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Recently, slogging computer-wise through folders of material I’d put aside – some for several years – I came upon a transcript of a “reading” done by “psychic” Char Margolis, on ABC-TVs “The View” back in 2000. She’d picked out an audience member named Anita, and here it is, a succinct example of “cold reading,” 34 seconds of psychic marvels…
CHAR: Is there somebody who’s an “A,” or a “Willy”? Uh, a “William,” or an “A,” or, uh, an “M,” connected to you? Anyone deceased? Or living?
SUBJECT: Living…
CHAR: What?
SUBJECT: That could be a last name, no first name.
CHAR: What? That’s an “A”?
SUBJECT: William.
CHAR: William? Is this someone living?
SUBJECT: Yes.
CHAR: Who is this?
SUBJECT: A co-worker friend.
CHAR: Okay. I was gonna ask, if you want to, are they making some changes at your work?
SUBJECT: Umm, I’ve been offered to do something new at work, yes.
At that point, Anita was dismissed and Char turned to another victim.
Damn! Now, I ask those snickering skeptics: How do these psychics do this?
In that same folder, I found another transcript of an excerpt from "The View," this one with James Van Praagh doing the same scam with a woman named Susan, this segment mercifully only 17 seconds long:
VAN PRAAGH: Who had eye trouble, please?
SUBJECT: [holds up her hand] Ah, I have eye trouble.
VAN PRAAGH: You had the eye trouble, did you?
SUBJECT: Yes.
VAN PRAAGH: The trouble with you. MmmHmm. She’s talking about eye trouble. Was there something about maybe having a surgery or a procedure having to do with something?
SUBJECT: Yes, I had eye surgery when I was two years old.
VAN PRAAGH: Thank you. Because she’s telling me that!
Notice a few points here. First, the changing of the verb tense by Van Praagh; he’s asking about a previous condition, the woman identifies it as a current problem, and he switches it back to conform with his guess. The un-named female “talking about eye trouble” is introduced by Van Praagh to see if the subject will identify some ghost who might have provided that information. In a blatantly obvious probe for data that he doesn’t have, he asks – using the escape hatch, “maybe” – whether there was surgery – of any kind, of any person, at any time in the past – or any “procedure” of any sort – “having to do with something”! How wide can you throw that net, James? It pays off: the victim gives him a very specific, important event, and a specific time – the eye operation – and Van Praagh is ready to use his tried-and-true gimmick: he takes what he’s just been told and puts it in the disembodied mouth of the ghost – “Thank you. Because she’s telling me that!” The victim will frequently later recall such a statement as coming from the spirit, not from herself!
Similarly, just last week the “Geraldo At Large” show featured a segment on a “cold reader,” one John Holland. The first example of his awesome abilities was just perfect. He “channeled” the ghosts of the 146 garment workers who died trapped in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. And what did he come up with?
It’s the part that they can’t get out, that’s getting to me.
Duh. What else do you think might have been on their minds, John?
The interviewer, who was not at all sympathetic to the “reader,” still fell for the leading comments and outright questions, freely giving out information at every opportunity. He’d announced at the start that he wanted to contact the spirit of his aunt Marsha; that lady didn’t turn up, but Holland asked the interviewer if he had known his father’s father, and got a “not very well” answer. Then, as one of his many rambling comments, he said, “I want you to remember the name David,” and the interviewer immediately interrupted and told the reader, “David? That’s my father’s name!” It was not anything asked for, and it was a full generation away, but that became the "hit" the videotape editors chose as being significant!
Jamy Ian Swiss, contacted by the show for his input, gave them a 20-minute-long interview on the subject of talking-to-the-dead operators. The entire statement by Jamy that they used, lasted just 12 seconds. Said Jamy when I inquired:
Yes, and they used THE WEAKEST statement from me they could find. I’d talked about method, motive, and morality – NOTHING. And I pointed out that the guy started out – according to the reporter's own account to me – by ASKING QUESTIONS! I asked, “Wouldn't your grandfather be able to come up with some more specific anecdote you two could share, beyond just his own name?”
