"Via a psychedelic music aficionado acquaintance - Is this something you've heard of?"

A reader [ADDED: Hazy Dave] sends me this link and says:

As an old Audible Althouse listener, I can understand the appeal of having a friendly well-modulated voice in your ears (though I usually can't get through entire an podcast and I'm too impatient to listen to books, even while driving). But I guess I listen to music for the occasional goose-bumps or “bubbles in your head” experience. Listening to a young blonde whisper in your ear seems like cheating, if not outright pr0n... I may need to try this out with earbuds later, just to see if I get weirded out, or if it just seems funny, or what. "Unsettling" seems like a reasonable starting point, even (very quietly) through tinny office computer speakers.

Wow! I watched some of those ASMR videos, then went back to some Audible Althouse  — my 2005-2006 podcast project— they're all here [ADDED: or maybe not.] It really does seem like that ASMR stuff. Truly strange from that perspective!

This reminds me a bit of Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North" and my own practice of falling asleep and sleeping playing an audiobook, a book read by a man with a gentle voice (almost always Bill Bryson, David Rakoff, or David Foster Wallace).

At the first link:

If... you’re one of the people the video was made for—one of those people who experience Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—you’ll probably find all six minutes incredibly satisfying, the video equivalent of a really nice, mellow kind of drug that leaves no aftertaste....

ASMR is a tricky feeling to describe, and I can only talk about it secondhand. From what I understand from conversations with ASMRers, it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine....

"What a perfect opportunity to inflict this on Althouse readers!"

Said Palladian...

Anti-Walkerites on the eve of the recall performed an "Om the Dome" ritual at the Wisconsin Capitol.

"Oma Vic McMurray, who runs a home childcare center and has been active in the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker, instructed the crowd on breathing techniques and led a practice group 'Om.'"

McMurray says the community chant was meant to be a time to "consciously connect on a spiritual level so that we could raise the energy and have faith that this will be a good week for Wisconsin."

Connie Nadler says she felt the symbolism of the moment. "It was quite touching. I was at the connecting point where we were stretching to reach and connect to the other end of the line. The Capitol police were there and were real encouraging. People rushed from the street to help" complete the circle.

Reminds me of Allen Ginsberg at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968:



And, especially since a building was involved, it takes me all the way back to 1967 and "Levitate the Pentagon"....

[A] group of hippies was trying to exorcize the Pentagon. The brainchild of Abbie Hoffman, the plan was for people to sing and chant until it levitated and turned orange, driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Viet Nam. The Pentagon didn't move.

Related: "What do you think Abbie Hoffman would do to stop the Koch brothers?"

Have you heard about the health insurance plan that covers your fresh, organic fruits and vegetables?

It's real!

Last summer, I paid a whole dollar for weekly half-boxes of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables as part of a community supported agriculture program. My health insurer paid the rest.

But wait, there's more:

A meditation-based stress-reduction class I took last year also was eligible for reimbursement...

Meditation! You know what else is stress-reducing? Sex. Why don't health insurers cover that? And I don't mean birth control and Viagra. I mean sex itself. Isn't that where we are going? Sex is a health matter. Insurance is going universal, with extensive government-imposed coverage requirements. I think those who have to pay for sex — people with various (undoubtedly health-related) limitations that preclude their acquiring it free — should be reimbursed.

Yes, you have to legalize prostitution first, but the prospect of something else that people like becoming eligible for government-mandated insurance ought to provide the incentive for legalization. As with marijuana, legalization is achieved through medicalization, and there's never a stage where you're simply free and able to seek pleasure. The old restraints will be removed only for the purpose of locking on the new restraints. You will have sex and drugs, when it's your medicine and when you can be made to pay for everyone else's.

Just wait!

I wrote all that without reading the rest of the column, so I'm amused to see what the columnist — Chris Rickert — actually did with the groundwork that got me going. He goes from meditation to sex too:

You don't have to look far to find that sex — at least the kind of sex society values, i.e., that occurring in loving, mature, committed relationships — is a partner with wellness.... Depending on which studies you believe, sex encourages intimacy, in some cases might reduce depression, provides good exercise, reduces pain and may even reduce the risk of cancer.

If a health insurer is going to buy its customers kohlrabi and celeriac to encourage healthy eating, why shouldn't it buy them contraception to encourage more healthful sex? In the end, everyone wins.

He'd just buy contraception at this point, not an actual sex worker's treatments. That seems so unfair. Them that's got shall get. Those with benefits get more benefits. When will government level the playing field?

"[C]ovetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on."

"It’s the frequent fruitlessness of such feelings that the Buddha is said to have pondered after he unplugged from the social grid of his day — that is, the people he lived around — and wandered off to reckon with the human predicament. Maybe his time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from these emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them. In any event, it’s because the underlying emotions haven’t changed, and because the grid conveys and elicits them with such power, that his formula holds appeal for many people even, and perhaps especially, today."

