But keep holding out hope. Your day will come, I’m sure.

Waldo’s law: As a discussion on waldo.jaquith.org grows longer, the probability of a comment involving penis shrinking approaches 1.

“Twenty percent came the next day to court and withdrew their complaints, claiming that they had recuperated.”

Or, as they said in Monty Python,

“She turned me into a newt!”

“A newt?”

“Well….I got better.”

It’s an article about mass hysteria in Sudan, in which men went into a panic believing that their penises were falling off or shrinking back inside their bodies, due to the use of evil or contaminated combs or hair-dryers. The “victims” initially blamed Satan, then on West Africans, and finally the Zionists. Here’s a choice pull-quote:

“Focusing on the report of the Sudanese man who lost his penis after contact with a comb, Abbas wrote: “No doubt, this comb was a laser-controlled surgical robot that penetrates the skull [and passes] to the lower body and emasculates a man!! I wanted to tell that man who fell victim to the electronic comb: ‘You jackass, how can you put a comb from a man you don’t know to your head, while even relatives avoid using the same comb?!’”

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/976.htm

Yeah, the marketing of something like biodynamics as super organic (or even the marketing of it at all), seems quite wrong to me too. Greenwashing may be a strong term though, since I usually think of that term being used to describe covering up some environmental misdeed with some clever PR trick. In this case, at least they are organic even if there is some elf poop involved.

Speaking of greenwashing, here’s an easy way to spot it. Any time you hear any company on television or radio make some sort of proclamation about how they are helping the environment you pretty much know they’re doing something bad – usually in inverse proportion to how great they claim they are.

The interesting thing to me though is that a lot of this 19th century philosophy continues to play such a huge role in society. The people involved were almost always very colorful and imaginative people, and like Steiner often believed some wild things. Nonetheless, sometimes that’s what is necessary to move society forward. It’s also typically far less interesting to see what these people came up with, than to see what other people did with it later. In the case of Steiner, it also led one of his follower to start the Camp Hill movement which provides life-sharing communities for people with disabilities.

For that matter, it’s also important to note that these clear lines we seem to draw between science, magic and religion were not so clear prior to the 20th century. Respected scientists like Isaac Newton often were quite involved in astrology, alchemy and summoning spirits and in Newton’s case, his discoveries in physics were considered incidental to what he felt was his main work. For that matter, our modern definition of “magic” is quite different from the 19th century one, which did not assume that it was necessarily supernatural nor unexplainable. In that sense, modern science tries to pretend that it was an orphan adopted by the modern age, while it maintains a significant amount of the occult in its attic left over from it’s parents.

Waldo, Rudolf Steiner is the dude behind the Waldorf method. Maria Montessori is behind Montessori schools.

D’oh—I looked that up, read about the two people, the two educational methods, came back here, and still wrote the wrong thing. :)

Gotta go harvest my cherry tomatoes. No elf poop involved.

As far as I can tell, Steiner had some good ideas, some really bad ideas and some relatively harmless ones.

Oh, surely. Montessouri schools seem to have worked out very nicely. :)

FWIW, I think that this biodynamics thing is well within the realm of bad as it’s practiced. It’s one thing for somebody to go sprinking elf poop on their own crops. I don’t care. After all, what’s it to me? But it’s this “more organic than organic” business that I find reprehensible. If the folks selling biodynamics thought that people wanted what they’re offering, they’d be up front about what they’re doing. Instead, they pretend that it’s some sort of super-organic practice when, instead, it’s this spirit world business. That’s deceptive, and that’s wrong. It’s greenwashing.

On a lighter note, and an example of sorts, can you guess which repected wartime leader liked to dance around at stonehenge with Druids?

Is that a younger, thinner Winston Churchill?