Cheating Death and Daesh

French philosopher and writer Vincent Cespedes is urging the young people of the New Millenium to embrace "a new form of resistance" in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.  He says:

To be human is to say, ‘No, I will not commit evil in the name of a seductive fantasy.’ To be human is to say, ‘I am like you,’ when someone else is suffering.  Even if I do not agree with your ideology, with your discourse, to be human is to say, ‘I suffer on the inside if you are suffering on the inside,’ out of pure human compassion.’

It may appear counter intuitive to those who demand retribution, but the inevitable backlash that follows every tragedy will merely feed the narrative of Daesh (aka ISIS) in their ambition to drown the world in blood and madness.

Reactionary rhetoric, discrimination and persecution, exploiting fear to advance a partisan agenda, all while ignoring the larger humanitarian crisis … these are dangerously counter-productive as well as immoral.

For my part, I will be busy in the weeks ahead organizing “Compassion Vero Beach,” an event that will hopefully bring Christians, Humanists, Jews, Muslims, and Unitarians together in the spirit of peace and harmony. 

Just a simple "Meet and Greet" where people can socialize and rediscover their common humanity, thus far I have several local congregations on board.  My community needs a positive message to counter the hate speech in our midst.

Wish me luck. 

Eating my words

Sometimes you have to eat words. Sometimes you're pleased to do it.  Whether it with a roar or whisper, nonetheless I'm hearing condemnation of the slaughter of French innocents from Islamic leaders.  Perhaps it's been there all along, perhaps it's been under reported, but I hear decent Muslims speaking out.  Let's hope it helps, let's hope someone listens and decides not to become a jihadist. Let's hope it gets so loud no one can hear ISIS through the din.

Let's hope

Back to the Past

"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Hobbes' horror, Reagan's utopia.

One mythopoeic tendency in American political rhetoric is to long for a better time in the past that America needs to return to -- and will,  if only we elect the illiterate who flunked Middle School history and knows nothing about economics, law or foreign affairs.   Things always used to be better and there was always a golden age, from Eden to Jerusalem, to Rome, to La Belle Epoch. Nearly every period in the past is caused to have some redeeming factor that makes us long for it nostalgically.  In our imagined past, we were  or would be heroes with opportunities, not peasants with none.


I'd love to confront the political blowhards promising to make us a "great Nation" again because I seem to have missed that period of greatness and it may be that times we look wistfully back to as "simpler" seemed pretty damned horrific at the time.  I even sometimes doubt the premise that I had more freedom back when where you could eat, where you could sleep and with whom were tightly controlled.  Gender and race meant an awful lot to the government and your neighbors in our great nation.  I must have had my eyes closed to that period of peace and tranquility when the certainty of nuclear annihilation hung over us like a patient etherized upon a table,  Hung like some lynched teenager in a land where you can't pass anti-lynching laws because of the Klan's influence in Congress and thousands of us died every week, killing millions for "our freedoms." --. but oddly, even though at any moment we are the greatest and best and most powerful and glorious nation that ever was or will be, it always used to be better.  The best of times is so tightly bound to the worst of times, they are one and the same.

Maintaining this fiction must be important to the people who teach us history and ethics and government policy because much, if not most, of what they say depends on framing, distorting, editing, redacting and inventing a past where there were no taxes or regulations and thus all businesses succeeded, everyone was free and prosperous  and Christian except for the lazy, and often at night, when the old folks were at home, the "darkies" were gay.

It's not to say that Americans and America haven't done great things, it's to say that they had nothing to do with that parallel myth: the ever more restrictive and regulatory government with ever increasing taxes hindering growth, individual success and that ubiquitous aspiration we call, in our narcissism,  the American Dream.  Gee, I'd like things to be better.  How exclusively American.  Golden age?  It musta been before my time, and my Father's and his.

