"A more obviously historic site in Duluth is the Armory" where "Dylan caught Buddy Holly's tour two days before Holly's fatal plane crash."

"Dylan was at the front of the crowd and spoke later of making eye contact with Holly, a moment fans in Duluth think of as a kind of mystical passing of the baton from one rock 'n' roll generation to the next."

From an article about traveling through Bob Dylan's Minnesota.

This post gets my "religion substitutes" tag. That's a pretty creepy example. Why is that worth saying? Poor Buddy Holly died at the age of 22. He was only 5 years older than Dylan. There was no one generation to the next! Buddy Holly only exemplifies the 1950s for us because he didn't make it out alive. But he would have fit in just fine with the 1960s. The Rolling Stones had a hit with "Not Fade Away" in 1964. The Beatles covered "Words of Love":

The Beatles' version was recorded on October 18, 1964. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were fans of Holly, harmonized on their version, holding to the vocal and instrumental sound of Holly's original as well as they could. When they had played this song in their early days at the Cavern Club in 1961 and 1962, Lennon and George Harrison were the vocalists. Ringo Starr played a packing case on this song as well as drums, to achieve a similar sound to Holly's "Everyday."

When that recording was made, Holly would have just turned 28. The Beatles — at the height of their popularity — were doing their best to sound like the man who had died 5 years earlier. Even if you are a soft touch for spiritualistic claptrap, the "baton" was Buddy's to keep, and it's nothing but sad that we didn't get to hear what he would have done in the 1960s.

"Faithful is not love. Faithful is a subservient position..."

"... in which insecure people can not accept that, despite their tremendous talents, they might be wrong. That's why I like cats and independent dogs."

So says Dante in at 3:01 a.m. in The Faithful Dog Café.

Faithful is not love? That made me think Love is faithful and kind... But it's "Love is patient and kind..."

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. 

Does that sound like a cat or a dog?

It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful....

Cat?

... it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 

Cat?!

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Cat?!!

Love never ends. 

That sounds like what we mean when we say faithful. (I know Paul goes on to put "love" in a category with "faith" and "hope" and says "love" is the greatest, but the love he describes includes complete faithfulness to the loved one.)

"Want to reduce the effects of global warming? Stop working so hard."

"Working fewer hours might help slow global warming, according to a new study released Monday by the Center for Economic Policy and Research."

A worldwide switch to a "more European" work schedule, which includes working fewer hours and more vacation time, could prevent as much as half of the expected global temperature rise by 2100, according to the analysis, which used a 2012 study that found shorter work hours could be associated with lower carbon emissions.

How about good old unemployment? Can we get some credit for that? Offsets of some kind? Or is everyone supposed to back off?

But I love this suggestion! I made my own list of similar suggestions back in 2010, following on an article that said people ought to give up air-conditioning. I had 6 ideas:

1. Your weight should be at the low end of normal, indicating that you are not overconsuming the products of agriculture.

2. You should not engage in vigorous physical exercise, as this will increase your caloric requirements. You may do simple weight-lifting or calisthenics to keep in shape. Check how many calories per hour are burned and choose a form of exercise that burns as few calories as possible.

3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don't run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.

4. Get up at sunrise. Don't waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.

5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don't have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.

6. If you have free time, such as a vacation from work, spend it in your home town. Read library books, redo old jigsaw puzzles, meditate, tell stories to your children — the list of activities is endless. Just thinking up more items to put on that list is an activity that could be on the list. Really embrace this new way of life. A deep satisfaction and mental peace can be achieved knowing that you are saving the earth.

Harsh, but if people really believed in global warming, they'd have gone in this direction long ago.

Yoga in public schools — an Establishment Clause problem.

NPR has trouble seeing the objection. This kids are stretching, readying their minds for learning, don't you know? But here's one mother's report:

"They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercise"...

The woman, Mary Eady, was able to take her son out of the classes — which is an appropriate accommodation but insufficient to solve an Establishment Clause violation. (In the old prayer-in-school cases, excusing the students who chose not to pray did not suffice.)

The school's program was richly funded by the K.P. Jois Foundation, whose Hindu founders connected yoga to their religion.

