I love the British press. So much so I get most of my news about the world from them, rather than American sources. What does it for me is the irreverence. Reading the New York Times or Washington Post, I get the feeling the writer filed his report while dismantling a bomb. There’s not much in the way of humor in our reporting. The Brits, on the other hand, will gladly mix tabloid nonsense with serious news on the same page or even the same article. They make the news fun.
This weird little story in the Independent is a great example of the devil may care habits of the British press.
The ‘consciously uncoupled’ star revealed that she follows the work of Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto, whose experiments attempt to investigate whether human consciousness has a direct effect on the molecular structure of water.
His theories go as far as to claim that shouting at rice – as one so frequently does – could turn it bad.
This is comedy gold, but it would never appear in an American paper. Our press cozies up to the powerful and famous. The Brits lampoon the rich and famous.
“I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter,” Paltrow wrote in a blog post for her much derided clean living website GOOP.
“I have long had Dr Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.”
Handing over the keyboard to friend Dr Habib Sadeghi to explain what on earth she was talking about, he wrote: “Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto performed some of the most fascinating experiments on the effect that words have on energy in the 1990s.
GOOP? Sure enough, it is a real site. I thought maybe it was an acronym for some British slang. She apparently runs or is the owner of an on-line boutique. Gwyneth Paltrow is a famous person. Her wiki page says she is “an American actress, singer, and food writer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991.” I thought she was an actress, but I have no recollection of seeing her in any roles. It gets even more weird when you look at her bio.
Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, and is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and the late film producer/director Bruce Paltrow. Her father was Jewish and her mother is from a Christian background, and Paltrow was raised with “both Jewish and Christian holidays”. Her father’s Ashkenazi family immigrated from Belarusand Poland, while her mother’s ancestry is Pennsylvania Dutch (German) and white Barbadian (English). Paltrow’s paternal great-great-grandfather, whose surname was “Paltrowicz,” was a rabbi in Nowogród, Poland. Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a half-cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, and a second cousin of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08). Her uncle is opera singer and actor Harry Danner.
I’m going to assume that a woman who thinks you can hurt the feeling of water is very far to the left in her politics. I don’t know enough about her to say for sure, but that would be my guess. Yet, her very carefully constructed wiki page is heavy on the race stuff. There’s some heavy duty signaling going on there. Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.
“In his experiments, Emoto poured pure water into vials labelled with negative phrases like ‘I hate you’ or ‘Fear’. After 24 hours, the water was frozen, and no longer crystallised under the microscope: It yielded grey, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals.
“In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like ‘I love you’ or ‘Peace’ on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals.”
Her insightful post comes just a week after she compared dealing with internet trolls to being a survivor of war.
Speaking ahead of her appearance at the Code technology conference in California last Tuesday (27 May), she said: “You come across [comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanising thing. It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanising thing, and then something is defined out of it.”
“My hope is, as we get out of it, we’ll reach the next level of conscience,” she concluded.
Assuming Gwyneth Paltrow believes these things she is reported to have said, the women is as dumb as a post. Then again, she has become famous pretending to be other people, so maybe this is just another act. In a world where everything is fake and cheesy, pretending to be a celebrity airhead could be the way smart people get rich in the entertainment business.