But of course we have Trump, we have Carson, we have Bush as pretenders to power (and pretenders to being qualified) and they're all going to repaint and re-gild that shining city on the hill by building a moat around it. A shining mansion maintained by serfs, barefoot and pregnant and like the survivors of Bush's shock and awe, thanking God for their freedom as they starve in the dust.

There were times though.  the times of our desultory flirtations with confidence and a view to great things.  We've had our per astera ad aspera days that led to feats the world had never been able to do and isn't it interesting how the good old days shamans want to prevent that happening again?  Back to the the past, to the golden age. It hangs in the air at our "debates"  but the meaning is 'abandon hope,' Arbeit macht Frei, God's in his heaven and the future is in the past.

Happy Holidays! (2015 edition)

Apparently, novelty candidate Donald Trump and some random Youtube pastor have decided that the annual "War on Christmas" is starting again: this time, it's because Starbucks changed their cups to plain red (which is particularly stupid, since what Starbucks removed from the cups wasn't Christian imagery; it was just random snowflakes, reindeer, and other secular decorations).

But as usual, the cries of "they can't say 'Merry Christmas' anymore!" are also going up. (I particularly like Trump's quote: "If I become president, we're all going to be saying, 'Merry Christmas' again. That I can tell you." Because he thinks that's a law he can pass? And people complain that OBAMA is a "dictator"?)

But, you know, "happy holidays" is actually a valid thing to say for the rest of the year. It isn't that there's a war on Christmas - somebody seems to have forgotten that there are other holidays.

For example, today was Veteran's Day. Speaking as a veteran, fuck you if you're ignoring it in favor of something a month and a half away. (The British call it "Armistice Day." If you happen to be Canadian, it's called "Remembrance Day" - same thing, just more polite.)

If you happen to be Hindu, this whole week is a celebration, based around Diwali (most of the festivals have different names in different parts of India, since they have a cubic buttload of languages in that country). You missed Dhanteras on Monday, but today is specifically Diwali, the "Festival of Lights," which spiritually celebrates the victory of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, good over evil, and hope over despair. It's a big-ass party, and you're missing out on it just because you're too small-minded and provincial to move out of your comfort zone.

It also happens to be Kali Puja, where the remembrance of Kali sets you free from evil, both within yourself and from the world around you. So there's that. And then tomorrow, the fourth night of Diwali, is called Govardhan Puja, when Krishna defeated Indra by benchpressing the Govardhan hill. (Seriously - look it up.)

And then, on the fifth day of Diwali, we have Bhai Dooj, which is all about celebrating the bonds between brother and sister. (It's a little bit sexist, to be honest - the sister is supposed to cook the brother's favorite food, and it's all about the duty of a brother to protect his sister, and a sister's blessings for her brother. But, hey, if they aren't yelling at each other? That's a bonus right there.)

Then, this Sunday (November 15th) through Wednesday morning (the 18th, if that math is a little hard for you) , we have Chhath Puja, which is thanking the Sun god for his blessings (and maybe getting a little spiritual cleansing in, at the same time). It's famous for being the holiday when Hindus bathe themselves in the waters of the Ganges and epidemiologists have heart attacks.

The day after that, November 19th, is the Great American Smokeout. Not really a holiday, but since my mom smoked herself to an early grave, I support it. So there it is.

And for Pete's sake, we haven't even made it to Thanksgiving, people! How can you bitch about "taking Christ out of Christmas" when you're ignoring "Giving Thanks"? (And for my own little part in the War on Christmas, Santa needs to haul his fat jolly ass back on the other side of Thanksgiving, where he belongs!)

Advent begins on November 29th, too. You're going to bitch about ignoring Christmas, but all you do with Advent is pull pieces of chocolate out of a calendar?

For that matter, both the Christian tradition and our secular friends have a whole flood of holidays throughout the month of December, as I've covered before. Feel free to review some of them if you're curious.

