Before I rant further on the subject of Blood Lake, the New York Times has given me another topic to kick around, though maybe it wasn't that firm's doing; it could have been someone else's link on the page where I was reading one of their annoying columnists, which I don't often do. The guy's tilted take on religion convinced me not to go to the second page, but this looked possibly interesting. Turns out an author's selling a book promoting his own "take on religion." As it happens, I'm not necessarily opposed to what he's preaching, which may derive from Hindu mysticism. But his marketing slants to the left, replete with references to "fundamentalism"--that f-word which nobody, it seems, wants to define. (I'm reminded of Orwell's postwar quip about another f-word, fascism, which people, as he said, didn't bother defining except to agree it was something undesirable.) This guy, a Jew who went to study Eastern spirituality (not the first such case I've known of), gives the impression he believes himself the first and only purveyor of great truth--when even in the West these ideas have been around a while. (See Ralph Waldo Emerson.) Furthermore, he comes across as making the same error he finds elsewhere: Dividing the world into "us" and "them." Possibly he just needs better PR.