Friday 8th of November 2024
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The great slide into crap...

drops

The New York Post has a bitchy article on Gwyneth Paltrow today. It’s not the first paper to demonise her about her “beliefs”. Sure, if I was Gweneth, I’d get my head examined but so should anyone who believe in god almighty and/or in Santa Claus -- and democratic monarchy. 

Apparently Gwyneth follows the teaching of a good doctor (who isn’t a doctor of medicine, but in omeothingy) called Sadeghi, who has alternative facts on his side. He believes that no-one knows how bird can fly while he believes in “cosmic flow” that translates for Gwyn as “healing modalities”.  Fair enough...

The whole purpose of the nasty article by the NYP was to point out that a Goop summit was happening with a few items to buy, including less of stuff for more cash, such as a Goop water bottle for $35. In the Count of Monte Cristo, a bottle is for sale to an imprisoned banker for about $100,000 while a glass is worth 20,000. If you're thirsty and have lots of cash, you should not object too much...

To each their own delusions and ways to make cash, Gus says, as long as not too many people start to enter the temple of Goop and turn it into a cult and a universal religion. 

“What makes water wet?” is the grand cosmic universal question by Sadeghi DO to which his answer is “no-one knows...” My own comic (I meant to say cosmic) alternative relative questions are “what is water?” and “what is wet?”... 

At this stage we enter the great slide of crap, with no end in sight down the well of unknowledge. 

What is sad though is that Gwyn’s husband, Chris Martin, has had difficulties to cope with this alternative shit. 

The Goop thingy is more to do with women and secret women’s business as they say here. So please, men, do not enter unless you are a decorated guru of alternative power and aura. I don’t dispute the power of positive thinking in maximising health. One can practice it daily without the mystery and associated expensive products that will line the pockets of charlatans and priests. We all should know that 50 per cent of believing goes a long way in curing ailments but not all ailments can be cured by positive belief. There are times we need to move out of the way of harm and of black cats.

In the short run of our lives, the point is to be sharing experiences, share bodily juices through kissing and sex in joy, and try to minimise misunderstandings, all the while we manage or enhance our emotions. We should be able to carry on the best we can without being robbed of our minds by the mainstream religious nuts and the alternative Goop loonies. 

We all should know how bird fly, even if the birds themselves don’t know the equations that provide this ability. We have studied the problem with success as we can make some 600 tonnes of aluminium, plastic, people and kerosene fly at 15,000 feet up in the sky.

The Gus picture at top though is a simple image related to what is water... What we see here is a more complex question to answer. In the picture there are several “forces” at play. Anyone who has studied the meniscus and the surface tension of water would know. We know that atoms bind in various “strengths” from valence, to gluons inside the atoms, to simple states of temperature level in which molecules conglomerate otherside they would be gaseous and fill the void -- or become solid -- or even collapse into a back hole, where temperature is relatively irrelevant in super grativational forces.

Here a simple study of the drops of water would go into extraordinary depth of knowledge about leaves, water content of the leaves, saturation, gravity, and of the attraction of water molecules to each other at this particular temperature level bracket, without falling of. Should the temperature rise, the water would evaporate and should the temperature drop low enough, it will freeze and, who knows, this leaf would become like my mum’s washing in wintery Europe. Left overnight on the line, the wet clothes froze and became brittle in minus 20 degrees Celsius. It was a “do not touch” moment, otherwise your nice sweater would become a rubble of lint on the ground. So what about the near perfect spacing of the drops? There’s no mystery. Though “beautifully enticing” in the picture, the calculations of the drops are complex and chaotic in time space and energy, including, as mentioned, the water saturation in the leaves. We know what water is, H2O, but someone with a leaky watering can and half a brain can deconstruct this knowledge and sell expensive Goop products, as long as we don’t buy.

And global warming is still going on...

Gus Leonisky

Your local non-guru

 

I don’t know what the f—k we talk about...

As an example of how his outlandish ideas work in practice, he sets an exercise for his cancer patients called ‘Purge Emotional Writing’.

In a quiet place, they must light a white candle before spending 12 minutes writing a stream-of- consciousness account of any unresolved issue about which they have not been honest. 

They then burn the paper. No need to read it as ‘you’ve purged this negative energy and don’t want to take it back into your consciousness’, Sadeghi says. 

