Friday, June 24, 2011

Huckster James Ray going to jail, I'd bet... now for others

Guilty.

Well, I guess that's where his harmonic wealth got him. And for what? Three  less dead people than the fictional body count (6) in Fargo?

I just don't understand it.

And it's such a beautiful day.


BTW, here's a Time Magazine article on these hucksters I missed when it came out in March

The American obsession with transformation isn't new. It's about as old as the nation. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the "infinitude of man." In 1879, Mary Baker Eddy founded the religion of Christian Science, premised on the limitless power of faith and mind. Norman Vincent Peale was an early best-selling self-help author with The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. But it was Werner Erhard, a lean, wolfish former salesman, who created the first modern transformation empire when he founded EST seminars in 1971. His courses were legendarily uncomfortable. He paced and cursed at his students. He had them writhe on the floor and scream out all their anxieties. He challenged participants to control their bladders so they didn't have to leave the long sessions. ("You are not a tube," he preened in the documentary Transformation while sipping water at the end of a seven-hour session. "You have transcended peeing.")

Update

And speaking of speaking of spiritual hucksterism, here's Scientology's version of "We are the world."

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