"It's stated in the curriculum that it's meant to shape the way that they view the world, it's meant to shape the way that they make life decisions," Eady says. "It's meant to shape the way that they regulate their emotions and the way that they view themselves."

"And then the question becomes — if it is religious, which it is, who decides when enough religion has been stripped out of the program to make it legal?" [says Dean Broyles, president and chief counsel of the Escondido-based National Center for Law and Policy]. "I mean, that's the problem when you introduce religion into the curriculum and actually immerse and marinate children in the program."...

"It is the stated goal of both the Jois Foundation and the district itself to prove scientifically that Ashtanga yoga works for kids here in the district and then export it nationally," Broyles says.

The Jois Foundation has a director, Eugene Ruffin, who is himself Catholic and who says the values taught in the program aren't specifically Hindu. But making religion generic doesn't solve your problem. Consult the original Warren Court school-prayer case, Engel v. Vitale, which involved a prayer concocted by the state that stripped out all denominational specificity.

My position — explained here in the context of Kwanzaa — is that the government should not use schools for exercises that reach into the spiritual aspect of the child's mind. Quite aside from whether courts would see an Establishment Clause violation, it should be rejected as a policy choice. Even where you have trouble deciding whether something is religion or not, if it's a religion substitute, operating like religion, you should be revolted by the government intruding into the sphere that belongs to the individual, parents, and private organizations. And on this ground, I would object to all sorts of indoctrination and idol-worship. Public schools must be committed to teaching real substance of the secular kind. Think: math and science.

ADDED: Imagine if a Christian foundation were handing out huge grants to public schools to adopt a program based on its values, with generic prayer-like incantations led by the teacher. Would NPR and its devotees be nodding calmly at how nice it was?

ALSO: NPR quotes the mother's attempt at paraphrasing the prayer-like incantation. I'd like to see the actual text that the school uses! Here's some material at the Jois website, but it doesn't show the text I'm looking for.

"The Elvis Problem: Defining Religion Under The First Amendment."

Instapundit weighs in on the Kwanzaa question I brought up yesterday.

And I want to drag something I wrote in my own comments section up to the front page. The Madison School District portrays Kwanzaa as something that belongs in government-run schools because it's a "culturally relevant practice," but:

Religion is a "culturally relevant practice."

It just doesn't belong in public schools.

And:

I mean practicing it doesn't belong in public schools.

It's fine and even desirable to teach children about the various religious traditions. It's part of history and social studies, and it should be taught competently and with a fact-based approach, not infused with promptings to feel inspired and devoted.

I think this is such a solid point that the definition of religion — for these school-based Establishment Clause cases — should be built around the idea that the compulsory attendance coerced in the name of education should not be exploited to capture the part of the child's mind that turns to God when the child is religious. All human beings have this aspect of their minds, whether they are religious or not, and the state's power does not belong there. When we see devotional exercises in public schools we should be revolted.

Background note: In the most relevant Supreme Court case (which is in a somewhat different context), the Court spoke of religion as "a sincere and meaningful belief which occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by the God of those [religions] admittedly qualifying for the exemption." (The context was conscientious objection from the military draft.) The value of the Court's definition was that it avoided making distinctions and favored equal treatment under the laws.

Shouldn't the Freedom From Religion Foundation sue the Madison school district for the extensive celebration of a religious holiday?

From the Madison Metropolitan School District website:

Kwanzaa celebrated at two schools

Students and staff at Falk and Lowell Elementary Schools recently performed and displayed art projects that reflect the principles of Kwanzaa. The culmination of a semester’s work incorporating Culturally Relevant Practices, the celebration also featured the donations from the schools' service learning project to help build a school library in Ghana. Four MMSD elementary schools (also Hawthorne and Mendota) are working together to provide Culturally Relevant Practices and experiences for all their students.

Video of Madison teachers and children celebrating Kwanzaa at the link.

The school district will surely say that Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday, but what constitutes religion for Establishment Clause purposes? It's not an easy question. I say that as someone who has taught a law school class in Religion and the Constitution for many years.