‘Fire is transformative and cleansing because it changes the chemical composition of things.’ Why 12 minutes? Because it has ‘great spiritual significance’ in nearly all religions. Of course!

Naturally, he has written a book. Or a ‘long-awaited’ and ‘life- changing’ first book, as Gwyneth describes it on her website. 



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2591285/If-think-Gwynnies-bonkers-meet-psychobabble-spouting-new-age-love-guru-whos-taking-La-La-Land.html#ixzz4jjzjPLga 


 

It was the physical manifestation of the day to come: For those willing to spend so much on so little, Paltrow will happily take your money.

She introduced her first speaker, Dr. Habib Sadeghi on Cosmic Flow, by explaining her own interest in wellness — or, in her parlance, “healing modalities.”

It began in 1998, she said, after her beloved father was diagnosed with cancer, and given her brand’s origin story, it seems naïve at best, craven at worst, for Paltrow to commodify junk science and dangerous information. Even the affable late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who had Paltrow on his show Tuesday night, couldn’t play along, asking about a recent Goop post claiming the scientific benefits of going barefoot.

“What is Earthing?” he asked.

“I don’t really know that much about Earthing,” Paltrow admitted. “There’s this type of electromagnetic thing that we’re missing and it’s good to take your shoes off and walk in the grass . . . I don’t know what the f—k we talk about.”

Read more:

http://nypost.com/2017/06/11/inside-gwyneth-paltrows-ridiculous-goop-sum...

the wellnessery...

Too much for one column. We could talk about the writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s beady-eyed observation that “the minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favour among women, wellness stepped in to pick up the pieces”. We could talk about Gwyneth Paltrow’s possibly untapped sense of irony in serving steamed clams to a journalist when the one thing everyone knows about Goop is that Gwyneth once wrote a piece on it recommending that women steam their vaginas. But what I would really like to talk about is a subject that is perennially close to my heart and that is the utter quackery of the wellness industry.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/aug/01/gwyneth-paltrow-wellness...

 

Read from top... if it works for you... spend your cash... For some people, wellness is all in the mind, for most of us we just plod nicely along like the philosophers we are... Pain and ageing are bastards though...

the women industry...

 

...

Set at an upmarket health retreat, complete with green smoothies, walking meditation sessions and a "noble-silence", the book is about nine middle-class Australians looking to change their lives.

The retreat is led by a beautiful, enigmatic Russian, Maria Dmitrichenko, a woman who had climbed to the top of the corporate ladder before having a heart attack.

"She turns her obsession away from the corporate world to the health world and then wants to share what she's learned with the guests at her health resort," Moriarty says.

Of course, being a Liane Moriarty novel, there are twists on the way. 

From Sydney to Hollywood

Moriarty has made a name for herself as an author of funny and dark commercial fiction.

She's written eight novels over the last 15 years, but it wasn't until 2013 that she hit the big time, with her novel The Husband's Secret becoming a New York Times bestseller.

Her fame went to another level with the success of Big Little Lies, the story of three Sydney mothers caught up in schoolyard politics, domestic violence and murder.

The book was adapted for American television in 2017, and the miniseries, starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, went on to win eight Emmy Awards.

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-26/nine-perfect-strangers-liane-moriarty-tackles-wellness-industry

 

Read from top.

not drowning people in minutiae...

There are so many people running for president in the US, it is hard to keep track of who’s who. So let’s begin with a reminder that 37-year-old Pete Buttigieg, known as Mayor Pete by those who like him and Mayo Pete by those who don’t, is the “Smart Candidate”. He speaks eight languages; he taught himself Norwegian so he could read an author’s untranslated work; he plays piano; he loves Ulysses. “Imagining yourself in a book club with Pete Buttigieg [is] this election’s having a beer with George W Bush,” the New York Times recently opined.

It is not clear whether Gwyneth Paltrow has been imagining herself in a book club with Buttigieg, but the actor certainly fancies the well-read wunderkind for president. She will be co-hosting a fundraiser for the candidate on 9 May; tickets start at $250; $2,800 gets you a picture with the man himself. Knowing Paltrow, you might even get a Buttigieg-branded vagina egg to go home with.

Paltrow’s fundraiser is not necessarily a boon for Buttigieg’s brand. There has been dismay that the South Bend mayor is cosying up to the Goop founder, who has become something of a postergirl for pseudoscience. Timothy Caulfield, the author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?, is one critic. It may seem petty to complain about a fundraiser, he tells me, but “we are at a point in history when advocating for truth and rationality is a central issue”. 

