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Mark Morford — Notes & Errata

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #250 on: May 02, 2013, 11:45:01 pm »


Mark Morford

World’s. Dumbest. Enemies.

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 5:28PM - Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Our research shows that, while many Americans would like nothing more than to make sweeping, insensitive generalizations about these two individuals based purely on their ethnic identity, this process is largely impeded by the fact that 9 out of 10 Americans truly know next to nothing about Chechnya, including even the very barest details of what or where Chechnya is.
 — The Onion


CHECHNYA! Of course! Chechnya wants America dead because they hate our freedoms, our shopping malls and our shiny perfect Jesus. Right? Because we have invaded their homeland and destroyed their culture with Burger King and Walmart and…um, wait, what? We haven’t? They don’t? The Boston bombers, while originally ethnic Chechens, are largely “self-radicalized?” And the younger one, Dzhokhar, is an American citizen? And they acted alone? And they’re basically dumb as logs? Oh.

It’s all so… confusing. So frustrating. How are we supposed to handle this? Who are we supposed to hate upon? The idiot Tsarnaev brothers don’t fit our beloved terrorist stereotypes, do not play the role we wanted them to play. Damn them!

Sure they’re Muslims, sort of, but they aren’t your classic, scarf-wearing fundamentalist sociopaths we love to hate. Sure they’re would-be terrorists, sort of, but it appears they’re also exactly just as hapless, ignorant, dopey, unrealistic, muddled, amateurish, moronic, foolish, gullible and downright stupid as nearly all terrorists the world over. Sure they’re from a violent and war-torn region, mostly (though Chechnya is quite stable now), but it’s also a part of the world almost no one knows or cares anything about, and never really will.

How utterly… deflating. For a country like America that defines itself by its enemies, that must have them lest the hawks and warmongers of the right sigh themselves to sleep every night, we just don’t know where to turn, where to direct all our intolerance and bile. All we have is one skinny, naive-looking 19-year-old kid named Dzhokhar who’s lying in a hospital bed, riddled with bullets, barely alive, his throat torn out and his world surrounded by cops and ignominy and death, whispering that he has no clue what the hell is going on.


Muddled idiots or hapless morons?
Muddled idiots or hapless morons?

This shall not do. No wonder he haters and the finger-pointers feel so gypped. No wonder hothead GOP numbskulls like Lindsay Graham and John McCain wanted Dzhokhar tried as an “enemy combatant,” mostly because they like saying the words “enemy combatant” on Fox News with a sneer and a total disregard for American law. If there’s one thing the GOP loves, it’s finding someone to despise and combat. Besides Obama, of course.

What a strange moment in American history. No clearly defined enemy, Islamophobia at a (relatively) low ebb, gay marriage foregone and obvious, the Red Scare of yore now a pale footnote, even our normal modalities of racism and sexism lacking the same bitter tang now that Obama won a second term and all the nasty old white guys who used to control everything have become less relevant and/or are dying off en masse.

Truly, to much of America — but especially the pundits of the right — the Tsarnaev brothers and their insipid act of violence have been a major disappointment. Can’t blame Obama, can’t blame Islam, can’t blame the lefties or vegans or immigrants, can’t hate upon Mexico or Europe or Iran — all our normal machinery of bias and intolerance left with nothing to gnaw upon. What’s a enemy-loving populace to do?

How about eating a little of itself? Note how the shrill blogosphere is in momentary turmoil about being so stupidly, wildly wrong about the bombers, spreading lies and misinformation so quickly on the night of the attack (first via Reddit, then Twitter, then all the rest) it was sort of terrifying, particularly for those who were incorrectly, unjustly, even violently accused.


Lone wolves: Not amused!
Lone wolves: Not amused!

For shame. It was nasty vigilantism and witch-hunting at its worst, with Reddit in particular revealed to be an ugly and irresponsible tool/community indeed, with no fix in sight. At least when CNN gets it wrong, they’re just an embarrassment. When social media gets it wrong, someone could get killed. You’d almost think Twitter et al have far too much unruly power and decentralized influence, to the point where a single bogus tweet could crash the U.S. economy in an instant. Nah.

This is the problem with globalization and the new high-tech melting pot; everyone is interbreeding, sects are blurred, no one knows where to turn for accurate, authentic information about who we’re supposed to hate anymore. Social media? Failed horribly. Old media? Mixed. Meanwhile, do you know what the worst job in America is right now? That’s right: “newspaper reporter”. So much for the future of credibility.

This much we do know: the enemy is definitely not well-funded, expertly trained clans of wild-eyed terrorists from foreign lands. The truth is, most terrorist attacks since 9/11 have been of the lone wolf variety, which, given the general idiocy, ignorance and ineptitude of most who attempt these plots, is a direct insult to wolves.

We are nonplussed, we are dissatisfied. It will likely be revealed that the Tsarnaev brothers bombed Boston for no other reason than they are slightly radicalized idiots born of awful parents, with no affiliation to any group, terrorist or otherwise.

It will likely be revealed that we will learn nothing new about terrorism or human nature, except that those who are desperate to find enemies will look harder than ever and bottom-feeding conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones will eat their own eyeballs for an uptick in click-throughs.

It will likely be revealed that, lacking the proper ingredients for a typical American blame-fest, this brutal and tragic attack will fade quickly in the national memory, joining a long list of dark, one-off events that scar the nation but don’t really do much to inspire it toward anything, except maybe the shocking realization that most people are far kinder, more helpful, and more willing to take care of each other in times of pain and crisis than our loud-mouthed, enemy-seeking punditry will ever be.

Not such a bad realization after all, really.


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« Reply #251 on: May 02, 2013, 11:45:12 pm »


Mark Morford

Everybody’s all gay now

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 2:25PM - Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

IF YOU don’t think it’s a big deal, you aren’t paying close enough attention.

If you don’t think the cover-story coming out of Jason Collins, the currently active, black, veteran, mostly-unknown NBA player, is still historic and all kinds of pioneering, particularly in light of the fact that both big-league pro sports and its slightly skeezy neighbor, hip-hop culture, remain the most homophobic and dumbly macho of all American industries next to NASCAR and maybe professional bass fishing, you gotta check your Twitter feed.

While I don’t watch pro sports or have the slightest interest in the lives of its players or teams, I do delight when the open palm of raw history slaps an excessively masculine, long-repressed institution across the face (Catholic church, US military, Republican party), and I certainly recognize the awesome refrain currently being blared out far and wide right now in regard to gay athletes in pro sports in general: “It’s about goddamn time.”


Dear NFL — You’re next.
Dear NFL — You’re next.

No kidding, right? I wrote about the obvious, closeted existence of gay pro athletes in this very column way back in 2005 (and again in ’11), how they must exist, in statistically significant numbers, back when such a possibility was complete cultural anathema, back when the big gay sporting news of the day was Sheryl Swoopes of the WNBA announcing, to no one’s surprise, that she was a lesbian. Yawn.

Prior to Swoopes, I think the only major gay announcement in the sporting world during the ’90s was the sweet, completely obvious gayness of… Greg Louganis, way, way back in 1995, on Oprah. But, really now — Olympic diving? Where you shave your chest, slick up your entire body and practice entering the water like a ballerina? Who isn’t gay?

Back in 2005, I was optimistic in my timeline guesstimate, but even I had little idea the pro athlete breakout would occur in well under a decade, or that a gay player from the Big Four would appear on the same cultural docket as gay marriage, gays in the military, gays all up in the bloated, pinched face of Antonin Scalia; I certainly had no idea any of it would happen under the calm, intelligent gaze of a black president who (finally) supports the gay thing all over the place, right along with nearly all Democratic and even a couple (very nervous) Republican senators. “Wow” doesn’t really cover it.

Fact is, many readers and gay rights supporters back then were convinced they’d never see gay marriage, much less a pro gay athlete (or a black president), in their lifetime. A full cultural awakening was at least 25 or even 30 years out, if that. And while Collins isn’t exactly Michael Jordan in terms of hero-worship celebrity, his decision earned instant support from many who are: Kobe Bryant, two living presidents, countless celebrities and assorted trailblazers who came before (Navratilova, Robbie Rogers, et al).

How delightful to be proven wrong. How amazing to to have underestimated the pace, and the attitude, and even the NBA’s response. How remarkable that all the major sports leagues have been preparing for this very day by hooking into sensitivity training and gay rights groups so as to better deal with the inevitable anti-gay backlash from not-very-bright players, thuggish fans and the various Christian family groups who will now likely “ban” the NBA for daring to allow Collins to spray his hot gay sweat near human children.

But even more wonderful to know that, while Collins might be the first active player to come out, he’s far from the last. Soon, gay athletes will be commonplace. Soon, no big deal. Soon, the NFL, NHL and MLB and (yawn) pro golf and even, maybe, a gay NASCAR driver, a guy who surely already exists and who is right now completely terrified of getting shot if he even dares to look in the direction of Jason Collins. Poor kid.

To me, this is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of all, this wild acceleration, the compounding energy, the quickening avalanche of turnabouts and awakenings, confessions, support. Even Collins made a point to say he’s glad he came out today and not in 2003, given how far we’ve come in the span of just a decade, in how gay rights have leapt from flame-baiting derogatory hot-button to front page, teary-eyed exclamation. Gay marriage? Gay military? Gay politicians? Gay sports? Everyone’s doing it. What’s next, a female president? Oh. Hell. Yes.

You are compelled to ask: How did this happen so quickly? Why the wild acceleration? That’s easy: Technology. Social media. Scared old white guys fading away and dying off en masse, which goes hand in claw with the end of the nasty, homophobic Bush era. All topped by the incredible hard work of countless gay rights activists and advocates in D.C. and everywhere else, for years, for decades, and still going strong.

Also, God not giving a damn about who you love, so long as you love. Also, younger generations not caring a whit about the sad “culture wars” of their elders. Simple, right?

You are almost be tempted to say that the walls are crumbling, glass ceilings are shattering and Obama’s rainbow coalition majority is already flexing its newfound, pro-gay pro-fem pro-variety muscle. You are tempted to see Collins’ handsome, smiling face on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and get all optimistic about the future, knowing that the last civil right has finally hit critical mass, and is fast heading toward the dustbin of history.

Don’t get too cocky. Such dazzling cultural momentum does not always work in our favor. From global warming to gun control, abortion rights to the bloody contortions of the Arab Spring, too many issues and needful cultural shifts are still stuck in the waiting room of momentous change, hoping for their big gay moment, for that time when it’s all obvious and positive and essentially done.

We’re not there just yet. Too much Tea Party. Too many not very bright people in the world, in Congress, in power. Ignorance and intolerance, fear and paranoia are not so easily defeated, can sneak and slither their way into the cultural consciousness via all sorts of nefarious laws, congressional subcommittees, hate groups and hate radio and hate speech galore. And they always will.

But really, who cares about them right now? Kids, look! A pro gay athlete, playing in the NBA! It happened in your lifetime! It happened in my lifetime. Who would’ve thought? It’s just sort of astonishing. It’s worth more than merely noting; it’s absolutely worth celebrating. Let’s get to it.


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« Reply #252 on: May 10, 2013, 09:47:42 pm »


Mark Morford

Nine amazing truths you already suspected

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 8:24PM - Tuesday, May 07, 2013

A FRESH BATCH of white-hot obviousness to soothe the savage satirist in you. Starting with…

The NRA is the new Christian right

Remember that shrill, fundamentalist, God-fearing, adorably insane Christian coalition that somehow elected Bush to two miserable terms, then self-imolated in a cavalcade of confusion and homophobia? Behold, it hath re-emerged! It is now tinier, angrier, far more paranoid, licks AR-15 semi-automatics like popsicles and gathers itself into sweltering Texas convention centers packed like canned lard with panicky, overweight white guys who cheer Glenn Beck’s sweaty tears and give standing ovations to Sarah Palin. Welcome back, right-wing fearclumps! My how you’ve shrunk. And God, you look awful.

The NRA is also a twitchy clown car of paranoia and failure

This much we know: Any event where Sarah Palin still gets a standing ovation, where not a single respected celebrity, politician, spiritual leader or intellectual pundit would ever dare show his face, where they want to arm children and compare Michael Bloomberg to a Nazi, these are surefire signs you’re among the most lost and desperate in America.

Yes, the NRA still has a ridiculously powerful lobby in Washington D.C. So does the high fructose corn syrup lobby. Did you see the photos from the big convention in Houston? Glenn Beck holding up a rifle? Wayne LaPierre’s mouth contorting in manic anguish? This is the army of the insane and the paranoid, the least compassionate the country has to offer. Sorry, Newtown kids; they hate you most of all.

Google Glass: Guaranteed to get you not laid


Goggle Glass! You know, pretty much.
Goggle Glass! You know, pretty much.

One tech pundit has compared Google’s widely mocked, ultra-geeky experimental eyewear to Apple’s awesome but ill-fated Newton, saying both were ahead of their time, and hence both were ruthlessly derided for being so out of step.

Well, sort of. The Newton was slammed for just not working very well. Google Glass, however, is the millennial version of a calculator watch, the world’s nerdiest fashion accessory from the world’s nerdiest company that only the nerdiest hoody-wearers in the world would (or maybe should) be caught dead browsing with their eyebrows.

Do you like sex? Do you ever want to have it again? I thought so. Wear Google Glass and watch the opposite sex shun you like love shuns the NRA.

George W. Bush is a sad, awkward loser

Bill Clinton is a rock star. His Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation are respected worldwide for their astonishing effectiveness, influence and good work. Jimmy Carter, at 88 and walking on artificial knees, is still building houses for the poor and helping with difficult conflicts all over the world. He’s also written 27 books. It’s a sure bet that Obama, when he leaves office, will become equally, if not even more globally respected and effective than either, given O’s relative youth and interest range. And we get his passionate largesse for the next 30 years. Democrats and liberals, it would appear, are naturally wired to help.

George W. Bush hides. He paints pictures of bathtubs and dogs. He makes few appearances, gives few speeches, delivers no commencement addresses. He does not build houses for the poor, rarely helps out in times of tragedy or disaster, or volunteer his time teaching a class in a university. He has no major charities or foundations in his name (except the one used to build his meek presidential library). There is no lecture circuit, only one tiny book, no commemoration of any kind save for the nasty, bitter aftertaste he left in the mouth of history.

George W. Bush is, in short, a shameful footnote, sad and strange and sort of awful. The Republican party — for whom, if they’re honest, George W. Bush remains their truest and most accurate representative — should be proud.

The US military would like to sexually abuse you now

Some say it’s the most underreported horror story in America, a widespread, ongoing national disgrace no one wants to touch. With more than 26,000 cases of sexual abuse, including rape and assault, reported last year alone (a whopping 37 percent jump), with untold thousands more going unreported due to fear and coercion in the corridors of macho military power, it’s certainly turning out to be more than a mere embarrassment. It’s repellant.

And now, the highlight, the top story, the tipping-point headline to ignite all disgust and put the story over the top: It’s the arrest of Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski, head of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, who’s been charged with… can’t you guess? Sexual battery.

Dear US military: The Catholic Church called, wants it sick irony back.

All terrorists are bungling imbeciles

Show me a photo of the Tsarnaev brothers, and I’ll show you a couple of pallid, socially inept douchebags who sit around huffing glue, watch z-grade porn, and drowning stray kittens for fun.

No one, least of all the 24-hour news channels, the D.C. punditry, or congressional politicians wants to debunk the shiny, zillion-dollar Hollywood myth that terrorists are slick, hyperintelligent monsters who speak five languages, live in elaborate underground lairs and look like Javier Bardem. That ridiculous myth makes billions, funds the CIA and keeps the hoi polloi roiling in fear.

The truth is far more banal: Terrorists worldwide are, generally speaking, morons. Dumb as bricks and half as clever. This is why stopping them is so difficult — not because their plots are so ingenious and intricate, but because it’s like trying to figure out when the next violent, meth-addled chronic masturbator is going to ram his Monte Carlo into a crowded shopping mall.

This sentence is totally gay and therefore I am writing a book about it

Carolyn Moos is the ex-fiancé of Jason Collins. Jason Collins is — perhaps you’ve heard? — the first NBA player to come out as gay. Carolyn Moos heard the news and was all, like, “OMG WTF”? Moos dated Jason Collins for eight solid years. Apparently, she had no idea.

And now, Carolyn Moos is going to write a book. Because this is what one does. The book is going to be titled, “OMG WTF?” and those two abbreviations will appear on every page, over and over again, about 52,000 times in an endless, unbroken stream because what the hell else could she possibly write?

Good Samaritans will almost always surprise you

Behold, Charles Ramsay, friendly and bitingly funny neighbor to sociopathic monster Ariel Castro, who, maybe along with his two brothers, apparently kept three young women captive in his Cleveland house for more than 10 years. Ramsay heard the cries of one, Amanda Berry, and helped her escape, followed shortly by the others. Ramsay’s interview has got viral, rivaling Kai the Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker (see video clip below) for unexpected wit and personality. Of course, the Interweb was quick to point out Ramsay is no saint himself. But hey, maybe he just found himself a bit of redemption.




Your pull quote du jour: “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Dead giveaway!”

Awesometastic. That all three women are still alive and relatively healthy? Even better.

Nation continues downward spiral into all-consuming hell

One word: Delaware. You go.


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« Reply #253 on: May 15, 2013, 03:04:40 pm »


Mark Morford

Guns to your gay mother

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 6:39PM - Tuesday, May 14, 2013

TWO Chechen-American idiots watch too much Internet and flagellate themselves into detonating a couple homemade bombs in Boston, and suddenly it’s an epic domestic terror attack that floods the nation with fear and panic, shuts down an entire major city and triggers the President of the United States to call Vladimir Putin directly, as an ever-whiny Congress re-debates immigration reform and “pressure cooker” shifts meaning in the American lexicon forevermore.

Meanwhile, Mother’s Day. A parade celebrating same courses through some rough neighborhoods of New Orleans. Suddenly, a 19-year-old thug (at least one, maybe more) of no greater or lesser quality than the idiot Tsarnaevs whips out his NRA-adored handgun and shoots 19 people, three of them children, for no reason whatsoever save that he, too, wished to lash out at his perceived enemies, the cops, the world.


Pressure cookers? Scary. But this is barely worth your time.
Pressure cookers? Scary. But this is barely worth your time.

The reaction? A numb shrug. A tragic sigh. Just another case of urban street violence that barely registers in the American consciousness because, hey, gun attacks are just the American way, aren’t they? And we’re powerless to stop them, right? Because guns are awesome? Because violence is just who we are? Right.

Besides, poor black people shooting each other in the mean streets of New Orleans? Who cares about that? It’s not like that teenager was shooting white children in Connecticut or something. Now that would be terrible.

