Love Was Never Free When They Trapped The Kids In It

The hippies couldn't tell the truth about The Civil Rights Movement, they couldn't tell the truth about Kennedy, they couldn't tell the truth about Harvey Milk or gays in general. They are a generation that simply can't tell the truth - and the first job, of the next, is to escape this edifice of lies the hippies built:

"In the 50 years since J.D. Salinger removed himself from the public eye and stopped publishing, he has been viewed — more accurately, worshiped — as the human embodiment of purity, a welcome antidote to phoniness. To many, he was a kind of god."

"A god"? Can you imagine anyone being so stupid? Some god:

Salinger was just another, in this long line of NewAge "guru" perv con artists, allowed to molest the naive and gullible, because the other delusional pervs wanted it that way, and nothing more.

And I dare anyone to say I'm wrong,...

 

Where'd The American Dream Go? Follow These Two,...

Make Money From Feminism & Gay Pride Hosting Those Who Scream "Race Hustler" And Attacking A Black Guy

 

"Most of the people who graduated in the 60's, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can't get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior."  

"The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already for the last 25 years,...Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to lack of moral standards,...exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it.... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization."

"People with greater math and numerical reasoning skills actually skewed their results more than those with lesser abilities depending on what they felt the fake study was assessing. Being smarter about something made it more likely that you would allow your political beliefs to harm your objective reasoning skills." 

 

"None of this is good — because it means that objective sets of facts, science and evidence are becoming increasingly less relevant in today's society, while the 'tribes' you belong to and their leaders may be vastly more important to what you think and how you act."

 

"Where it can become dangerous is when the leaders that you trust for road maps simply lie or deceive for their own purposes, because more and more, this research implies, there is a tendency to simply ignore an objective set of facts if it goes against your beliefs and what people you trust are telling you." 

 

This sort of 'cultural cognition' model has profound implications for all sorts of things. In the Syrian situation, for instance, it may not matter whether Syria used chemical weapons against its own people. What may matter more to you is whether you believe Barack Obama when he presents that objective set of facts. Facts don't matter. Who describes them to you does."

The Crack Emcee: 

"All [Ann Althouse] has to do, for me, is show the balls I used to give her credit for and openly and honestly engage her critics. Say sorry sometimes. I made a mistake. Whatever. It ain't asking for much."

Meade Lawrence ["Second" husband to Ann Althouse]: 

"What makes you the high judge of who is sufficiently open and honest and who is not?"

Mitt Romney Ain't The Only Politician Who Said The Left Were Tripping (Rick Was Always Holding Your Baggage)

 

I love the stunning defense this "reporter" offers.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone else that what just happened, between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, was exactly what conservatives predicted from the beginning, in one form or another? That we were going to lose under this man? Remember back when it was Obama declaring we were not exceptional? 

Then why are we surprised? 

 The hippies said, by way of them, the American Empire will fall - they got their fall guy. Happy now?

I Think We'll All Be Cutting Out At About The Same Time

“It is a gross mistake to suppose that self-esteem is always a good quality, the more of it the better.”

- THEODORE DALRYMPLE 

 That quote's from a child-killing story I needed to brush up on, as I'd let it slip by with just a glance before, and felt a bit guilty. 

God, I'm glad I'm not a hippie. I've just had to live with them, in the destruction of their wake. That's been enough. 

I've learned how to laugh about it. 6 kids dead so a fool could "feel good about himself"? ♬It's getting better all the time!♪

So, that said, can we get to the nude photo spread of Miley Cyrus already? Isn't that where this is all leading? Isn't the gradual push, push, push, just extended foreplay for television to graduate into the equivalent of a 24 hour porn booth? You see any other "artistic barriers" being broken? Even attempted to be broken? Well let's get on with it then. You're "liberated," baby - Madonna said so - now show me your tits.

There goes my gag reflex. Unfortunately, it's usually triggered by things other people insist on me watching, like the selling of Barack Obama. 

We HAD to have him, too, remember? He was the fulfillment of,...something. The editor of Newsweek said he was a god. People shot guns in my neighborhood when he got elected. Meanwhile, I was hunkered over the toilet, because I share a planet with anyone so stupid. That's how I've spent a lot of my life. Shoot, who am I kidding - it's become real life:

One long session, staring at porcelain, giving it up,...

 

Determined You Never Be Like The Greatest Generation

Guess which pop celebrity recently said it: 

  "My dad used to make me sit outside on the steps all night long looking for UFOs flying by, and I had to do that for years." 

 I say, parenting got weird once hippies got their hands on it,...

 

"Je Suis Celui Que Vous êtes il Que Vous êtes Moi Et Nous Sommes Tous Ensemble" Is No Joke In French

How did "being open-minded" get to be considered good, when so many examples of it's pitfalls surround us?

Roger Gonnet,...is the subject of a special feature in the latest edition of French magazine XXI,.... 

This time however, his journey from dedicated Scientologist to the movement's most vociferous critic in France is told in the graphic-novel format. 

