Profound: January 2010 Archives

Michael Fumento reports: "The Negative Side Of Positive Thinking"

A review of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America: "Unhinged optimism is pervasive, but the real culprits are those who profit from it: motivational speakers and writers, "life coaches" and various gurus, as well as the 'pastorpreneurs' of the 'prosperity gospel' movement. These chuck aside Christ's teachings to declare that 'God wants us to ... have plenty of money to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.'" (Via Fausta, who has links to related stories on runaway self-esteem.)

Vegan Reader: How To Make Rice Milk And Stop Supporting Rice Dream

"In this country, many of us are beginning to realize that when we traded in our own skills for the convenient agreement of others doing our work in exchange for money, we won ourselves a world of pesticides, polluted skies and water, contaminated food and foreign sweatshop labor. We stopped living like the incredibly skilled American Indians, or even the early pioneers, nearly all of whom knew how to grow food, make fire, build shelter, find water, craft clothing and feed people. We have become a nation of unskilled workers who pay others to do everything we need for the very basics of being alive, and those we have given our money to have failed to resist the temptation to increase profit by casting care for human and environmental health aside." (Via Phoebe Gleeson.)