Such a dicey and delusional species are we. Such masters of self-deception, of bizarre equivocation, cherry picking our tragedies and our collective neurosis as we are told by the warped media, nasty politicos, hate-radio pundits and marketers of all kinds just which thugs and demons we should fear most, and which merely exist somewhere in blighted, faraway neighborhood you need not care about.

What’s your tremor du jour, citizen? Hooligans with guns? A twitchy NRA with even more guns? Chechen morons with unregistered cookware? The IRS?

Ah, the IRS, doing what the IRS does best: being sort of hateful, targeting various groups it doesn’t like, adding pressure to groups it feels are some sort of threat, nailing little people from whom it feels it can suck some extra dollars. Nothing new there.

Except now, now the IRS overstepped even its own ignoble rules in targeting some dumber-than-thou conservative groups, right around the last election. How utterly stupid. How utterly embarrassing. How utterly pointless.

Then again, who doesn’t know the IRS targets specific demographics all the time? Who doesn’t know that this is essentially what the IRS does? Do you know how many (liberal, wonderful, not the slightest bit rich or threatening) friends I have who run small businesses that the IRS has decided to audit, for no other reason than it’s far easier to scrape a few bucks from 10,000 little guys than it is to go after one heavily armored, tax-exempt megacorp? Lots, that’s how many.

Do you know who’s laughing hardest about the current IRS microscandal? Exxon. Apple. Microsoft. Monsanto. Genentech. All those giants of industry that escape billions in taxes by way of various loopholes, exemptions, armies of expensive tax attorneys. Carry on, rich people — go get richer. It’s OK, no one’s looking.

The worst part of this little IRS scandal? Nope, not that Obama is having another Worst Week Ever. It’s that the Tea Party is suddenly back in the national spotlight, all righteous and spittle-flecked, full of its usual inbred nonsense, when it was all but dead a week ago. Worse still: If the GOP has its way, we’ll be hearing the Tea Party’s nasally shriek through the 2016 elections. Thanks, IRS.

Obama and Benghazi? Obama and the IRS? Obama’s Justice Department going after the AP and secretly nabbing months’ worth of phone records of its reporters and editors in an “unprecedented overreach?” Jesus. Ugly all around. As Jon Stewart so perfectly put it, “Congratulations, President Obama — conspiracy theorists who generally can survive in anaerobic environments have just had an algae bloom dropped on their fũcking heads, thus removing the last arrow in your pro-governance quiver: Skepticism about your opponents.”


Judge Korman: Full of sass, hero of girls.
Judge Korman: Full of sass, hero of girls.

Not mentioned in this ungodly hellstorm of GOP-empowering gassiness? The lesser but still feisty tale of the federal judge who’s been unloading all sorts of awesome sass all over Obama’s FDA, Kathleen Sibelius in particular.

I speak of the sort of amazing Judge Edward Korman, of course, a 70-year-old Reagan appointee who’s been just falling just short of calling Sibelius a lying, two-faced dingleberry for her duplicitous and completely impossible-to-defend attempts to block the over-the-counter sale of Plan B to girls of all ages, which Korman recently ordered via a landmark decision.

Have you followed this delightful tale? It’s a personal favorite for a variety of reasons, one of which is, while I hate to add more ammo to those attacking the Obama administration right now, there simply are no right-wingers championing Plan B, or Korman’s position. He’s acting alone. He’s acting brilliantly. He’s empowering all young girls to get access to safe birth control. The GOP hates that.

What’s more, he’s speaking truth to power like you almost never hear at this level. The fact that the power in question is part of the Obama administration makes this story sort of backwards and bittersweet, to say the least. But what the hell; you take what you can get.

Which is why it’s safe to say, all is not lost on this odd and bleak news cycle. While it’s true Obama is having a terrible week (despite a surprisingly healthy economic outlook and a record-high Dow), we can always find the gems among the grime, the rainbow amidst the ugly political thunderstorm.


Minnesota wins, Bachmann loses. God smiles.
Minnesota wins, Bachmann loses. God smiles.

Look, there’s another one right now, beaming bright over Minnesota, which just became the 12th state in the union to approve gay marriage. Can you believe it? Is it not a thing?

Wait, you must look closer. For Minnesota is not just another state that defied expectations and changed direction sort of radically from just last November, when a referendum banning gay marriage forevermore almost made it into the state constitution.

Minnesota is, of course, also home to the Tea Party’s twitchiest nutball, its most flagrantly insane hood ornament, one Representative Michele Bachmann, a goofy homophobe of epic proportions who once dragged a squadron of conservative “prayer warriors” into senate chambers to ask God to help smite the evil gays.

And lo, it would appear God has finally responded to Michele Bachmann, and the nation’s right-wing homophobes in general. Can you see it? Why, it looks like a very large, very bright, very unmistakable… middle finger.


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« Reply #254 on: May 22, 2013, 10:07:58 pm »


Mark Morford

Is WiFi destroying your brain?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 3:40PM - Tuesday, May 21, 2013

IS YOUR face getting hot right now? Do you feel an itch or a burn around your eyes, your mouth, perhaps a tightening in your throat? Are you finding it difficult to breathe? Focus? Swallow?

Here, let me adjust the frequency. It is, after all, a new and experimental WiFi system we’re testing in your home, very powerful, located in that box near your very delicate skull.

How about now? Headache? Feeling dizzy? Heart racing? Difficult to stand or walk? Yes, the blinking light on the box means it’s working. Let’s turn the signal up, but place it slightly further away. Better? Worse?


EMFs! They are everywhere and nowhere! Just like Jesus!
EMFs! They are everywhere and nowhere! Just like Jesus!

Here is perhaps the far more important question: How much of what you’re feeling is really the result of the WiFi, and how much comes from your anticipation of the danger, your expectation that the device must be causing you harm, your absolute conviction that, because I’m telling you it’s so powerful and you’ve heard/read/been told of the mysterious dangers of EMFs and shadowy gizmo malevolence, it must be causing you ill?

In other words, how much is self-generated complaint and wishful victimization — resulting in a very real, nasty physical reaction — and how much is the actual consequence of the technology? Do you know? Can you separate?

Hint: Probably not. Not by a long shot.

It is nothing new, of course. Here is this chemical syrup that causes immediate nausea after swallowing. Here is this drug that has a nasty side effect of sexual dysfunction and dizziness. Here is the mysterious ingredient you have been told causes spontaneous encephalitis in lab rats. Here is a photograph of this bearded, dark-featured person from a foreign country who is standing near a strange flag.

Do you feel anything? Are you convinced? Are you feeling anger, confusion, sickness, dysfunction? Are you fearing, just a little, for your life?

OK, truth: This has all been a lie. An experiment. There is no WiFi signal in that box, there is no chemical in that syrup, there is no dangerous drug in that pill. That scary looking person is just a Photoshop hack, a random amalgam of 10 different faces from people sitting in that café across the street.

How do you feel now? Foolish? Justified? Are you still in pain? Of course you are. Because you sort of feel like you should be. Because you are convinced.

I am not making this up. Behold, yet another fascinating study, published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, where researchers tested nearly exactly what I describe above: A powerful new WiFi antenna, placed on subjects’ heads to see how well it worked and what, if any, ill effects might result.

Can you guess? How many subjects felt hot, dizzy, sickened, even so incapacitated by this strong and experimental WiFi they couldn’t even walk?

Answer: More than half. More than half.


This is your brain on iPad.
This is your brain on iPad.

The catch, of course, was there was no WiFi signal; the antenna was a fake. The participants were in no actual danger whatsoever, save for that generated by their own minds, their own expectations, their innate conditionings and fears.

Are you surprised by these results? Doubtful. The effects were startling, but not at all unusual. The power of the human animal to convince itself something must be very wrong, that we are weak, in danger, ever at the mercy of nefarious forces we do not understand, when we actually aren’t, has been around since the dawn of, well, advertising.

This effect has a name: it’s called the nocebo effect, the “evil twin” of the placebo effect, defined as “the power of our conviction to cause real physical illness.” (Caveat: The full details of this particular study are not freely available to the public; I’m extrapolating from the study’s abstract).

But of course, it takes little common sense and a glimpse at the totality of the human experiment (along with many other easily available studies) to see the overarching pattern, to understand the nocebo effect to be exceedingly true not merely for technology, but also for food, love, religion, health, fate and much of human life overall.

Conviction creates reality. Energy flows where attention goes. And some people just can’t take it, not one little bit. So they move far, far away.

Do not misconstrue. There are plentiful demons about which we should be genuinely alarmed. There are indeed hundreds of verifiable compounds, chemicals, additives, synthetics, preservatives and technologies that have been widely proven to make humans very sick and very dead and we have little doubt about most of them. The severity might be debatable, but the danger is real.

Also? It does not take much beyond practical wisdom — and spending even a little bit of time out in raw nature — to understand that surrounding our lives with a million wires, EMFs, radio signals, flashing diodes, chemicals, gasses, pixels and waves can cause averse health effects. We are an infinitely adaptable species, but our technology is far outpacing us. We are inventing devices and mechanisms every day the physical, mental, spiritual effects of which we still have little capacity to understand, much less assimilate at any depth.


Well, it sure looks dangerous, so it must be. Just like life!
Well, it sure looks dangerous,
so it must be. Just like life!


Yet and still. Is your cellphone really making your brain ache, or are you merely wishing yourself to be one of the special ones, hypersensitive and delicate and oh so abused by the world? Just how casually convinced are you of your everyday victim status? How much control over that status do believe you have? Your answer reveals, well, pretty much everything.

Let us expand a little. Let us widen the lens to suggest the nocebo effect is perhaps one of the most slippery and dangerous in all of humanity, our convictions about a thousand of life’s supposed daggers, which might also only be feathers, which also might just be nothing at all but nagging phantasms, hollow bogeymen, strange and yappy illusions containing zero actual truth.

Your parents ruined you. Your abusive upbringing has scarred you for life. Your brutal divorce raped your soul. You cannot drive a car because the dials give you a headache. Gluten will make your colon explode. You cannot go anywhere near a department store. You are powerless to stop smoking. The Smart Meter on your home gave you heart palpitations. You are a compulsive shopper because OMG the Internet. You are hypersensitive to perfume/toothpaste/house paint/parrots/water. Men are pigs/women are manipulative so to hell with love forever. You are violently allergic to anything containing the color blue. The world, to some degree, is a wildly dangerous and deadly place in ways you cannot not even know. Believe it? Then it’s true.

Unless it’s not. Unless the world is sort of benevolent and generous, or neutral and dispassionate, open to your suggestion, your co-creation on a moment to moment basis. Is it maybe both? Does it depend on how you choose to see it? How much?

You can keep going. You can suggest that even if something is proven dangerous, even if WiFi does cause harm and even if you are diagnosed with a disease, that the power of your conviction has a very real effect on just how debilitated you might be, how well you do or do not recover. Obviously. Sometimes.

There is no easy answer. But it is a question, a daily inquiry posed by spiritual practices all over the world: Is life really a miserable hellstorm of abuse and suffering, or is it merely the result of how you choose to view and respond to it? What’s really true and what’s a matter of conditioning, expectation, fear, ingrained weakness and self-imposed victimhood? Shall we do some more research, or is the WiFi giving you a headache?


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« Reply #255 on: May 29, 2013, 01:20:11 pm »


Mark Morford

My miracle can beat up your miracle

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 4:11PM - Tuesday, May 28, 2013

DO YOU recall the browser wars? Microsoft Explorer vs. Netscape and the cute absurdity of the earliest-known battle for Web supremacy, in the late ’90s? That’s OK. It’s worth forgetting.

How about the platform wars, Mac vs. PC? That one ended only recently, with everyone agreeing not to really give a damn anymore, given how Steve Jobs is dead and Bill Gates is now a kindly, gray-haired philanthropist and their respective companies are now both monoliths of such staggering international ginormity it’s no longer any fun to take sides.

How about the megapixel wars? That one’s mostly over, too. Did you notice? Probably not; digital photography has been completely adequate for most consumers since about megapixel number three, despite how Canon, Nikon, Panasonic et al kept racing well past 20, not to mention how all the most widely used camera apps, like Hipstamatic and Instagram, are designed specifically to look like they used barely a single megapixel, underwater, with a piece of dirty Kleenex over the lens. Ironic!


What Would Jesus Instagram?
What Would Jesus Instagram?

It ain’t over yet. Right now we’re smack in the midst of the smart phone wars, which consists of the iPhone versus, well, everyone else (mostly Samsung). While the iPhone is supposedly still “winning,” Samsung’s Galaxy is apparently moving up quick, thanks to the cheapness of the Android OS and also because oh my God blah blah blah who cares just shoot me now.

Meanwhile! The Bay Area recently gushed all over the massive, megageek frat party of dreadfully dressed white boys known as Google I/O, an enormous developer’s conference in which the Web’s most powerful overlord rolled out an awesome slew of upgrades, features and services that blew everyone’s mind — that is, if your mind consists of swipe-able interfaces, indefatigable widgets and a hundred nifty applications that send your BFF an exhaustively detailed map of where you like to go for sushi. Neat.

The media coverage of I/O was all kinds of feverish and silly, featuring countless wide-eyed headlines about Google stealing Apple’s limelight, or how Apple had better watch its back, or how Siri is now obsolete thanks to Google’s new voice commands, on and on, ad nauseam.

Apple will reply shortly. The programmer orgy that is Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) starts June 10, and tickets sold out in less than two minutes (“95 percent faster than Google I/O!”), despite costing at least $1600 each. This is because the WWDC is the senior prom of tech conferences, and the Black & White Ball, and the highest paid prostitute money can buy, all rolled into one. It’s where you go once you graduate from making dorky widgets for Google. Ooh, snap.

WWDC is where Apple inspires its army of devoted developers and reveals its own most dazzling upgrades and widgets, mostly centering on iOS, which increasingly runs the Apple universe. Are you ready? Can you sense the WWDC excitement? Yeah, I’m guessing not.

Here’s the thing: Somewhere in the midst of all those silly wars, epic battles and amazing OS revelations, somewhere between Steve Jobs quietly revealing the first iPod (in 2001 — see video clip below) and Sergey Brin wearing the dorkiest eyeglasses ever built, we quietly passed the point of everyday miracle.




Did you notice? The wow factor of what our consumer tech can do is now so routinely high, so commonplace, we look right past the fact we’re no longer heading toward a truly miraculous tech age; we’re already there.

Don’t just take it from me. Scan, if you dare, any of the geek forums, from Slashdot to Engadget, Technorati to MacRumors, and skim the discussions of Google I/O or WWDC. Behold the furious fights over inane, microscopic OS feature sets, app functionality, just how fast or slow, say, Google Earth renders a live-updating photo of our planet in real time (or whatever).


I don’t understand why no one will have sex with me or my Google Glass.
I don’t understand why no one will have sex with me or my Google Glass.

It’s sort of embarrassing. Battles absolutely rage among pale geeks, and even many consumers, over the most inane and miniscule application tics, hang-ups, lack of a certain phenomenal feature in this or that device. It would all be sweet and hilarious, if it wasn’t so frequently hateful and nasty.

It’s like two naïve snobs fighting over the saltiness of the caviar. It’s like arguing over the brand of jet fuel used in the Lear. It’s an embarrassment of riches, with both sides attacking each other over whose enormous pile of gold coins is slightly glitterier on a given day, from a given angle, if you’re wearing the right slouchy hoodie and never have sex.

Sweetheart, can’t you see? It’s a goddamn pile of gold coins. No one cares which one’s slightly better at drunk texting your ex-girlfriend via slurred voice command in the dark. Check that: far too many still care, and modern culture is the worse for it.

Small anecdote: Jaguar has a new sports car coming out, the F-Type, a ridiculously sexy two-seater that’s set to compete with the likes of the Porsche 911 and the Mercedes SLK55 AMG. It’s utterly gorgeous. It’s getting rave previews. It starts at about 70 grand, goes to 110.

In one of the reviews, amid the usual talk of horsepower and torque, awesome handling and sumptuous, leather–wrapped everything, came the definitive discussion point: Is this car better than the Porsche? Than the Audi TT-RS? Than the BMW Z4? Which one, oh rich and pampered CFO with four other cars and a third home in Italy, is the best?


That’s all you got? Infinite miracles on a gorgeous slice of magic glass?
That’s all you got? Infinite miracles on a gorgeous slice of magic glass?

The reviewer summed it up perfectly: The question is ludicrous. If you’re shopping in this category, there are no bad choices. There are no “wrong” $85,000 sports cars. You are in rarified space indeed and if you actually give a serious damn that the Jag is 0.7 seconds slower than the Porsche Cayman or that the Audi R8 can hit 100MPH three seconds faster, something is deeply wrong with you.

So it goes for the current state of everyday tech. We’re all driving ridiculous, luxury sports cars now. Even the most basic smart phones can now perform what would be seen as stupefying miracles just a handful of years ago. Any mobile web browser running on any platform can effortlessly reveal the universe. We all have access to everyday tech so advanced, it is indistinguishable from magic.

So smile, biped. Quit fighting about utter nonsense. It’s nearly impossible to make a “bad” choice in the upmarket, high-tech category anymore. You exist in rarefied, first-world air. You are surrounded by magic and wonder. It’s when we stop noticing that fact that the real trouble begins.


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« Reply #256 on: June 05, 2013, 03:25:20 pm »


Mark Morford

Again with the face-eating monsters

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 2:00PM - Tuesday, June 04, 2013

OH, NO. You guys. There is something under the ice. Alive. Malevolent. Bizarre. Enormously terrifying. It will soon hurl our entire cluster of space-traveling heroes into fits of insanity and violence and much panicked screaming. Oh, no.

How will our astronaut movie heroes possibly survive? And just what is the monster, exactly? What did this gritty new film’s creators come up with? Does it matter? Will you pay 15 bucks to find out and then be vaguely disappointed because you’ve seen 15,000 things just like it 15,000 times before? Oh heavens, yes, you almost certainly will.

By the way? The landscape in this upcoming movie — it does not matter what the title is, or who stars in it, or that it’s coming out soon, even though it is — is gorgeous. The cinematography is stunning. Many millions were obviously spent on the special effects because the realism is sort of effortlessly mind-blowing in that look-what-they-can-do-with-computer-graphics-these-days sort of way.

The plot is, as always, childishly simple: The usual humanistic buildup (news conferences, crew bonding, photos of the kids back home) is soon followed by Our Intrepid Crew landing majestically on Europa, the frozen fourth moon of Jupiter. The score swells. There is amazement, much cheering back home. It’s breathtaking out there, really.


What, this? This is easy. The opposite is what’s hard.
What, this? This is easy. The opposite is what’s hard.

