Rewriting Jesus

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This was my comment to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer when I signed the petition asking her to veto SB1062:

Whom would Jesus refuse to serve? This bill isn't just un-Constitutional. It's un-Christian.

I'd love to think that her decision to veto the bill was because of people like myself who petitioned and protested this legislative abomination. I'm not naive. I'm quite sure it had much more to do with the business leaders who brought their cumulative corporate weight to bear. Arizona doesn't want the opinions of the little people so much as it wants their tourism dollars.

Either way, that particular crisis was averted. But hate is a hydra. A similar bill is gathering momentum in Georgia.

Graham Hancock: Exploring Consciousness

Graham Hancock here offers an excellent synthesis of some of his more recent work. The "hard problem of consciousness" is turning out to be one of the most divisive issues in the sciences, as the TED fiasco made abundantly clear. Here Hancock discusses why TED was so challenged by his short talk and goes into a lot of depth on his own personal and professional processing of that question. The talk primarily focuses on three of his recent books. I've read them all and I've loved them all. Supernatural, in particular is on the short list of my very favorite books of all time. Enjoy!

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Breaking the TEAL SPELL -- UPDATE: The Noncasts

Update: The Noncasts (See Below)

Further Update: Blake Addresses Jason Freedman Mystery (See Below)

Yet Another Update: Kicking "Tealers" Down the Memory Hole (See Below)


Some years ago, when I was doing the Flower of Life teacher training with Drunvalo Melchizedek, one of my fellow travelers shared with me that he was troubled by what he called the "Drunvalettes." The term was his own invention but there was no mistaking his meaning. He even pegged a few of our classmates with that term. He liked Drunvalo quite a bit but that there was this kind of adulation by some Flower of Life folks made him uncomfortable. He had some concern that Drunvalo might have been fostering this unquestioning sycophancy. So one day when we were enjoying a break, he asked Drunvalo very directly how he felt about his Drunvalettes.

Dru shook his head and sighed. "I just try to stay out of it," he said.

That's one approach. There's a conversation to be had, for sure, about whether ignoring the phenomenon and trying to distance oneself from it is enough. Is it necessary to more actively discourage such behavior? But I think the one thing we were all in agreement on -- Drunvalo, myself, and the gentleman who raised the concern -- was that such hero worship was not a good or healthy thing.

The term "tealer" has similarly been thrown around to describe those who've drunk the "teal-aid." Some of her more passionate and angry defenders who've posted on my blog have been quite pejoratively labeled "tealers" by other commenters. So imagine my horror when I read this in a recent TEAL post about her seminar in Atlanta.

I am struck by how much the imprint of the days of slavery still remains on some of the older buildings and railways here in town. It has soaked its way especially into the old wood that dots the brick walls. The venue for yesterday’s workshop was one such a building. It was a fitting energy, seeing as how the theme of the entire workshop was self-liberation.

This group which is being called the “Tealers” is the most open minded, eccentrically intellectual group I have ever beheld.  I think it is now my favorite part of holding these workshops.  Long-term friendships are formed.  People find their place to belong. And I get to witness the fact that this world is in good hands.  All across the globe, they form a supportive web of awakening.  They touch the lives of the people in the cities they live in.  It is like a little legion of enlightened spirits, whose practice is that of non-resistance and expansion.

You're Freeeee! Wait. Not so fast.

UN Finds That Catholic Church is Bad for Children

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The report is scathing.

The Vatican "has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by, and the impunity of, the perpetrators," a U.N. human rights committee charged Wednesday.

The Vatican is stunned, a little defensive, but standing firm in its homophobia.

The stinging language surprised the Vatican and put it in damage-control mode, with officials strongly defending the church and accusing the committee of allowing itself to be swayed by pro-gay ideologues. The Vatican, which defended itself at a U.N. committee hearing last month, said the panel ignored the measures the Holy See has already taken to protect children.

"I'm tempted to say that the text was probably written ahead of time," said the Vatican's U.N. ambassador, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi.

The report was unstinting in it's criticism of the Church's handling of its sex abuse crisis.

"The committee expresses serious concern that in dealing with child victims of different forms of abuse, the Holy See has systematically placed preservation of the reputation of the church and the alleged offender over the protection of child victims," the report concluded.

At a news conference in Geneva, committee chairwoman Kirsten Sandberg ticked off some of the core findings: that bishops moved pedophile priests from parish to parish rather than reporting them to police, that known abusers are still in contact with children, and that the Vatican has never required bishops to report abusers to police.