Among the Buddhists, the 8th of December will be Rohatsu, or Bodhi Day. (Rohatsu literally means "8th day of the 12th month," incidentally.) It commemorates the day that the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautauma, or Shakyamuni) achieved enlightenment. Traditions vary amongst Buddhist sects, but usually include meditation, study of the texts, chanting the sutras, or simply performing kind acts toward others.

Now, Chanukah this year will run from sunset on Sunday, December 6, through Monday, December 14, 2015. This should be moderately important to Fox "News" watchers, since they like to trumpet the importance of the "Judeo-Christian tradition." Weirdly, the "Judeo" half of that seems to fall to the wayside a lot.

Which means that they'll also be ignoring the fast of the Tenth of Tevet (in Hebrew, עשרה בטבת‎, or Asarah Be'Tevet), which happens to fall on December 22 this year. It commemorates the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and among observant Jews, it's a day of fasting from dawn until dusk, with a small service at the end of the day.

Most interestingly, to me at least, December 24th (Christmas Eve to most Americans) has a special meaning this year. It also happens to be Eid Milad ul-Nabi, the Sunni celebration of the birth of the Prophet: the Sunni celebrate it on the 12th day of Rabi' al-awwal (the third month in the Islamic calendar); the Shia celebrate it on the 17th of Rabi' al-awwal. (If you're curious, some sects of Islam, particularly the Wahabbi, consider the celebration itself to be bid'ah, an unnecessary religious innovation.)

Depending on where you are in the world, the observance can be anything from a solemn ceremony to a carnival atmosphere, and can include anything from an exchange of gifts to doing charitable work.

So you see, there are plenty of holidays to come through the end of the year. And with about 3 out of every 10 customers not being Christian (and even among the remaining 70%, there being a lot more than just Christmas to be observed), obviously, it's only reasonable to say "Happy Holidays!"

Gimme Shelter

The quote "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" is attributed to Samuel Johnson and I have no reason to doubt that or its truth. These days we have to examine a number of things that now inhabit that foul habitat of 21st century Patriotism, like extreme politics and extreme religion and extreme dishonesty -- and in a year like this, at the beginning of another election cycle and the Christmas season, the Star Spangled Blather begins to stink the place up.

Take Donald Trump, always struggling to be first in line, he's thrown the first pitch of the annual War on Christmas season this year by preaching against the Starbucks Christmas coffee cup,  which is now simply red and without the type of commercial Northern Winter and Sears Roebuck iconography some religious Christians despise. I'm surprised actually to find Starbucks turning out something that close to tasteful and without a pseudo-European name, but the Donald assumes he can take that simple red cup and work you into a lather of religious outrage by explaining it all the Fox way. It's War on Christmas time once again and pretending that anyone ever told you not to say Merry Christmas is the lie behind the tyrannical  agenda  of legally requiring you to be not only a Christian but an ignorant, paranoid and militant one.

It takes a certain kind of malignant mendacity to insist that Starbucks Hates Jesus and a certain kind of unbalanced mind to believe it, but believers gotta believe, don't they -- and we're a nation of outrage addicts, not too particular about veracity. But Christmas in America wouldn't be Christmas at all without the imaginary war on it and Donald Trump wouldn't be the ruthless sociopath without the contorted, contradictory lies that make up his campaign. I won't give him credit for inventing it. Actually pious Christians invented antipathy to Christmas a long ago and Christmas has been banned periodically by Christian leadership, both here and abroad. There's nothing new under the sun or under the comically bad hairdo for that matter.

Americans and American business have been in love with the holiday for a century or more and in fact much of our Christmas iconography and tradition has been authored by big corporations to sell product. That bothers the "put Christ Back in Christmas" crowd no end. But drink your $20 Frappomachiadohalfcaffventi in a plain cup or a Merry Christmas Santa cup and you'll piss someone off, whether they think Jesus the Barrista or Jesus the Christ is being disrespected. Trump is playing both sides and playing against anything that resembles freedom of anything. Hardly anyone is buying his Crappuchino of course, red cup or otherwise, but Trump is not afraid to work the bottom of the barrel or any other deep, dark and fetid place, and the media are not hesitant to give it all the publicity it can.