Why is the crew there? The crew is there, naturally, to search for signs of life on this tiny speck of space dust, this cold and barren rock next to Jupiter. Because obviously.

Of course, being a sci-fi thriller, the life they seek is not easily visible. Alien life is never, say, living just over there in a little shack by that outcropping, waving hello. It is never friendly, intelligent, hanging around in plain sight, eager for some guests. “Hi! Thanks for coming so far! Did you bring wine?”

Is it not a thing? How aliens are never sociable and welcoming, excited for our arrival? Or even just ambivalent or too busy to care? Not ever, not even once in a thousand million sci-fi thrillers unless they’re mindless slapstick comedies or maybe ET — which was made, of course, for children, and has about a sophisticated an idea of intelligent alien life as Herbie the Love Bug has about transportation. Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why that is.

But never mind that now, because oh my God, there is life hiding on Jupiter’s ominous frozen moon, because the movie would not exist otherwise. Do you know where the life is? That’s right: It’s beneath all that ice. Time to drill.

Do you know what happens next? Are you more than six years old? Have you lived with American popular culture for more than a single week? Then you know exactly what happens next.

We live in an age of miracles and wonder. It is an age when we can conceive of the most gorgeous and radiant urban landscapes, art, gadgets, architecture, ecstatic designs, possible futures.

It is a time when, no matter how horribly we treat her, Mother Nature still insists on bombarding us with spectacular, otherworldly organisms, patterns, hyper-sophisticated evolutions. Have you see Blue Planet? The Secret Life of Plants? Hubble telescope composites? The goddamn night sky? Awe abounds, more than we can ever fully comprehend.

And yet? The only significant popular entertainment I can recall where the deep-sea/outer space/cave-dwelling creatures were not evil, soul-ripping face-melting colon-exploding fanged-toothed acid-dripping madness-inducing hateblobs whose sole purpose was to suck the flesh from humanity’s bones in the most gruesome way possible, the only film I can recall where the alien life was actually depicted as sort of wonderful, positive, radiant, even ethereal and delightfully mysterious, was an old, pre-Avatar James Cameron movie from 1989 called The Abyss. Close Encounters also came close. And maybe 1997’s Contact, a little. And that’s about it.


You again? Yawn.
You again? Yawn.

Do you know The Abyss? It’s a surprisingly well-crafted hunk of “gritty” sci-fi, with a rather surprising, contrarian twist: the monsters from the deep turn out to be no monsters at all, but rather these gentle, flowing, intricate, bioluminescent  things made of pulsing light and profound intelligence (credit Cameron’s passion for oceanographic science for the creature’s plausibility). These lovely beings then proceed to save Ed Harris’ grumpy character from certain death. And then, well, they just sort of swim away.

It’s true. The Abyss has perhaps the worst ending of any sci-fi pic I can recall (Harris’ character is saved by the creatures via what looks like a massive piece of Styrofoam. And then the movie just… ends). It’s as though even Cameron himself had no idea what to do with the staggering possibility he revealed. “You guys! Magical, hyper-intelligent beings of light are flourishing deep in the ocean, right now! And, um…” Roll credits.

To be fair, it’s not exactly easy. The normal clichés were not present. We did not kill the monsters. We did not vanquish the demons, or prove ourselves the most awesome species in the galaxy. The acid-drooling alien did not wrap a slimy tentacle to the spaceship as we lifted off, or impregnate one of the crew with its parasitic egg. We did not “cancel the apocalypse.” Right? BO-ring.

Here is the gist and the point, finally: When it comes to strangers and the alien unknown, we are masters of the vile and grotesque, but can’t do unspeakable magic or beauty. We can effortlessly create the ugliest and most bizarre, the most repulsive horrors imaginable, invent movies with images so disgusting you can’t even describe them in print. This is easy. Almost anyone can do it, and almost everyone does.

But if I say, “Please come up with a creature or a scenario of nearly indescribable beauty, an alien organism of such staggering luminescence, or power, or unusual character you almost can’t look at it without weeping, or catching your breath, or suddenly expanding your soul,” you will almost certainly fail.


Nature does it, endlessly. Why can’t we?
Nature does it, endlessly. Why can’t we?

Or if I say, “Imagine for me a monster that is no monster at all. Let us make a grand and mind-blowing film that features such beasts of wonder, people walk out weak in the knees and speechless. And no, it can’t be anime. It can’t be Miyazake. It can’t be goddamn Disney or cutesy, slapstick Pixar. It can’t be bogus religious fantasy. It can’t be New Age corny.”

Can you do it? Can anyone? Probably not. The available palette is far more limited, the antecedents and references too few and far between. We just don’t seem to have the creative bandwidth. It’s not in our cultural conditioning.

What does this mean? That we are, by nature, more violent and gruesome, more innately wired toward doom and horror than by untamed beauty and magic? Maybe. Or perhaps we just haven’t evolved as much as we think.

It’s funny, though. Despite easily imagining ourselves traveling to astonishing, faraway planets in gorgeous, distant galaxies on powerfully advanced spacecraft, all we can ever imagine when we arrive is abject terror and death. Maybe we haven’t actually arrived anywhere just yet.


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« Reply #257 on: June 12, 2013, 04:03:55 pm »


Mark Morford

Jesus loves your downward dog

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 4:00PM - Tuesday, June 11, 2013

LET'S JUST get this out of the way right off the bat, shall we?

Yoga is a religion. Oh, it most certainly is. Packed like Mary Magdalene’s cherry Lululemons with feral devotion and sweat-soaked passion, ageless wisdom and funny breathing sounds you make though your face, indicating rapture.

Like any reasonable religion, there are wild, multi-armed deities and smoky incense, sticky bodily contortions and profound prostrations, yelping lunges and powerful upside-downings, funky music and rhythmic incantations, laughter and solemnity in miscellaneous turns. Just like the Mormons.

And of course, it’s all frequently topped (or rather, bottomed) by deep contemplations where you sit for many minutes in total stillness, imagining complete re-absorption into the gaping maw of infinite, universal consciousness which smells strangely like sandalwood and pomegranate seeds and Shiva. Nice.

How do I know about yoga? I’ve seen it. Felt it. Live it. Hundreds, nay thousands of students passing through my classes over 14 years of teaching Vinyasa yoga in San Francisco, many of these students enjoying religious or near-religious experiences, spiritual transformations, upheavals, dark nights of the soul (though to be honest, most just come for fantastic exercise and exquisite stress relief), followed by giddy tastes of their own innate divinity that rocked their world and helped them leave their thankless husband or loveless job or Texas. Hey, it happens. A lot.

Yoga is a religion the way breathing is wine. Yoga is a religion the way air is music. Yoga is a religion in a way too few westerners are trained to understand, particularly the right-wing variety, particularly the right-wing pseudo-Christian lawyerly types of America, scowling and confused and ever-furious at the world. As you would expect.

Have you heard? About these odd folk from the National Center for Law and Policy — which, by its very name, you know must be a dreadful place to slump into every day — terribly unhappy people who spend their days hoping to “cure” awful gay people and put a stop to women who use birth control and enjoy sex and orgasms and premium boutique coffee? Presumably?


Shhh. Secret Hindu indoctrination ritual.
Shhh. Secret Hindu indoctrination ritual.

It would appear the NCLP is suing, on behalf of some very uptight SoCal parents, the Encinitas Union School District over a pilot program that teaches some playful yoga basics — stretching, breathing, a little calming meditation — to children a couple times a week. The horror.

Their claim? Yoga is rooted in the Hindu “religion”, and therefore serves as an indoctrination into that belief, much in the same way techno music and giant mimosas “indoctrinate” kids into homosexuality. The NCLP claims that rules separating church and state demand these children stop that happy, self-empowerment bull-crap right this minute, and get back to fearing an angry, all-American God, or no one gets dessert.

Is it not adorable? And a little bit sad? It is my guess that these fine, terrified people are not at all studied in matters of yoga or ancient philosophy. It’s my bet that most have never left their home state, much les studied the world’s great spiritual traditions at any length, much less delved into their own aching bloodstreams to seek any sort of subtle, throbbing understanding of mankind’s staggering myth-making abilities, his ageless need to invent religions and gods, the gorgeous, difficult, chthonic craving to connect with something larger than the self — which, in yoga, we like to call the Self. If they ever had, they might glimpse the absurdity of their claims.

But perhaps they suspect? Perhaps some part of their lonely souls sense that, if children learn to enjoy yoga, they might begin to embrace its timeless, dramatically simple message that tells them they are perfect and wholly divine already, and therefore need no God, or church, or shame? So it would appear.

To religious fundamentalists, this is yoga’s most dangerous, un-Christian, sacrilegious teaching of all: That you are not innately broken, or flawed, or sinful. That there really is no god to worship but the one already present in you, waiting to be expanded. That you are already the divine light you seek. Therefore, you need not attend any church, send cash to any gloomy priest, beat yourself into bloody redemption, or believe what your parents or politicians tell you about heaven or hell, sin or fear, guilt or shame or gay people or women or nature or time or foreigners or politics or sex. You need only wake up to your own innate divinity, every moment, every breath, every touch and taste and step, before it’s too late. See? No wonder they’re terrified.

But perhaps we should try to be a little clearer, tease out a few more meanings. Because, while yoga is like a religion insofar as it offers, at least for more dedicated, serious practitioners, proven, mystically structured access to total spiritual liberation, it also has almost absolutely nothing to do with how clenched Americans like the NCLP define, and are defined by, organized religion as we know it.

The yoga I know — Westernized and athleticized, branded and heavily marketed, but still deeply tinged by ancient Hindu philosophy — this yoga demands no specific theological doctrine. There is no harsh scriptural dogma. There is no heaven, no hell, no old, scowling, puppetmaster superdeity. Unlike the bloody tragedies of Christianity and Islam, et al, yoga teaches that there is no separation between the self and the divine, between you and God. It’s you. You’re both. You’re already “there.” Can you imagine?

It’s this idea of separation — this cruel, Puritanical thought you’re just a meek and broken animal stuck here on Earth while God is way up there, flawless and perfect and unhappy with your porn collection — where yoga philosophy differs most wildly, most beautifully, from the west, and it is this simple notion that perhaps terrifies people like the NCLP the most of all.

Behold, for example, Virginia’s ultra-conservative candidate for Lieutenant Governor, one E.W. Jackson, who believes that yoga and meditation aren’t just religious, they’re downright Satanic, insofar as meditation teaches you to “empty out” — which, to Jackson, is basically an invitation to let Satan slide right on in.


This guy got it. Tragically few of his followers do.
This guy got it.
Tragically few of his followers do.


Speak for yourself, nervous candidate. In meditation, you “empty out” so you can clear the toxic debris of frantic modern life. You “empty out” so you can better find, and live from, your heart, as opposed to your fears and your false convictions, your ego, your manic strivings for popularity or power. You “empty out,” in other words, to avoid becoming anything like E.W. Jackson.

But wait, here’s where it gets really juicy. Because most established yoga philosophies see every individual as wholly divine, as God in microcosm (all the Hindu gods and goddesses are merely tools, divine access points — you work with them heart to heart and eye to eye, like sacred mirrors), and because there is no stifling ecclesiastical hierarchy, yoga is actually no religion at all — even though it effortlessly contains all the rest. Isn’t that lovely?

So yoga is a religion, but it is no religion at all. Yoga is a divine reconnection and means to expand the soul via all sorts of powerful tools, techniques, icons, sutras, tantras, musings, offerings, chantings, stretchings, sweatings, classic moral precepts and healthy lifestyle adjustments, but without organized religion’s nasty knife drawer of shame and guilt, sin and fear, numbed-out heaven and childish threats of eternal, all-consuming hell.

Can you imagine teaching such a thing to children? “Indoctrinating” them into such a belief? Can you imagine how happy and balanced, powerful and calm, strong and spiritually self-defined they might become? What a terrible world that would be.


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« Reply #258 on: June 19, 2013, 03:49:27 pm »


Mark Morford

The sheer terror of sitting still

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 8:16PM - Tuesday, June 18, 2013

PAUSE and you get eaten. Introspection is for hippies. Ruthlessly forward is the only perspective, the only direction, the only proper attitude.

Self reflection and mindful presence? Calm and OM and inner stillness? Sounds adorable, but holy hell have you seen the pace of the world today? Who has the time? Who has the energy? Who has the patience?

And really, does meditation even work? All the hoopla, all the supposed health benefits, all the ancient Buddha wisdom, even modern science slowly coming around to the idea that clearing your mind and working the “attention muscle” is beneficial for reducing all sort of toxic things, like stress, anger, road rage, beating your kids, ultraconservatism, Paul Ryan.

But come on. There’s so much to do! Money to make. Empires to build. Spines to slouch and hoodies to wear and souls to crush. This is America. Work is all there is. Well, work, and the Internet. And porn. And global warming. And artisan cocktails. Eat or get eaten, sucker.

“If every 8-year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world in one generation.” — Dalai Lama.

Wait, what? Who let that guy in here? Doesn’t matter what he says; for most Americans, stillness is… how to put this honestly? Terrifying. Deep, even momentary quiet freaks people out. The hardest thing anyone can ever do in our culture is sit still for a moment. The demons! The memories! Voices! Kids! Video games! The guilt and the doubts and the FOMO, all hammering down on you like a cold rain made of fear and capitalism and shame. And it’s only been… 27 seconds. Meditation is hard.




We are addicted! White noise and activity filler and lists. Do you know how many apps there are for making To-Do lists, setting alarms, organizing schedules, keeping track of appointments and tasks and urgent needs? I don’t know, either; I’m far too busy writing this column to count them all. Do you know how many there are for meditation and relaxation? Five.

I’m kidding. There are probably more. I haven’t actually looked. Too busy, and it’s not on my list. But I do know they don’t stand a chance against the many hundreds designed to keep you busy or lovingly distract you (like mine) or help you get more stuff done, even though you can never get everything done, because as soon as you polish off your list for the day it’s hey, look! Five hundred more things to do tomorrow! And then you die.

I recently read a profile in Men’s Journal of Gordon Ramsey, rock star chef, empire builder, relentless curser, infamous hothead, wildly successful businessman, total madman. Ramsay has 27 restaurants all over the world. He has multiple hit TV shows (Hell’s Kitchen, Master Chef, etc). Books and columns and product lines and his own TV production company. Netted something like $38 million last year alone.

Not enough? Ramsay also races Ferraris. He regularly runs ultra-marathons. He is training for the Iron Man in Hawaii. He has four seemingly happy kids and a pretty wife and a giant house or ten. He is roughly my age.

This is, I hereby admit, staggering to me. Despite all my yoga training and my understanding of deeper meanings and personal paths, I can still get caught up. I still compare. I read about a rabid and cartoonish megasuperachiever like this and I find I cannot, do not relate in the slightest.

What sort of life is this? I cannot comprehend such output, the exhaustion and the staggering pace, the adrenaline addiction, the constant empty striving to prove something to someone (in Ramsay’s case, his late father, who was a complete monster, violent and abusive, an alcoholic, a total failure. All of which Ramsay has vowed never to be, no matter what and to the extreme).

Is that the answer? The reason? Because I lack Ramsay’s brutal motivational demons, his father’s hateful words stabbing at his subconscious at every turn, I therefore feel less compulsion to achieve a titanic amount of success I can never possibly appreciate anyway?


Enviable?
Enviable?

Maybe. Even so, I can get caught up. In the fantasy. In the spin. There is much desirable fluff for the ego to envy in Ramsay’s madman drive, much to wonder about and say, “Oh my God, I’m not doing nearly enough with my time. Not producing enough, creating enough, churning and manipulating and strive strive strive.” Hell, most days it’s all I can do to manage a single girlfriend, my yoga classes and workshops, a handful of writing projects, one apartment and a new iPhone app. Twenty-seven restaurants and five TV shows and four kids? What are you, high?

One telling note about Ramsay. He can’t slow down. Doesn’t know how. Fully admits that sitting still, contemplating anything at any depth or length terrifies him. An intimate awareness of the deep, messy bliss of existence? Authentic human connection? Not a chance. “I’m scared of standing still,” he says. “I shit myself. I need to move.” Gotta go. Gotta fight, conquer, own, achieve. And of course, it is never enough. The void is never filled, the hungry ghost is never sated, the itch never fully scratched.

And how can it be? If there’s one thing we know, it’s that true fulfillment never comes from financial or material success. Happiness and deep sense of connection have nothing to do with money or fame or material wealth, a truism constantly reinforced by deeper common sense (and the occasional ultra-inspiring true-life confession) but rarely trusted by the ego. Besides, say what you will about the spiritual vacuity of sex and drugs and cash and toys; they sure are damn fun to have along the way.

The thing is, the scientific studies, the articles I read about meditation (and yoga, and the “simple” life) in mainstream media, they get it sort of wrong. Most scientists and western docs talk about it as though it were akin to working out, exercising your “concentration muscle” or maybe “mindfulness training”, as though the whole point is to help you be calm and sit still longer so you can better work your ass off at a job you hate for people who don’t deserve it in a world that doesn’t give a crap anyway. You get to keep on with your miserable, flabby, hardscrabble life — you just won’t mind as much.

What meditation et al really bring, if you go into them, is ultimate arrival to a place where you realize all that striving and goal-setting and money and racing around is sort of ridiculous, and fruitless, and will kill you, and is not the slightest bit necessary, and sure you can play with those energies all you like, but if you don’t see it for what it all is — a dance, a grand illusion, a hollow and misleading truth, signifying nothing — you will die numb and pale and miserable and never know why. And what sort of enlightenment is that?


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« Reply #259 on: June 27, 2013, 12:21:58 pm »


Mark Morford

A fine week for total insanity

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 10:22AM - Wednesday, June 26, 2013

THEN COME those days where progress and humanity seem to lurch and stumble around like confused animals, where, if you have any sort of progressive inclination whatsoever, you are left feeling like you’ve been both kissed and mauled, flattered and mugged, bitch-slapped and proposed to, all while riding a burning roller coaster, on a Wednesday, drunk.

So it is that this generation’s nastiest, least compassionate Supreme Court, rigged like a poison grenade with the likes of Antonin Scalia, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, first slapped civil rights back a generation by invalidating a vital part of the Voting Rights Act this week, a hugely successful piece of legislation that protected minorities and the poor from getting screwed over at the polls by rich white southerners.

Not anymore. Those protections — which required states with a history of racial discrimination (hi, the entire South!) to get approval from the feds for any change in their voting systems — have been wiped out like the last intelligent lesbian feminist in Mississippi.

This much we know: Any racially charged decision from SCOTUS that is both endorsed by all the conservative judges and “cheered by the South” is very bad news indeed for the American experiment going forward.

Oh, and btw? The Supremes — namely Scalia and his crew — also just took away your right to remain silent. It’s ugly, and you should know. More shoddy interrogations and wrongful convictions, anyone?

Meanwhile, a stunning mini-saga unfolded in the Texas state legislature, where a sole and sort of awesome Democratic senator named Wendy Davis dared stand up, quite literally, to the lumpy, inbred club of Republican Good Ol’ Boys who have a stranglehold not only on the state, but on the rights and integrity of its women.


Senator Wendy Davis, insta-heroine, calmly defying the slings and arrows of outrageous Texas Repubs.
Senator Wendy Davis, insta-heroine, calmly defying the slings
and arrows of outrageous Texas Repubs.


In case you missed it, Senator Davis heroically filibustered, alone, for 13 straight hours without break or pause, all in an effort to (at least temporarily) kill one of the nastiest, most mean-spirited anti-abortion bills in America, one that would shut down nearly all abortion clinics in Texas and force all attuned, sexually aware Texas females to reconsider why the hell they live anywhere near these sweaty, cold-blooded bastards in the first place.

What, too harsh? Hardly. You have but to watch the evidence for yourself.

Wendy’s amazing feat played out live on social media — completely ignored by cable news — and in the final hour her efforts were mocked, stomped on, lied about and derided by her fellow Republicans in the chamber, all in front of nearly 200,000 pro-Wendy YouTube followers and a million more on Twitter, thus further galvanizing every intelligent female in America to never, ever have sex with a Republican ever again.

Was Wendy successful? She was (for now). Did the hateful bill pass? It did not (for now). Were the 24-hour news channels again caught flat-footed on the hottest/best story of the night? Absolutely. Is it once again re-verified that Texas Republicans are not only flagrantly misogynistic and antediluvian, but also sort of monstrous? You already know the answer.

Ah, but despite the disgusting antagonism of the GOP, there is good news to be had, even here. It lies in the huge, instant and sort of staggering outpouring of support for Davis — which included President Obama himself — all of which only underscores, once again, why the vast majority of American women voted for Obama in 2012, and will vote for Hillary, and will continue to vote Democratic in the future. So thanks, Texas GOP! Perversely!


California: now 57% less embarrassed by Proposition 8.
California: now 57% less embarrassed by Proposition 8.

And finally, wow and can you believe it: Gay marriage.

Messy! Lopsided! Awkward! But ultimately positive, yes? And sort of amazing? You think? Let’s go with that.

The good news: DOMA is dead, and Prop 8 was slapped aside, thus allowing gay marriage to resume in California — but alas, nowhere else, as the mealy-mouthed court completely sidestepped the larger issue of the overall unconstitutionality of state bans on gay marriage. Wimps.

Translation: California can finally join the gay marriage club, but the remaining 37 states must continue the fight, region by region and ignorance by ignorance, until enough old, conservative white males die off, love prevails and the tipping point is finally reached. Shall we say 2025? Sooner?

Already, Governor Jerry Brown, who is proving to be all kinds of calmly fantastic for California all over again, has directed CA county clerks to start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples ASAP. Florists statewide are giddy. Wedding planners are all asqueal. Of course, fundamentalists and ultraconservatives are freaking out, endless hellfire surely awaits, but what fun we shall have on the way down, no?

(And a special shout-out to Christian nutball Bryan Fischer, whoever you are, for whipping out the phrase “sodomy-based marriage” to describe how we’re all going to hell. That’s fantastic.  Does that make your marriage “vagina-based”? “Misery-based”?)

At last we arrive at the ultimate question: Do you feel any better? Are you (tentatively, awkwardly) celebrating any of this news? Or do you sort of feel like you’ve been mauled by a pack of friendly dogs in heat, like your wallet was just stolen while you were having sex in a dark room, like someone roofied your artisan whisky cocktail, but you don’t really mind?

I know just how you feel. So it goes with American politics, particularly when this coldly divided SCOTUS is involved: Always a little painful, always a little bit bloody, always with a razor blade or two in the apple pie.


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« Reply #260 on: July 03, 2013, 10:42:42 pm »


Mark Morford

Conservatives don’t dance

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 3:44PM - Tuesday, July 02, 2013

IS IT like this across conservative America, too? Are there any smart, shimmering towns full of hardcore Republicans that frequently erupt in spontaneous outpourings of joy and wild bliss after some major sociocultural upheaval lands in its favor?

Here is my guess: Probably not.

Hey, I might be wrong. Do you know if tens of thousands of ecstatic citizens overflow the wine bars and buy up all the champagne in Utah and South Carolina whenever America, say, brutally invades some developing nation for its oil, or builds a new razor-wire fence against them damnable Mexicans, or when some duplicitous cardinal from the Catholic Church works like a demon to shield millions of church dollars from sex abuse victims?

Do overjoyed conservatives rush out in their finest, glitteriest, most awesomely silly partywear whenever the Defense Department approves a new, billion-dollar weapon of mass destruction? Are there outrageous public celebrations all over Arkansas and Kentucky when basic background checks fail to pass an acidic, NRA-molested Congress?

What about spontaneous, screaming hugs and rampant tongue kisses in the street in Alabama and Mississippi when SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act, or when North Dakota passed the most hateful anti-choice laws in America, or when Kansas and Texas dumbed down their school textbooks to lobotomy/troglodyte levels?

Hey, there might’ve been; I admit I don’t live anywhere near America’s legendary sinkholes of regression and conservative panic. But I’ll just come right and suggest that there’s just no way ultraconservatives enjoy anything like the street-rattling, confetti-strewn, life-exploding celebrations of newfound liberation similar to what San Francisco — and nearly every other major educated, forward-thinking city and college town nationwide — enjoyed this past week.

There are truly few words to describe the elation, the outpouring of love and drunken, celebratory energy that resulted from the death of DOMA and the demise of the hateful, homophobic troll that was Proposition 8.

San Francisco’s City Hall turned into a rainbow. Pride parades nationwide exploded with woozy affection and freedom. The very pulse of the City quickened, the very temperament of the culture shifted toward the lighter, looser, more colorful and interesting and wickedly unruly. It is safe to conclude that this does not happen when conservatives win, well, anything at all. Not now, not ever, not like this.


I’m sure City Hall in Montgomery, Alabama looks almost identical to this one in San Francisco right now.
I’m sure City Hall in Montgomery, Alabama looks almost identical to this one in San Francisco right now.

Is it not sort of telling? Is this not one of the more surefire signs of progress and wobbly breakthrough in a given culture? Keep your bland 4th of July parades, your drunken tailgate parties, your blind jingoism, spoon-fed patriotism and your abject denial that America ranks right near the top in privacy-slamming, torture-endorsing and unchecked warmongering, and always will.

Give me instead this new kind of American pride we reveled in last week, one more colorful and unafraid, more messy and open-throated, a little less steeped in traditional American antagonism and opposition, fear and dogmatism, fanatical guns and exasperated God. Possible?

Look at it this way: When Prop 8 passed the first time, there were no parades, no scowling crowds of Mormons stripping off their strange underwear and waving banners of joy in the streets, celebrating this new and nasty constraint on love. Oh sure, maybe some relief flooded the nation’s terrified fundamentalist megachurches, a slap or three was heard in Bill O’ Reilly’s fetish dungeon, maybe a few thousands Fox News homophobes tweeted their gay porn to each other, but that’s about it.

But when DOMA and Proposition 8 died last week? Joy immeasurable. Joy unmistakable.

It happened when DADT was killed. It happened after Lawrence vs. Texas was decided. It happened after Roe vs. Wade, too, though with a decidedly different tang. It certainly happened when Obama won, both times, though the outpouring of relief and celebration in 2008 when he finally ended the Dark Days of Bush was nothing short of historic, meteoric, downright intergalactic.

Do not misunderstand. When Bush won a second term, the nation was flooded, too — with a wave of dark, leaden sadness. The Internet was jammed with countless thousands of dejected Americans, posting their apologies to the world. Similar energy is unleashed nearly every time there’s a major conservative victory of note: a shuddering pall is cast over most of country, indicating gloom. Women cringe. Babies recoil. Flowers wilt. Science groans. Immigrants and minorities sigh in imminent pain. Gun makers and oil companies rejoice. Yay conservatism!

Maybe that’s too simplistic. Maybe I’m reading in a little. After all, there are many ways to measure the unruly progress of the American experiment. There are polls and statistics, there are landmark legal decisions and the election (or rejection) of momentous public figures. There are prearranged celebrations and saccharine, carefully mapped parades, protests and rallies. We landed on the moon! We ended the war! Women can vote! The Bible is for paranoid, terrified children!


The Castro district, AKA “Bill O’Reilly’s wet dream”, could barely contain itself this week.
The Castro district, AKA “Bill O’Reilly’s wet dream”, could barely contain itself this week.

But to my mind, there are few more accurate indicators of constructive change than that wild, palpable buzz you find out in the streets after a major decision like Prop. 8; that intense, unmistakable lick and slap of upheaval that only comes when some hoary old roadblock has finally been blasted aside, when some rancid plug of conservative phlegm has been cleared from the collective throat. You know? Did you feel it, too?

I’m sure they didn’t feel it much in Texas. Or Alabama. Or Utah. Or Fox News. Or over in the dank dungeons of the Catholic Church, now even less relevant and compassionate, and even more hateful and antagonistic to all that is light and happy and free in the world, than ever before. Amazing, but true.

Nevertheless, the feeling has never been stronger: Something good has just transpired. An astonishing new crack has appeared in the ragged shell of America’s imperious fear, bright (and getting brighter) new light is finally pouring through – and best of all, the crack can never be sealed up again. Who wants champagne?


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« Reply #261 on: July 31, 2013, 01:42:54 pm »


Mark Morford

Attack of the gluten intolerant sex addicts

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 5:05PM - Tuesday, July 30, 2013

HOW MUCH do you think you know for sure? How many of your personal afflictions and torments, ailments and woes are indisputably real, I mean obviously, I mean there is no doubt I feel this way because, well, we are nothing if not in love with our own creations, all the conditions we quietly like to invent, and then claim we are powerless to control?

Are you gluten intolerant? Pretty sure? Feels sort of right? Are you a fresh recruit in the upstart army of bread-bashers and pasta-cringers right now animating a very excitable multibillion-dollar industry, even though it was a zero-dollar industry just a decade ago because, after all, it’s bread. Wheat. Next to water, dark chocolate and latex fetish porn, it’s sort of a staple. Just ask Jesus.

There is some interesting news. It is very likely you are not. Gluten intolerant, that is. Few people really are, few really have full-blown celiac disease. But it sure is interesting to notice how many want to believe they are, to note our mad, collective desire to locate and prove the existence of another new and famously delicious non-demon that’s been around since the dawn of dawn. Oh, how we want to belong!


Gluten hates puns.
Gluten hates puns.

More interesting still? The more you believe such an ailment exists in your body — and then have others agree and validate that experience — the more it most certainly will. Belief creates symptom. Amazing creatures we are, no? Like flawed angels? Confused and broken gods, hurling lightning bolts at ourselves?

Before you wince oversmuch, think about the WiFi you’re likely using right now, the EMFs swimming around your head. Are you sensing them? Do you absolutely feel the tingle and zoom of radioactive doom whenever a hot gizmo is nearby, shooting its invisible devil rays through your genitalia and turning your cerebral cortex into Jell-O to the point of headache and nausea, and how dare anyone tell you it’s not actually happening even though, well, studies show it’s not actually happening?

You are far from alone. The modern world, it seems, is increasingly too much with us. To large numbers of people, the world is a snake’s lair lion’s den hornet’s nest of imminent suffering, a million poisonous tentacles aching to attach themselves to your exposed soft tissue and leech away your money and your life force and your fetish porn collection. Bastards!

Unless it’s not. Unless the world is sort of cosmically neutral, an infinite palette of divine possibility, and we have forgotten just how powerful we are to shape it toward the healthy and the luminous, and how nefarious the media and the lure of groupthink, how susceptible we are to suggestion and the timeless need to belong. The hypersensitive tribe. The gluten intolerant tribe. The money-mad tribe. The EMF sensitive, the zero willpower, the can’t-quit-smoking, the keep-these-donuts-away-from-me, the everything-makes-me-sick.

And maybe it’s true. Hell, Big Pharma and Monsanto, Chevron and the Republican Party et al certainly do not, on any level, have your best interest, your health, or the health of your children at heart. No one anywhere doubts that these breeds of demons — chemical, religious, political — exist, and will spare no expense to keep you ill, so that you will continue to blindly buy, and believe, and never dare to question.

But which ones are they, exactly? Is it not interesting to ponder? The idea that we actually create many of our addictions, afflictions and ailments simply by believing in them so passionately, so religiously, almost as much, if not more, than they actually exist in the first place?

Perhaps this idea makes you a little angry. A little woozy and sad to think it’s all in your head, and you’re duping yourself sick, or fat, or pasta-less, or it’s-just-too-hard-to-quit. Perhaps you’re just low on vitamin E, maybe some selenium, and all you really need is a fistful of dietary supplements to counteract all the negative forces that suck vital elements from your bloodstream.


I want to believe.
I want to believe.

Bad news, patriot; turns out, as the Atlantic points out, that science is damn near unanimous in declaring that most vitamin supplements — also a largely unregulated, multibillion dollar industry — are almost completely useless, if not downright harmful, if not downright likely to increase your odds of getting cancer. Don’t tell the late Linus Pauling.

The list goes on. Remember the infamous MSG scare of yore? How that ubiquitous flavor additive in Asian food reportedly numbs your spine and causes spontaneous blindness in tiny Americans and giant pandas? Or something?

Guess what? Yep, total bullshit. Never really true. As Alan Levinovitz suggests over in his terrific Slate piece, odds are that if I fed you a giant bowl of MSG-laden fried rice and you ate the whole thing believing it was MSG-free, you’d feel dandy and fine. Repeatedly. Every day. Conversely, if I tell you it was packed with MSG and it really didn’t, you will complain of violent headaches and fall over in pain. Your religious-like belief caused very real symptoms. See? You really are a god.

What else you got? Cigarettes? Perfume sensitivity? ADHD? Facebook addiction? Fibromyalgia? Sex addiction? Conspiracy theories? Global warming denier? Can’t bear crowds, sunlight, salt? Are you sure? Of course you are. The more sure you are, the more you will seek selective validation of that certainty, the more real it is, and the more impossible it will become to believe otherwise. As a wildly ego-centric species ever disconnected from Source, this sort of self-duping is easy. It’s kind of what we do.


Muffin porn addicts, unite.
Muffin porn addicts, unite.

Look, I know how you feel. I do it, too. And it’s obnoxious to be told some of your ailments might be illusions, that you’ve made them up, that you’re in full control of their lifespan and many only exist because you really want them to exist, for whatever reason — attention, love, pity, medication, tribal association, a community of like-minded souls united by suffering, if not irony. Our victimhood gives us power! Our martyrdom gives us identity! We hereby sacrifice all hot, delicious sourdough baguettes toward the death of Monsanto!

Perhaps it’s just that simple? Just that obvious? The world, we are endlessly told, is in a constant state of violent meltdown, endless chaos. There is comfort in selective suffering, reassurance in collective disorder, and you get to opt-in wherever you see fit. Nice.

Hey, it feels good to be sure of something, no? A life raft in an angry ocean? To be able to pick and choose your own set of ailments and struggles, enemies and perceived threats? This is, perhaps, our last true freedom, a semblance of control in a world gone mad. It is somehow perversely reassuring to say, “This is what I am, suffer, endure, struggle with, am sickened (or conversely, am given joy and love and acceptance) by, and no one — not science, not evidence, not being tragically deprived forevermore of insanely gorgeous muffins with a soft-boiled egg inside — had better try and take that away.”

Really. But are you sure?


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« Reply #262 on: August 08, 2013, 01:33:33 pm »


Mark Morford

100 percent all natural lies

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 5:02PM - Tuesday, August 06, 2013

LITTLE THINGS, but important. Things you wish everyone knew, across all cultures and genders and IQ levels, for then the world would only be a better place, healthier, less overtly depressed, disillusioned, poisoned. You know?

Here is all natural. Or rather, “all natural”. Here is this completely empty phrase/marketing ploy that has been in use for decades and which adorns hundreds of food products from here to peanut butter marshmallow bacon-wrapped blueberry graham cracker deep-fried microwave pizza colon bombs.

Did you know the phrase “all natural”, or perhaps “natural ingredients” or even “natural flavorings”, as they apply to food items you thoughtfully purchase, place in your mouth and then swallow, believing them to be at least remotely near “organic” or “healthy” or, at the very least, “derived largely from nature”, meaning plants, meaning minimal processing and certainly no chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, or synthetics, did you know these common words are utterly meaningless, arbitrary, and nearly always a flagrant lie every time you see them on any product anywhere? It’s true.

Little things. Things you wish everyone knew, but shockingly few actually do.


Naturally flavored! By hateful trolls!
Naturally flavored! By hateful trolls!

Truth: The FDA gave up trying to define “natural” for US food products more than 20 years ago, and does almost nothing to prevent companies from using the word however they want. The USDA sort of half-heartedly tries to outline some basic guidelines, but never does much to make it stick.

In sum, no agency anywhere actually enforces anything related to the term, partly because it’s so vague, but more because food monoliths are every day trying like hellspawn to get away with far more hateful, egregious, cancer-causing atrocities in their myriad processed food globs than some little white lie on products that are at least occasionally better for you than Snapple or Monster or Kraft or any of the other 15,000 chemically blasted, cartoon-colored products and liquefied sandwich meats lining the shelves at your average Safeway.

The FDA, for its part, “discourages” food companies from using “natural” on labels, which is sort of cute, and which is a bit like “discouraging” a boa constrictor from being so cruel to those nice bunnies. Good luck with that.

The agency does urge that “for a product to be called natural, it must be free of artificial or synthetic ingredients or additives, including color, flavor or any ingredient ‘not normally expected’.” Of course, they don’t really do anything to enforce it, but at least it’s something. (By the way, “organic” isn’t much better in terms of meaning what you think it should mean, but at least there are enforceable guidelines in place).

Once in a great while, someone will complain (read: sue) loudly enough, and a given company is forced to sigh an evil sigh and remove the words “all natural” from a particular label, given how the product is actually derived from old motor oil, pulverized cardboard and the tears of tortured migrant workers. You know, more or less.