It also targeted church attitudes on a number of hot-button issues.

The panel condemned church doctrine that it considers out of step with the principles of human rights and child welfare. In blunt language, the committee took particular aim at church stances on sexual orientation, reproductive health and gender equality. It delved into details, expressing its concerns, for instance, about the stereotyping of gender roles in Catholic school textbooks.

The Vatican pushed back hard.

The Vatican also slammed the UN for asking the Catholic Church to accept the practice of abortion, which Tomasi described as "a contradiction with the principle of life" that the UN itself should be defending. Tomasi said that the Committee did not seem to properly understand Church teachings on the matter.

The Vatican press office released a statement that said that the Holy See noted the recommendations, but expresses regret over “an attempt to interfere with Catholic Church teaching on the dignity of human person and in the exercise of religious freedom.”

The committee petitioned the Vatican to take immediate action.

Among other things, the panel called on the Vatican to immediately remove all priests known or suspected to be child molesters, open its archives on abusers and the bishops who covered up for them, and turn the abuse cases over to law enforcement authorities for investigation and prosecution.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

The committee's recommendations are non-binding and there is no enforcement mechanism. Instead, the U.N. asked the Vatican to implement the recommendations and report back by 2017. The Vatican was 14 years late submitting its most recent report.

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The Beautiful Unfoldment of an Episcopal Diocese

"I just stopped believing God was a mystery you could nail down with one book." ~ Keanu Reeves in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

I was contemplating last evening, apropos of nothing, just why I did not become an Episcopal priest. I strongly considered it in my youth and even well into my college years. I knew I was "called" to religious service. But I outgrew the Church. What it came down to, I finally realized, was that as open and forward leaning as the Episcopal Church is, it's dogmatic enough to make me uncomfortable. I still felt too limited by doctrine. I couldn't be comfortable devoting my life to it, and worse, teaching things I really couldn't endorse.

I drifted in and out of the Church for some years. There were so many things about it that I loved but other things that were quite jarring. I vividly remember being at a funeral, after not having been at a service for a year or two, and hearing the "Prayer of Humble Access" as if for the first time.

We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table...

I'd heard it hundreds of times before but suddenly it was like nails on a chalkboard. So shame-based. What possible good could come from such self-denigration? That moment crystalized in my thinking the reason that Christian orthodoxy was just never going to work for me. It probably didn't help that I've always had an inherently mystical orientation. How could we be so much less than God when we we are God, I thought. I began to realize that, in fact, that central belief of mine wasn't actually endorsed by the Church. As egalitarian as the Episcopal Church was, it was also hierarchical. God was "up there" and outside of us. It didn't really make sense to me. So I went another way.

The Ruins of TED

A friend of mine posted a video lecture the other day by another casualty of TED's war on "pseudoscience." Above is the TEDx talk that was removed from TED's platform after its super secret science board had a go -- or perhaps it was just another Reddit feeding frenzy.

I'm not terribly surprised that they disappeared Jim Vieira's talk. It's on unacknowledged ancient monuments in New England and disputed reports of the skeletal remains of a race of giants. It's pretty outre stuff, slightly more so than the Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake talks that were deleted. Not so much more controversial that it should be treated so differently. And it was treated very differently.

I've searched the entire TED site and found no official reference to Jim Vieira or his talk. All I was able to turn up was the original announcement of that TEDx event, a complaint about the deletion, and a comment about it in the discussion thread about the Hancock and Sheldrake deletions.

During the fracas over Hancock's and Sheldrake's talks, we heard repeatedly from Chris Anderson and his various acolytes that it wasn't "censorship" and how dare anyone call it that. How could it be censorship when the videos had been reposted in an unembeddable format, padded with shaming text from TED, and offered with a time limited discussion to amuse the hoi polloi? As Anderson explained it to Hancock:

In informing us that they are about to delete our talks from the TEDx Youtube channel, TED also state in their letter: “The talks won’t simply disappear from the web. Instead, we propose to feature them in a new section of TED.com that allows for debate, in which talks are carefully framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the problems with their arguments.”

Ooh, a "new section." But, of course, there was nothing new about it. The videos were posted on the site blog, which dates back to September of 2005. Next they moved the "debate" to TED Conversations where it was well and truly hidden. This message board isn't new either and it was definitely in existence when they deleted Vieira's talk. I know this because a member posted his query about its removal on TED Conversations.

