. If he exercises the same lack of skepticism that he just exercised in this interview, I expect that his report, should he do it, will be no better than the segment on John of God that Oprah Winfrey aired last month. At the very least, if Dr. Gupta plans on going through with this, I hope he talks to someone like James Randi or Joe Nickell first. He desperately needs an education.
Seriously. That's what you expect from this guy?
A doctor - in need of an education? Imagine that. There seems to be a lot of that going around.
Doctors, scientists, professors - why the entire "credentialed but not educated" class seems to be in need of being taken back to school by somebody - but who could it be?
Orac sounds as credulous about Gupta as Gupta is to the claims of John of God:
"What I don't expect is to see someone like Dr. Gupta wrapping up his report by saying that he is 'honestly not sure what to make of this' and that this is something he should see for himself."
Really? We are talking about the same Dr. Sanjay Gupta, aren't we? The goofball surgeon who believed what the Raelian U.F.O. cult was putting down? When Gupta was picked to be Surgeon General, Orac said:
Do I think Dr. Gupta is sympathetic to antivaccine views? Not at all. But he clearly does not recognize them when he sees them, and he seems tainted by the journalistic tendency to 'tell both sides' even when there is no scientific support at all to one side.
In other words, not only is Sanjay Gupta potentially anti-vaccine but he (like so many others today) is not a man but a fool - and Orac knows it. Gupta's hospital, The University of Arizona, is even on Orac's Academic Woo Aggregator, so the idea that Orac would be surprised about any position this loon holds is,...well, surprising. Well, actually, not really.
Because, of course, what Orac's missing (or more accurately, has been rejecting now for years, because we show more "humanity" than he does) is the big picture regarding The NewAge Movement. Things like how it was, nonsensically, NewAgers Oprah "John of God" Winfrey and Arianna "John-Roger" Huffington (who Orac said runs a "wretched hive of scum and quackery") that provided busses to The Daily Show's "Rally To Restore Sanity". Because we don't treat NewAge in a piecemeal fashion, people in the anti-cult business don't miss ass-backwards things like that - while, we're positive, good ol' Orac wrong-headedly approved with all his heart, merely because the rally had "sanity" in the title. Duh. Brilliant cover, right? Yea, if you're simple and checked your skepticism at the door.
So Orac's missing NewAge. Hell, Orac's even missing what he's written about it - and Sanjay Gupta - so what can one expect? He'll keep on writing about Gupta, or Oprah, or whoever, and, each time, act surprised like it's the first time he ever discovered their pushing NewAge quackery - because it probably will be the first time - all over again. Like we said:
Complete nonsense, it’s fiction, it comes from a cult ideology. There’s no science in there, no facts to back [it] up.
"A cult ideology" huh? Well isn't that interesting? And, of course, our old friend, Glenn Reynolds - commenting on Corbyn's prediction of a "brutal" winter - adds "I hope he’s wrong. Unfortunately, his predictions so far have been quite accurate." The Instapundit doesn't even mention the cult claim. Hmmm.
Yesterday we said, despite Reynolds' jackassery, he still provided a pretty good service. Today - based on this obvious omission - we're starting to wonder if the Instapundit provides any kind of service at all.
What he does is starting to look more and more like the "lamestream media" after this one - holding back important information from his readers, because he doesn't like someone, is fucked. He's the shit-faced Instapundit, for Christ's sake! Tell the people we're assholes (like he does Matt Yglesias) but don't keep them in the dark about the other issues, when others keep agreeing with us, or we turn out to be right. Hey, Glenn, even assholes can be right! (Or even smarter than you,...lamer.)
Reynolds did it again, yesterday, with our aptly-titled post "And Not Posting Critics Is Part Of The Problem". Instead of, at least, adding it to the list of opinions he got on why people would quit a job without having another lined up - we say, more than anything else, it's because of this Maharishi/The Secret-inspired management technique that (thanks to Boomers attending cult seminars) has swept the nation:
Instead of even mentioning that, though, Reynolds posted two opinions that almost sound just as deranged as we can - one, from someone named Grace McLoughlin, blaming it on Obama's abuse of management (Oh, how our hearts bleed for those in management - who, as far as we can tell, mostly all voted for Obama and are the ones who strictly enforce the Maharishi/The Secret-inspired management techniques) and another, from someone named Dave Price, blaming "the less productive". No, we're not kidding you - "the less productive". That's who's to blame out there. "Less productive" than who, Mr. Price (nor Mr. Reynolds) says, but they're out there - they just know it - sitting on fat piles of cash, being lazy.
It was at that point we asked ourselves the same question Reynolds must ask when he sees a critical post arrive from us:
New Age "Asiatic" thought,...is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.
Is it possible - just possible - that under this Maharishi-inspired brainwashing regime, the problem is really "management is so freaking ass-backwards awful I'd rather stick needles in my eyes than return to that place"?
Is that even a remote possibility, Professor?
That the people running things - you know, those guys at your level - are such useful idiots we'd rather take our chances utilizing the law of the jungle? And, if so, tell us this:
What's "fun" about that?
Seriously, if anybody wants an analogy that really works, how about saying the average office environment can be about as dispiriting as reading Glenn Reynolds telling us why people don't want to go back there!
At least that jibes with how it looks from down here. Shit, even Barack Obama don't listen to anybody but himself. It's all deafness, starting at the top, and shit rolling downhill:
At just six, Shruti Pandey is the youngest yoga trainer in the world.
The bendy youngster has been teaching adults at an ashram, in northern India, for the last two years.
Her trainer, Hari Chetan, 67, set up the ashram 35 years ago and as soon as little Shruti became one of his students, as a tiny four-year old, he spotted her talents.
Now she starts her classes at 5.30am every morning, at Brahmanand Saraswati Dham, in the Jhunsi town, dressed in white leggings and a red t-shirt surrounded by 30 eager pupils ranging from businessmen, teachers, housewives to pensioners.
Shruti said: 'It feels good when people follow my instructions, I feel like a real teacher.
Of course you do, dear. But even you know you're not a "real teacher" but only "feel like" one, because - excuse us - you're only 6 years old and have merely mastered a useless endeavor. In all honesty, you should be in school where you can learn something that will further your mind in preparation for what lies ahead.
Her brother, Harsh Kumar, now 11-years-old, made the Limca Book of Records at the tender age of five by learning all 84 yoga positions - but he's never been interested in being a teacher like his sister. Hari, who Shruti also calls her grandfather, think she's a miracle.
Sure she is. Just like the little brats who now come home in Western countries, demanding their parents do what they say to "save the planet". It's not that children have all of a sudden become exceptional, but that adults have gradually become infantile, incapable of mature thoughts, unable to comprehend what's important, or their own role as parents and adults.
We're relieved to finally know, out of all the Hollywood Democrats out there, at least Tom Hanks ain't crazy:
