Malls: "A Large Number Of Compliant People To Effect"

I love the gleam in his eye when he's got them,...

There's A Reason NewAgers Are Always In Trouble,...

"It's Inevitable!" (They've Been Saying It All Along,...)

In the future, when someone defends electing a cultist for President of the United States (besides Obama and Romney) I, too, must remember to compliment them - on how "intelligent" they are,...

ADDED - Here's Derren Brown's entire program (aptly titled Something Wicked This Way Comes) if you Romney supporters want to see how easily manipulated large groups can be.
 

Game Change: Exposing Faith Healers On Easter (Derren Brown Is Back On The Case)

This story is connected to that last post, on lawyers abandoning prosecuting a faith healer, showing it can be done if you know what you're doing:

"I guess I've gone from being somebody who wanted to go: 'Look I can do magic tricks – aren't I clever?' to having grown out of that now," says Derren Brown, who Channel 4 audiences have watched apparently predict the lottery numbers and play Russian roulette live on air. His Easter Monday show aims to discredit faith healers – and do so using a member of the public posing as a pastor who can perform miracles. "[It's] about somebody else's journey rather than me looking clever and doing tricks and things."

Those who watched Hero at 30,000 Feet last autumn might question Brown's change of direction; I'm not sure I was ever convinced by the idea, let alone the execution. But his new adventure finds him firing on all cylinders – faith healers shouldn't expect an easy ride. "I realised it wasn't just [like] psychics and mediums," Brown says. "I realised they're genuinely dangerous."

Brown grew up Christian and saw faith healers as "worrisome" but not to be taken too seriously – a view he didn't change until he abandoned his faith. "Coming out of Christianity altogether and having a slightly clearer sense in my own mind of what I believed and what I didn't believe … it was much clearer to me: no, no, this is just a scam," he says.

And so, Brown recruited a volunteer, and taught him the tricks of faith healing: how the blind are made to see, the deaf hear, limbs lengthened. And then "Pastor James" and Brown headed for America to see if they could play the healers at their own game. The pair's adventures make for some great television – but Brown also wants to make a serious point: that faith healing exploits those it claims to help.

"You have the despair of all those people who are no better – and it's despair because they're blaming their own selves and their faith for it not working," he says. "And then you have these hordes of people who are following these healers round America; chronically ill people going from gig to gig to gig – and it just never happening, so there's that wake of despair. And then there's the money side of it." The top healers, Brown says, earn more than Hollywood A-listers – and what's more, because it's religion, it's all tax free.

And they can be busted - easily - if you understand the landscape, but lawyers are reluctant to go there.

Why, I just don't know,...

Whoa, Ho, Ho - It's Magic!!!!

"The reason I do magic is to shake people's belief systems up a bit."

-- Derren Brown, another magician determined to end all this nonsense about "belief" - with my full support - after "predicting" England's National Lottery numbers, in The Daily Mail.

Message To The Police: Redrum - REDRUM!!!

"Say it isn't so. The police actually asked two psychics for help on a murder case?

Good grief.

Please tell me that was just a press release from Sensing Murder.

In the article, I read a cop saying he was on the fence about psychics.

Please, no. Don't be on the fence about psychics. You might as well be on the fence about violent crime. Or Nigerian emailers promising you millions.

Psychics are bogus.

Psychics are pscum.

Psychics are full of pshit.

Note to Serious Fraud Office: please investigate Sensing Murder.

Shut them down. Make that heinous TV show pass through the tunnel of white light to the other side.

If these people really could communicate with the dead, how about this: names of murderers please. Names, addresses, clues.

I don't want to get in the way of entertainers earning a crust, but it's scummy to pretend to communicate with the dead to take advantage of grieving relatives.

At best, psychics (mediums, palm readers, tarot card readers etc) employ a technique of vaguespeak called cold reading. Buy a book online called Tradecraft or Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind.

If we all learn these showbiz techniques, we can put the scum out of business."

-- Raybon Kan, exhibiting the kind of "positive attitude" TMR's looking for, in New Zealand's Sunday Star-Times

Fabulously Famous For Fraud

"A small group of people in the public eye promote pseudo-science without embarrassment and cannot be dissuaded from it."

-- From a new information leaflet, on the obviously cultish behavior and idiotic pronouncements of various celebrities, put out by Britain's Sense About Science, "a charity founded to increase the public's understanding of scientific issues." [Emphasis Mine]

Madonna (looking good, above) Elle MacPherson, Jamie Oliver, Chris de Burgh, Heather Mills, Stella McCartney, Joanna Lumley, Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Prince Charles, the late Queen Mother, and various other members of the Royal Family, are all on the Sense About Science list of celebrities who have been told they don't know what they're talking about but still won't stop promoting what The Telegraph calls "celebrity mumbo-jumbo". (I don't know if The Oprah Winfrey Show is broadcast in England but, in America, she would be at the top of this whackjob list.)



Psychological Illusionist Derrin Browne (seen above) was saluted by SAS for his understanding of, and respect for, scientific principals. Master Magician, and anti-homeopathy campaigner, James Randi, of course, is regarded as a genius by all scientists.