All my life I have hated and despised charlatans and mountebanks. Not for the loot they extract from fools — which, after all, is nothing more than their natural inheritance — but for the cynicism their lies sow wherever they practice.  Deepak Chopra is such a one. The cult of Scientology is another.  Television evangelists represent little more than a snake pit of them.  In the course of recorded history, their names alone would fill the database capacity of a main-frame computer.  I repeat that I do not in any way begrudge them the money they extort from deluded idiots: only the harvest of bitterness their cant and hypocrisy deposits in its wake.