Hippies are Asking for it

You probably have a whole bunch of free weekly papers where you live, they seem to be universal. They cater for all sorts of things; music, entertainment, real estate, local news and art but they all really exist for the purpose of selling ads. Anything that isn't an ad is really only filler designed to give the paper an excuse to exist so they can sell ad space.

All well and good, capitalism must be served. I picked up one I hadn't seen the other day, an "holistic" magazine that gives its mission as "to inspire, nurture, inform and empower". Cool - the hippie press. Now, it should be blindingly obvious to even the most casual reader that I need some calming influence so I thought this paper might do me some good.

It starts off well enough - it has naked people reading in a park on the cover. I'm all for naked people. I start reading and it seems fine enough - going without your car, chronic fatigue, fairly predictable "bio-dynamic" products being advertised. Then I stumble across the headline "How intelligent is your food?"

Maybe they mean how intelligent are the choices you make regarding food? I read a bit. No, that isn't what they mean. Here are some actual quotes:

"Food contains intelligence."

"When we eat... we metabolise the life or intelligence of that food."

"The fresher the food the more intelligence it contains."

"Food can lose its intelligence the longer it sits around in the fridge."

And apparently this hippie didn't consider how much intelligence they lost sitting around on the couch taking bong hits.

The more of this outrageous drivel I read the more angry I became. Some might argue this is relatively harmless hippie waffle but these people are giving themselves titles like doctor, educator and, of course, swami. They pitch this unmitigated horseshit as the truth and make no mistake - hippie or not, it's all about the money.

This paper is all about promoting an "expo" on the last weekend of April in Melbourne when these charlatans will be trying to bilk as much money as possible out of gullible and desperate people. Want your cancer cure? We got it right here.

I will be spending quite a bit of time between now and then ripping into these quacks and idiots - there is a very dark underside to the commercialisation of this appalling non-science. They are even dumb enough to put their names and photos after the articles and in their advertisements. All I can say is they better not walk in front of my car while I'm driving.

Now, I'm not suggesting anyone should go out and inflict violence on these cretins - I think that's the army's job. But I'll be damned if I'll let this pre-medieval quackery go unchallenged.