Skeptico

From The Sublime to The Ridiculous

This Saturday I was watching a repeat of the Larry King Live with Criss Angel – the one where Angel says he doesn’t think people have psychic powers or can talk to the dead. The one where he says he will bust anyone on live TV if they claim psychic powers.  (And of course, a few days later he did bust Jim Callahan for doing just that.) I had missed this interview originally. Anyway – irony time – it was immediately followed by a repeat of the November 16th Larry King with all the phony psychics, mediums, ghost hunters etc. The one that was advertised as “taking your calls” but in fact didn’t. (So we couldn’t play Cold Reader Bingo. Maybe next time.)

And what a waste of an hour that was.

The star of the show was celebrity nutter Shirley MacLaine, who was given a whole segment to espouse her made-up nonsense about reincarnation and the afterlife. It also featured cold reader James Van Praagh, cold reader Lisa Williams, professional twit Jason Hawes (an investigator on the Sci-Fi program "Ghost Hunters", who believes for no rational reason I can think of that EMF signals are ghosts), someone called Chris Fleming at the site of the filming of the fictional film "The Shining", (again for no rational reason I could ascertain), plus Mary Ann Winkowski, upon whose life the TV show "The Ghost Whisperer" is supposedly “loosely” based. Very loosely actually, since the TV “Ghost Whisperer" has detailed conversations with dead people where names of murderers etc are clearly given. (No “I’m getting an R”.)

It’s not worth deconstructing the drivel from this show line by line, but here are a few samples to give you an idea (full transcript):

VAN PRAAGH: There is no such thing as death. There is no such thing as death.

VAN PRAAGH: The spirit. You're first and foremost a spirit. The spirit doesn't die. You're a spirit encased in a physical body. The physical body will shut down, break down and be, you know, decompose. But the spirit will not. The spirit remains -- lives on.

WINKOWSKI: OK. All children can do this. Children are so innocent. Their imagery friends are not imaginary.

MACLAINE: The whole question is the question of consciousness, to me. That's why science exists. That's why people like Steven Hawking and the Dalai Lama agree with each other -- that energy never dies, it just changes form. So when someone, so-called, dies and the soul leaves the body -- which is not to say the mind. The mind is different from the soul in my studies.

I think we're suffering now with the confusion of the paradigm blindness. I mean once we understand the paradigm of this other dimensional reality, we won't be so blind to what's happening.

MACLAINE: I'll tell you what it means mostly to me. You don't kill when you kill somebody. The mind dies. The body dies. War is stupid, because nobody gets killed. The souls get all screwed up and karma is incurred. So war is stupid.

MACLAINE: I see -- not like these other gifted people you have. I see, every now and then, out of the corner of my eye I see, oh, and that's a spirit.

MACLAINE: Karma. And it maybe not happened in one lifetime because remember, there's no time.

Einstein wrote about that, Hawking writes about that. So all time is happening concurrently now.

MACLAINE: Stephen Hawking came to his presence and to this place of proof and said, I know there is an afterlife and the soul never dies because I understand energy. What would he say?

I’ll just point out again that this stuff is made-up by these people. You should also note the misuse of science: the huge leaps made from what the actual science says to the unwarranted metaphysical conclusions they want to foist on us.

And then there was the token skeptic. Once again it was Dr. Bryan Farha, the guy who in May 2003 actually managed to get in a call on Larry King, to Sylvia Browne, to ask her why she was avoiding taking Randi’s million dollar challenge as she had promised. On this week’s show he was one against many, and was only given a few minutes to express doubt at all the extraordinary (and frankly absurd) claims being made by everyone else. And for part of those few minutes, it has to be said, the camera panned to the smug grins on the faces of the frauds sitting around the table. It’s at times like this when I wonder if there really is any value to skeptics appearing on such a show. In a written forum (such as the JREF forum, or comments posted to skeptical blogs), the woomeisters have nowhere to hide: their rhetorical tricks and lack of evidence for their claims can be easily exposed. On Larry King, they can get away with smug comments about closed-mindedness etc, before Larry moves on to his next credulous question.

Also, I was a little disappointed in Farha. I don’t want to criticize him too much, because at least he is prepared to put himself on the line on TV (something I’ve never done), and I’m sure it’s more difficult than it looks. And without him there would have been no voice expressing any doubt at all. However, I wished he had not talked so much about needing “proof”. Scientists don’t usually talk about “proof” – they usually ask for “evidence”, for the very good reason that you can’t really “prove” anything outside of math. Asking for proof opens you up to all sorts of rhetorical counter-attacks. Fortunately, none of the twits in the studio were smart enough to take advantage of that, and van Praagh even said he had proof of life after death. Still, you can’t rely on that every time.

I was also a little disappointed in Farha’s reasons why skepticism here is important:

KING: Do you see any harm in believing it?

FARHA: Well, there's harm in believing anything that could fall into the category of being hocus pocus. If you don't think critically -- this is about critical thinking. This is not about ghosts and haunted houses.

If you don't learn to think critically, you might wind up suffering in all kinds of other areas. You might not send your kids to the best school if you don't think critically. You might find a love interest that is a wife-beater, a batterer. You have to think critically in order to get along in the world, and this doesn't lend itself to critical thinking.

Which is all very well in general, but not a specific reason to be against cold readers like van Praagh. And, probably not a very convincing reason for anyone watching the show. I would have said that these so-called psychics waste a lot of police time chasing false leads in missing child and murder cases. Time that could have been spent following up legitimate leads. Also, I would have said that people can be falsely accused of crimes. And finally, I would have said that parents of missing children are manipulated and taken advantage of at their most vulnerable time. To understand what I mean, you should read what Mark Klass has to say.  Tragically, his daughter Polly was abducted and murdered in 1993, and numerous “psychics” took this as a cue for their moment of fame. Klass writes:

In truth, that psychic detectives contribution to the case was counter productive. As always seems to be the case with psychic predictions, her interference created distraction. Law enforcement resources are diverted toward useless endeavors as phantom leads disappear into thin air. One cold and dark November evening many of us were lurking around somebody’s property because the psychic said that it held the key to my daughter’s disappearance. With the heightened sense of paranoia that already existed in the community that property owner would have been well within his rights to blow us away on the spot for trespassing. We were very fortunate that night, because although he did angrily confront us, he had absolutely nothing to do with the crime we were investigating.

In the end, and despite their protests, there is not even one case of a psychic truly assisting or solving a missing child case. It’s just smoke and mirrors. Their references do not support their claims and law enforcement cannot acknowledge their existence. Instead, their wishful thinking collides with your desperate hope and leaves you diminished.

Unfortunately, the next time a little child is kidnapped and mom and dad reach the end of their emotional string the vague, empty promises of the psychic detective will rebound off the stark walls of the missing child’s bedroom and a photo or toy will be palmed as the negotiations are engaged.

That’s the real problem with these frauds. And it’s this admittedly more emotional argument that I believe might get through to those on the fence, rather than Farha’s rather dubious concern about sending kids to the wrong school. It’s really quite a simple response that we should all have ready when asked such a question.

I want to end with a comment on skeptics, from the “Ghost Hunters” guy:

HAWES: Well, I think what the skeptics need to do is stop throwing insults at the self-proclaimed sensitives or the people investigating claims of the paranormal and really meet in the middle, start trying to figure this out together. If we work together, we can come to an answer, but if we're going to spend all our time attacking each other, we're not going to get ahead

Wrong, jackass. It’s not the job of skeptics or anyone else to “meet you in the middle”. That’s not how science works. If you want us to accept your “hypothesis” (in scare quotes, because I don’t really believe he has one), you need to support it with evidence. To be clear – that’s your job, not ours. Then (and this is the bit you want to avoid), you need to let other people examine your evidence for holes, to try to prove it false. What’s left standing after this process has a reasonable chance of being true. That’s how real scientists do it. That’s what Einstein did and that’s what Hawking did. In fact, Hawking had to change his views at least once after others proved him wrong. Einstein was also shown to be wrong on some things. They didn’t whine about being “attacked”. (Hey, if woos can invoke these intellectual giants, so can I.) Until you do this Hawes, you’re just a whiner who wants special treatment for his silly claims. That may be good enough for the Science Fiction channel, but it’s not how science works in fact.

The Missing Revenue Source

That would be Joe Vitale’s Missing Revenue Source. But not missing for much longer.

Reader FP emailed me with this latest piece of Joe Vitale made-up nonsense:

Have you ever had one of those days where gravity just isn’t working for you?

Where you can’t seem to keep your feet planted on the ground and you wind up sort of floating around in the atmosphere?

Of course not.

Why not?

Because gravity is a LAW.

It doesn’t work some days and not work other days.

It’s always working, and you are experiencing the effects of it all the time, at every moment.

But you probably never spilled a cup of coffee and said, “Damn that Law of Gravity!”

Instead, you realized it was your actions coupled with the exiting law that caused the accident.

Well, the Law of Attraction is exactly the same.

Except it isn’t. It does not work “every time” like the law of gravitation that Vitale wants to compare it to. And if you don’t believe me, Vitale proves it himself later on in his own words, when he reveals that to benefit fully from the law of attraction, you will need to:

… order a copy of my new audioprogram “The Missing Secret: How to Use The Law of Attraction to Attract What You Want — Every Time.”

… for (get this) a mere $119.95.

And right there is the proof the law (sic) of attraction isn’t like the law of gravitation. I don’t need an audio (or any other kind of) book by Joe Vitale to tell me how to make the law of gravitation work for me. My computer monitor stays firmly on my desk thank you very much regardless of what my “subconscious thoughts” or “deep-seated collection of beliefs” might be attempting to the contrary. And it really does work “every time”. The law (sic) of attraction, on the other hand, is just a made up marketing gimmick. And I have to say, marketing is one thing Vitale is pretty good at. Unable to make any money on The Secret, he is selling (wait for it)  “The Missing Secret”.  Pure genius!  Send Joe $120 (plus tax and shipping) and he’ll send you a load of drivel that was missing from The Secret.  The only puzzling thing is why it took him so long.  I guess he didn't want it that much.

Remember that Joe says, in his article:

You can’t “do” the Law of Attraction wrong.

If you can’t do it wrong, why would you need any instructions on it from Vitale? 

Don’t buy this snake oil from Vitale. He doesn’t need your money.

74th Skeptics’ Circle

The 74th Skeptics Circle has just been posted at Med Journal Watch. A special Thanksgiving edition.

Bingo Night!

Tonight is Bingo Night – John Edward / James van Praagh Bingo. Except it looks like John Edward has pulled out – Larry King’s site now advertises “Psychics (sic) James Van Praagh & Lisa Williams take your calls”. I wonder if John Edward discovered that a few thousand people would be playing Bingo with his cold reading guesses, and decided he didn’t want to be made a fool of. But he’s a psychic, so he must already have known that. Must be some other reason then. It’s a pity, because the card was designed primarily around Edward’s style. Still, perhaps it won’t matter. Perhaps the card will work just as well with Lisa Williams, thus demonstrating all cold readers use basically the same techniques. We’ll see.

I was contacted by Brett, who wrote some software to randomize the Bingo card. That way, if you want to play with some friends, you can each have a different card. They all have the same items in the boxes, but they’ll just be in a different order. The winner is the first one to get a straight line. Brett did a great job and I’d like to thank him immensely. Here it is:
I think it should be fairly self-explanatory.

Click on my original post, John Edward / James van Praagh Bingo, for the explanations for the squares. Thanks again to Brett for the card, and to James Randi and Rob Lancaster for the additional comments and examples. Check out Randi’s video featuring some of van Praagh’s tricks. And have fun playing Cold Reader Bingo!

26 November 07 - Edited to add:

I just posted about the actual program (which was not as advertised) - From The Sublime to The Ridiculous.

Criss Angel / Phenomenon

I wasn’t going to comment on the Criss Angel / Phenomenon videos, since it seems almost everyone else already has. But Randi is hosting the videos on his site and, now I’ve seen them, I had to post briefly on this.

If you haven’t heard, there is a reality TV show called “Phenomenon”, with Uri Geller and Criss Angel judging conjuring acts. Except that there was this bozo called Jim Callahan who pretended he was not a conjuror but that he really was doing something paranormal by channeling a dead person. Or something. Angel had already promised he would bust anyone who claimed paranormal skills, and so the result was, to some extent, inevitable.

Anyway, go to Randi’s site and watch the video of Angel busting Callahan – it’s short, just over a minute. It ends with Angel and Callahan apparently having to be held apart by the two other hosts.

Then watch the other video (longer) with interviews with the three players. First up is Geller, with a load of drivel about how you can’t disprove the paranormal (channeling James van Praagh), and ending with the lame argument about how energy can’t be destroyed, so “where does it go” when we die? Oooohh – good point. Except it isn’t. Dipshit: the live human body is at a temperature of 98.6 F, so my guess would be when you die, the energy is given off as heat. No paranormal explanations required. Oh well - at least we didn’t have to witness him bending spoons “with just the power of my mind”.

Then comes Angel with a fairly level headed and reasonable explanation of why he did what he did. Angel is irritated that Callahan is passing off something that he (Angel) could do when he was 14, as if it must be paranormal. I don’t know how that trick was done but I’m guessing Angel does. As does Randi, Penn & Teller… and any number of professional magicians.

The best bit though is Callahan, with a long sorry rant about Angel – how he’s trying to prove Jesus is not real (he does a walking on water illusion), and how he’s “hiding” behind his clothes and jewelry.  (Someone’s been watching Dr Phil. Actually, I think Callahan would have more luck on Oprah.) And loads on how Callahan “doesn’t like being questioned”. All in all though, it was a load of whining about Criss Angel, but nothing about why anyone should believe that Callahan actually has any paranormal powers. The truth is though, it was really about Callahan, and not Angel, despite Callahan's attempts at misdirection.

But the funniest bit was where he rambled on about how Angel needed “people between me and him” – a reference, presumably, to how the two other hosts kept Angel and Callahan apart, although Callahan gave the appearance of wanting a fight. If you want to know why it’s funny, you have to go back and watch the first video. Right near the end (13 to 14 seconds left on the counter), you see that Callahan accidentally breaks free of his minder, and could actually get to Angel if he wanted. So what does he do? He quickly goes back and links his arm with the host – because he just had to make sure he had someone holding him back. Even the losing his temper / wanting a fight was a lame act. What a loser.

Judgment Day – Tonight on PBS TV

Tonight, 8.00pm on PBS (US TV) is Nova’s Judgment Day - a two hour montage of interviews and reconstructions of the Kitzmiller vs Dover case from 2005. (Wow – was that really two years ago? Time flies.) The documentary apparently features all the main players except (inexplicably) Michael Behe. Or perhaps not so inexplicably. Remember, the Dover case was where Behe got to admit that Intelligent Design was a science just like astrology. I would want to forget that too if I were Behe.

Looks like an interesting program, anyway.

Panda Bear – tells CAM like it is

Via Orac I discovered Panda Bear MD – written by an Emergency Medicine Resident Physician who has a way of describing alternative medicine like it is, for example as in this piece:

At a philosophical level, leaving aside the utter ridiculousness of Reiki healers shooting sacred energy from their fingers, this is the difference between real medicine and Complementary and Alternative Medicine whose practitioners, as they don’t treat real pathology, have never developed humility in the face of disease. It is easy, for example, for your acupuncturist to promise a perfect cure because they’re not really treating anything, just some nebulous mumbo-jumbo like a dysfunction of your ability to receive pure qi from the heavens. Side effects? None, of course. It’s perfect medicine because, despite being based on a completely imaginary idea of physiology that has no relation whatsoever to the way things actually are, it can magically target your imaginary complaint.

The whole thing’s worth a read.

John Edward / James van Praagh Bingo

Note to new readers: this post is about the pretend-psychic and cold reader John Edward (pictured right), and not anyone with a similar name who is currently running for President of The United States. It’s also about James van Praagh (pictured below left). This coming Friday November 16, the credulous Larry King (CNN) is featuring “psychics (sic) John Edward and James van Praagh”. No doubt they will be playing their usual guessing game with callers.

My ID Creationist Bingo card proved popular, so I decided to produce a John Edward / James van Praagh Bingo card. It’s based on the numerous times I’ve seen Edward perform his lame cold reading act, as well as my detailed analysis of the transcript of an earlier Edward appearance on Larry King. Although it’s based on Edward’s technique, most of the bingo squares will apply to van Praagh too. If you want an analysis of Edward’s cold reading technique, then read my earlier post John Edward Re-revisited. That’s a long post, so I’ve summarized below, the meanings behind the different bingo squares. If you have any friends or family members who believe in this nonsense, I suggest you watch the show with them and play the bingo game. It will help if you explain in advance what the squares mean, and how Edward and van Praagh will manipulate the callers to believe they are really talking to dead people. From personal experience in doing this, I can say that saying in advance what Edward and van Praagh are going to do, is a powerful persuader. Playing Bingo just adds to the fun. Here’s the Bingo Card: Edited to add: I replaced the original card with the new randomized bingo card – have a cold reader bingo party with your friends.

Both Edward and van Praagh use a technique called Cold Reading – where the “psychic” makes a series of guesses and the caller tries to make them fit his or her situation. The following is an explanation of the different squares, and a summary of the main cold reading techniques:

J, M, R and S names

Why the dead can only remember their initials, and not their full names, is never adequately explained. Anyway, guessing initials is the bread and butter of the cold reader. J, M, R and S are common initials in America. (For crying out loud, both these cold-readers’ names are “J” names.) And they’re flexible - for example R includes Bob as well as Robert. A “G” will count as a hit for the “J” guess, and so on . M is common especially among older women. Also Mike is a fairly common male name. “M” can also be “Mom”. Notice how often (ie not very often) they guess other initials.

“Yes You Do!” or “Write This Down” or "Keep That"

"Yes you do" is a specific Edward technique. When he guesses wrong, he will insist the caller, not he (Edward), is wrong. The caller just doesn’t realize he had the older brother that Edward incorrectly guessed he had. Edward’s technique is to be very aggressive and supremely confident – so much so that the callers often think their knowledge of their own family is incorrect.

The instruction to “Write This Down” will also give the impression that Edward is right and the caller wrong, since Edward is obviously so sure he is right, he wants the caller to write it down to verify it later. Of course, no one ever follows up to see if what the caller wrote down was actually true. 

Van Praagh version of this will be to say "Keep That" - to imply the caller will eventually recall what van Praagh has guessed.  Again, no one can check to see if the missing connection is ever recalled.

The thing to note is that “Yes You Do!”, “Write This Down” and "Keep That" are just techniques to recover from the completely wrong guess.

Father Figure / Older Male and Mother Figure / Older Female

This is sufficiently vague that it covers a multitude of possible dead people, including older brothers/sisters, aunts/uncles as well as parents and grandparents. The caller will supply the actual answer that Edward can then pretend he got. This approach is so much more likely to produce a hit than, say, “I can see your Father” (who might not actually be dead).

Larry King goes “Wow!”

Not strictly an cold reading technique – but notice how Larry will credulously accept even bad guesses as a hit. It’ll happen at least once during the one hour show, and serves as additional validation.

Chest Area / Head Area / Cancer

Most deaths can be assigned to either the “head area” or the “chest area”, so either of these guesses has good chance of being correct for somebody the caller knows.  “Chest area” covers all heart disease as well as lung cancer.  Either head or chest could include car accidents and the like.  Also asking about "Breathing Trouble" will usually result in a hit - what person didn't have "breathing trouble" when they were dying?

Also, there will be several guesses of “Cancer”, because who doesn’t know someone who died from cancer?

Birthday / Wedding / Dog or Cat / Child / Toys

Questions such as “who had a birthday recently” will usually result in a hit – who doesn’t know someone who recently had (or soon will have) a birthday? Likewise, “Wedding” is likely to be a correct guess for someone the caller knows.

Most families had a loved pet that died, sometime, and so asking about the dog is a reliable standby.

Asking about a dead “Child” may be less reliable, but will be an strongly emotional hit if the guess is correct. If not, Edward may claim he is right anyway (see “Yes You Do!”, above). 

Van Praagh often asks about "Toys".   This is  really the same as asking about the child, but is in my view much more emotionally manipulative in that it conjures up an image of a child "on the other side" still playing with her toys.  It also allows him to pretend he knows more that he initially did, as in this example:

VAN PRAAGH: Did she have a toy that she loved so much, she nearly wore it out?
CALLER: Yes! She had a stuffed Pink Panther that she carried with her everywhere!
VAN PRAAGH: Because she's showing me a Pink Panther.

Boxes

Edward or van Praagh will ask, is someone moving? And lets face it, who doesn’t know someone who just moved or is about to? (Think about your own friends. I moved recently and two of my friends did also.) If this is a good guess, Edward will always say something like “I thought so because they’re showing me boxes”. It’s his way of claiming this rather obvious guess was told to him by the dead people.  "Boxes can also be a hit for any other kind of gift, such as a birthday (coming soon or just gone).

Wild-Ass Guess

Occasionally Edward will make an outlandish guess – who died in a plane or car crash? / who has a leg or arm missing? / suicide? / shot in a robbery? – you name it. It’s always presented as a question, so when no one fits the bill he can quickly move on to the next guess. And the mark will rarely remember the wrong guess. But on the rare occasions he is correct it will look as though he must be the real deal. “How could he know my grandfather lost his arm in the war?” Of course, you need to carefully count the number of guesses he gets wrong that the callers forget. Which can be difficult at the speed that Edward spits out guesses.

Numbers from 1 to 12

As well as initials, they will at some point guess a number. The number chosen will usually be from 1 to 12. That way, if the number is (say) the actual date the relative died, (or was born, graduated – anything will do), he can claim a great hit – he got the date right. If not, then someone will have a birthday, death (etc) in the numbered month. So when the number guessed is between 1 and 12, there is always the fallback to claim it relates to a month. The guess is therefore much more likely to be a “hit” than a number over 12. In fact, see if either of them ever guess a number over 12. And see how many times they guess a number from 1 to 12.

Jewelry

Van Praagh will often ask about "Jewelry" - because most elderly relatives will have left some jewelry, or perhaps a watch to their children or grandchildren.  The caller will supply the details.  This is, of course very manipulative, emotionally, to remind the caller of precious items their dead relatives left them.

Caller Accepts a Miss as a Hit

These can sometimes be hard to spot at the time, and frequently they only become clear when looking at the transcript. For example, see this exchange from the reading I linked above:

EDWARD: OK, Linda, the first thing I want talk about is, I know you're looking for your mom but I'm getting an older male who's also there on the other side. I feel like this is somebody who would be above you, which means it's like a father-figure, or an uncle, and he passes from either lung cancer or emphysema, tuberculosis; it's all problems in the chest area. OK, that's the first thing. And I feel like there's a J or a G-sounding name attached to this.

CALLER: That's my mother.

EDWARD: She's got a very dominant personality.

CALLER: That's my mother. Her first name starts with G and she had emphysema.

Edward had said the “chest area” person was the “older male”. Caller recollects this ailment is her Mother. The caller has accepted this obvious (wrong) guess as a “hit”.

This one is more obvious:

EDWARD: Is there a Katherine or Kathleen connected to you?

CALLER: My brother's name was Keith.

This is a big part of the psychology of cold reading – the caller feels it is his or her fault if Edward guesses wrong and so the caller, if possible, will try to turn Edward’s miss into a hit.

Multiple Fishing Questions

Edward especially relies on speaking very quickly and on multiple rapid-fire fishing questions. From the transcript again:

What is coming through is a younger male figure, who is passed over, and I feel like he passes because of a car accident, or because of an impact to his body-something that impacts his body. He's telling me, "He's connected to R"-like Rich or Richie or Robbie; and he's connected to somebody beneath you. So I don't know if you have a son, and this is a son's friend who's trying to come through to his family. But there's somebody younger coming through like this; and it's in your area, it's not out-of-state. It's not far away-

It’s hard from just reading the above, to appreciate the speed that Edward can get through something like that. I’m pretty sure the idea is that with enough guesses, something is likely to be right, and with the speed that Edward whizzes through them, the caller will forget all the wrong guesses. 

Complete Miss on All Guesses

Despite all the above techniques, Edward or van Praagh will sometimes miss completely on every guess for a caller. When this happens, they will simply say that the reading (ie the dead person he was talking to) was for a different caller. It’s the perfect “out” – when he’s right he’s right; when he’s wrong he’s still right (but for a different caller). Of course, this result is indistinguishable from someone just making guesses.

Badge / Flag

Edward will sometimes ask about the “Badge”. This is an over riding guess that can work for a dead relative in the military, police force, fire department, etc. It will normally go along these lines:

EDWARD: I see a badge. Who wore a badge?

CALLER: My Dad was in the police!

EDWARD: Yes, because they’re telling me he was in the police.

Edward claims specific knowledge although his guess was initially much more vague. The caller supplied the details that Edward pretended he got.

