Blender Feng Shui

As far as the people perpetuating the scams, well, there is no discomfort that's close to right for them. What they are doing is so evil that "discomfort" is not appropriate.
— Penn Jillette

Whatever Jami Lin learned from taking feng shui courses with just about everybody she tossed into the fertile blender of her mind, pressed the Liquefy button, and poured it out in her writing. The appropriate metaphor for her literary excrementalizing (including her woefully deficient "earth design") truly is the poor amphibian in the Cuisinart.

Poor froggy.

Lin plunders cultures and belief systems for gain. She twists Kabbalah, aromatherapy, and feng shui into alarming new shapes. She disrespects every culture and every spiritual system except Christianity (and she dismisses every variety of Christianity except New Age neo-Gnostic, though many of her concepts and her comments use fundamentalist, evangelical language).


Sadly, she reserves the worst treatment for what she claims is her own religion.


When you challenge her research, revelations, and writing style, she launches into full diva-drama, but it is merely a diversionary tactic. She has laughed while admitting that she makes up what she writes. In June 2005 she admitted to the Miami Herald that she blended every type of feng shui to create her fatuous "earth design."


Yet Lin is truly shocked and outraged that people analyze her inventions and criticize them.


Her idea of a rebuttal is to protest that any form of analysis and criticism is personal attack — a typical New Age histrionic used as a red herring to avoid accountability. (Dodging responsibility is also a New Age strategem.)

Cheap plastic imitation

Lin invents connections to various spiritual systems and other (frequently spurious) systems and passes them off as careful study and mystical revelation. For example, her version of Kabbalah fails to distinguish between types of authentic Kabbalah and the antisemitic, New Age version. She pleads (or feigns) ignorance that her concept of linking Kabbalah to physical objects and to other religions is considered blasphemous and idolatrous by Jews, and does everything she can to avoid linking Kabbalah with Judaism.

Perhaps it is because she claims her inventions "reveal" what she calls "greater truth" — which is yet more blasphemy.

You'd be a fool to trust whatever she says without doing some careful research. (Someone who promotes dubious products like the EMF Harmonization Chip that allegedly prevents nonexistent "electro-pollution" could find themselves investigated for mail fraud.)

Anything she announces as historical is merely hysterical (as in unintentionally funny), yet supremely credulous women — for it appears that all her clients are women — pay handsomely for such nonsense.

Be afraid. Be very afraid

Then there is the troubling matter of the business ethics. Lin's exhaustive knowledge of her clients' lives, broadcast on her websites and in her books, leads one to think she's a social worker, not an interior decorator. I could be persuaded these breaches of privacy were not a problem if I embraced one wag's definition of a social worker as an

underachiever with neither the financial nor intellectual capacity to earn or obtain a Masters or higher post-graduate degree in psychology or psychiatry, who nonetheless wants to meddle in other peoples’ lives due to their own pathetic lack of one.

Anyone who proudly posts intimate details of clients' lives for the world to read is not concerned about anyone's right to privacy: they want that information to bring in the money. Or they belong to the Frazier Crane school of thought:

What’s the good of having [clients] if you can’t make fun of them?

Anyone shameless enough to laugh as they admit they invent a lot of what they tell clients, and thinks nothing of gossiping about clients for the sake of money, is probably capable of being quite vicious when cornered.


Let's see.