I once gave an exam that challenged students to think about Establishment Clause problems inherent in an invented state program pushing environmentalism, defined by statute to mean "the belief in the importance of honoring and conserving the Earth’s resources, minimizing the impact of individual human beings on the Earth, and understanding one’s personal duty to inspire others to honor and conserve resources and to minimize human impact on Earth." In my hypothetical, schools were required to stage day-long Earth Day celebrations every year, praising nature and inspiring conservation, and teachers had to begin each school day with a "solemnification exercise" that included "a recitation enforcing the values of environmentalism along with a set of symbolic gestures," with this example, described in the state law:

On a small table, the teacher unfolds a green cloth to reveal a twig, a small stone, an egg, and a small box of good soil. The teacher opens the box, takes out a bit of soil and sprinkles it on the stone, egg, and twig, and says: "This is our Earth, which is given to us, to love and preserve, for all time." The students then repeat that phrase aloud, and the teacher carefully closes the box, rewraps the items, and puts them away.

My hypothetical environmentalism, like Kwanzaa, is at least a religion substitute, in that it attempts to capture the children's idealism and spiritual longings and to direct them into a particular ideology. It employs the devices of traditional religion: songs of celebration, symbolic gestures and rituals, incantations. In the case of Kwanzaa, based on what I've read, it was originally designed as an alternative to Christmas. And the 7th of the 7 principles of Kwanzaa is:

Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in God, our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

Presumably the God part is watered down for school purposes, but watering down religion is a problem in itself.

ADDED: I see that at something called "The Official Kwanzaa Web Site" — what makes it "official"? — the "Imani/Faith" principle has no "God." It is otherwise word-for-word the same as what I've quoted above. Without God, the statement of faith is puzzling: believe with all your heart in our people and the righteousness of our struggle. That sounds like the worst of what governments have done grabbing at the hearts of young people.

A conversation for the end of the year.

"The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit — replacing what works with what sounds good."

Writes Thomas Sowell, in a column called "On Christmas, Liberals Are By No Means Liberal."

After watching a documentary about the tragic story of Jonestown, I was struck by the utterly unthinking way that so many people put themselves completely at the mercy of a glib and warped man, who led them to degradation and destruction. And I could not help thinking of the parallel with the way we put a glib and warped man in the White House.

Wow. That's harsh.

Here's the documentary about Jonestown. And here's Sowell's excellent book "Intellectuals and Society."

"Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism."

"It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that."

So writes Firmin DeBrabander, who is a philosophy prof at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in the corner of the NYT called "The Stone," which calls itself "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."

I'm not familiar with Firmin DeBrabander but I would like to know if he extends his principle generally to all of the individual rights currently protected in the various interpretations that have emanated from the Supreme Court.

Does our abortion culture/free speech culture promote a fatal slide into extreme individualism? Do abortion rights/free speech rights foster a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another. Would Professor DeBrabander say that abortion rights and free speech rights are not freedom but the opposite?

Let me offer a bonus literary reading to sharpen the question. It's from a famous book. I've added some boldface to stress things relevant to DeBrabander's philosophy:

"You are thinking... that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?...

"We are the priests of power.... God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone— free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body— but, above all, over the mind....

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation— anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to...."

"Corporate America has its own religions, and one of them is Myers-Briggs."

Yea, even as there are 12 signs of the zodiac in Astrology, there are 16 personality types in Myers-Briggs.

Academics would contend that... Myers-Briggs... [is] about belief much more than scientific evidence. And it’s administered by leadership coaches who, by and large, have no formal education in the science of psychology. 

“People like it because it reveals something they didn’t know about themselves or others,” says [Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School]. “That could be true of a horoscope, too.”

Even Katharine Downing Myers concedes that “psychologists had no use for the indicator; they felt that Jung was a crazy mystic.”

And yet the psychological community has been reticent to speak up too vocally against it. The fact is, many psychology professors do lucrative side work as organizational consultants. And as taboo as it is to praise Myers-Briggs in U.S. academia, it’s equally taboo to disparage it in corporate America.

Maybe if it were understood to be more of a religion/religion substitute, corporate America could overcome its embarrassing dependency on this pseudoscience.

"3 Books To Read Before The End Of The World."