A similar guess is “Flag”. Edward sees them waving a flag – that can mean someone patriotic (in the military), or someone born (or died, etc) around the fourth of July, or a warning sign – the caller supplies the answer.

Dead Relative is “OK”

The sum total of most of these validating guesses is usually that the dead relative is “OK”. There’s never any useful actual information given – “the gold coins are buried _________”, or “the number of the Swiss bank account that you didn't know I had is ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­____________”, or “the name and address of the person who murdered me is __________”. Instead we always hear that the dead people are “OK”. Worthless. And, most importantly, totally unverifiable.

Do you understand?

Edward’s favorite. After a series of guesses that are clearly wrong (the caller hasn’t agreed with any), Edward will ask, aggressively “do you understand?” The caller will usually reply “yes” – ie they do understand what Edward is saying. But “I understand” is not the same as “you are correct”.  It can appear that even just a nod here can mean verification.

That covers all the squares. If anyone knows any of van Praagh’s specials, please add them to the comments. And have fun playing bingo. Usually the game is to get a straight line marked out. With these two bozos I think it should be possible to get the whole card marked off.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to The Amazing Randi for supplying the van Praagh techniques I included above .  Also thanks to members of the JREF  Forum, and  especially  Rob Lancaster for the "Pink Panther"  example.  And a huge thanks to Brett who built the randomized bingo card you see above.

Update - Friday November 16, 2007

The show was a total let down - no cold reading  despite the promise that the psychics would "take your calls" - just a load of vapid claims from a bunch of dopes that included Shirley MacLaine.  I'll leave the post up so that it's there for the next time they actually do have Edward doing his cold reading act.

26 November 07 - Edited to add:

I just posted about the actual program (which was not as advertised) - From The Sublime to The Ridiculous.

PETA Hypocrisy

You may have read recently how the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) recently caused $20-30,000 damage to the house of a scientist, because the scientist’s work includes animal testing. Actually, the scientist was lucky: the ALF really wanted to burn the house down but settled instead for merely flooding the place. Nice.

This is the same ALF that PETA co-founder and President Ingrid Newkirk wrote about approvingly in her book Free the Animals! The Untold Story of the U.S. Animal Liberation Front and Its Founder, ‘Valerie’. According to Amazon.com, Newkirk "is one of the few people with firsthand knowledge of the ALF and is personally acquainted with the organization's founder."  Furthermore, Newkirk:

…gives interviews to ALF’s publications, supports the legal defense efforts of ALF criminals (with PETA’s money), has been subpoenaed in regard to her ALF connections, and has even been accused in court documents of participation in the ALF arson of a Michigan State University research lab.

I think it’s safe to say that Newkirk would have approved of this recent terrorist attack on a scientist’s home. Newkirk is so strongly opposed to animal research that she has said:

even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, "we'd be against it"

So she’s uncompromisingly opposed to animal testing. Well, as it turns out, not so much. Not when she needs modern medicine, at any rate. You see, recently she broke her wrist:

Just as I was setting out to launch my new book, Let’s Have a Dog Party!, I met a wet floor and went splat, neatly snapping the bones in my wrist. Ooh, the pain! Thank goodness for IV drips.

Thank goodness for IV drips. IV drips. That would be those same intravenous anaesthetics that were tested on rats, rabbits, dogs, cats and monkeys. Apparently she’s not opposed to that animal testing. So unopposed that she thanks "goodness" for it.

Now, you may say, Newkirk didn’t have a choice in this matter, or that Newkirk believes animal testing was unnecessary to develop these medications and procedures. Well, if you think that, I’ll just refer you to PETA’s Animal Testing page, that unambiguously states:

Send back items that you have from companies that test on animals...

From the comments to the PETA blog, I think we can assume that Newkirk is now aware that her painkillers were, in fact, tested on animals. So can we assume that she will now refuse (“send back”) any more painkillers? Or will she, like PETA Vice President and insulin (tested on dogs, rabbits and mice) dependent diabetic Mary Beth Sweetland, continue to enjoy the benefits of animal testing while supporting terrorist acts on the scientists who provide them?

I think we should be told.

73rd Skeptics’ Circle

The 73rd Skeptics Circle has just been posted at Holford Watch. There are some boxes for you to tick. I think.