In our America, religion and patriotism are one and the same refuge of more than one scoundrel and no Republican Patriot would dare give himself that flag-kissing title without bufoonicating about Jesus the conservative billionaire and his ever present "liberal" enemies. It's expected. Patriotism entails positing a mythical past greatness that needs to be returned to. A past which entails a return to military swagger, Religious authority, isolationism, xenophobia, repression, racism and a forced ethnic "purity" which means a Christians First Nation and Christian rule and Biblical Law and above all, a Snowman on your paper coffee cup. That, in fact seems to be the only consistent theme among any likely GOP candidate in recent years. A foolish consistency you might say, as it requires you to hate the commercialism of Christmas and the non-commercialism of Christmas equally. It's a sacred holiday, but don't call it a holiday, and if you go through a minute without saying Merry Christmas from September through New Years eve, you hate Jesus.

Trump threatens not to renew Starbucks' Trump Tower lease  - (just now after how many years?) He suggests we boycott them and promises that if he's elected we'll all be saying Merry Christmas. That's a sure thing of course because we are doing that already and have been for as long as I can remember. Christmas is the most celebrated holiday in the US and a large part of our economy depends on us continuing to do so.  How can we not notice that the Donald has no commitment to  freedom of worship or of speech?  In what bizarre world is this patriotic?  The USA of course.

Atheists say Merry Christmas, Jews and Muslims say Merry Christmas and I say Merry Christmas in full knowledge of it's pagan origins, all external to the Christian canon. I think that peace and compassion and good will are better symbols, even in a hypocritical world than animals with light-up noses and trees from the Boreal forests. Acknowledging the dignity of the poor, showing affection toward children - these make it worthwhile to me. They have nothing to do with Trump or the politics of hate, fear and arrogance he preaches.

Yes, you greedy old grinch, I'll be saying Merry Christmas on December 25th,  but not to you or because of you,  pissing on the people who follow other religions and those who really love Christmas for their own reasons and acknowledge it in their own way:  the kids, the grandparents and the people who like pretentious coffee in plain cups. Pissing on those who preach year round goodness for goodness' sake.  If there's anything good about the religion you pretend to, you're stepping on it. If there were laws against hate speech, you'd be spending the holiday in jail and if there really is a hell with punishment for sin, we'll all be drinking eggnog while you lie howling.

VOTE FOR AMY

One of the contestants on NBC’s The Voice is an alumnus of the same preparatory school I attended years ago (before my sudden Kafka-esque metamorphosis from human to cephalopod). Her name is Amy Vachal (class of 2007). This notice arrived in my email box this morning:

Amy Vachal '07 on NBC's "The Voice"

Now among the top 20 performers on the show, Amy finds out Wednesday if she will continue on to the top 12. 

During her audition, Amy's rendition of "Dream a Little Dream of Me" captured the hearts of all who were watching, including the coaches. Though Blake Shelton, Pharrell Williams, and Gwen Stefani all vied for Amy to join their team, she chose Williams and joined Team Pharrell. 

In the next round, the "Battle Round," Amy moved easily past the couple she faced, shining on stage as they collectively sang "To Love Somebody." 

"Amy, there's a delicate way about you and your approach to songs. I can only imagine people listening to your voice after having a really tough day. You just make everything feel like it's gonna be alright. You're amazing," said Williams, before declaring her the winner of the battle.

At the next stage of competition, Amy delivered a soulful rendition of Etta James's "A Sunday Kind of Love," and though her performance was not enough to earn Pharrell Williams's vote, she was eagerly "stolen" by Adam Levine, joining his team for the remainder of the season.

Vote Amy!