On the theory, presumably, that it's still amusing to talk about the Mayan apocalypse, NPR picks out some reading material, beginning with "literature's first and perhaps best answer to the question of what to do while waiting to die." The answer is: "Stay up all night, tell stories, make jokes and ignore what's coming."

Whether we're imagining the coming death in apocalyptic form or not, it's good advice and it's the advice most people seem to follow (even if they mix in some religion).

Obama promises "meaningful action... regardless of the politics."

Noted.

Obama's statement is...
	Meaningful and not political.
	Meaningful and political.
	Not meaningful but political.
	Neither meaningful nor political.
pollcode.com free polls

"Meaningful" was a vogue word circa 1970s. Back when people were acting as if sex outside of marriage was new idea and "pre-marital sex" seemed to be missing the point, the term "meaningful relationships" had its day. That faded over time. I'm not sure exactly how or when. It wasn't just sex but also politics that were supposed to be meaningful. One imagined wellsprings of inner satisfaction opening up. It was almost even religious. Or not religious, but spiritual. A rabbi wrote a book called "The Politics of Meaning." It turned Hillary Clinton on and made Michael Kelly write a NYT article titled "Saint Hillary."

Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

That was written in 1993. (Michael Kelly died in 2003, in service as an embedded journalist in Iraq.) In 2008, Jonah Goldberg published a book called "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." In 2010, we got our all-encompassing health care, not from Saint Hillary, but from Saint Barack. We called it Obamacare, because Obama cares, cares about meaning, regardless of the politics.

Barack Obama has written 2 books. The word "meaningful" appears once in "Dreams from My Father" ("meaningful time frame") and 7 times in "The Audacity of Hope":

1. "[W]hat binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."

2. "I have criticized the [Bush] Administration for lacking a meaningful health-care agenda...."

3. "[T]he standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important in their lives, and in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics, the cornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and policies."

4. "[W]e already have hard evidence of [school] reforms that work... meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a fuller picture of how a student is doing...."

5. "[A lesbian] knew when she decided to support me that I was opposed to same-sex marriage, and she had heard me argue that, in the absence of any meaningful consensus, the heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians."

6. "[W]here there’s strong evidence of prolonged and systematic discrimination by large corporations, trade unions, or branches of municipal government, goals and timetables for minority hiring may be the only meaningful remedy available."

7. "I wanted to call [an immigration activist group] and explain that American citizenship is a privilege and not a right; that without meaningful borders and respect for the law, the very things that brought them to America... would surely erode...."

What meaning is contained in "meaningful" for Barack Obama, specifically, and for all of us?

Something terrible has happened. Children were killed, seemingly senselessly. We are bereft of meaning. The President deems it meaningful to speak, to offer us meaning, not for why that happened, but in the future. An action has horrified us, an action in the past, which we cannot change. But in the future, actions can be taken. We can do something there in that place of hope. So meaning, meaning... where is meaning? Put it in the future, where the action is. Meaningful action.

There, now. Are you salved? Are you saved? Is there meaning?

"On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason."

Best answer to the question why Paul Ryan — and not Biden (or Obama or Romney) — drank water during the debate. I had 5 suggested answers in my poll:



But the commenters — both in my post here and over at the poll site — came up with some funny answers:

"Hey — you think you're the only one playing a drinking-game during that debate!?"

"Drinking water helped him keep his cool and avoid beating the shit out of that smug asshole Biden."

"Heat generated by combination of Biden's gusty pizza cheese-smelling sighs and the dazzling white-hot glare from Biden's fake chompers led to increased need for hydration."

"Possibly he had come across Enoch Powell's 'Full Bladder technique.' Powell was a British politician of fifty years ago, famous, inter alia, for being a brilliant public speaker. He always made his speeches on a full bladder, on the theory that it helped concentrate the mind."

"Actually, it was a specially devised clear liquid CHEAT SHEET full of rethuglican LIES!!!"

And thanks as well to those who said things like:

Thanks for posting this, Ann. I've long felt that Instapundit was a bit too heavy on links to relevant and/or interesting content.

Wow. That's some hard hitting insightful analysis there, Ann.

