You Know...

I should say something about Tom Cruise. Except that I shouldn't. He's just noise. Mean-spirited noise--going after Ms. Shields when she wasn't in the room to respond/rebut was the act of a coward, and talking down to Matt Lauer--well, OK, talking down to Matt Lauer is something we're all entitled to do. The hosts on E! get to talk down to Matt Lauer. But still, he's claiming education he doesn't have--that he can't have, because you can't study something as intensively as he claims to have (awk. sentence structure) without spending years of doing nothing else. And, he hasn't. I talk about him, then, not because Scientology is a wack-job religion--most religions are, on some level, but you can generally tell the good from the bad by the kind of people they produce. Mormons are, in general, so freaking nice you can't quite believe it (setting aside the evil bastards in Southern Utah who rape their nieces), and Jews and Buddhists who are sincere are just ducky folks. Muslims--the real ones, not the ones you see on TV--are so polite and spiritually refined you just relax a little the minute they walk in the room. Episcopalians, Anglicans, we're so cool we're barely religious at all. But, with apologies, Pentacostalists have a paranoid and kinda mean streak somewhere in there--they seem to get off on condemning as much as celebrating. And Scientologists act like they're members of some dark sect of the Illuminati--"Oh, it's wonderful--my eyes have been opened to the true workings of the world--but you are not ready yet to receive such knowledge. You must join us...or you will forever remain ignorant of...The Truth." Is it just me, or do you imagine they have a dank, golden-laced temple in the Basement of the Center, with a 100-foot icon of L. Ron on an altar, where they regularly sacrifice the blood of homosexuals who refuse to be 'cured'? Just me? OK, no problem.

Point is--

I'm not slamming Tom for his beliefs. They're idiotic--they make fundamentalist Christianity look positively sane--but they're his beliefs, and inasmuch as there's nothing in them that explicitly encourages violence against others, I'll let the silliness slide. I'm slamming Tom for being a loud-mouth non-expert who claims knowledge he does not have, and offers lies (psychiatry is a Nazi endeavor?--yeah, Tom, so I guess all of Hitler's claims that it was "jew science" was just a COVER for his REAL agenda--yep, that Sigmund Freud, you know he had to be a favorite of the boys in the Brown Shirts) as truths. That's the mark of a bad person. Look. I'll be fair. He once saved a hit-and-run victim, Heloisa Vinhas, and then paid her hospital bills. For that, the world is a better place for his having been in it, and I give him a conditional pass. But he still needs a ruler across the knuckles for the last month or so. Oh, and date women your own age--he'll be treading into Humbert Humbert territory soon.