Note: the “reader” didn’t identify the grandfather, at all, but the reporter later stated, “It kind of freaked me when he busted my dad’s name, David.” This is the typical, expected, and dependable reaction from the victim, to supply information and to then adapt it to fit the situation. With that kind of help, the “psychic” doesn’t need any more. The reporter wasn’t looking for his father’s name, at all, and as Jamy reminds us, Holland knew who was going to interview him, and probably has access to the Internet...
Holland also “tried on” references to motorcycles, a motor crash, and sky-diving, but none worked for him, drawing total blanks…
Such transcripts can use a lot of study to determine the clever methods used by the “readers” to hook their naïve victims. Ian Rowland’s book, “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading," reveals all these secrets, and can be discovered at http://tinyurl.com/7khso. Ian’s website is www.ianrowland.com. This is a guy who tells you, up front, that he’s an entertainer and not a “psychic,” as does Banachek, of course.
At www.randi.org/jr/2006-04/041406schwartz.html#i2 I mentioned the resident psychics at the otherwise prestigious Selfridges Store chain in the UK. Click on http://tinyurl.com/fmzm4 and see what the UK Skeptics have to report on this continuing shameful exploitation of trusting customers.
Reader Paul Leigh brings us up to date on the latest educational literature and its consumers:
Re your piece on “Common-Sense Tarot” in this week's commentary, I was in Borders last week and noticed a book with the endearingly accurate title of “The Complete Idiot's Guide to Elves and Fairies.” Comment superfluous...
Got your attention, right? Sorry, the “stuff” is energy, and it’s not free at all. I’ve just been sent a massive book – two inches thick, weighing just under three pounds, and 979 pages long! It’s titled, “Energy from the Vacuum: Concepts & Principles” from which I just read a few excerpts over the phone to the American Physical Society’s Bob Park. He was almost hysterical with laugher, because he understands physics.
This tome is by a chap we first mentioned at www.randi.org/jr/051002.html – do a search for “MEG” and look for several other references in SWIFT. He’s Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden, Ph.D., U.S. Army Retired. This present book, published in 2002, is peppered with references to “COP>1.0”, which in the special language used by the free-energy-perpetual-motion crowd, stands for “Coefficient of Performance greater than 1,” in other words, free energy – or perpetual motion, if you can get it working and applied. That appears to be a major and unsolved problem for these folks. The book has numerous huge footnotes, a characteristic which always alerts me to the possibility that the author has nothing to say. One footnote runs to a full two pages…
Just to demonstrate how ponderous the text is, try on this 200-word selection, and it’s by no means the worst I could have selected:
One of the problems with present conventional application of Dirac's theory is that the positron is not used in its unobservable causal negative energy 4-electron state by modem theorists and experimentalists, but after observation where its direction has been reversed, its charge has been reversed, time has been stripped away, and the mass has become positive. So it is actually used as a positive energy entity having positive mass, and producing positive energy EM fields and positive gravity. This defeats the entire magic of the causal (unobserved) 4-positron as the electron carrier of negative mass and negative energy (convergent electromagnetic energy) in currents in the vacuum (spacetime) itself, rather than the electron carrier of positive mass and positive energy in ordinary 3-space. By replacing the unobserved (causal) vacuum 4-positron (negative energy electron) with the observed (effect) 3-positron with positive mass and positive energy, the entire vast area of negative energy EM fields – and thus direct antigrav via electromagnetic means – is discarded. But the physicists avoided having to grapple with practical negative mass and practical negative energy (cool mass and cool energy). It also set back the pace of physics discovering and engineering antigravity transportation for nearly three quarters of a century.
Bearden promised, in 2002, in regard to the “MEG” (motionless electromagnetic generator) system, that by 2003:
The first MEG units to be produced for sale will output 2.5 kilowatts of free electricity. Forever. They should be in production about a year from now. Facilities for manufacturing the device are being set up in an unnamed "friendly nation."
This free electricity will flow indefinitely, without much, or any maintenance. The units may be hooked together to provide more wattage, so four of them would provide 10 kilowatts. [Hey, he really can do math!] After some production experience, units will be made which output 10 kilowatts each. With a couple of those units a house could get off the electrical grid.