I say thanks because it's helpful to me to remember that there's a segment of the population that doesn't get fun. I assume my readers are fun-loving, but there are some people who are essentially fun deaf, and things like this are as annoying as Joe Biden guffawing while Paul Ryan is talking about nuclear war in the Middle East.

Perhaps for some people, the sorrows and travails of this world are so weighty that we ought to demand a somber demeanor at all times — not just from ourselves, but from others. I can imagine a religion that requires grim facial and verbal expression at all times and for everyone, forever. An eternal funeral. After all: People are dying, dying at the rate of one per second. Wipe that smile off your face. Permanently.

Okay. I just wanted to acknowledge that you of the Religion of Grim are out there. And now, why don't you just take it easy, and please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you'd like?

Axelrod says Obama "was confronted with this kind of Gantry-esque performance" from Romney.

On "Face the Nation," talking about last week's debate. Bob Schieffer was all: "What did you just say?" And Axelrod repeats: "Gantry-esque." Shieffer seeks to clarify: "Elmer as in Elmer Gantry the fictional evangelist?" And Axelrod goes: "Elmer Gantry. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thanks for clarifying."

What madness! What dream world is Axelrod living in? "Elmer Gantry" is a novel from 1927. It was made into a film in 1960 — half a century ago. I'm 61 years old and the movie pre-dates my movie-going days. Normal Americans are supposed to be conversant with this character? I mean, I know it's a fictional character who was played by Burt Lancaster in the movie that had something to do with religion, but I have to look it up in Wikipedia to try to see what Axelrod was driving at:

The novel tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his early ambition to become a lawyer. The legal profession does not suit the unethical Gantry, who then becomes a notorious and cynical alcoholic. Gantry is mistakenly ordained as a Baptist minister, briefly acts as a "New Thought" evangelist, and eventually becomes a Methodist minister. He acts as manager for Sharon Falconer, an itinerant evangelist. Gantry becomes her lover....

Sounds more like Obama than Mitt Romney.  New Thought, eh? That made me buy the book, downloaded in Kindle:

... a vicious satire of preachers and those they fool. Gantry has no redeeming features but is seen by the gullible public as a man who speaks the truth about God. Of course he could just as easily have been a lawyer or a politician and the heart of Lewis’s satire is how easily people believe what they want to believe.

That really does sound like Obama. Interesting that the character is fixed in the Mind of Axelrod! Wish I could trace that thought-path back to its origin.

NOTE: I corrected a couple errors in the transcript text, based on watching the recorded show.

ADDED: A passage from the book that made me think of how Obama might have felt on debate day:

Now that he often had as many as a thousand in the audience, as he peeped out at them from the study he had stage-fright. Could he hold them? What the deuce had he intended to say about communion? He couldn't remember a word of it. It was not easy to keep on urging the unsaved to come forward as though he really thought they would and as though he cared a hang whether they did or not.

It was not easy, on communion Sundays, when they knelt round the altar rail, to keep from laughing at the sanctimonious eyes and prim mouths of brethren whom he knew to be crooks in private business. It was not easy to go on saying with proper conviction that whosoever looked on a woman to lust after her would go booming down to hell when there was a pretty and admiring girl in the front row. And it was hardest of all, when he had done his public job, when he was tired and wanted to let down, to stand about after the sermon and be hand-shaken by aged spinster saints who expected
him to listen without grinning while they quavered that he was a silver-plated angel and that they were just like him.

"I’m asking you to keep believing in me."

Is this a religion?

ADDED: From the same article:

Before the president took the stage, Madison congressional candidate Mark Pocan, Mayor Paul Soglin, outgoing U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., and U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin set the tone for the afternoon, encouraging attendees to get out and vote.

While at the beginning of his speech Obama took shots at Romney, he mostly stuck to talking about his vision for the country and urged the crowd of young supporters to vote in November.

College aged voters showed up at the polls in historic numbers four years ago to propel Obama into office, and Thursday he again pushed for their support.

So there was no pretense at all that this event had anything to do with educating young minds, exploring political ideas. It was unabashedly a get-out-the-vote effort... right down to demanding that the students acquire tickets by going to the campaign website and providing their email addresses and phone numbers (which, from what I've heard, were immediately used to spam the students with pleas for donations).

