It really does astonish me how anyone with their brain enabled can think The Secret works. 

For the uninitiated, The Secret is this: the universe loves you, and will give you anything you want if you wish hard enough for it. 

That’s it. That’s what the multi-million dollar enterprise of books, DVDs and plugs on Oprah have been about. 

Of course, something so blatantly ineffective would need a few failsafes to protect it from, well, people like me (though I admit I’m pretty late on the boat on this one). So, if you wish in a ‘negative mindset’ like “I’ll never get X” it ‘doesn’t work’, and there’s no time limit on it. So you have to keep wishing. 

So, essentially, it’s positive thinking that covers in advance for confirmation bias and mixes everything up with spiritualist nonsense and magic hokum. 

I don’t really know why I’m blogging on it, though. I guess it just irritates me that so many people have fallen in for such a transparent con. 

Edit: it looks like positive thinking might not be such a good idea anyway.

On the thirty-first of May, abortion doctor George Tiller was shot dead in his church in Kansas. His shooter has since complained that he’s “being treated like a criminal”.

Yesterday, an 88-year-old white supremacist walked into the US Holocaust Museum in Washington with a rifle and opened fire, injuring two people. One of them, a security guard, later died from his injuries.

Meanwhile, a pastor has publicly stated that he is praying for the death of President Barack Obama. On this, he said: “I am not a terrorism supporter. I am a vengeance of God supporter” (though, to be perfectly honest, I don’t see any difference.)

The election of an intelligent black progressive to the office of President of the US seems to have driven the right to the kind of extremes they usually only talk about.