Just happened to poor PepsiCo, in fact, which recently had to change the labeling on its Naked fruit juice drinks and pay out a grumbly $9 million for lying about the “all natural” ingredients on a product line that, ironically, really once was 100 percent natural, but ever since Pepsi purchased the company and expanded the line exponentially, Naked juices have duly become injected with all sorts of assorted mass-manufacturing goodness, because that’s just what happens when you want to sell bottled fruit smoothies in convenience stores in every state, 365 days a year, to compete with your evil Coca-Cola/Odwalla archrival.


Naked, except for all the parts that aren’t.
Naked, except for all the parts that aren’t.

It’s always this curious dance, isn’t it? Where to direct your ire? Where to feel abused and slightly mauled by wayward corporations who care about your health and well being the way Russia cares about gays, or Texas cares about human intelligence?

How angry, exactly, should you be that every time you see “all natural” or “natural flavorings” on a product, it probably means the exact opposite of what you think it means, and hence they’re just sort of slapping you across the face like their bitch, albeit gently?

How incensed have you been in the past? Like when you learned that you can waste two or three or sometimes even six bucks on a bottle of glorified tap water from Aquafina or Dasani (among others), and never even realize that the EPA’s guidelines for tap water in most cities is actually more stringent than the FDA’s for bottled?

Truth: Most municipal tap water is usually cleaner and better for you than bottled, and is certainly no worse. And bottled water costs a staggering 300 times more than tap (which costs only pennies per gallon), whereas bottled water costs far more than what you pay, all things considered, for gasoline. Bottled water is one of the greatest food scams of this century. Have you been screwed so well and for so long, you no longer even realize it?

It looks like you have. The bottled water industry remains a booming, multibillion business, with no end in sight. The food monoliths already won, to the tune of $11.6 billion in sales last year alone. Your basic intelligence, common sense and wallet already lost. Someone oughtta sue.


Package design by Crayola, to appeal to the ignorant three-year-old in you.
Package design by Crayola, to appeal to the ignorant
three-year-old in you.


Maybe it’s not a big deal. Maybe these lies and misprisions seem small and relatively insignificant, even harmless, particularly when compared to larger and more ominous issues of the day like Syria, the NSA, terrorism, gun fetishism, the wild ignorance of the extreme right, or the existence of Florida. Maybe there are far uglier and more volatile things to worry about than the basic knowledge that 74% of what’s in the average American supermarket is crap.

Nevertheless, I am oft amazed and saddened when I hear from baffled readers after I post something about one of these truths, readers who simply cannot believe that, say, there is really no such thing as 1000 thread count sheets, or that smoking really isn’t all that difficult to quit, or that terrorists are generally morons, or that most of what ails your mind, heart and body can be cured by eating far less (and far better) meat, cutting way back on sugar and bread, eliminating processed foods, exercising, meditating regularly and tripling your intake of fresh water, maybe with a little lemon or bourbon because hey, it’s bourbon. It’s 100 percent natural.

But maybe these lies are just a little bit important? After all, the wise ones tell us the simple truths are the most profound. It’s why we seek out “all natural” or drink water in the first place, because they’re supposedly pure, unspoiled, free of politicized bulls–t and corporate lies.

And when we find out they’re not, that we’ve been lied to and casually insulted for years and even decades, well, something cracks, and bitterness and cynicism sneak in. And baby, those are the most dangerous poisons of all.


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« Reply #263 on: August 15, 2013, 12:16:36 pm »


Mark Morford

Who’s afraid of a little sodomy?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 2:18PM - Tuesday, August 13, 2013

THERE IS something a little sad, if not enormously disturbing, about people like Ken Cuccinelli, the intensely troubled AG of Virginia and one-man Tea Party sideshow who is currently running for governor and who, if he has his way, will hereby outlaw sodomy and oral sex. For everyone. Forevermore.

Something desperate. Something lost. Something demented and strange, like rolling around on broken glass, like slapping yourself in the face with a furious eel, like openly molesting a bunch of baby asparagus. That’s Ken for you.

Have you heard? Virginia’s deepest embarrassment is making national news, again, for out-Rick Santoruming the legend himself.

Yes, Ken Cuccinelli is apparently so disgusted by human sexuality that he is trying to circumvent the Supreme Court’s own 2003 sodomy ruling and reinstate Crimes Against Nature legislation that makes both oral and anal sex a Class 6 felony, so he may freely arrest anyone — married, single, gay or straight — who wishes to indulge in either of these ancient and time-honored, God-blessed, Greek-sanctioned sexual acts the likes of which, along with whisky, puppies, yoga, Black Sabbath reunions and ecstatic dendrology, help make life worth living.


Ken Cuccinelli — rejected much?
Ken Cuccinelli — rejected much?

For the record, Ken is notoriously daft and effortlessly caricatured. As the wonderful Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate points out, Cuccinelli has attacked respected climate researchers. He has questioned Obama’s citizenship. He has bashed women’s rights and shut down abortion clinics. Easy access to health care gives him a genital rash. With due props to John Ashcroft, Cuccinelli actually covered up the exposed breast of Virtus, the goddess of virtue, on the 234-year-old Virginia state seal, to great and derisive laughter.

In short, Ken Cuccinelli detests and fears pretty much everything you and I stand for, and we are hereby grateful he is lives so far from the Left Coast, and offer heartfelt sympathies to anyone left in Virginia with an active mind, heart or vagina.

Let us waste no more energy pointing up the absurdity of Ken’s agenda. Let us, instead, ponder widely to the heavens: What happened to him, growing up? How do people like Ken turn out this way? How does a single human accumulate so much shame and fear, to the point where they wish so much oppressive ill on the rest of the human race?

It is, or course, a timeless and not at all insignificant question. It goes beyond simply wondering just how many women, homosexuals, playground pals and household pets rejected Ken and his awkward sexual advances when he was younger. It’s beyond pondering just how terrible were his parents, or if he was addicted to huffing glue as a teen, or if his father whipped him with a belt for enjoying “The Little Mermaid” a little too… vigorously.

That all might or might not be true. I am not a trained psychologist. I do not have professional insights into the cracked Wiffle Ball that is the Tea Party soul.

One thing we know for sure: If there’s vigorous anti-sex crusading going on, you know there’s lots of oppressed desire humming just underneath. The rule holds ever true that the louder the wailing against a perceived sexual “indecency,” the more obvious the obsessive craving by those doing the wailing.

Perhaps Ken, a unique political creature virtually unknown to those of us in states with multiple top-notch universities, superlative wine, award-winning sex toy designers and easy access to international travel, just has difficulty with the concept of time.


“The Cuccinelli”. Now available at participating Virginia Walmarts.
The Cuccinelli”. Now available at participating
Virginia Walmarts.


Perhaps he is unaware that this is 2013, and not, say, 1580, when the Catholic church condemned non-vaginal sex of any kind, period. Even for married people, sex was prohibited “during pregnancy or menstruation, after a child birth, on Sunday, Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday, during each of the three Lents, feast days, quarterly ember days, or before communion.” So, you know, fun time to be a Catholic.

It is not 1895, the year Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy, and given the most severe sentence possible by enormously cruel humans on low moral and mental par with Cuccinelli: two years in savage English prisons, where Wilde suffered terribly and died shortly thereafter.

Nor are we still enjoying the reign of Pope Julius III (among many other fine, sodomy-loving popes throughout history), who fell so madly in love with an illiterate street urchin, the pope made him a cardinal, inspiring the epic love poem “In Praise of Sodomy”. Incest, wanton massacres, rampant pedophilia, whoring, poisoning and perversions galore? That’s the church for you. That’s organized religion for you. Ah, simpler times. Ken would have enjoyed them.

This much is true: For as long as humans have had sex, there have been those who’ve been violently disturbed by it. Ever since the concepts of shame and sin were invented by the church to control the masses, a variety of sad, desperate humans have tried to crush, regulate, demean, spit upon and destroy sex. It’s just that kind of energy. It contains just that kind of power. If you don’t know what you’re doing with it, it can make you more than a little crazy.

Ah, but as we all know, there is something special about sodomy, something rich, forbidden and wonderfully disorienting. It’s not enough to point out how this fine, universal act has been enjoyed, to varying degrees of permissiveness or barbaric penalty, by all cultures worldwide, for thousands of years. It is insufficient to say that it’s everywhere in nature, that we now know that nearly all animal species engage in occasional homosexual sex, for a variety of reasons. Either God is the worst sinner of all, or his followers haven’t a clue about their own creation. Your choice.


Thanks for the sodomy.

Fact is, no matter the evidence, the pleasure, the history, Mother Nature’s design or the progress made on gay rights so far, there will always be people like Cuccinelli. So long as there is sexuality of any kink or perversion level, there will be panicky armies of closed-minded zealots who don’t know how to enjoy it, and therefore viciously resent those of us who do.

We must also remember that America remains a broken and uneven sidewalk. There are still 13 states with anti-sodomy laws on the books, despite the unconstitutionality, and it will take another 10 years, minimum, before these backwater hateswamps catch up to the basic human rights enjoyed by the rest of us, and another decade on top of that before they come anywhere near what, say, California already enjoys in terms of sexual education and fearless, albeit imperfect, play.

By then, Ken Cuccinelli and the rickety clown car that is the Tea Party will be long gone. Will new versions step up to take their place? Will wanton human sexuality still be under ridiculous duress? Does a pope sin in the woods?


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« Reply #264 on: January 11, 2014, 02:48:40 pm »


Mark Morford

Everything worthy of your time

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, October 29, 2013

WAIT, is the brutal budget impasse/government shutdown thing already over, and I didn’t even get a chance to join in the collective mockery of the one-person clown car that is Ted Cruz?

Nor did I get to point up the gargantuan absurdity of Texas, and its ever-impressive dependence on ignorance and isolationism, on being home to the largest misled, undereducated right-wing Tea Party underclass in America, to a degree that they would shut down the entire world just to try and prove it’s still flat?

Did I miss my chance to then turn around an celebrate the general awesomeness that is someone like, say, Wendy Davis, and her who-cares-if-it’s-probably-doomed gubernatorial campaign, which I would then perhaps follow with a nice digression on the wild and also wondrous ironies of life, and places like Texas, how you don’t always know what you think you know, and isn’t that just the greatest thing ever?

I might have missed writing about that one. What about the NSA? Snowden? Ongoing and appalling revelations of high-level spying on us, by us, on our enemies and allies too, and also, most likely, on your mother and your Facebook and your personal cellphone calls to Chancellor Merkel, because it now turns out the U.S. government, far from the greatest fire-breathing, flag-waving, freewheelin’ first-world democracy that’s ever been, has now fully revealed itself to be, in the post-9/11 era, a panicky, shadowy, whiny little Dick Cheney fever dream, a colicky demon baby with an overused Amex Platinum, a devious thug with too much free time and too little backbone to be honest with itself — ergo its asinine willingness to spend billions of your tax dollars to build vast, menacing machineries of milquetoast paranoia that make China’s totalitarianism look like a finger puppet at a production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.


WORTHY
WORTHY (click on the image)

Is the NSA story still fresh enough to poke and prod? Still worth your time and attention? I’m not so sure. It’s certainly relentlessly depressing, dour and deflating. New revelations keep arriving, it’s true, keep embarrassing the president, keep crushing the tired old myth that America is this rugged, individualistic Marlboro Man of feral freedom; that numb lie has been swapped with what appears to be a lost — and very unfunny — outtake of Breaking Bad.

But oh, how these heavy-breathing stories whip by at a furious pace, don’t they? Like racehorses on meth? Like angry stormclouds made of flawed history and broken glass? Like false cowboy fantasias told by a thousand bobble-headed pundits, signifying nothing?

Obamacare website glitchy! Brutal Texas anti-abortion laws declared unconstitutional, mostly! Jonas Brothers break up! Miley can’t keep her tongue in her mouth! Apple sells record number of iPhones; shares fall! What’s a wary and exhausted populace to do? How much can you possibly care?

I am often asked, when these kinds of oddly empty stormclouds race by, if I am going to write about this or that atrocity, misprision, scandal, the latest GOP/Tea Party dingbat to dumb down the national debate and embarrass us, again, on the international stage.

Maybe. Sometimes. Depends. I’m always a bit humbled by the question, sometimes slightly embarrassed that a given headline-heavy megastory has zero hold on my attention, has no real earthly charge, no soul, no connection to what I feel are the larger and more potent themes of humanity and love, reverence and time. They just sort of lie there, limp and grunting, giant lumps of molten pathos, burping up gas.

Maybe it’s 15 years of column-writing experience in a salacious embrace with an equal number of years teaching and studying yoga, a singularly odd (but, to me, quite wonderful) combination that results in a strangely lucid filter, a reflexive ability to suss out which media bombshells vibrate at a high enough pitch to expand and touch Real Meaning, and which are just low and mean and a little bit cruel, fetid pigs jostling for position at the trough. Sure, they all have place on the continuum, but some at least try to understand the hieroglyphs of God.

It all comes to mind as I’m poking at a second surreptitious collection of columns, a madhouse follow-up to 2010’s fine-selling The Daring Spectacle, in which I’ll gather my best and most of well-loved — or at least, well-agitated — columns from the past four years and hurl them at the wall of digital publishing to see what sticks, to see if you’ll download it for less than the cost of a triple latte and a pack of condoms.


UNWORTHY
UNWORTHY

It’s a fascinating practice, really, noticing which pieces I remember writing with a sort of galvanizing passion, and which barely trigger a single memorable blip, so vacuous is some of the media effluvia that occurred at the time, so instantly forgettable some of the historical moments the columns try to inhabit. It’s the nature of journalism and cultural criticism, to be sure, but still; it sure is freaky.

But it’s not just me. If you’re at all awake and engaged with the world, it’s a filter we all develop, some more than others, some choosing to filter out everything, to lump it all together in a big ball of excruciating fatalism to be rejected and ignored, lest you be crushed under the weight of all that suffering.

Others choose the opposite, to take it all on, to shudder and rage against everything at once, to see it all as a giant fireball of conspiracy and spying, lying and corruption, all designed to enslave us and chain us to the vile machinery of capitalism. They’re not far wrong. Maybe. Sometimes. Depends.

Most, of course, fall somewhere in between, picking and choosing the stories that ignite, that light us up, that spark indignation or inspire love and hope and a wisp of something greater than mundane everyday cube-farm BS. Worth honing that skill? Hell yes. What else you gonna do, nap?

When it comes to media, sadly, most stories must be allowed to pass right through, lest they poison us with their clumsy hatred of deeper intelligence and warmer spirit. Some, however, have that magical ability to connect at some sacred level to what it means to be alive.

The practice is never complete, the process never ends. Which, in yoga philosophy, is exactly as it should be. But of course, if you read this column, you already sensed that. Perhaps someone should tell Senator Cruz.


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« Reply #265 on: January 11, 2014, 02:48:51 pm »


Mark Morford

40 billion ways to dance

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, November 12, 2013

EVERY DAY it’s the same: At any given moment, someone, somewhere is discovering something either quiet or grand, miniscule or momentous, that changes the way we think, the way we hold space, the way we perceive the mind, the world, the galaxy and even reality itself, to the point where we will likely never be the same again.

Even better? This stunning flow of ideas and discoveries, debunkings and feral potentialities is not the slightest bit linear. It is, instead, as the mystics and gurus have known for millennia, a leaping, looping, lurching thing, jumping up and spitting divine fire before folding back on itself, only to ignite anew and singe the eyebrows of your jaded and wary soul.

Do you recognize it? It’s nothing short of the cosmic dance itself, the ceaseless winking of Shiva’s third eye, a trickster angel with Tourette’s and a flamethrower.

Behold, the Kepler spacecraft. Its foremost (and now defunct, as it sadly broke down late last year) duty: rabid and fast-panting calculations of the stars in our tiny galaxy, in the hopes of calculating just how many might have stable, rocky planets swirling around them that might be similar to, well, Earth.


You are here.
You are here.

Kepler’s initial conclusion, when combined with what astronomers have already discovered? Somewhere around 4,500 planets, with one in particular — the recently discovered Kepler 78b — having the same density and orbit speed (but alas, not the same temperature) as our own pale blue speck.

It’s a stunning finding, which floored astronomers and ignited all sorts of glorious debate about What It All Might Mean. A hot little gem of a planet right here in our very own galaxy, one that meets most of the Drake equation, the formula used to calculate potential Earthiness? Plus thousands more like it somewhere out there in deep space? Fantastic. Awesome. More than enough to set curious souls newly aflame.

But of course, that was just the beginning. Along comes a hard-workin’ Berkeley grad student by the name of Erik Petigura to really crunch Kepler’s numbers, and write a paper exclaiming how that 4500 number is, well, probably more than a few zeros short.

That’s right: the actual number of potential Earths is closer to 40 billion — that’s one in every five stars, just in our galaxy alone — with that number possibly much higher (Kepler is reportedly very sorry it conked out too soon to tell us more).

Holy WTF, humble biped. That will do nicely, no? This is quite sufficient to rip the bodice off our naive understanding and completely ravish our sense of awe, especially when you consider that one of those 40 billion stars might actually be close enough — just 12 light years away — to see with the naked eye, from wherever you are, in whatever outfit you’re wearing right now, in whatever scientific posture you prefer to take.

Go ahead, try it. Step outside tonight and glance skyward, pick any star and then visualize its own rocky, Earthy little ball orbiting around it, with some form of life potentially dancing a tango on top. Go ahead and multiply that awesome possibility by 40 billion, and then multiply that number exponentially, into the other billions of galaxies beyond our humble Milky Way. Feel free to pour copious amounts of wine as you do this – it’s going to be a dizzy ride.

Did it work? Did you quickly fall over in a sloppy, giggling heap as your ferociously limited mind shut off somewhere around a million and change, simply could not compute all that vast possibility, leaving you to swoon to the core at the grand, cosmic absurdity of this life, at the idea that we think we have a clue as to how it all works, and why it’s all there, and what sort of grumpy, homophobic grandfather figure snapped his arthritic fingers and set it all in motion?

What a grand slap upside the head! How wonderful to be a part of this constant and ongoing explosion of our supposed reality, the eternal flux and burp of divine wisdom, consciousness refusing to hold still even for a second because it simply cannot, and never will! Who wants wine?

Do not misunderstand. It’s all sorts of fun to think the odds are now overwhelming that one (or even one billion) of those planets is almost certainly home to some form of life, that some of that life is almost certainly intelligent and we might someday have sufficient technology to attempt to visit one of those planets and shake tentacles with some aliens. After all, it’s the height of human hubris to believe we’re the best the cosmos can do in terms of sex-obsessed monkeys with too many guns and not enough compassion.

But let’s go a little wider. Further in. Right to the heart of our understanding that the minute we think we know something, the minute we have the nerve to declare a truism about life, the galaxy, love or time is the minute the goddess laughs and sheds another veil.