But should we really expect more from Buttigieg? While he has been framed as a brainiac, Buttigieg’s airy, feelgood politics actually align perfectly with Paltrow’s aspirational pseudoscience. “It’s important that we not drown people in minutiae before we’ve vindicated the values that animate our policies,” Buttigieg recently said when asked why his website is light on policy. It was the Goopiest of answers.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/30/gwyneth-paltrow-pe...

 

Read from top.

 

And by the way, the "long" drop of water in the picture at top has "attached itself" to a sticky spider web remnant... The surface of stuff has different attraction to water. Some leaves will repel water, some will allow water to "stick". Plastic stuff in a dishwasher rarely dries properly... Etcetera.

I had a different hypothesis...


For many years, scientists could not solve a 100-year-old physics problem: why air bubbles in a narrow vertical tube wouldn't rise up, seeming to stick to the insides instead. 

A student from The Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) research institute and university Wassim Dhaouadi has solved this physical problem, according to the Neue Züricher Zeitung.

Using the interferometric method of research, the student discovered an ultrathin layer between the bubble and the liquid, which, contrary to one of the previously proposed theories, does not stick to the tube, but moves extremely slowly. It's just that this speed is so low that changes are not visible to the human eye.

The movement of the bubble itself depends on this layer, and it is its characteristics that affect whether air will rise or not.

"I was happy to carry a research project early in my curriculum. It is a new way of thinking and learning and was quite different from a Homework set where you know there is a solution, although it may be hard to find. At first, We did not know if there would even be a solution to this problem," Dhaouadi said.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/society/201912041077478886-student-solves-centur...

 

 

Read from top.

 

I had a different hypothesis (similar in some way).

 

In a narrow tube, in a non-flowing liquid, there is no room for the necessary flow down of the liquid to go below the bubble for the bubble to rise. Simple enough — yet depending on the diameter of the tube and of the nature of the liquid. Water also has a (high) surface tension that prevents a high flow of water along the side of a thin tube, stopping (or slowing beyond simple observation) the bubble to rise on specific gravity differential alone...

 

 

 

 

burning the private part candle...

You can sniff Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candle — but don’t you dare take her picture!

The Goop founder kindly created a $75 candle called “This Smells Like My Vagina” so we can all get a sniff of her special sauce (or we could if the piquant product weren’t sold out). Proving her head is also up her proverbial pudenda, Paltrow made a public presentation at the National Retail Federation at the Javits Center Tuesday and promptly threw out all fotogs so she could wax lyrical to 2,000 people about her privates with privacy.

Gwynnie blamed sexism in the business world. Using an unfortunate turn of phrase, she said, “There are different kinds of controversy. First of all, I am a huge target because I was an actress, a very visible actress, and then I decided to be a founder and entrepreneur, and I think that really rubbed people the wrong way.” What really might have rubbed others the wrong way was that infamous jade egg incident when Goop was fined $145,000 for making “unsubstantiated” claims the product could fix hormone levels and bladder control.

Describing such malodorous moments as “headwinds,” she continued, “I think people have mixed reactions to me and to all women stepping outside the box that they are very comfortable with us being in and doing something else. I have been in the public eye for a long time, and I understood that was going to be something inherent in this journey. Sometimes I think of the headwinds I’ve had to face growing this business, and then I think of some male counterparts who started businesses at the same time, and it’s pretty incredible what we’ve come up against.”

 

Read more:

https://pagesix.com/2020/01/15/gwyneth-paltrow-waxes-philosophical-on-the-vagaries-of-goops-vagina-candle/?

Is this for real? Is this candle helping solve global warming?

 

Read from top.

 

 

And now a bit of cynicism from the Guardian:

 

Huge excitement in TV’s burgeoning disinfomercial genre, as Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show prepares to make landfall next week. Based on her lifestyle portal, currently valued at $250m, The Goop Lab will see the turbocapitalist fanny-egg entrepreneur take us to new frontiers in the wellness universe.

Incidentally, I just want to say right off the bat that I still have no idea what “wellness” even means, but I make sure to always use it with an appearance of knowingness, like I do with “neoliberalism” or “cervix”. In fact, I am beginning to think there may be some semantic overlap between all three of the aforementioned concepts.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2020/jan/16/do-no...

 

Read from top.