Tetherd Cow Ahead

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #3

This is Raël. Raël believes* that he is the prophetic ambassador on Earth for The Elohim, a race of superhuman beings that created all life on our planet.

In 1973 Raël was a racing car driver called Claude Vorilhon. It so happened that while Claude was visiting a secluded area of the French countryside, a member of The Elohim appeared in a silvery saucer-shaped space-ship to give him a message to pass on to all humankind. After this, he evidently felt compelled to change his name (well, fair enough I guess – Claude is a somewhat underwhelming name for a cult leader†) and run up a huge account with Persil.

Now, see, this is where those aliens of superior intellect always seem to go tragically wrong. Out of all the effective methods they could conceivably adopt to get their message across, they invariably choose to use as their mouthpiece someone like a racing car driver with eccentric dress sense.

We can only speculate that the process that takes place in Elohim Central every time they turn their attention our way goes something like this:

Elohim Subordinate: Oh Noble and Thrice-Blesséd Grand Master Elohim! We desperately need to save Humankind! Despite all our efforts so far, they continue to ignore our message! What should we do?

Grand Master Elohim: Fellow Elohim! Land your Glorious Silvery Saucer in a hidden field in France! Wait, then, for a deceitful man of questionable intelligence to come by, and impart the Galactic Wisdom to him. Do this in a cryptic and abstruse manner, and refer frequently to scientifically dubious concepts such as anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel.

Elohim Subordinate: As you wish, Grand Master. Only, do you think that maybe this time we might have better success if we landed our Glorious Silvery Saucer in Times Square and delivered a PowerPoint presentation? There are a lot of people there at all times of the day, some of them with video cameras. Perhaps the humans would be more likely to believe us if we did that?

Grand Master Elohim: Are you crazy??!! We don’t want them to know that we are responsible for PowerPoint!

On one of his trips to an Elohim planet (an experience detailed in his imaginatively titled book Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet) Raël was shown all kinds of genetic & molecular tinkering by the aliens and as a consequence introduced those concepts into his movement. He set up the controversial Clonaid in 1997 as a ‘stepping stone to the achievement of immortality’ promising as a sideline to help gay couples have cloned children and to allow people to resurrect identical duplicates of deceased pets (I mean, wtf?). Clonaid gained notoriety in 2002 when Brigitte Boisselier, a Raëlien member of ‘The Order of Angels’, claimed that she had successfully created a cloned baby girl named Eve. The contention was of course rubbish, but it gained the sect a lot of publicity.

Bafflingly, Raël continues to attract people to his beliefs and declares that he has 60,000+ followers. There is no doubt that a portion of the appeal to many is the Raëlian cult’s endorsement of sexual promiscuity among members. This is no surprise after all; sex and science fiction have gone hand-in-hand for decades.

So, is he really a deluded dingbat who thinks that he can communicate with aliens and bootstrap the human race into a new era of enlightenment? Or is he a cynical conman who’s found that starting a religion is a great way to get money, sex and plenty of time in the spotlight. He wouldn’t be the only one.

Maybe we should let his ex-wife, Marie-Paul have the last word. When asked in 2003 if she thought Raël was crazy she said he was ‘not mad, just devious, crafty, manipulative and very, very clever’.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Or, like Jasmuheen, says he believes…

†Not that Jim Jones cared much, I guess.

___________________________________________________________________________

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #2

This is David Icke. He is a conspiracy theorist par excellence. David believes that some thousands of years ago, an alien civilization of humanoid reptiles came to our planet and colonized it, interbreeding with humans, yet craftily preserving a special lizardy bloodline that continues to this day. These ‘Reptilians’ have worked their way into positions of power and so rule our world, luckily being able to ‘shape-shift’ to human form at will in order to keep the hideous truth from the rest of us unsuspecting monkey-folk.

When they’re in private they supposedly revert to their scaly forms (undoubtedly with an exclamation of ‘Thank Mangar-kunjer-kunja! I couldn’t have stood another minute in that sweaty hairy jumpsuit!’) in which they presumably relax on a warm rock with a nice chilled glass of raw egg and a big bowl of crunchy flies.

I want you to pause and reflect for a moment. What I’ve just outlined is not some scenario for a B-Grade science fiction film* – this is a matter of actual fact as far as David Icke is concerned. And he has a labyrinthine website that is testament to his efforts to prove it. Be sure to put aside a couple of hours if you intend to visit it though, because it demonstrates about as much structural logic and coherence as David’s belief system.