This "naughty corner," as Sheldrake termed it, was invented for no purpose other than containing the damage of deleting authors whose following was every bit as prepared to attack TED's choices as the New Atheist scientism brigade that got the videos deleted.

I think the only thing that bothers me more than the censorious nature of TED -- its suppression of ideas that don't flatter the establishment or its well-heeled donors -- is Anderson's bald-faced bullshitting.

It's very obvious what happened. TED realized that Hancock wasn't going to back down and that he could bring the weight of a very energized fan base. Jim Vieira had, only a few short months before, accepted his deletion with a sense of resignation and clearly couldn't marshal the same kind of numbers in his defense.

Jim Vieira posted this on his Facebook after being notified of the deletion:

Censorship is alive and well. I have just been told that my TEDX talk will be taken down. At over 116,000 views it is the most watched TEDX video in the world in the last month. I imagine pressure from Anthropologists and Archaeologists led to the decision. the same professionals who have studied texts and scientific journals that have been censored of these giant skeleton reports. Alex Hrdlicka was named the Smithsonian's first curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology in 1910, before Hrdlicka's reign there were no denials of giant skeleton reports. Hrdlicka and associates purged further reports from the historical records but could not erase the thousands of accounts in the Smithsonian's own Ethnology reports, town histories, Scientific American, American Antiquarian, New York Times headlines etc... so he explained that those accounts were made by scientists not understanding human anatomy. Beyond that the fact that many of these accounts reported anatomic anomalies like double rows of teeth was never addressed. Hrdlicka believed no race existed in America before 4000 years ago and called Louis Leaky a heretic to his face. Hdrickla was a pre-Nazi eugenist who was quoted in the Science News letter V13 #353 1928 pg.21 as saying "the greatest danger before the American people today is the blending of the negro tenth of the population into the superior blood of the white race." In 1927 he endorsed a comparison of African babies with young apes. In 1937 he published findings in his American Journal of Physical Anthropology to "prove that the negro is phylogenetically a closer approach to primitive man than the white race." He viewed Native Americans and African Americans inferior to whites based on cranial measurement. Not one of my historical and documented quotes was cited as in error but nevertheless my video will be censored. I have a host of radio interviews in the next few weeks including Coast to Coast AM where I am sure this will be a hot topic. I urge others to pass this post along and contact TEDX to convey your disgust. I am working with the crew from GCTV to do an hour and a half video on this subject that won't be censored so stay tuned. Thanks for the support

Vieira never got the chance to directly challenge TED in its "new section." The video was deleted permanently, not reposted in any "naughty corner." The only place their reasons have been outlined is in this letter from the TEDx affiliate who'd invited him to speak. If you look at the comments, it got no response until the Hancock and Sheldrake fiasco. And then a number of their points were capably disputed by commenters. But open disputes are something TED would like to avoid because the next thing you know they have to cross out their entire argument with nothing to replace it.

It just shows what kind of contempt TED has for anyone outside of the establishment. They don't want to debate the ideas -- just ridicule, trivialize, and marginalize them. To debate them would assign them too much validity. But mostly, they can't debate them. Given every opportunity to have a real debate with Hancock and Sheldrake, they ran away. They didn't even politely and directly decline. They avoided and sidestepped.

It's very clear that when TED censors TEDx speakers, they prefer to do so quietly. Any public response from them is entirely reactive. If you're popular enough, they'll even invent whole "new sections" that are nothing but Potemkin villages propped up on sections that have existed as long as their website. And if you're as wealthy as Nick Hanauer and can afford a PR campaign, you can even shame them into posting the offending video on their main platform. But if you're a little guy, a stone mason armed with nothing but some very intriguing questions about obscured archaeological history, down the memory hole you go.

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The First Stone

A transgender woman in Shreveport, Louisiana put a councilman's biblical beliefs to the test and offered him the first stone. Unlike Councilman Ron Webb, Pamela Raintree seems to actually understand the Bible. As noted here, here, and here, the Bible doesn't simply condemn homosexuality. It imposes a death sentence. But like most good Christians, Webb discovered he wasn't willing to see his belief through to its natural conclusion. So far the only fundamentalist Christians that I'm aware of whose faith is that unambiguous, at least here in the States, are Pastor Worley and his congregation.