One Giant Step

Like most adolescent boys I had a strong interest in tropical Geography, but National Geographic has always been one of those magazines too beautiful and informative to throw  out.  Basements and attics around the world are still packed with moldering stacks of these magazines.  It's hard even to give them away, but that may change.  Rupert Murdoch has bought the place, it's no longer a not-for-profit corporation and thus the information it contains will no longer be above suspicion.  Of course it hasn't been the best place to see bare breasted women for a long time, but it's wonderful ability to present science to the masses without the taint of sales hype and politics is now gone as well. Murdoch has apparently already done a Trump and fired the award winning staff.

Will the famous yellow cover take on a new meaning?  Can we expect more stories about Atlantis, UFOs and alien abductions?  Will the next article about ancient Egypt be authored by Ben Carson of the hollow pyramids theory or Mike Huckabee of the 6000 year old Earth? I'm sue we'll hear no more about climate change or the decline of  bio-diversity and pollution.  I'm sure we will be treated to spectacular photography of the village in Kenya where Barack Obama was born and the women will be wearing shirts.

Again one of the icons of journalism has fallen to the scoundrels who own Fox News and soon will be sharing the same corporate motto Pontius Pilate made famous:  What is Truth?  It's one small step for the end times and one giant leap for ignorance.

Yesterday it was Poison, Today it's Medicine.

Am I going out on a limb by suggesting that a high proportion of what you read in the popular media as concerns health and nutrition ( and many other subjects to be sure) is untrustworthy?  I guess that depends on whether the tree is genetically modified and grown with non-bovine fertilizer.

All joking aside, remember when Coffee was "linked" to pancreatic cancer and should be avoided in favor of  soft drinks at breakfast time?  I do, it was back when some were trying to take Aspirin off the market because "tests showed" it to have no value.  If a cynic like me suggested, and I did, that The Coca Cola Bottling Company and the people who make non-aspirin anti-inflammatory drugs  had some part in conducting and interpreting those tests, names were called.  We can't trust big corporations unless they're conducting tests that vilify other corporations.  Somehow anything pretending to defame common assumptions has a good chance of being believed uncritically,  particularly when presented as something "they don't want you to know."  It makes us feel savvy and hip and part of something important.

Times change however.  We know how aspirin works now, and that it does work and that it has uses other than treating headaches. In some cases it can be lifesaving.  Coffee it seems, has medical benefits beyond getting you to the point where you can get dressed in the morning. It may even help you avoid pancreatic cancer and some dementias, and a recent study suggests regular, moderate intake may reduce risk of type 2 diabetes substantially.  It may also reduce Coca Cola breakfast sales just as aspirin, a product there's little profit in, cuts into Tylenol and Ibuprofen profits.

Capitalism can be a dirty business. Those of us old enough to remember how cigarettes prevented colds and flu might by now have begun to lament that our schools don't seem to teach critical thinking or the application of logic in  everyday life.  It can often appear that hardly anyone knows what science is much less to respect it as a way to get at the truth, but  Capitalism has no morals. You sell things any way you can and hyperbole, Gerrymandered evidence and captious arguments are the rule.  Is it true that aspirin is worthless while Tylenol is safer and more effective?  No.  Is it likely that you'll hear from Johnson & Johnson  that it is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States, causing 60,000 emergency room visits every year: that it is the leading cause of liver transplants in England?  Not unless the government makes them do it and that of course would be "too much regulation."  Is anyone touting the "no-Tylenol lifestyle?"  I don't think so and I think the reason is that no corporation profits from bashing acetaminophen.

But we Americans are outrage junkies and all we need is a story plausible to the average man, a bogeyman or villain and a way out that usually consists of buying what the outrage monger is selling.
We scan the papers and watch the news and worst of all we look at YouTube and the blogs for new outrages every day. I admit I'm one of those people. Righteous indignation is better and cheaper than Cocaine and harder to kick - and it fills blog posts.