One of the things you can find, if you have the tenacity, is a list of people who are really lizards. This includes: George Bush (plausible, I guess), Dick Cheney (obviously), Al Gore (look at the profile), Gordon Gecko (haha, just kiddin’) and the Queen of England and all her sons (that explains the blue blood). There is also a generous sprinkling of US politicians (of all political inclinations, lest you think Mr Icke is being partisan).

When people have suggested in David’s earshot that he might be, well, crazy, he is on record as saying ‘People would have said the same thing of Jesus’. Which of course instantly confirms his status as a loony since, as we know, comparing oneself to Jesus or Napoleon is Indicator #1 on the Bedlam Admittance Guide.

So, how, according to David Icke, are we to have any hope of ever determining who are the Lizard Overlords among us? ‘Just pray for God to reveal it to you,’ he says.

I rest my case.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Well, actually, it is, come to think of it.

___________________________________________________________________________

Found by Phoebe Fay. Well, OK, maybe it’s a l-e-e-e-e-tle bit different to the one she discovered.

Jasmuheen grabs a midnight snack.

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series

Hello and welcome. Today we begin a new series here on The Cow – an examination of some of the, er, more unusual beliefs held by human beings. I’m not talking about your common garden-variety misapprehensions like homeopathy or free energy, but the real The-World-Is-Flat/Aliens-Are-Among-Us delusions of certified fruitcakes. And to show some impartiality I’m not even going to go straight for the easy pickings of American loonies, but instead start with an Australian.

This is Jasmuheen. She is a Breatharian.

Jasmuheen believes (or she says she believes – these are two very different things…) that she doesn’t need to eat any food or drink any water to survive. At all. Ever. In scientific terms, this qualifies her as an idiot.

Breatharians like Jasmuheen say that instead of consuming the nutrients that our species has needed for several hundreds of thousands of years, they are instead able to live on a mystical energy called prana, a Sanskrit term that refers to a kind of ‘life-force’. Indeed, many Breatharians assert that they can bypass prana entirely and live exclusively on sunlight. Well, why not, eh? Plants can do it. Jasmuheen herself has written a book called Living on Light: A Source of Nutrition for the New Millennium in which she outlines a 21 day program that will stop your body from aging and allow you to achieve immortality by living solely on light.

I can hear what you’re saying: if Breatharians live only on sunlight, how do you tell one from a philodendron? Well, effectively, you can’t. Certainly they are the intellectual equivalents of philodendrons. They also typically exhibit a greenish skin colour after several weeks without food or water.

Jasmuheen, or Ellen Greve as her name appears on her income tax file, runs an organisation known as the CIA. Hahahaha! No, young fella, sit down there, it’s not the Central Intelligence Agency of the good ol’ US of A (even though that would explain a lot) but the Cosmic Internet Academy!!! (WARNING: SANITY-SAPPING RAINBOW ALERT if you click on that link). Taking a quick spin ’round the CIA website we can find, among other things, information on Interdimensional Field Science, handy facts about Divine Nutrition Research, and Breatharian suggestions for ‘eradicating world health & hunger challenges’ [sic]. Well of course! Just let poor people eat air!!! Problem solved! Doh! How the hell could we have missed that!

Here you can also see (and purchase, should you, for some reason, take complete leave of your senses) Jasmuheen’s ‘art’. You can even experience her incomprehensible babbling pearls of wisdom directly via one her her many YouTube appearances, such as this one:

If you’ve bothered to endure that video, here are some things you might like to ponder:

• In the interview, there is a jug of water on the table in front of Jasmuheen – who is it for?

• There is a some kind of palm tree behind Jasmuheen – is it my imagination, or does she seem agitated that it is hogging all the light?

• After listening to what Jasmuheen has to say, who do you think would make the more formidable Scrabble opponent – her or the palm tree?

In 1999, the Australian version of 60 Minutes put Jasmuheen’s claims to the test under controlled conditions. After Jasmuheen had fasted for four days the experiment was terminated on the advice of Dr. Berris Wink, president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, who was monitoring her vital signs. In the doctor’s professional opinion, Ellen Greve was in danger of dehydration and kidney failure if she went any longer without water.