Councilman Webb inappropriately and in flagrant violation of the First Amendment invoked the Bible when he voted against a nondiscrimination ordinance in Shreveport. He was still voted down 6-to-1.

Shortly before the council voted 6-to-1 in favor of the ordinance back on December 10th, Councilman Ron Webb said, "the bible tells you homosexuals is an abomination." Webb added that he does not socialize with homosexuals and that the ordinance is a bad piece of legislation.

He refused to let the matter drop and put forth a motion to repeal said ordinance. Until this plucky transgender woman tested his faith.

Raintree brought the stone with her to the council meeting and stated, "Leviticus 20:13 states, 'If a man lie also with mankind as he lieth with a woman, they shall surely put him to death.' I brought the first stone Mr. Webb, in case that your Bible talk isn't just a smoke screen for personal prejudices."

KMSSTV.com reports that after Raintree gave her moving speech, "Webb moved to withdraw his proposal to repeal the Fairness Ordinance" and "his withdrawal motion received support and was unanimously supported."

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Noah, the Versificator & the Persistence of the Soul

I love Noah.  I fell hard the instant I heard his rendition of "Sexy and I Know It." He took it to pieces and brought the innate irony of the song to new heights. A round-faced, ruddy-cheeked cherub with the voice of a Delta bluesman, the boy has chops. And he keeps turning out glorious covers of good songs and bad. He elevates them all.

It occurred to me this morning as I was listening to his transformation of One Direction's "Story of My Life" just why it is that I love Noah so. I loathe One Direction, another prefab pop act designed in a board room. My daughter's twelve -- their target market -- and she knows their music insults her intelligence. Her instincts are intact. She quickly intuited that they exemplify the contempt the industry has for her. Their music is the worst kind of dreck. But there was Noah making it beautiful. So naturally I thought of Orwell's 1984.

I thought of George Winston puzzling at how the pointless entertainment churned out by a machine could be brought to life by an authentic human voice.

Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies’ diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

It was only an ’opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred!
They ’ave stolen my ’eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

I thought of how her lovely voice reminded Smith that where there is soulfulness there is beauty and there is hope.

As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.

‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.

‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.

He held Julia’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.

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The Artist Formerly Known as Teal Scott

On January 4, Teal Scott and Sarbdeep Singh Swan were wed.
The Artist will henceforth be known as TEAL.

There's a story in the Marine Corps, perhaps apocryphal, about something a senior officer wrote in a FITREP for one of his junior officers: "His Marines will follow him anywhere, if only out of a morbid curiosity to see what he'll do next."

TEAL has many followers. Only some of them are fans. Or so I learned when I wrote a blog post articulating my questions and concerns about the self-described "spiritual catalyst." Shortly after posting the piece, I started getting comments from some of her fans and detractors -- mostly detractors. About a month later TEAL responded to my post.

Last night on my way to the bathroom, I peered into Blake’s room and noticed that he looked incredibly distressed. [Doesn't anybody knock?]  I asked him what happened and he explained that a blogger named LaVaughn (Celestial Reflections) had dedicated a ten page itemized article slamming me for every aspect of my career and personal life that she could get her hands on.  He also explained that he was receiving e-mails from people asking me to refute her outrageous claims [Pssst. I didn't make any claims.] because they “no longer knew what to think”. [I believe what we have here is the need behind the need. Her response is an attempt at damage control.]  It was by far and away the most “anti-Teal” material we’ve encountered to date.  Blake was livid.  He wanted me to write an entire counter article to put people’s minds and hearts at rest.  But it didn’t feel good to me.  On top of the fact that many of her claims were too off base to even be worthy of address, [Did I mention that I didn't make any claims?] I could not get my energy behind the idea of dedicating time to defending myself against a random person who crawled out of the woodwork to gain popularity and attention by slandering me. [Dear God, could this woman be any more vain?]