Maybe you feel it, too? Maybe you apply this lesson to your own life, every day, in how you move and breathe and offer forth?


Think you know how it’s all supposed to look, feel, move and dance? How adorable you are.
Think you know how it’s all supposed to look, feel, move and dance? How adorable you are.

Put it this way: Every certainty contains the need for its own demise. Every human conviction is but an impudent taunt to the gods, a petulant child claiming he is king of the swing-set, ignoring that “king” is a worthless construct and swing-sets were invented by dark matter five trillion years ago.

Which is to say, it’s just another divine opportunity for radical release, to realize “facts” are but playthings, guidelines, pointers, designed to be blown open and re-digested, over and over, never to be held for long lest they turn toxic and lethal. Isn’t that right, Catholic church?

As it is with the universe, so it is with you, me, us. Think you got it down? Think you know who you are, who I am, what you’re all about, and your spouse and family too? Got all the facts you need, politics, pet peeves, sports team, narrow ideology, religious tremors, a fine set of stiff little convictions about what kind of person you are and always will be? Good for you. I got 40 billion reasons to call bullshit.

Truth is, there’s really only one appropriate response to Petigura’s findings, and all findings like it, from Galileo to the Higgs Boson, from the dawn of consciousness to the most luminous moments of deep meditation.

It comes from one Geoffrey Marcy, the (understandably) excited, planet-hunting UC Berkeley astronomer who oversaw Petigura’s research, and helped write the paper. And it is, when all is said and done, the only honest response you can ever really have when face to face with the Great Mystery.

“I’m feeling a little tingly,” he said.


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« Reply #266 on: January 11, 2014, 02:49:03 pm »


Mark Morford

10 awesomely easy resolutions for 2014

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, December 31, 2013

YOU WANT to exercise more, eat better, read more books? Wonderful. Have at it. Me, I’m going a little esoteric, a little vibrational this fine year of our imminent apocalypse. It just seems appropriate. Starting with:

1. Thinner membranes

You think you have a pretty good idea? You think you sort of “get” this world, with all its “facts” and “emotions” and “Large Hadron Colliders testing supersymmetric theories of kinetic particle interrelationships”? The great gurus throughout history would like a word with you. And that word is, ahem, “bullshit”.

This much we do know: The veil separating our “real” world from the parallel realms, from other potential dimensions and rarefied fields of energy, is as thin as Kleenex made out of the drunken hiccups of an embarrassed flea. But the thinnest membrane of all? It’s the one separating our collective hubris – source of all our inane wars, rabid gun fetishism and ludicrous claims on God — from the fact that it’s all a trick of light, a cosmic eyeblink, and all it takes to traverse this membrane is an honest urge to wake the hell up. You ready?


You think you know, but you have no idea.
You think you know, but you have no idea.

2. Profounder bows

Once you understand the above, once you realize, somewhere deep in your bones, that the human spirit is not, as some tragically delimited neuroscientists would have you believe, just a dumb clump of gray matter spitting out rote, pre-programmed blurps, but is, rather, a fluxive pulse, a sweltering, delirious inhale and exhale of divine consciousness swooning in a permanent orgasm loop, all you can do is fall to your knees and kiss the ground about, oh, 108 times. And then take off your pants. And then keep dancing.

[size=15]3. Wiser discernments[/size]

Fascinating, brutal and more than a little lopsided piece over at Slate right now, detailing a bit of the horror that is the Mexican cocaine trade, and how so many are suffering so brutally for the silly indulgences of the American overclass.

Angry and emotionally ham-fisted, the author claims that if you ever buy cocaine, you are fully complicit in the gruesome murders of countless thousands of Mexican fisherman, police and innocents, as if it’s all that simple, as if, say, American tax dollars don’t cause far worse carnage by funding the failed War on Drugs, along with all our other vicious wars, not to mention the NSA, the drone program, CIA assassinations and Mitch McConnell’s Viagra prescription.

Do our choices as consumers matter? Absolutely. Is it worthwhile to expose all demons at play in the fields of our wanton desires and rank/blame them accordingly, before claiming that American partiers are responsible for beheaded fisherman? Maybe.


4. Juicier gasping

Has the much-discussed “pornification” of youth culture – from too-easy access to nauseating ultra-raunch on the Web, to sexting, “revenge porn” and even hookup-happy Tindr — has it all ruined the younger generations for truly skillful, soulful sexual interplay?

Put another way: Are college kids far worse at sex and even basic F2F communication than a gang of sea otters and pink flamingos thrown together in a room, blindfolded? Possibly. Can you alleviate this potential and tragic truism by knocking it off with the whining about sex and instead learning your body and the body of your lovers like Galileo learned about the moon? One guess.


Sort of a smirk, really.
Sort of a smirk, really.

5. Lighter rending

There’s a gorgeous little theory bouncing around ScienceTown right now that suggests the entire universe might very well be nothing but a complex hologram, a grand projection onto a single plane of reality (among multitudes), all fashioned by the enthusiastic pulsations of vibrating, nine-dimensional strings. Possible? It’s already been partially (and gumpily) debunked, but not before everyone who read about it experienced that deep shudder of recognition, a jolt of wonder borne of the knowledge that we are only beginning to understand the depths of what we don’t understand. PS: Shiva says “hi”.

6. Serener swipings

I see you there, frantically attacking that poor smartphone, anxiously swiping this way and that as if the Truth was in there somewhere, as if the very next Instagram/tweet/text will surely contain the Ultimate Baby Picture or the World’s Funniest Kitten or the Most Awesomest Status Update Ever, and then boom! All your anxiety will evaporate, your skin will clear up and everything will suddenly make all sorts of obvious sense.

Too bad the exact opposite is true; the more frantically you swipe, the more desperately you expect to find some sort of answer from any source that’s not the Self, the further from the Truth you get. Isn’t that always the way?


7. Slipperier inclinations

Fear continues to rule our world, alas and woe and same as it ever was. The conservative mindset in particular likes to tie its anti-everything fatalism to all kinds of willful ignorance, resulting in the weird belief that the slightest delighted dalliance in kink, vice, “perverted” sex or “alternative” relationship will only lead to the complete unraveling of society, to incest, bestiality and wanting to marry your dead grandmother.

Rarely do fundamentalists seem to realize that the “slippery slope” argument works even more beautifully the other way around: kindness breeds kindness, tolerance opens out to wonder, forgiveness leads to increased softening of the icepick heart. Ultimately, releasing your paranoid grip on how you think it’s all supposed to look, feel and taste might, just might, slide you right into the arms of easeful, open-minded joy. You think? Hey, it worked for Jesus.


8. Humbler astonishment

At the time of this writing, one of the greatest drivers in auto-racing history, a seven-time Formula One champion and winner of countless “lesser” death-defying contests, Michael Schumacher, lies in a medical-induced coma in France after suffering a traumatic head injury… from a ski accident. And he was wearing a helmet.

The morbid, almost shocking irony of the event is surreal enough to bend the mind and warp your sense of reality. How do you possibly process such bizarre occurrences? What is your bumper sticker takeaway? “You just never know”? “Carpe Diem”? I’m not sure there is such a simplistic lesson, except to say that it doesn’t matter the year, the name of the president, the state of the economy or what you think about death: the only real response to life is endless wonder, mixed with awe, shot through with gasping reverence.


Don’t be scared, honey. It’s just life.
Don’t be scared, honey. It’s just life.

9. Nimbler distinctions

Did you read that belief in evolution — perhaps the most obvious, verified, common sensical hunk of science in human history next to gravity, relativity and the general awesomeness of Jennifer Lawrence — has actually plummeted among Republicans, from 54 percent in 2009 to just 43 percent today?

Which is to say, more conservatives than ever are in bizarre denial of the most basic functions of nature and their own bodies, preferring to believe some bitter grandfather figure fashioned us out of cosmic Play-Doh after losing a bar bet with the Devil. Why do you think this is? Is it a sad desperation to assign the meaning of our existence to something greater and more unknowable than ourselves, so we don’t have to take responsibility or look too closely in the mirror? Is it the deeper fear that, if some people actually try to sit still and delve into that divine Self — you know, as Jesus instructed — all they’ll find is echoes and ghosts?


10. Broader conundrums

In the time it takes you to finish this sentence, 17 people will be born and eight will die. In the world. Somewhere. According to the Census, which wouldn’t lie about such things.

In related news, it appears there might very well be tens of billions of potentially habitable planets right here in our humble galaxy, with hundreds of billions more beyond, to the point that you can do nothing but gasp, and laugh, and shake your head, and feel at once both infinitesimally small and yet wildly interconnected to some grand energetic deluge of birth, life, death and rebirth, ever swirling and moving, leaping and cavorting like a giant pod of spinner dolphins acting out the Rapture.

Wait, you still think you’re way over here and those billions of planets are way out there? You still think you’re a million miles from understanding, much less being, God? You still believe in separation, the greatest lie of all? You didn’t read No.1 closely enough.


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« Reply #267 on: January 11, 2014, 02:49:14 pm »


Mark Morford

Five companies to fear, fondly

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, December 07, 2014

WHAT, you were expecting Viacom? You were expecting Time Warner, AT&T, Disney, maybe even Walmart or the twitchy knuckle-draggers of the Tea Party or Fox News? You were thinking the CIA? Wall Street? How cute you are. And how very 2003.

Those mediocre players are, right now, just a sideshow. I’m reading a rather brilliant annual exchange, a “State of the World 2014” chat between the always illuminating sci-fi author, journalist and all-around vivid intellect Bruce Sterling, who’s been tracking the tech zeitgeist since long before San Francisco’s current army of pale tech bros were knee high to a first-gen iPod, and Jon Lebkowsky, a “social polymath,” futurist and activist, over at famed chat spot The Well, which BTW I’m delighted to report still exists and which, for those who don’t know, is the original uber-forum for smart, adult conversation, well before anonymous commenting destroyed civilized discussion, before texting and tweeting ruined the English language, before BuzzFeed gutted deep thinking and made media for stoned 5-year-olds.

(Roundabout side note: the original founder/visionary of this very SFGate website, one wonderful guy named John Coate — who has long since moved on — was also a co-founder of The Well. Neat.)


Don’t be evil. Just be creepy and duplicitous and buy military robots for the hell of it.
Don’t be evil. Just be creepy and duplicitous and buy military robots for the hell of it.

Sterling and Lebkowsky, they chat and they dissect and I find myself nodding and sighing in equal parts, delighted at the astute observations (Sterling’s apt summation: “An extraordinary atmosphere of sullen, baffled evil, as the year opens”) but also realizing how deep is the craving for, and how notable the lack of, such intelligent discussion elsewhere in various tech forums.

All we get now is snarling hipster beatdowns at ValleyWag, 10-minute gee-whiz shotgun blasts at TEDx, or clumps of poorly dressed 24-year-old Stanford business drones blathering about “product” and how their new app caters perfectly to the whims of spastic 14-year-old girls (hi, SnapChat!).

Bruce and Jon point it all out, and it’s sort of stunning to contemplate. Notably: Here are Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Here are your top five gleaming, overweight leviathans of industry. With the notable exception of hoary old Microsoft, all of them were once scrappy, radical, almost cool, ”don’t be evil” underdogs and outlaws, breaking with bland tradition and blazing new trails in personal tech, books, music, community, you name it. And oh, how we loved them so.

And now? Have you noticed? It is no longer the same. It is 2014. Capitalism and really big money have colluded in all these companies — and the Internet itself — to induce a sea change so rapid it’s less of a sea and more of a tsunami wrapped in Wikileaks disguised as Candy Crush Saga. The fact that no one could have really predicted it doesn’t matter in the least.

Google has become utterly terrifying. Google is officially so gargantuan, so powerful, so omnipresent as to be downright surreal, buying military robots, mapping more of the universe than anyone really wanted, hiring armies of lopsided, socially inept brainiacs straight out of geek school and coddling them around San Francisco in private luxury buses, building God knows what in various candy-colored “secret labs” and trying to convince everyone that ridiculous glasses that record your every move and play Robin Thicke videos in the corner of your eye while you work are the “future” and really do “look good” and won’t prevent you from ever “getting laid” or “being thought of as a completely silly, obnoxious ass.”

One thing is evident: Sergey and Larry do not know what to do with all their money. When you do not know what to do with all your money, the money will figure out what to do with you. Google’s money is like high fructose corn syrup: It has found its way into everything, and is slowly poisoning all of it.


In Apple, no one can hear you sigh dejectedly.
In Apple, no one can hear you sigh dejectedly.

Apple! Oh, my beloved Apple, still so sleek and gorgeous, hiding a giant, guilty secret that the Jobs-era magic and industry-upending innovation has been quietly replaced with a cool, militant, soulless control, a perfectly sealed spaceship from which no light escapes. The Apple Way is still beautiful, intuitive, perfectly engineered, even miraculous. But so is a switchblade.

Let us skip right by Microsoft. No one has ever loved Microsoft, or even liked them. We just tolerate. Microsoft still exists because it hard-coded itself into modern life like a birth defect; it refuses to uninstall from ten billion work computers until 2025, when every buggy old Windows machine is finally replaced with an iPad running iOS 12. Meantime, it gasps along, raking billions on legacy alone. Microsoft will be remembered poorly.

Facebook is the new guard that couldn’t guard a glazed donut. Facebook still refuses to grow the f*ck up and burn that ludicrous hoody. Teens are flocking away from Facebook because it only has one thing to offer, and that thing isn’t all that interesting once your parents start using it, which is why Facebook bought Instagram and wishes it could buy SnapChat for four billion dollars, even though SnapChat is to human life what Grape Twizzlers are to your colon.


Sign on Jeff Bezos’ lawn. Because geek humor.
Sign on Jeff Bezos’ lawn. Because geek humor.

Everyone loves/hates Amazon. Amazon wants to drop packages on your head from the sky because Jeff Bezos thinks you’re too fat, stupid and numbed out by Facebook to care to go outside, much less to a brick-and-mortar store. Jeff Bezos dreams every night that he’s Steve Jobs, except he’s actually Sam Walton, running a cheap empire of gross, overlit mega-warehouses of runaway consumerism. Hey, at least he seems to enjoy it.

Here is the disheartening news: Not one of them has your best interests at heart. Not anymore (as if they ever did). Not while they funnel their staggering mountains of personal data to the NSA, support the tar sands (Facebook), endorse the moronism of Ted Cruz (Google), or when, as Sterling points out, all they want to do is re-make the world in their own image and control every aspect of modern life, from shopping to listening, sharing and interacting, driving to brushing your teeth.

Can you blame them? Insane growth/profit at the expense of pretty much everything else is what tech companies do. But the thing is, the once-radical Internet, along with once-radical San Francisco, so full of surprises and potential, such a source of independent thought and unique expression, are radical and unique no more.

San Francisco is drowning in a tepid ocean of geek monoculture hired by Silicon Valley to ruin all the good restaurants, explode rental prices and have really terrible sex. The Internet, while more open to all than ever, has been vertically integrated by the Big Five to such a degree there’s almost no device, site, widget, stream, email client or shopping service they don’t somehow control or own outright.

Does that sound cynical? Not trying to be cynical. I use products and services by most of these blandly evil companies every day, and usually enjoy them greatly. Just sort of amazed and awestruck by the evolution, and moral devolution, of the spirit of the times. Observing companies, ideas, innovations you once thought were radical and interesting turn into hyper-commodified, calcified artifacts, just another specimen floating in a jar in capitalism’s dank basement, is disheartening, even if it’s an expected and a normal part of the cycle.

But that’s the devil’s greatest trick of all, isn’t it? Making you believe such bloated machinations, such vicious invasions of privacy,  such comprehensive control of 99 percent of everything by one percent of the populace is all normal, and positive, and slightest bit healthy? Such a grand and marvelous lie. We’re just too overwhelmed, numbed and wildly oversold to notice.


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« Reply #268 on: January 15, 2014, 09:08:03 pm »


Mark Morford

Velveeta at the end of the world

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, January 14, 2014

DID you hear? More than one-third of shockingly not-very-bright Americans — mostly Republicans, Tea Partiers and perhaps a handful of encephalitic waterfowl — outwardly reject the scientific fact of evolution, as meanwhile climate change has fully taken hold, extreme weather is the new normal, the oceans are rising and there is simply no denying any of it, with the notable exception of all the tragically unevolved people who do.

Do you know what this means? This means, of course, that millions of deteriorating Americans are more desperate than ever to ignore the fundamentals of reality and instead pour large, simmering buckets of revolting liquid cheese straight into their self-hating colons.

It means, more specifically, that many of them are terribly worried there might not be enough Velveeta cheese dip to go around (fake shortage scare!) when they watch their favorite teams of giant, homoerotic males give each other permanent brain damage and call it “patriotic” and “exciting” and “NFL football.” True story!


It’s true. Eat this product and naked women will shun you. Violently.
It’s true. Eat this product and naked women will shun you. Violently.

We are here to link it all together. We are here, in this fine column, in this fine year of 2014, to suss out the meanings and the trends, the similarities and the flagrant weirdness, and try to make some sense of it all, even if no sense is to be had. Because this is what we do, never mind the fact that it cannot really be done.

Because it’s January, silly. Every year it’s the same; January offers up a true slopgoblin of a news cycle, all sorts of remnants and detritus thrown by underpaid reporters at an exhausted nation still stumbling back to work after the onslaught of the holidays. Everyone’s broke, CES just proved that technology is getting a hell of a lot creepier, and no one’s sure what the hell is coming next.

This is why we get blubbery, half-chewed stories about buffoons like Governor Chris Christie, who recently proved what a bully and vengeful prick he is by… wait, whatnow? Snarling up traffic in New Jersey for three days? Not even a secret gay lover or a raging oxycodone/Twinkie addiction to go along with it? Pfft. January.

I should really be outside right now. As I write this, it’s 74 degrees in San Francisco, startlingly clear and packed with astonishing amounts of sunshine, which would all be glorious indeed were it not hampered by the sickening knowledge that it should be cold. And raining. A lot.

Bad news indeed: The Sierra snow pack is a meager 20 percent of normal, 2013 was the driest year on record in the state, and California is facing a severe drought (official announcement coming soon, says the governor), not a week after the rest of the country was pulverized by a “polar vortex” so cold, so snowy and unprecedented, it turned boiling water into instant water vapor and turned Fox News pundits into giggling trolls who equate anything below 70 degrees with “proof” that global warming is a liberal hoax and 10,000 PhD-clad scientists worldwide are totally wrong because look! You guys! Snow!


Extreme weather is just God’s way of saying he hates gay marriage. Or is that too 2009?
Extreme weather is just God’s way of saying he hates gay marriage. Or is that too 2009?

Do you trust Fox News? Stop reading now. Do not come back. It’s for the best.