Flattering egos by offering an "in-crowd" membership, like enraging the public, is a major component of every sales campaign but do we blame them or do we blame ourselves for our gullibility and ignorance?  It doesn't seem we do. It's more likely we will defend our mistaken choices.  We'll  try to race that 700 hp Dodge with our 200 hp Nissans and our Ultimate Driving Machines and we'll have a good reason to ignore the results and try again when the inevitable occurs. We will never get a colonoscopy but we'll avoid "processed" meats. We will remain suspicious of aspirin and Alar and insist  that rusty nails cause tetanus.  We'll insist our candidate isn't a crook when he's caught red handed, that our non-Alar apples taste better and make us feel good.  We'll ignore the dangers of "organic" fertilizers loaded with heavy metals, because of course it's "natural."  Most of all we'll simply ignore or shout down unfashionable criticisms of our cherished beliefs.  After all we're animals.  We're Natural, unprocessed and organic - how could that be bad?

The Longer You Stare - The Enigma of Certainty

"Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein"

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

If you stare long into the abyss, the abyss will also stare into you.

_____________________________

The longer you stare into this image, the more zombies will appear.  Try it.  It's true.

Or is it?  Do we see shadowy figures or do we see zombies -- particularly the kind of Zombies invented by Hollywood and the Walking Dead comic books? The kind that doesn't exist. The power of suggestion is slippery and can be as hard to perceive clearly as those blurry phenomena we find things of our own making in -- of our own imaginations, prejudices and fears.

So when we have those little epiphanies, those spiritual moments that hint at unseen noumena; how genuine is our perception and how much of what we're prompted by our culture and experience to see appears to our eyes?  Krishna, Christ or Chuckwu look back at us, whispering like Enki from behind the wall. 

In fact no matter how you blow the image up, you can't say from what you see that they are zombies any more than you can know just what zombies look like outside of  fictional representations.  We see the same phenomenon when we see the face of God in the window, the face of Jesus in a rust stain or pattern of mildew on old wallpaper. We have no idea what those people looked like, but we swear to it, it was Mary and she was a virgin and wore a shawl.  It's the power of suggestion and our culture is at heart an encyclopedia of suggestion and meme.  

How much do we bring to what we see? Two crossed lines will mean something different to a Hindu than to a Christian.  That applies to what we see in others' faces, to what we taste when we're told what we're tasting, whether it's true or not.  One person in a room gets sick.  how many others feel bad and how soon?  How much better will that wine taste when the "expert" raves over it?   How fast will that placebo cure your headache?  Often faster than the Aspirin. 

Eating breakfast, I stare into the granite counter top.  A thousand faces stare back.

Quack, Quack

The ad calls it the DR. PUHARICH EMF PROTECTION - NATURAL FREQUENCY TESLA WAVE CHIP FOR YOUR WATCH,  What's a Tesla wave?  I've never seen a description that didn't sound like double talk intended for very, very non technical people and full of denunciations of "Orthodox" science. It's one of the claims having to do with free energy or perpetual motion or the like that got Tesla scorned by serious science, or at least until the Internet and it's faith-based hipsters came around and made him sort of an offbeat hero again.  Anyway the ad tells us it's also an "EMF/ ELF stress shield" which is basically gibberish and a bit pretentious since it's a small square of copper you put into your watch to shield you from things that don't exist. True, a large grounded copper box would shield you from EMF at any frequency if you were inside it, but putting a piece of copper in your watch gives you a watch with a piece of copper inside and nothing else.

In a way it's similar to the "Translator Amulet" which consists of a few randomly selected electronic components: I see some small carbon film resistors,

a ceramic capacitor, a couple of molded Mylar caps, a Germanium 1N34 diode in a DO-1 package all soldered together in a fashion that might make a 4 year old -- or an American new-age doofus think it's a radio.  It isn't. "Natural frequencies" means nothing other than to evoke the modern longing for nature and things natural and the fear of the new. It doesn't do anything  and it doesn't have to, in order to do what the seller claims it does.