It is profoundly out of alignment [Alignment with what?] to design an entire piece of writing around resisting someone or something, which is what this woman did.  She does so from a place of bitterness and fear and therefore pain.  I would not seek to increase her pain by attacking back to defend myself. [Aaawww. How sweet.] It seems that what people wanted from me was proof that she is wrong about what she said about me.  Proof is a difficult thing because there is ultimately no way to create solid proof that could not be refuted. [I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that this is the real reason she won't defend herself against the many claims I didn't make. She can't.] I could refute each piece of her evidence, the same way that she is refuting mine, but what would be gained?  I will not convince her that I am good.  I would not be doing so for any other reason than my own need to be approved of by everyone.  And I do not distrust the discrimination of the people who enjoy my material.  People do not need my proof to know what is good for them or right for them personally.  What they need to do is trust themselves.  And whatever answer they receive about me, is right for them at that time. [Aahh. So I didn't so much critique TEAL as I insulted the judgment of her many, many fans. Did you hear a dog whistle? 'Cause I'm pretty sure I heard a dog whistle.] I do not wish to prove skeptics wrong.  I gain nothing by resisting skeptics.  As my fame increases, [Dear God...] there will be more and more skeptics.  I gain only by continuing to do what makes me happy and hoping that what brings me happiness, brings other people happiness.  I understand how hard it is when you distrust yourself, to navigate a world full of opposing perspectives.  When you live without self-trust, the world seems to be full of people who are out to get you.  And so, you don’t know who to trust. [I believe that should read "whom to trust" but I probably shouldn't play grammar noodge with TEAL. That game has no end.] But you can trust yourself.  And by not refuting every skeptic that comes up against me, I am in essence giving people the opportunity to consult their own feelings and their own personal truth, and thus learn to trust themselves.  It would be a great world though if the people, who were inspired to write ten pages on one person, did so from a place of loving that person.  All too often, the only people full of enough bottled up energy to write ten pages on one person, do so from a space of hating them. [Yup. I'm a hater. Haters gotta hate, yo.]

Chipping Away at Lululemon

Chip Wilson is bad for business. He announced earlier this week that he will step down as chairman of the company he founded in 1998 -- a yoga-themed retail chain he created to address the scourge of feminism and named to mock the Japanese.

But the news just keeps getting worse for Lululemon. Yesterday the company took a beating on Wall Street after lowering its sales projections. Shares fell 11.7%.

Under the new chairmanship of Michael Casey and with new CEO Laurent Potdevin, Lululemon will try to rehabilitate its image and stock price.

Lululemon Athletica Inc (LULU.O) named a new chief executive on Tuesday and said founder Chip Wilson will step down as chairman, as the upscale yogawear retailer tries to expand globally and put a series of embarrassing quality issues and other gaffes behind it.

The company said Laurent Potdevin, most recently president of trendy footwear brand TOMS Shoes, will replace Christine Day as CEO in January and emphasized Potdevin's role leading TOMS' global expansion.

Lululemon, in the early stages of a push into Europe and Asia, was forced to recall some of its signature black stretchy pants in March because they were see-through. The incoming CEO said quality will be a top priority when he takes the helm.

"Product and quality for any premium brand such as Lululemon is absolutely paramount," Potdevin told Reuters. "It will be a very clear area of focus for me."

One hopes not insulting the public with one outrageous statement after another figures into Potdevin's plans because that would appear to be the larger problem. Most recently, Wilson announced that  women whose thighs touch are bad for their overpriced yoga pants. You can never be too rich or too thin to be a Lululemon customer. Their stores shun the over size 8 woman, burying a minimal selection of sizes 10 and 12 in the back. And if you're over size 12, forget it. Your ass is too fat for Lululemon's bottom line. Wilson explained that the extra fabric would cost too much, ignoring the obvious fact that other companies manage to eek out a profit making larger pants for far less than Lululemon's roughly $100 price tag.

Amazingly these aren't the worst things he's ever said or done. A rundown of some of Chip Wilson's greatest hits can be found here, such as his pontification on the toll feminism has taken on women's lives and health.

"Women’s lives changed immediately [after the pill]. ... Men did not know how to relate to the new female. Thus came the era of divorces," Wilson wrote in a blog post in 2009.

"With divorce and publicity around equality, women in the 1970′s/80′s found themselves operating as 'Power Women.' The media convinced women that they could win at home and be a man’s equal in the business world.... The 1980′s gave way to Power Women dressing like men in boardroom attire with big shoulder pads. They went to 3 martini lunches and smoked because this is what their 'successful' fathers did in the business world.

"... Breast cancer also came into prominence in the 1990’s. I suggest this was due to the number of cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill (initial concentrations of hormones in the pill were very high) and taking on the stress previously left to men in the working world.

"Ultimately, Lululemon was formed because female education levels, breast cancer, yoga/athletics and the desire to dress feminine came together all at one time."

