Just randomly venting...

[onager]

A-a-a-a-r-g-h!

Sylphs! Kook-Trails! Holistic cures for bird flu! Intelligent Design fans!

And just when I thought I'd seen everything on DU, up jumps the Global Consciousness Project...which really needs "Un" in front of the second word:

But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards...

The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.

For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.

Pfft! I was in South Korea when they planted the Princess. Not one Korean in my immediate area had the slightest interest in her funeral. The only comments I heard were along the lines of: "Why is everybody in the West so interested in this over-privileged clothes-horse?"

The article about GCP found its way to a skeptical website and drew the following comment, which made me LMAO:

The dominant response at Free Republic was woo-woo credulity with some fundy overtones. This is as opposed to the woo-woo credulity with New Age overtones that we would see on a lefty site.

http://www.skepticnews.com/2005/02/rednova_news_ca.html

[progressoid]

1. I like this guy's post

"Ong Ching Guan's entry contains many of the earmarks of quantum quackery. Deepak Chopra himself couldn't do a much better job of mixing terminology from legitimate physics with New Age drivel to create a finely sculpted mound of excreta."

[NMMNG]

2. Wow, amazing--I made a donation!

:rofl:

[BiggJawn]

3. Woooo!

Woooo!
Woo-Woo!
I propose that they create an organic RNG. Get some chimps and hand them dice.

That makes as much sence as me introducing the ancient New-Age art of Turdomancy, where you look for portents and signs in what you leave in the crapper every morning.

Or if you DONT leave anything, that could be significant, too.

[FM Arouet666]

4. Resistance is futile

They try to "commune" or "resonate" with the machine. ???

What a load of crapola. Global Consciousness Project? I am astonished that people believe in such nonsense.

I tried to commune with the power ball machine, no go, can't even hit one number let alone six, now if I could commune with the T.V. I could save a fortune on batteries for my remote.

We are Borg? :evilgrin:

[geniph]

5. If anything in this world LESS exemplifies Global Consciousness

than millions of people sitting stupefied in front of the television watching the overhyped funeral of a spoiled, vapid, celebrity-by-reason-of-marriage-alone, I'll be goddamned if I know what it might be. Does anyone with two functioning neurons actually believe that most of the people gorging themselves on fantasy tales of doomed princesses were actually THINKING? or even, at that moment, truly sentient?

[toddaa]

6. Go ahead and call me a hateful bigot

But I despise New Agers. They are solely responsible for keeping alive the racist notion of the noble savage. White appropriation of oppressed minority groups' cultural traditions for material gain. While I'm always careful to be respectful of a pagan, once I get a whiff of new age cultural misappropriation, it's no mercy time from me.

[FM Arouet666]

7. Hateful Bigot!!!!!

Sorry, someone had to say it. ;)

If you want a scintillating new age experience go to Sedona, Az. My wife made me take a new age tour of the vortices. These are areas of energy flux where one can feel the power flow through them. I was standing in a field listening to a group of believers saying that they felt like they were being lifted off the ground. One especially large women stated that we needed to hold her down or she would float away. I bit the tip off my tongue to contain my laughter.
I never felt a thing, all I remember was needing to pee.

Calm down, put on some Yanni, get out the crystals and lets concentrate on the energy vortex. OOOOOhhhhhhmmmmmm OOOOOhhhhhhmmmmm

http://sedonamysticaltours.com/

:evilgrin:

[onager]

8. FM beat me to it, dammit...

:evilgrin:

But I like your point on the "noble savage" foofaraw. It was a crock even way back when Rousseau was spouting it, and getting a paint job and a new set of wheels from the Woo-Woos hasn't improved it a bit.

Somewhere, maybe in The Bleating Room, I got into this with someone who posted all the drippy Sew-Age propaganda about Native Americans...they lived in perfect harmony with each other and the Earth...

Right. A 30-second google turned up a webpage...written by a Lakota Sioux, no less...who talked about the Lakota forcing other tribes out of the Black Hills when they settled there.

I was also happy to work in a favorite rant about how the Lakota did that...with Evil Western Technology they acquired from Demonic White European Invaders. (They adapted horses from the Spanish and got guns from French-Canadian traders.)

The notion that they Lived In Harmony With The Earth is also BS. They tended to exhaust resources and move on, just like every other primitive people...whether they lived in pre-Columbian America, Europe or the Middle East.

That's not to say Native Americans weren't brutally and genocidally treated. They certainly were.

But mythologizing them doesn't help that any. Besides, that whole line of thinking is uncomfortably close to another tired myth: the one about two peope in fig leaves and a talking snake.

[geniph]

9. "lived in perfect harmony with each other and the Earth"???

Someone actually SAID that? That may be the single dumbest thing I've ever heard. Tell me ANY other tribe that managed to live in "harmony" with the Apache, for example. The only nation that wasn't afraid of the Apaches was the Navajo, and that was only because of strength of numbers.

Tell the Kiowa that the Comanche weren't really killing them on sight.

Puh-leeze!

And the "harmony with Nature" thing - sure, it's easy when you are nomadic and there's plenty of open space. You trash the area you live in, then you move on, and by the time you move back to where you were before, the garbage has rotted away, the animals have replenished themselves, the flora has regrown...that's not harmony, that's just the advantage of not overpopulating.