"The Translator helps to understand angelic messages, communications from the higher self, your guides, and it helps in channeling. This is the vertical aspect - between the higher and lower vibrational realms. It also works horizontally - around you, on this level and this reality. It helps you to understand what is being said, what is being communicated in this realm, person to person, animal or plant - through words, images, music, sound or otherwise. This Quantum device helps you to understand what is being communicated, with trust, openness and keen intuition".

Ordinarily one wouldn't have to explain to people that this bit of ad captandum vulgus escapes being outright fraud only because the description is gibberish and claims of helping you understand or avoid or rid yourself from what doesn't exist are hard to refute.  At least it's "artisinal"  I can't refute that.

It's called quackery and it's an ancient practice as old as religion and probably older than what we sometimes call the oldest profession. It's also called Shamanism and it's alive and growing faster and faster with the power of the Internet and the decline in scientific literacy and critical thought.  I used to collect late 19th and early 20th century technology which included a few quack-medical items, like "violet ray" and high voltage shock coils.  The  former was sold to cure almost anything and had attachments which would, when turned on, glow in the dark. It regrew hair, cured skin conditions and a certain one could be inserted in various orifices for purposes I don't want to know about. Needless to say it didn't work. Needless to say they sold millions of these things. Needless to say lack of evidence was not an impediment to sales.

 The Electro-Medical Shocking Coil or a "Faradic Battery" was a very popular item a hundred years ago when electricity was still mysterious and frightening (perhaps it still is) and it was sold to cure things like Neurasthenia, a disease of mostly "sensitive" and intelligent people -  or so the health  hipsters of yore titled themselves.  Working stiffs were said to be immune to it. Of course the disorder doesn't exist any more than do Tesla waves or ELF stress fields, so it's hard to accuse the sellers of quackery with fraud  -- and besides all these quack devices had countless customers who swore by them and mocked the "orthodox" and closed-minded detractors. There was never a lack of "experts" and studies and anecdotes to reassure them of their elite status.  Some call it the Barnum Effect, others the Whole Foods business plan. Nonetheless, the cultic aspects of consumerism are quite powerful.  Flatter the masses and the masses will follow you with open wallets.

eBay abounds with "detox" machines you put your feet in which remove unspecified toxins you don't have in some pseudo-scientific way.  foot pads, foot baths and pieces of duct tape to remove those "toxins' we love to believe in and rid ourselves of,  as the ancients once performed rituals of purification. Enemas, "cleanses,"  magic bracelets and rituals have evolved to take on the white coats of science while rejecting scientific method with prejudice, fable  and anger.

Impurity, impiety and sin are made-up things that have plagued us for eons and power and riches have accrued to those who told us we were tainted and sold us stuff to make it go away.  Those who told us the world was in decline from some golden past have shaped the course of history and proof to the contrary be damned.  Nothing has changed.  People are easily frightened in this world of randomness and easily sold quackery in both verbal and mechanical and chemical form and he who can sell the cure will have customers and fanatical followers.  The fear doesn't have to be real the malady doesn't have to be real and the cure doesn't have to be real, such is the power of suggestion and the power of belief.

True scientific tests of medicine and medical devices include a control group given placebos and of course the results invariably show much support for the empty pill and non-functioning device.  Harvard Medical School has a program for placebo studies and so do their hospital affiliates.  The placebo, the suggestion prove that the power of the mind is strong.  People leave faith healers and places of miracles like Lourdes convinced they're cured - at least for a while -  and they will defend such things assiduously while the purveyors use their stories to continue the business.

Billions believe that prayer can effect changes in nature contrary to evidence, People will go to war to defend their tribal name and description of deities who don't exist.  Parents let their children die because scientific medical practices aren't "natural" and don't fit the beliefs the power of suggestion cemented in their minds.  They turn to quack medicine because doctors are bogeymen and Big Pharma is out to poison us.  They vote for policies that have failed to work and repeatedly.

Are we still no more than the upright apes that evolved on the savannas of Africa?  Do we still believe in magic and shamans and mysterious forces even if we've dressed them differently?  I think the ape answers that question every day.