Strangely, these ideas didn't go over well with the store's customer base.

Also unpopular was his plan to stem the problem of youth unemployment in the Third World. Where most of us call that exploiting child labor, the forward thinking Wilson saw it as a way for impoverished children to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Then there was his childlike glee at the unintentional hilarity of Japanese people who "try to say" Lululemon. Wilson seems almost impossibly tone-deaf.

The ironic contempt of a yoga clothier for women's bodies that stray from a largely unattainable ideal has even alienated some of Lululemon's most ardent supporters. "Luluheads" lit up social media with their outrage over Wilson's comments about thigh "pressure." And at least two Lululemon ambassadors have written public kiss-offs.

"Chip Wilson can kiss my fat yoga ass," says Alanna Kaivalya, whose long relationship with the store included twice acting as an ambassador and teaching free yoga classes in their stores.

I have taught free classes for Lululemon all across the country, and only been paid in sweat-shop-labor-made Whisper tanks. I felt like it was good exposure, and I always try to teach when it's asked of me, but eventually something didn't add up. Why wasn't I feeling good about participating in these "community building" events? Because they weren't for me, or for the students, they were for Lululemon.

I mean, it's great free advertising, right?

Get a bunch of people in a vacant store filled with nothing but Lululemon product and feed them 60 minutes of free, good quality yoga. And when they're just coming out of their yoga buzz-filled shavasana, turn on the lights and start up the cash registers. Ka-Ching!

Brilliant move. Except, the yoga teacher has just given up her Saturday and will probably go teach three more paid classes that day just to make what she needs to pay her electricity bill that week.

Word to the wise: When a business is making a profit on your free labor, you're being exploited. This is something more and more TED speakers -- and TED refuseniks -- are learning. It's something I grokked early on in the new age marketplace. People who are passionate about their non-traditional careers and interests are a very exploitable commodity. Teaching yoga is a labor of love.

Kaivalya had also grown increasingly concerned about the LGATs and cultishness in Lululemon stores, as discussed here. But the final straw was the non-inclusiveness of Wilson's comments about women who happen to have thighs -- an attitude that stands so at odds with the principles of yoga.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela hung up her Lululemon ambassadorship because Wilson's thigh-bashing comments starkly revealed what has long been an undercurrent of misogyny in the store's corporate culture.

In 2010 I was flown to Vancouver to attend Lululemon's inaugural Global Ambassador Summit: three days of networking, exercise, and immersion in lululand. The organizers described it as an opportunity to "create awesome" and in many ways it was. At a roundtable discussion with a senior executive, however, I enthusiastically raised the idea of focusing more deliberately on pregnant women, whom I knew loved their clothes. The answer? A bemused snicker, and an explanation that Lululemon was about "aspirational fashion -- and there is NOTHING aspirational about pregnancy." I smiled weakly, astonished at the incongruence between this arrogance and the attitudes of the lulu team back in New York.

I immediately thought of this interaction when I heard Wilson's interview. That same macho derision toward female bodies, especially heavy ones. Most of all: a repugnantly familiar misogynist tendency to reduce a woman to her body parts. This cultural malaise reaches far beyond loudmouths at lululemon. The anti-choice movement is notorious for defining women as little more than uteruses. Ardent "lactivists" are guilty as well, disdaining women who choose not to breastfeed. Even the breast cancer awareness movement has embraced a do-it-for-the-boys campaign to "save second base." Wilson's comments, in correlating a woman's worthiness to wear lululemon with the distance between her thighs, (that's an inverse relationship, FYI) partake of the same disturbing trend.

There is "nothing aspirational about pregnancy." I don't even know how to begin to process such a statement. Chip Wilson has created a company that is utterly contemptuous of women's bodies. Perhaps it can be rehabilitated under its new leadership but I'm not optimistic. Wilson will still sit on the board of directors and will no doubt continue to exert a great deal of control over the direction of his brainchild. This is probably little more than a cosmetic change. Only time and clothing sizes will tell.

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Strings and Things

There have been some big doings in the world of physics, real front page stuff. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to skip the part where I try to pretend I understand any of it.

The theory of the holographic universe just got a major boost from new developments in string theory.

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.

A new geometrical model simplifies quantum calculations and may bring us closer to a unified field theory.

Physicists reported this week the discovery of a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.
The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and an author of the first of two papers detailing the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.

Neato!

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