Jasmuheen, on the other hand, says that ‘60 Minutes stopped the experiment after 5 days ((In the manner of such charlatans, she is quite prepared to distort the statistics to make her feat seem more impressive.)) fearing I would be successful which could create problems for them as their intention was always to portray me as deluded…’ ((Interestingly, this claim has been removed from Jasmuheen’s main website, but you can read the cache here.))

In addition to the absurd beliefs that you’ve read so far, Jasmuheen further contends that due to her pranic sustenance her DNA has somehow altered from the standard two strands usual in all living things, to twelve, and now her body is able to ‘take up extra hydrogen’. ((Even if this nonsensical assertion had any merit, she has nowhere elaborated on why any of this should be desirable. Further, she has declined to allow a blood test to definitively settle this claim, saying: ‘I don’t know what the relevance for it (the blood test) is.’)) Also, in her capacity as ‘an Interdimensional Field Scientist’, she writes that ‘crop circles have always represented a Sacred Geometric Language that is designed to trigger various reactions and awakenings among various people’.

So to recap, Jasmuheen:

• Says she lives on solely on sunlight;

• Claims her DNA is different to all other living things;

• Believes that crop circles are alien messages;

Hmmm. Difficult to understand how anyone could perceive her as deluded.

Anyway, should you somehow receive an invitation from Jasmuheen to attend a Breatharian party, my suggestion is that you eat beforehand, because you know that all she’s likely to offer up in the way of refreshments is a light snack.

I suppose that you’ve all been on the edge of your seats waiting to find out if Prophet Peter Popoff would manage to find time in his busy schedule to reply to my reply to his missives to me. Well Cow fans, fret not! Last week I had a personal reply from Prophet Pete acknowledging my correspondence!

Well, in a manner of speaking.

Prophet Pete professes to be pleased to hear from me and yet his verbose (now that’s a surprise) response neglects to address any of the topics I raised when I wrote to him. Golly gosh, it’s almost like he didn’t even read my letter!

Prophet Popoff seems to believe that he and I have now developed some kind of special spiritual bonding (even though he doesn’t have a lot of interest in anything I say) and spares no effort to give me the benefit of his irksome and clichéd ‘wisdom’. Somewhere ’round about paragraph 4, though, the tone of his writing changes and he begins to get disturbingly familiar:

In this personal letter I must share certain things with you The Holy Spirit has “revealed” to me.

Uh oh.

This morning, during my prayer time (5.30 am) a powerful anointing came over me as I called your name. As I prayed, God showed me something unusual 3 different times… I FELT A POWERFUL ANOINTING “RELEASED” AND FLOWING BETWEEN US. I don’t have the interpretation yet, but I will.

Well I have an interpretation, but I’m really not going to elaborate because, well, it makes me feel kind of queasy. If it’s all the same to you Prophet Pete, I’d just as soon you didn’t call out my name at 5.30 am in the middle of a powerful flowing, or at the very least, just keep that information to yourself.

Prophet P goes on to tell me of the three visions he’s had for me – three things that God has revealed to him. #1 involves the packing of boxes…

Are you planning some kind of move?

… he asks. My God! The man is psychic! How could he possibly know? Now I’m really paying attention for Vision #2 but it’s just plain boring (and completely wrong). Let’s skip to Vision #3 where we hit paydirt:

Have you been praying for a certain amount of money for something special? Yes ___ No ___ How much? ___

Yes! I have been praying for some money Prophet Pete! How much? Three BILLION DOLLARS! I know, I know, that sounds a little bit greedy, but heck, this is praying, right – may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb! Even more spooky though, I’ve been praying for a pet eagle!

The letter rambles on in the manner I’ve come to expect (excluding, strangely, the underlinings and coloured annotations of previous letters), and after asking for some money Prophet Pete signs off with the usual guff and urges me to write down any unusual dreams. Since he has comprehensively failed to acknowledge my request for details on any dreams he may have had involving a ‘tetherd cow’, I am forced to conclude that he has no real interest at all in my own visions and therefore worth no further attention.

So adios Prophet Peter Popoff. If you want to get any further coverage on Tetherd Cow Ahead you’re going to have to do significant work on your schtick. Of course, if my pet eagle arrives tomorrow with a cheque for, oh, say, a cool billion, I’ll be quite prepared to eat crow.

___________________________________________________________________________

*We spell it cheque. You’d best be checking your spelling when in our country, n00b.

___________________________________________________________________________