Into this miasma, a fine tech headline, something along the lines of “Windows 9 rumors heating up”, which I thought was adorable in its attempt to have an actual pulse, in its attempt to convince anyone that Microsoft has an excitement quotient greater than a moldy 8-track tape found in the back of a ’97 Honda Civic. Are you excited about Windows 9? You are completely alone in the world.

But lo, be not afraid! The month is not a complete wasteland. Leave it to the snarling, razor-blade hipsters at Vice to open the year right by posting a truly fantastic, viral-ready, gross-out story deluxe, a sordid (and slightly dubious) tale of illegal butt enhancements in (where else?) Florida, and the already quite large women who want these horrifying, Kardashian-sized glutes, but can’t afford an actual, you know, “doctor.”

Butt enhancements are a thing. I suppose. And they’re exactly as disgusting and weird as they sound. Hey, at least we’ve moved on from Botox, collagen lips, nose jobs and giant breasts, right? Isn’t that a great bit of info to start the year?

Jennifer Lawrence just won something. “Her” is a gorgeous, deeply moving, tonally flawless movie. A Florida (!) man, a retired cop, recently pulled out his gun and shot a guy dead in a movie theater because the guy wouldn’t stop texting, noisily, during the previews. Google just spent $3 billion to buy a company that makes really nice thermostats. “Wind chill” is total bullshit. Just FYI.

In the past week alone, I took three UberX cab rides across San Francisco in a brand new Cadillac XTS, a perfectly acceptable Toyota Camry, and a bland-as-pudding Prius, respectively. The drivers were fast and incredibly friendly. The fares were ridiculously low. No hailing, no tip calculations, no creepy smells or sticky seats, no fumbling for cash or credit card.

It was sort of startling, how such a simple, elegant shift in a long-entrenched business model can make such an enormous difference, can make an otherwise merely tolerable, often cringe-inducing experience so much more pleasant. It also makes you realize how ugly and outdated was the old way — especially when looking at it from the back seat of a shiny new Cadillac.

Chatting up one of the (very happy, working to create his own team of sub-contracted Uber drivers, singing along with the radio) drivers about his experience working for Uber (“amazing company, great guys, incredible business skills they teach you”), I mentioned how I wish someone could come up with a similarly innovative model to revolutionize my beloved old media, before it dies out completely. He just laughed. “Oh man, that would be great!” he said. “I love reading stuff! Good luck!”

I just smiled, sighed heavily, and stepped out into the shocking sunshine.


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« Reply #269 on: February 12, 2014, 02:38:51 pm »


Mark Morford

Fine weather for creepy melancholia

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, January 21, 2014

I HAVE enjoyed many terrific birthdays in San Francisco. I have, if memory serves and it sometimes does, nearly always celebrated my January birthday indoors, perhaps luxuriating in a fine hotel, or soaking in a hot, steaming body of water, or rolling around in a very large bed surrounded by whisky and laughter and various slippery things, all due to the chilly and invariably drizzling, foggy, sleeting, flagrantly unpleasant winter weather outside, weather that has always slammed January in San Francisco like a familiar and necessary refrain.

Not this year. This year, I was sunbathing. This year I was splayed out on a tiny, hidden gem of a beach down in Half Moon Bay, sipping champagne, wearing nothing but underwear and a smile alongside a gorgeous companion equally — though significantly more beautifully — unadorned, both of us marveling at the 74-degree temperature, the glass-calm ocean and the utter surreality of the dry, warm, lightly breezed air.


Beach day! In January! WTF!
Beach day! In January! WTF!

We were, quite obviously, enjoying ourselves immensely. We were gasping at the stillness, the clear and simple heat, the ache and bite of the thirsty sand, repeating over and over that we couldn’t believe it was actually winter even as, deep down, we both could sense it — as I’m sure you can, too: Something is wrong.

It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to be warm, dry and sunny in the Bay Area for the entire month of January, and probably February, and most of December, and who knows how much longer. Not here. Not now. Not ever.

Let me be clear: “Something is wrong” isn’t just something you mutter to yourself when the weather blips and flops and pulls a weird little stunt, like a rogue cold snap or fluke heat wave that you know will pass in a few days so hey, let’s get out the sunblock and have a freak barbecue in December.

This kind of wrongness, it’s of a different tang and scale. You can feel it in your bones, your primitive animal nature, your equilibrium. It’s not about weather, per se. It’s about something bigger. Deeper. And quite a bit scarier.

Surely you already know that California is officially in the midst of a severe, unprecedented drought. You’ve probably already read that 2013 was the driest year ever recorded in the state, that it could be the driest winter in 500 years, that the Sierra snow pack is 17 percent of what it should be, and that many, many people are beginning to get very, very concerned.


Do you have enough sunblock? You do not have enough sunblock.
Do you have enough sunblock? You do not have enough sunblock.

What you might not know is a normal January has zero wildfires, whereas this one has already had 150. What you might not know is the predictive models for the entire western side of the country show extremely bleak times ahead. Go ahead, skim through just how scary it really is. If the insane fire danger alone isn’t enough to freak you out, the dour forecasts for all sorts of industries, from agriculture to ski resorts, certainly should.

So really, this is not a column about the weather. This is a column about gut-level disquiet, about seeing the woes of our city (San Francisco hasn’t even reached half of its record-low rainfall for this time of year) and our state, and then widening out that lens of unsettling weirdness to take in the totality of what’s happening, from the brutal (and equally unprecedented) “polar vortex” slamming the rest of the country, to extreme disasters, such as Supertyphoon Haiyan, the strongest storm ever recorded at landfall, which killed 6,000 people in the Philippines.

It recently snowed in Cairo for the first time in 112 years. In June of last year, in Death Valley, they hit the hottest temperature — 129 degrees — ever recorded for that month.

We are, at our core, blood-soaked, spit-infused, bone-hammered animals. We are, behind all our air-conditioned defenses and numbed-out obsession with technology and loneliness, still somehow attuned to the rhythms of the planet, still a living organism deeply interwoven with, and desperately dependent upon, a much larger organism. What happens to her, happens to us. We can feel it. Even if we caused it. Maybe because we caused it. Can you really separate?

Let’s take one paragraph right here to openly slap back the mortifying idiocy, the dangerous ignorance of the Tea Party, Fox News and all tiny-brained global warming deniers everywhere, and point instead to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent climate report, by far its most shocking and damning yet. Conclusion: It’s no longer a matter of when, but how bad.

Which is to say: dramatic climate change is no longer even remotely preventable. It’s here. It will be here for centuries. And yes, most of what’s happening is very much our fault. It’s now only a question of severity, adaptation and survival.

Do you care? Do you feel it? I bet you do. Your very body, your cells, your electromagnetic field and neural wiring, they all understand that nature is not a linear, easily predictable force, particularly when we’ve been slapping her, mauling her, cramming billions of tons of toxic waste into her and generally behaving towards the Earth the way a meth addict behaves toward a mixed green salad. A creeping sense of resigned doom pervades the blood.

Is there any good news? Sort of. Advances in conservation, energy use and environmental policy are happening every day. Wind, solar and thermal power are growing fast, though still remain light years behind oil and coal. There’s still a chance California could be deluged by rain and snow in March. Our fatal game of Russian Roulette with the planet might once again leave us standing, quivering and stupid, one more time.

The bad news? Science and common sense agree: It’s all too little, too late. Short of an immediate, radical overhaul of international energy usage on a scale unprecedented in human history, we’re headed for some vicious struggles for survival indeed. Check that: They’re already here.


Nothing left to do but sigh.
Nothing left to do but sigh.

So, what do you do? How do you respond? Do you profess utter powerlessness and hope someone, somewhere figures it all out in time? Do you enjoy the random spoils of odd weather while you can, praying the wildfires don’t wipe out your home or the polar vortex doesn’t kill your grandparents, and store up on bottled water and good porn and Jesus? Do you shrug it off and keep dancing?

Maybe you make a nervous joke out of it, a game, tell everyone to “shower with a friend!” as you work to cut back on your water usage by 20 percent, even though you know upwards of 85 percent of all water in California goes for farming (less than 10 percent is residential), and most of that goes to grow grain, to feed cattle, to feed our gluttonous meat/fast-food obsessions, to feed our obesity epidemic which feeds our love of pharmaceuticals and fad diets and hoping someone else figures it all out in time. Ah, the circle of life.

Maybe you realize, deep in your bones, it’s no longer possible to turn it all around, and that there’s only so much you can do to adapt to severe unpredictability and the fact that Mother Nature always, nay always bats last. We’d try to whistle past the graveyard, if our lips weren’t so damn chapped.


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« Reply #270 on: February 12, 2014, 02:39:02 pm »


Mark Morford

The myth of the Christian conservative

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, January 28, 2014

I OFTEN WONDER, given sufficient whisky and irony and time: Has there ever been a more delightfully inept, wince-inducing oxymoron in the tortured American lexicon than “conservative Christian?”

I am almost completely serious. I stumble across this strangled term frequently in the media world, usually in reference to this or that corporate executive, pinched titan of industry or misguided political movement, and every single time I feel a strange twitch shoot from my brainstem down to my soul, a sudden seizure of meaning as the phrase falls back and implodes into itself, like a confused little star that thinks it’s an enormous sun but is really just a speck of flaming space dust.

I’m over at Mother Jones, reading of the vast ugliness that is the family DeVos, a wonderfully power-mad, union-hating clan of exceedingly rich (keyword: Amway), exceedingly white Republican males over in Michigan, rivaling the Koch brothers and Coors clan for title of Most Despising of Everything You Love. Hey, for the .0001 percent, it’s a very popular competition indeed.




Like most of the super-rich, they are men (and a few women) who think they know something of the world, of culture, of God and heroic success, but instead appear to only know greed and money and empire and patriarchy and a certain cold-blooded detestation of anything free-thinking, independent-minded, progressive, humble or compassionate. Do you know the type? Of course you do.

From Reagan to Bush 41, Bush 43 to Mitt, union-busting to anti-choicism, antediluvian “family values” advocacy to pro-corporate think tanks, Blackwater to the unutterably silly Left Behind books, this is the kind of power-hungry billionaire clan that has its tentacles in every right-wing movement, cause and devious conservative ploy since the early ‘60s.

The patriarch, Richard DeVos, Snr. — a man who, I imagine, genuinely loves his family, enjoys a good, hot bath and fears death every second of every day — calls himself a conservative Christian, as do the rest of his family, his company and their entire ethos and position in the world. The phrase pops up repeatedly, like a rash. And it’s always just a little bit hilarious.

I mean, isn’t it? Given how the DeVoses — Dick Jr. is now the lead union-hating arm-twister of the family — endlessly conspire to slash and destroy, delimit and defund every progressive (read: Jesus-approved) cause and teaching in existence, from women’s rights to fair wages, gun control to pacifism, union protections to civil liberties, gay marriage to protecting the environment? Ah, Christians. Always the last to understand irony.

I ponder: What must that be like? To believe you are something that you so very much are not? To hold a set of values that, in truth, have nothing whatsoever to do with the real source that supposedly inspires and defines it?

It’s a severe, almost laughable chasm between what Republicans define as “Christian conservative” values — isolationism, protectionism, love of fireams, suppression of alternative viewpoints, sexual dread, belief in strict gender roles and family structures, institution-as-guardian, and so on — and the teachings of the actual, messy historical Jesus who taught, well, the exact opposite.

One example? The very same day I’m cringing my way through the DeVos piece, I just so happened to read a wonderfully weird little item over on a blog called NeuroBrainstorm (written by a researcher of admittedly indeterminate credentials, Kevin Loftis), all about the various hallucinogenic plants, herbs and compounds mentioned in, used by, or hovering near the Bible and its wily cast of characters.

Which is to say, you got your myrrh, calamus, acacia (DMT!), spikenard, galbanum, cannabis and probably psilocybin (magic mushrooms), among others. In fact, it would seem that psychotropics were all over the place in Biblical times, growing innocently over here and anointing the body of the messiah over there, regularly transporting many true believers into states of highly altered consciousness for the purposes of, well, same as ever: divine sight. Union with God. Visions. Dreams. Journeys. Cavorting with nature, the goddess, consciousness itself. You know, just as it should be.


Jesus: He’ll trip you out!
Jesus: He’ll trip you out!

Reading this piece, it struck me again, for the 1,000th time: As far as we can tell and if he actually existed, Jesus was a shaman. A seer. A radical. A wild and divinely possessed trickster and spiritual pathfinder. What’s more, it’s possible that he was frequently stoned. Hallucinating. Hey, lots of them were. Wouldn’t you be? Psychoactive plants have been used to commune with sacred realms since cavemen scribbled trippy hieroglyphs on the wall by moonlight. It’s just what gurus, mystics and saviors do.

I realize none of this is exactly news, the idea that Jesus’ life, teachings and level of shamanistic eccentricity are actually diametrically opposed to the tortured, guilt-hurling figure of righteousness the church founders and the Roman empire jointly canonized a few hundred years later. They took the anti-authoritarian shaman and stripped him of all mysticism, modesty, and divine love, and turned him into the ideal spokesman for the world’s first corporate megabrand. They created the Son of God™. Accept no substitutes. Or else.

So now it begins to make more sense. While conservative Christians of the DeVos variety aggressively despise everything the real Jesus stood for — nonviolence, aiding the poor, ministering to the sick, equal rights, spiritual autonomy, the anointing of lots of trippy holy oil to commune with sacred realms — they very much value what came next: the institutionalized church and all its megalomaniacal, sociopolitical success, perhaps the greatest, most oppressive corporation/political operation of all time. The GOP can only dream.

It’s true, no? More than 2,000 years later, despite endless scandals, oppression and political obfuscation, the church’s brand is still going strong (well, sort of). It is empire incarnate, the greatest marketing success in history, squashing opposition, steamrolling spiritual autonomy and most of all, encoding into millions of followers the most tragic lie of all time: that you are separate from the divine. That you cannot ever truly know God. That you are meek and broken, full of shame and sin. But if you’re really lucky, if you work hard, soak yourself in guilt and support the correct (white, rich, male) leaders, you can maybe, just maybe, avoid Hell. Familiar message, right? Just like Jesus absolutely never intended?


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« Reply #271 on: February 12, 2014, 02:39:13 pm »


Mark Morford

The devil in the pie chart

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, February 04, 2014

IT'S A thoroughly stupid, weirdly inelegant way to exist, isn’t it? Contrary to nature and time, insulting to the very dignity of the soul?

Yet here it is, the single-most toxic, fossilized, hammered-down maxim our culture — along with most of the barely civilized world — lives by, pounded into our fundamental ethos since birth.

Nope, it’s not organized religion. It’s not a sad misunderstanding of love. It’s not wisdom, loneliness or even rampant tribalism, nationalism, unhealthy worship of technology or celebrity. Oh, it’s far worse than that.

Do you know this toxic law? I bet you do: Companies will do anything to accomplish it, cities obsess over it like a dark religion, populations are viciously addicted to it — and of course, capitalism has it tattooed onto its very heart, a blood-soaked dragon of relentless, nearly unendurable pressure, sneering and cruel, only fully satiated when it’s burned everything to the ground.

Of course you know it: It is the maxim of furious, nonstop growth at all costs. It is the vast, overarching demand that everything we humans create, produce and desire must keep growing and expanding, adding to and complexifying, without stop and without fail because to pause, to slow down, to contract, to calm the hell down even for a moment, means fiscal doom, cultural irrelevance, death.

Ergo, the ruthless mantra: More product! More stores! More bodies and more customers and a fatter bottom line, expanding the brand into 127 new countries in 2014 alone! New tract developments, new buildings, roads and sprawl, bigger families, bigger workforce, larger tax base, more drilling, fracking, sucking, ripping out the planet’s guts to satisfy our insatiable need for energy because we can’t stop now and we can’t imagine any other way, even though this way leads directly — and I mean directly — to our perfect demise.


Never enough, baby.
Never enough, baby.

My favorite example of the moment? Here is Apple, perhaps the most amusingly admired, debated, storied company in modern existence. Apple just announced that it sold an all-time record 51 million iPhones in the last few months – which, if I’m calculating correctly and I’m probably not, is about seven phones every second, or about 150 in the time it took you to read this paragraph.

Oh, they also sold a record 24 million iPads, 4.5 million Macs, generated $57 billion in revenue ($13 billion in net profit) and now control 42 percent of the smartphone market, up from exactly zero just seven years ago. “Astonishing” doesn’t begin to cut it.

Do you know what happened next, right after Apple’s amazing announcement? That’s right: The stock price plunged nearly 10 percent. Because Wall Street is diseased and insane. Because Wall Street is full of tiny-souled, cackling man-demons who measure human existence the way the devil measures time: in units of potential pain.

See, Wall Street, employing its trademark rule of grow-or-else nonsense, thought Apple should have sold 54 million phones, not just 51, and therefore they think the company might have peaked and might not continue its stratospheric growth into the next year. In short: Apple made billions of dollars and outpaced itself in every category, but it still wasn’t enough to feed the dumb, ravenous beast. It never really is.

But why stop with just Apple? Here is Facebook, doomed to die… eventually. Here is Google… same. There was Motorola, Microsoft, IBM. Starbucks and McDonald’s, WalMart and Coca-Cola, Ikea and Whole Foods, too. There is Spain, China, India and Africa. There’s the Catholic church, the Mongols, the invading force, the conquering heathens, spreading their dogma, their brand, their tedious seed, as if it somehow matters, as if that’s the whole point, as if that’s all there is to life and you just gotta deal with the inevitable pushback, the forthcoming ruin. Hey, it’s the nature of the system. God, what spiritual infants we are.

Worse still, these entities are followed around like rabid dogs by pious economists, politicians, prognosticators, all barking out a dire warning to any country, company or government who might wish to break the golden rule of growth and instead downsize, simplify, cut back. “Are you insane? Do you want to lose tax revenue? Wall Street support? God’s love? We’re humans. More work, more babies, more revenue, more unsustainable growth is what we do.” This is the message. This is the rule.


Humanity is going down, hard. Who wants some money?
Humanity is going down, hard. Who wants some money?

You can see the absurdity, no? More importantly, you can you see the danger to all life, health, human becoming? We know such a modality is completely unsustainable. We know that the world, being a finite, delicately balanced organism, will not put up with our bulls—t for much longer (well some of us know this — the Tea Party is still in adorable denial). Hell, she’s already starting to slough us off en masse.

But even deeper still, we know that life is anything but linear. It is not a silly chart, a simplistic bar graph, a particular percentage of ownership. And we know that Wall Street, despite its endless, self-important bloviation and ravenous greed, knows absolutely nothing of life.