"Cleansing" — basically, juice-drinking — with co-workers is a big trend in NYC.

Or so the NYT says in this big article, which seems a bit like an ad for a product called "Cooler Cleanse":

Eric Helms, who founded the four-year-old Cooler Cleanse company with the actress Salma Hayek, says office cleansers now make up 30 percent of his business, and in the last year he has hired three customer-service employees just to handle the details of them.

Salma Hayek! She has something to do with you working in an office. Buy this juice.

Last year Oprah Winfrey’s entire production staff in Chicago completed a three-day cleanse...

Recent six-juice-a-day-dieters include employees at Merrill Lynch and the Carlyle Group, she said. In May, Citigroup began offering BluePrintCleanse in some of its Manhattan cafeterias, a spokeswoman said. Restaurant Associates, which runs the cafeteria, declined to explain the decision.

The popularity of cleanses continues to rise, even as health experts seem dubious about the efficacy of some of these diets. “Your liver and kidneys can handle toxins just fine,” said Joan Salge Blake, a Boston University associate professor of nutrition, who has studied fad diets. “There’s no science to back up cleansing.”

Seem dubious?!

The thing about the "corporate cleanse" is that it reaches men. Without this new approach to marketing the dubious product, the customers would be mostly women.

Jina Wye, director of sales and marketing for BluePrintCleanse...  said: “These Type-A men have an all-or-none perspective. If they’re going to commit, they do it whole hog.” Most popular among male en masse cleansers: the Excavation cleanse, described on the Web site as “the most intense.”

Now, I'm thinking about the corporate bathrooms, and I'm a little scared.

Office cleanses are rarely corporate sponsored, subsidized or sanctioned. Several companies declined to allow employees to speak publicly about them because cleansing is a sensitive issue.

In March, @VeraWanggang tweeted: “Have been inspired by @glamour to try @coolercleanse. We are doing it as a team so none of us flake.” But the spokeswoman Priya Shukla said in an e-mail that she decided recently that the company won’t comment on diet or nutrition, which she noted are “personal choices.”

Ha ha. You can see why it's "sensitive." Management bullying everyone to participate in a completely unscientific pseudo-medical treatment? We are doing it as a team so none of us flake. "Flake" is the perfectly ironic word choice. You may not flake, but you are flakes. I'd rather get stuck with a boss who insisted that the underlings join his prayer groups.

“I felt like I kept hearing about juice cleanses, and I thought, ‘I’ll try anything, let me see what this is all about,’ ” said [Peter Alfano, a Citigroup vice president, 37]. Cleansing with colleagues appealed to him because of the moral support. “We would all hang out together at lunchtime, and we’d take our bottles to the park,” he said. “You can’t wait for it to end, but the feeling of accomplishment is amazing.”

You drank a bottle of juice in the park. Something a toddler does. Yet you have an amazing feeling of accomplishment. And you needed a support group to do it. And you wanted to do it because you kept hearing about it. Not because you looked up the research on the subject. Just: People are talking about this, so I'll try it and see what it's all about. Could people please start talking about science and behaving like an adult so maybe this corporate VP might try it? He says he's try anything.

Those who choose to drink the kale at other offices reported enjoying creating rituals around the cleanse, if not always the juices (and the endless trips to the bathroom). 

See? People lapse into religion mode. Your childish take-my-bottle-to-the-park and going-poopie is now a cult. Congratulations, morons!

At the Madison Avenue office of the fashion Web site Moda Operandi, every empty bottle was slammed triumphantly on the Ping-Pong table. 

Ooh! Macho. What big (ping pong) balls you have!

At the Brooklyn outpost of a Big Four accounting firm, there was a first tentative sip in unison of that hour’s concoction, followed by tasting notes — while cleanse dropouts were referred to as “doing the walk of shame” to the refrigerator....

Shaming. In the office. And what are "tasting notes"? Like that crap people write about wine?

Co-workers don’t let co-workers drink alone, suggests the BluePrintCleanse Web site, noting that “happy side effects include increased energy, productivity, focus and clarity (which come in handy at the office.)” Cleansers may dispute the promise of alertness (“I felt like I was jet-lagged,” said Cynthia Rooney, who drank with 10 Ralph Lauren colleagues), but many agreed they were more productive.