Gonnet's story is the centrepiece of a 34-page dossier dedicated to Scientology in the latest edition of XXI, which appears quarterly. 

L'Evadé de la Secte (roughly, He Escaped from the Cult) is built around his experience of the movement: but it also works in the basic story of Dianetics, Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. 

Bringing his story to life in a 30-page strip is Renaud De Heyn, a Belgian comic-book artist and illustrator with several books to his name. 

...De Heyn recounts how Gonnet and his wife Françoise got pulled into Scientology by his uncle, who with an American friend ran a successful franchise of the movement. 

At the time Gonnet was a business consultant and Françoise a teacher: but this was in 1973, at the tail end of what was still a thriving hippy movement in France, when people were open to all kinds of unconventional ideas.

Tell me something I don't know - TMR's got a "delusional thinking" tag. 

At the bottom of the post - look.

I'd love to have someone illustrate my cult story, especially for the French, since part of it takes place there and I find the frogs, generally, so on-the-mark about cults but so "off" when assessing America. And the cult of homeopathy. 

We, both, require more study.

Where was I? I don't know - Scientology's on trial in France, and will probably be getting the boot soon, or something. In this, we can learn from The Frog Nation. Nobody needs this shit.

 But make no mistake: 

From here on out,...

That's about as "open-minded" as we should plan on getting about anything.

FOR REALS,...

Destructive Appearances

And then, every so often, I catch a glimmer of daylight:

  Millennials Hate Bruce Springsteen

Which, of course, needs to be stamped out - that's the purpose of the article. The writer, being a fan of the adulterous and multi-married Springsteen, he probably thinks, or thought, like this:

Some years ago, the man I am married to told me he had always had a mad desire to go to an orgy. Why on earth, I asked. Why not, he said.

And he'd later be divorced by that woman, who'd become admired for it, because she thinks, or thought, like this:

It would be just like the dances at the YMCA I went to in the seventh grade—only instead of people walking past me and rejecting me, they would be stepping over my naked body and rejecting me.

These are misshapen trolls, presented as our cultural heroes.

Thank goodness, not everyone's following their lead,...

 

Simon Cowell's Having A Baby With Another Man's Wife (So, That Means, Criticism Stops At Judging Ourselves)

Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

Unfortunately, the media spotlight so cheaply won by Cyrus will inevitably spur repeats of her silly stunt, by her and others. Image and profile now rule the music industry. At a time when profits are coming far more from touring than from CD sales, performers are being hammered too early into a marketable formula for cavernous sports venues. With their massive computerized lighting and special-effects systems, arena shows make improvisation impossible and stifle the natural rapport with the audience that performers once had in vaudeville houses and jazz clubs. There is neither time nor space to develop emotional depth or creative skills. 

Pop is an artistic tradition that deserves as much respect as any other. Its lineage stretches back to 17th century Appalachian folk songs and African-American blues, all of which can still be heard vibrating in the lyrics and chord structure of contemporary music. But our most visible young performers, consumed with packaging and attitude, seem to have little sense of that thrilling continuity and therefore no confidence in how it can define and sustain their artistic identities over the course of a career.

I think the phrase that pays nowadays is "unsustainable".

I love when Boomers pretend that - after their kids witnessed their antics - they now have no idea where any of this is coming from.

But - they also assure us - there's nothing that can be done.

It's just so neat and tidy,...

 

They Had Nothing Better To Do Than Lie Around Naked

Maybe they'll listen because a WOMAN said it:

It’s time to put my baby-boom generation out to pasture! We’ve had our day and managed to muck up a hell of a lot. It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move — with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts.

If you ask me, when it comes to Boomers, there's a lot of that going around,...

 

A Presence, Over-Riding Everything, Denying They Exist

It's interesting that black Boomers can admit this while white Boomers take umbrage:

The Civil Rights Generation made massive progress, but in many ways they dropped the ball. While they made it clear that there was work to be done, too many of them did not choose those who would do it. Too much energy and focus has been placed on one or two people, and we need cohorts of the next generation to work together. 

The Baby Boom Generation (mine) has dropped the ball as well. We have been beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Generation, but we have not passed our largess or our lessons on.

Too, too, correct: 

The generations after the Baby Boom are poor for a reason - and it has little to do with us,...  

Hypnotized (By The Cult Of Enviro-Mentalism)

"Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with 'Ecotopia,' a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known."

 

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called 'recycle bins' sit on trains, along with 'hanging ferns and small plants.'

A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. 

'You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.'

...Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. 

 

And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. 

...'Ecotopia' has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their 'natural' aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)

 Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: 

 

Most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world.

Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. 'Ecotopia' is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.

Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. 

Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere 'Walden.'

“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. 'This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.'

But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, 'Ecotopia' is a blueprint for the future.

'It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,' he said. 'But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.'

'And we’d better get ready,' he added. 'We need to know where we’d like to go.'"

-- Scott Timberg, on the '70s cult novel that has been discovered as a cultishly philosophical blueprint for American society's current manipulation, in The New York Times.