Robert Wright, writing in the NYT, on a theme that has been big in the NYT: how technology is hurting our brains.

"Our minds are quite scattered with planning and remembering and tracking and we don't live much in the present."

"We can be so lost in our minds that we don't see the sunset over the Pacific, we don't see the eyes of our children when we come home, we don't see the garden."

Why haven't I produced another post yet this morning?

Because I'm seething away in the comments on the Goldie Hawn/Buddhism post from yesterday!

When do Hollywood liberals favor teaching religion in schools?

When the religion is Buddhism, propounded by The Hawn (as in Goldie) Foundation and it's used "to rethink our whole approach to classroom education, integrating neuroscience with the latest social and emotional learning techniques," because "a peaceful, happy child is the first step towards a peaceful world."

Somehow the Other's religion is neuroscience, to be imposed on rowdy children to make them serene. Thanks, Hollywood liberals. You know, I can't think of one Hollywood movie about kids that had a placid protagonist. The movies always boost boisterous children. The great kids that we are encouraged to identify with are mischievous and too energetic for their stuffy teachers. If there were a movie with an aging hippie teacher character bringing nonviolence to the kids through Buddhist meditation, I'm virtually positive she would be a self-loving idiot whose was really about repression and a hostility to the vibrancy of youth. But outside of the movies, are our Hollywood friends on the side of the childish protagonists or the repressive authority figures?

"In our culture, women have been conditioned to have closed sexuality and open feelings, and men to have open sexuality and closed feelings."

From a ridiculous article about a commune dedicated to the female orgasm.

AND: I'm concerned about the dedication of communes to female orgasms.

A dubious Wall Street Journal opinion piece on alternative medicine.

I know some of my readers are doctors and scientists, and I'd like a professional assessment of what I consider to be a very weird column by Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil. (Enough authors?)

I'll just highlight a few things that triggered my suspicions:

In mid-February, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the Bravewell Collaborative are convening a "Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public." This is a watershed in the evolution of integrative medicine, a holistic approach to health care that uses the best of conventional and alternative therapies such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture and herbal remedies. Many of these therapies are now scientifically documented to be not only medically effective but also cost effective.

A "summit" is a "watershed in the evolution"? Even setting the inane mixed metaphor aside, that's inane. The convening of a "summit" is not a scientific advance, it's just people talking about something. And either treatments are supported by scientific testing or they are not. I'm not impressed that "many" alternative therapies have been "scientifically documented to be ... medically effective." The proper distinction is between what has passed scientific testing and what has not. I don't care about the categories "conventional and alternative." If it's proven scientifically it becomes conventional, doesn't it? The proven ones don't get to hang out with the bogus ones, propping up their reputation. [CLARIFICATION: I mean Chopra, Ornish, Roy, and Weil can't be permitted to group the proven ones with the bogus ones.]

President-elect Barack Obama and former Sen. Tom Daschle (the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services) understand that if we want to make affordable health care available to the 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance, then we need to address the fundamental causes of health and illness, and provide incentives for healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing only drugs and surgery.

So, the alternative therapy gurus want their cut of the money. Millions of people need medical treatments, and these guys want money to instruct people about meditation and eating right.

Many people ... have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lifestyle -- what we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke cigarettes, how much exercise we get, and the quality of our relationships and social support -- can be as powerful as drugs and surgery.

Oh, bullshit. People believe that — to excess if anything. What they have a hard time with is actually losing weight, exercising, and quitting smoking. Don't waste limited health care funds on these characters who only want to nag us about what we already know. And by the way, this isn't alternative medicine. It's is the routine health advice that any doctor would give you.

Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker's compensation claims costs, yet studies show that it is often susceptible to acupuncture and Qi Gong. Herbs usually have far fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals.

Usually. Look, if those herbs are drugs, test them as drugs and get them approved by the FDA. Don't spread the generic notion that "herbs" are good. That's harebrained hippie talk. And as for acupuncture and Qi Gong: Point me to the scientific studies.

I'm skipping the paragraph that talks about erections. Integrative medicine wants to help you with your orgasms.

Closing in on the conclusion:

It's time to move past the debate of alternative medicine versus traditional medicine, and to focus on what works, what doesn't, for whom, and under which circumstances.

Yeah, let's call it all science, and let's just do real science, and cut the bullshit.

It will take serious government funding to find out, but these findings may help reduce costs and increase health.

Look, if you have a study you want funded, apply for funding. If you just want public support for a nice chunk of cash to go toward promoting alternative medicine, I say no no no no no no no.

Integrative medicine approaches bring together those in red states and blue states, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, because these are human issues.

Oh, shut up.