Many agreed. Who's going to volunteer that they are less productive?

And who's going to puncture all that happiness with an explanation of the placebo effect? Not the New York Times.

"Listen, we’re just politicians. I wasn’t elected to play God."

Said John Boehner:

The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney. I’ll tell you this: 95 percent of the people that show up to vote in November are going to show up in that voting booth, and they are going to vote for or against Barack Obama.

Mitt Romney has some friends, relatives and fellow Mormons ... some people that are going to vote for him. But that’s not what this election is about. This election is going to be a referendum on the president’s failed economic policies.

Mitt Romney believes, just like we do, that if we’re going to get the economy back, if we’re going to put the American people back to work, we need to fix the tax code, we need to stop the regulatory juggernaut that’s going on in Washington and we need to fix our economy. Solid guy, he’s going to do a great job, even if you don’t fall in love with him.

I think we've had enough love for a while. Let's not idolize politicians.

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?"

"I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear..."

"... nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary."

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

That's the rest of the paragraph in Thoreau's "Walden" that begins "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

I'd looked it up when I was writing this morning's post "'Baseball as a Road to God' — the name of a course at NYU" and saying that "my father never went for a walk in the woods." I was big on "Walden" back in those days. Well, you know that. You know the story of me and religion and my high school graduation. It was back in that "Meade's Mud" post.

Remember: "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place...."

And everything seems connected, now, doesn't it? There's Paris, and we were just talking about France and the French, and whether they're the ones who are not living what is not life.

To put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...

Rout. Cut. Shave. Drive. Reduce.

"Baseball as a Road to God" — the name of a course at NYU.

Taught by John Sexton:

As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.

“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”...

The core of his original reading list — “The Sacred and the Profane,” by the religion historian Mircea Eliade — remains central to the class all these years later. Eliade’s essential insight, at least for Dr. Sexton’s purposes, is his concept of hierophany, meaning the manifestation of the sacred in the world. So, just as much as Stonehenge or the Kaaba or the Western Wall or St. Peter’s Basilica, baseball in Sextonian teaching affords such a locus for faith.

Hey, this reminds me of what my father used to say when I asked him why he didn't go to church. When we kids were little, the parents took us to church — we went here — but later they opted out. My father, who liked to play golf, said "God is every bit as much on the golf course as He is in church." I'm putting a capital "H" on "He," but it's not like he said it with a capital "H." That answer annoyed me, by the way. I was a teenager.
I was a nonbeliever in the proposition that guys on the golf course were thinking about God. Maybe if he'd claimed God was there with him when he went for a walk in the woods, I'd have accepted it. But my father never went for a walk in the woods.

By the way, a sexton is "An officer responsible for a church and its property, and for tasks relating to its maintenance or management" or "A warden, a custodian; a guardian or keeper of something..." The etymology goes back to words like "sacristan" and is influenced by the "secretarius" line of thinking which leads to "secretary." It's not connected to "sex," "the state of being male or female," which goes back to the Middle French word "sexe," meaning genitals —I'm getting this from the Oxford English Dictionary, which, sadly, I can't link to — even though one might think of genitals as sacred and secret.

"Hierophany" — which the linked article calls Sexton's "concept of... the manifestation of the sacred in the world" — is a word that is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. The closest thing is hierophancy, "The function of a hierophant; capacity of expounding sacred mysteries." A hierophant — familiar to anyone who's fooled with Tarot cards — is "An official expounder of sacred mysteries or religious ceremonies...." The etymology goes back to a root that means "bring to light, make known, reveal."



The sexton and the hierophant... picture them. One keeps things and the other brings them out into the light. Sexton's intellectual pursuit seems to be a manifestation of that old notion that an individual takes on a profession suggested by his name — many dentists are named Dennis, that sort of thing. If you were a sexton, would you not long to be a hierophant? If you were a groundskeeper, would you not long to be the Commissioner of Baseball? And if you were a lawprof, wouldn't you want to be President of NYU?