The deeper wisdom is: life is a looping and spiraling thing. It is pulsation and vibration, expansion and contraction, inhale and exhale in constant and eternal flux. Force it to stick to just one hard polarity — in our case, bigger and faster and more — and watch your species die. Simple, really.

But hey, whatever, right? Save it for the next generation to worry about. True capitalists abide no such smarmy, soft-focus drivel. Respect, sustainability, reducing our catastrophic footprint? Eat my profit margin, hippie. There’s piles of money to be made, right now, even in our downfall. Wall Street will go down screaming and aflame, useless clumps of dollars in their angry monkey fists.

Fondly do I remember a professor of mine back at Berkeley, a warm-hearted philosophy nut who loved discussing our bizarre American conditioning of greed, the nature of money and mad desire for incessant growth. His favorite semi-rhetorical query: How much do you think you need, really, to live healthy, comfortable and happy? A million dollars? Ten? How much land, how many resources, how many cars and homes, how much stuff?

And we, being young and eager, would measure and discuss and map it out, thinking the answer was always much more than it ever really was. Slowly, but invariably we came to the shocking, un-American realization that what you actually need to be happy is often far, far less than we’ve been trained to believe. Even more shocking? It turns out the inverse rule is even more true: The less you believe you have to have, the happier you get to be. Simple, really.


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« Reply #272 on: February 12, 2014, 02:39:28 pm »


Mark Morford

Believe this and live forever

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, February 11, 2014

EVERY DAY, the battle! Every day, the forces align and the crusade begins all over again. And for what? For your attention, of course. Your loyalty. Your innermost desires and convictions. In short, the war wages for your hard-won, but ultimately sort of fickle and apparently rather wimpy belief.

That’s right: wimpy. But also invaluable. To gain this prize, billions are spent. Armies of designers, marketers, chemists, analysts, strategists, psychologists, politicians and drug dealers are marshaled to sway your wayward convictions this way and that in hopes of hooking you into a religion, a brand, a product, a stance, a country or team or tribe, enemy or allegiance or god. Do you feel it? I bet you do.

Or maybe you don’t. They’d all be much happier if you weren’t very, you know, dialed in. Healthy. Attuned. Awake to the world, your body, your heart. It makes their job so much easier if you’re generally sort of numbed out, sedated, convinced that you’re a powerless, impotent victim or a meek plebe at the mercy of a terrible God or multiple heartless corporations. Believe in shame and guilt, the original sin of merely being born in the first place? Baby, you are a goddamn goldmine.


Go ahead. You know you want to.
Go ahead. You know you want to.

Let me ask you this: Did you sleep well last night? Are you sure? Here is a new study that sort of proves that if you believe you slept really well, if enough people tell you that you did, then you will perform better and feel better throughout your day, probably. Conversely, if you are told (and therefore believe) you slept terribly, the opposite is often true: you will feel foggy and perform less than optimally, even if you actually slept fine. Because you believed otherwise. Because you are more powerful than you know. But only if you believe you are. Get it?

It’s another fascinating example of the placebo effect, otherwise known as the power of your own belief to affect (cause?) your behavior, your health, your energy levels, even your body chemistry, your basic functioning and overall happiness quotient.

It’s the most baffling, enigmatic thing, this placebo effect (and its evil twin, the nocebo effect, wherein negative beliefs/fears induce illness and disease) and scientists are still sort of clueless as to what to make of it.

Nocebos are, in particular, sort of hot right now. Name your trendy poison: EMFs, MSG, gluten intolerance, Wi-Fi sensitivity, antidepressants, fibromyalgia, stress, chronic pain, chronic anything: More and more studies are proving that the more (or less) you believe an ailment or demon exists and directly affects you, the more (or less) “real” it becomes. Works for positive and healthy things as well as it works for destructive and hurtful things. See? Goldmine.

Take antidepressants, the world’s most overprescribed medication: Studies increasingly confirm that taking Prozac, Xanax, Paxil et al is likely no better or worse than popping a plain old sugar pill, and in many cases the sugar pills worked better at alleviating symptoms of clinical depression. Amazing.

Conversely, millions now claim they are gluten intolerant, not because they’ve actually been diagnosed with celiac disease, but because to believe that bread is evil is a powerful way to take part in the culture of victimization, to validate suffering, to lay blame for whatever may ail you. Does this mean the symptoms suffered by so many aren’t real? Of course not. But what’s the actual cause? The bread or the belief? How do you know for sure?

It all invites the slippery question: What, deeper down, can you actually trust? How do you know what’s “real”, and what’s the power of your consciousness, your devout belief, to make it so? Is there a difference? If sheer certainty can alleviate/cause suffering, what does this tell us about the nature of our woes and our ecstasy? What’s the distinction, exactly, between subjective and objective reality? Do the lines not begin to blur? Dissolve completely?

Here is where science likes to get mired, veering off into all sorts of neurological/psychosomatic theorems, biomechanics of the brain, tinkering with structures. And we shall leave them to it.

Because, psycho-spiritually speaking, this is also exactly where things begin to get really juicy.

Try this: If we can change the very nature of our experience — pain or pleasure, illness or health, you name it — just by believing it to be so, is that not in line with what the gurus talk about when they suggest we are “co-creators” of our own reality? Or when the sage speaks of consciousness as the only truth? Or when the mystic speaks of abiding in a perpetual state of “non-dual awareness” — that is, no separation between you and the world, God, any and all objects and experiences and things? Belief doesn’t just affect reality; it causes it, it becomes it.

This much is irrefutable: How you direct your gaze, where you place your energy and your conviction, how you tune your perception and with what integrity and attitude you offer yourself to the world means, well, everything. Why can’t this basic truth be broadened out to humanity as a whole?

It can get a little… unwieldy, akin to pondering dark matter, like hearing there are billons of galaxies in the universe and our tiny blue dot is but a speck off on the far corner of a vast beach a million miles long. The concept leaps the bounds.


It only looks new agey until you try it.
It only looks new agey until you try it.

But who cares? Let’s go even further. Because if it’s true that you are, on a moment-to-moment basis, the co-creator of your own reality, and if it’s also true that we as a society can do the exact same thing through our collective, shared convictions, what about humanity on both a very deep, and very grand scale? What if the placebo effect isn’t just a phenomena, but in a sense, the nature of reality itself?

Look, we have plenty of evidence to prove that if a large group believes in a given phenomena powerfully enough, wonders (and tragedies) can occur. You can believe yourself to death. You can also believe yourself to godhood. So then, what if we, as humans, at some very deep level, have collectively agreed that, say, gravity works this way and mass feels like this and this is how we breathe, move, screw and die? Doesn’t that mean it’s all maya after all, a collective illusion, a wild, feral dream we all just happened to agree to at some point back in the cosmic dust of things? And to simply wake up to that fact is the nature of enlightenment itself?

Maybe that’s a little much. Maybe it’s better to test it all out yourself, every day, on micro scale, to feel into what you really believe, what you know to be true at core level, versus what you’ve been fed, and by whom, and for what spurious purpose.

Who the hell told you you’re broken? Who told you you’re an addict, a loser, a Type-A, a manic depressive? Who said you’re too weak to quit smoking, to start exercising, to eat better, to find love or to quit being an overbearing jerk with zero redeeming qualities? Who told you humanity must operate a certain way? Who told you you’re full of trauma and rage? Who dared tell you you’re not already God? You really believe that? Good lord, why?


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« Reply #273 on: March 19, 2014, 05:29:02 pm »


Mark Morford

How to eat an Internet troll

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, February 18, 2014

HERE'S something you surely already suspected but which is nevertheless sort of nice to have validated by science:

Internet trolls? Those nasty, scabrous, hate-spitting folk who spend their sunlight-deprived days taunting, baiting and venomizing all over the Interweb’s anonymous comments sections in response to, well, just about about any article, column, video, photo gallery, product review or heartfelt tale of love and woe from the here to Gawker to Amazon, Car & Driver to Knitter’s World to the NYT, including but certainly not limited to the very Slate article which discusses the general cruelty and stupidity of trolls itself?

Turns out they really are awful people. Sociopathic, sadistic, narcissistic, cruel by nature, highly unpleasant to be around. They love to cause pain. They delight in ruining the beautiful. The more pure and integrity-filled something is, the more they enjoy corrupting it. So says a new psychology study. Also, they’re antisocial. Poor dressers. Ungainly. Hairy in all the wrong places. Smell like soggy asparagus and old toenails. I’m just guessing.

Did you already suspect as much? Of course you did. It takes exactly 28 seconds of reading the comments beneath, say, any Gawker article ever posted to feel deeply soiled and sad for the state of modern humanity, and for the under-30 Millennial set in particular. And trolling’s even more vicious alter-ego, Internet bullying, has resulted in far uglier consequences, like depression and suicide. Trolling and vicious, look-at-me commenting in general has, to many, reached epidemic proportions, and some major news sites are shutting off comments entirely to try and tamp down the bile.

(Amusingly enough, the very Slate article that discusses the troll study is rife, nay rife with all sorts of snarky feedback, nasty comments and demeaning trollspeak both casual and foul, thus verifying another quality you already suspected about trolls: their complete lack of a sense of irony).


BLACK WOLF

But the personality of trolls wasn’t really the question, was it? The real question is: whence do these warped beings come? Does the Internet spawn these toxic personalities, or merely exacerbate their puerile nature, give it outlet and volume? Which came first: the sadist, or the anonymous forum into which the sadist is born?

Here’s a pleasant fact: Just like in real life, the nasty, small-minded people who get off on trolling make up a very small fraction of Internet commenters as a whole, and an even smaller fraction of Internet users overall (more than 41 percent of Internet users never post in the comments sections in the first place).

Then again, it’s my experience that countless are the commenters who probably don’t consider themselves true trolls at all, who think they’re merely engaging in snarky and “clever” bantering as they casually rip apart the subject of a given article (like this one), or the writer, or the host site, or the weather, or each other, everyone apparently so bored out of their minds that engaging in a flame war about, say, stemware brands, or dog breeds, or Google buses, or which Bluetooth headphones are best is cause for endless, low-level viciousness and disgust disguised as “discussion.”

Ah, but causality is elusive, is it not? There’s simply no way know if the Net has made the culture of hatred exponentially worse, or uglier, or of any different a nice/mean ratio than your average slightly obnoxious cocktail party. There’s no way to measure today’s cruel jerk quotient against that of even 20 years ago. It sure seems like there’s more odium in the world, but that’s probably just a factor of the Net’s megaphone effect.

What we can measure a bit more accurately, is the positive flipside. Because here’s the good news: While the Net is an irresistible playground for sadists much in the way a public garden is an irresistible place for thugs to stomp on the flowers, the Internet also enables and encourages millions of already nice, already thoughtful, already reasonably happy people to get, well, even nicer.

Do you notice? Do you notice enough? Countless are the wondrous tales of support, love, rallying cry, outpouring of grief and adoration, sympathy and financial help in response to all sorts of need, from disaster relief to upstart project.

Entire Internet-enabled industries have been emerged as a result of this timeless humanistic urge: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, RocketHub and all the other crowdfunding success stories, for example, are born of this innate to help out, to discover causes, products and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise. According to Forbes, the U.S. leads the world in crowdfunding, estimated to have hit around $5 billion in 2013. The Guardian reports that visitors to Kickstarter alone pledged upwards of $480 million to various projects in 2013, up from $319 million in 2012. That’s a lot of anti-troll positivism.

It’s easy to forget, isn’t it? The number of people who are cheering someone on, helping a friend’s business, participating in an online charity or sending a blast of blessing, kindness, or love far outnumber — not to mention wildly outclass — the trolls. Forget it at your peril.

It’s like junk food. It’s like reality TV. It’s like like old media, in which the loudest, most bilious talking heads still get the most airtime. It’s like politics, where the hysterical wails and alarmist stunts of the Ted Cruz’s and Rand Pauls of the world will always grab the headlines. It takes a bit of effort to remember that intelligence and integrity still outweigh the trashy and the dumb. Mostly. Sometimes. You hope.

For the record and for what it’s worth, I never read the anonymous comments below my own columns, never have and never will. The toxicity level is far too high, and any honest discussion-making by intelligent or otherwise articulate parties is shouted down and poisoned by various insta-haters and right-wing trolls. They deserve exactly zero of my energy or time. I’m usually good for maybe 90 seconds of skimming comments on other news sites I frequent before I read something that makes my heart recoil (exception: the smart, lightly moderated conversations over at Metafilter, which rarely devolve into nastiness or outright trolling, and which are often tremendously informative and engaging).

But I don’t feel so bad about shunning the trolls entirely, never responding, never engaging them in the slightest. After all, if sadists and hate-mongers don’t have an audience, if their targets offer only pity them and know them to be just a sad, lonely, ragtag army of sociopathic narcissists, they will have nothing left to feed on, and will resort to the only action left: they will merely eat themselves alive.


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« Reply #274 on: March 19, 2014, 05:29:13 pm »


Mark Morford

Untimely death of the homophobe

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, February 25, 2014

DID YOU HEAR the one about how, if you live your whole life absolutely convinced that the world’s going to hell because of gay marriage and the terrifying “homosexual lifestyle”, that you’ll die approximately 2.5 years sooner than you would if you were, you know, not a homophobic jerk your whole life?

True. There’s a study. That sort of draws a correlation. Between the stress of intense bigotry and dying ugly. Which is a really fun thing to tweet and make easy jokes about, but also which, alas, actually misses the biggest, juiciest point there is about love and sex and age and death.


Bigots don’t merely die sooner. They live uglier.
Bigots don’t merely die sooner. They live uglier.

Do you know what it is? I bet you do.

But wait, before we get to that: Isn’t it odd how lifespan gets so much attention? Every few weeks a new study emerges declaring that this or that questionable behavior, food addiction or awful choice in footwear will, if you continue doing it, surely shave years off your precious life.

Do you smoke? Binge drink? Tanning booth? Four Diet Cokes and a carton of Hot Pockets every day while watching Fox News? Live in West Virginia or Kentucky or Mississippi? You will die many years earlier than someone who’s not, you know, a thrumming naif.

Do you work 97 hours a week? Fear God and enjoy porn, simultaneously? Stockpile ammo and shallow dread because Obama is surely coming to take away all your guns and canned ravioli? Are you Bill O’Reilly? Better get that casket now. You might already be dead.

Is this idea not a little bit strange? As if the promise of living longer is some sort of motivator. As if that’s really what’s most important. As if the world’s homophobes are reading that study — which they most certainly are not — and will suddenly realize it’s time to warm their frozen hearts not because it’s the right thing to do, but because they might make it to 80 and not, say, 77.5.

Make no mistake: longevity matters. Everyone knows men die younger than women, largely due to the high-anxiety male roles of breadwinner, heavy lifter, office drone and Grand Repressor of All Emotion, the sum-total stress of which wears us down to an early grave. You have but to stroll the halls of any retirement home in America to witness the huge numbers of sighing widows, many surely wishing their late husbands hadn’t worked so damn hard. Or hated gays so much.

(Of course, this traditional cultural imbalance will surely correct itself now that women have entered the workforce en masse and are taking over many of the stressful, heart-lethal jobs men once endured. Welcome to the workforce, ladies. Now we can all die together).

But here is your far more pertinent question: Who, when they’re 30, 40, 50 years old, really cares about living to 90, particularly when you can’t really do much with those latter years except slow strolls in the park and bourbon at bedtime, hoping you remember where you left the grandkids?

Isn’t what you really want sort of the exact opposite? To be living wildly better and right now, vibrating with all flavors of radiant immediacy and health? Isn’t the reason you quit smoking not so you’ll live longer, but so you don’t smell like a cancerous tailpipe and can climb stairs without collapsing? Is it not far better to move through life unburdened by the karmic detritus caused by ignorance of love, of God, of the body, of sex and death, convinced the world is a miserable hellhole ruled by thieves and snakes? It’s like the Buddha said: Wake up now, oh endlessly whiny one. It will make getting to 90 so much more fascinating.

But wait. There’s another angle, even better, even deeper, more cosmically aligned and true. It’s the idea that, if you do, in fact, live your whole life as a raging homophobe, if you die still poisoned by any sort of misshapen, bigoted belief, not only will you expire sooner, but you will surely come back.

To do it all over again. To try and get it right. Another life. Another body. Another soul. Over and over again, maybe a million times, until you finally learn a whole pile of karmic lessons you apparently haven’t quite gleaned just yet. Until you, in other words, lighten the hell up.

Do you believe in this idea at all? The cycle of unfinished souls? Don’t take my word for it. Look around; it’s easy enough to notice all the clenched, low-vibrating humans wandering the world, dead behind the eyes, hunched and lost, many of whom seem to feel compelled to perform some sort of gloomy, pre-set role because they have no idea there’s another way.

Do you know anyone like this? Beings who not only have learned almost nothing of conscious expansion, but who seem a long, long way from being ready to do so? Beings whose entire life path centers around a single personal drama or psycho-emotional snag — an addiction, a parental trauma, an abuse, a power grab, a bullying methodology, a shallow material goal — and no matter how many years and how much therapy, they never seem to break free?


What are you so scared of?
What are you so scared of?

Those beings, they’re coming back. For another try. Again and again and again. Until all meanings are soaked to the bone and they finally wake up. Maybe.

On the other hand, you probably know a few beings who, no matter what they’ve been through, no matter their physiological configuration or the failures of their parents, are effortlessly buoyant, in full possession of the unashamed energies of life, grounded and deeply calm, always with a certain gleam in the eye and a relaxed, luminous aura in their wake.

They’ve been around awhile. They’ve already come back, in myriad forms and times. Lessons have been lived and learned, paths have been taken and not. Result: they sort of get it now. And the lightest and most awake of these beings? They might, when they pass away this time, move on to another playground entirely. Like the Buddha said: See ya.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure. There’s no study to cite, no way to measure soul evolution, no way for our linear little minds to grasp this sort of divine, abstract vastness.

Hence, maybe it all sounds like silly New Age fluff to you. Maybe you like your world finite and dour, bounded by the hard, myopic lines of the scientific method. Or perhaps you’re one of the 68% of Americans who believe in a perky Christian heaven, where you get to bop around in some sort of misty Romper Room populated by chirping birds and angels shaped like Ryan Gosling. Good for you. And also, well, just a little bit sad.

I certainly have no exact answer. No one really does. It’s not really that kind of question, anyway. It’s more of a deep intuition, a sacred possibility, a subtle hum  in the heart. Besides, it’s not really worth stressing about, is it? That just leads to more anxiety, which leads to a pinched and miserable way through the world. And we all know how that ends up.


Email: Mark Morford

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http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/02/25/untimely-death-of-the-homophobe
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