Well, four years have now passed since Bearden made that confident promise, and a call to my local Home Depot has determined that the huge retail outlet hasn’t even heard of the “MEG” device, let alone stocked any. But notice that Bearden has leapt ahead to connecting together 2.5 kw units that haven’t even been made yet, to give 10 kw production items! Why is it that these nut cases continue to make such wild claims, which are never fulfilled? Why do they? Simply because they know they can get away with such boasting, and their stockholders will continue to listen to their alibis…
But beware! Bearden’s book is packed with tales of intrigue. To me, this indicates too much preoccupation with spy movies and fantasy programs. He himself, he says, is afflicted with a “mysterious, unknown ailment” of the “modified biological warfare kind produced by a combined U.S./Canadian team,” that he somehow contracted in 1968. This attempt to silence him brought about his efforts to rush to produce this book into print, he says, thus “passing the ‘energy from the vacuum’ information and baton” to those who will continue his campaign…
As pointed out above, getting an actual working model seems to be the main problem. All through the text of the book, we find tantalizing suggestions that this has already been accomplished, however. We’re told, for example, that one Eric Laithwaite “for some years a professor with the Imperial College in London,” in 1970 was approached to provide a working unit. Writes Bearden:
The Centennial Center of Science & Technology in Ontario was looking for working models to decorate their entrance hall. Laithwaite showed that… a steel washer (about 3 cm in diameter) could be made to roll continuously in a vertical plane around the inside of the stator… [He] completed and delivered a working model to the Centennial Center…
What ever happened to this miraculous device…? The Centennial Center is now known as the Ontario Science Center, a science museum in Toronto, Canada. I inquired there, but somehow this startling invention has dropped from view. And that’s what’s happened to all the dozens of “working models” of Bearden’s machines. Without exception, they’ve been misplaced, seized by authorities, stolen, purchased and concealed, or destroyed. Pity…
With Bearden, some new breakthrough is always just ready to happen, often “available by the time this book is published,” but never realized. NASA, we are told, was just about to reveal gravity-shielding devices or something just as startling, but somehow the world-shaking story only showed up in supermarket tabloids, and the machines never materialized.
Bearden recounts how the courageous inventors who come up with systems that the oil companies cannot abide, sometimes suddenly drop from sight so completely that “even their investors can’t find them” (?) or are often found dead “under mysterious circumstances.” One example of this, he says, was inventor Stefan Marinov, who is variously reported as having committed suicide or falling off a building. Bearden has him
…killed with a longitudinal EM wave shooter… with his body thrown off a building to make it appear a suicide.
Says Bearden, Marinov’s body was allowed to lie on the pavement for a long time because it was “emitting longitudinal EM waves” and
When [it was] finally moved, the pavement glowed in that area that had been underneath the body. Only one weapon on earth [sic] will kill a person in that manner, and that is a longitudinal EM wave “shooter.”
Another researcher, reports Bearden,
…was killed with a Venus Technique (look it up, it’s a distortion of the wave front) modified beam that plunges the heart into violent fibrillations.
Bearden says that he himself was attacked – presumably by the dreaded oil interests – with one of those “Venus” weapons in a restaurant in Alabama, but managed to escape through a back door after seeing the device and the person doing the “beaming.” Another man in Australia, he reports, was killed on an upper floor of his building by such a weapon, “right through the walls,” by a “bazooka-sized shooter.” Yet another inventor, he says, was killed by an “ice-dart dipped in curare” –
…a professional hit method, used by some of the sinister arms of various intelligence systems.
Come on, friends! This reads like a really bad movie script written by a 14-year-old.
The entire text of “Energy from the Vacuum” is strewn with carefully selected quotes from real physicists such as Hawking, Einstein, Feynman, Wheeler, Bunge, Maxwell, Planck, Lorentz, Faraday, and Penrose. For flavor, some Sigmund Freud and Arthur C. Clarke is tossed in. No, quotations from these names don’t add validity to the book; they just fill space and might suggest to the unwary that perhaps there’s real science to be found there.
From the Philippines, reader “Edwardson” asks:
In the latest issue of Swift (http://randi.org/jr/2006-06/062306follow.html) you said,
And, "Is Uri Geller genuinely paranormal?" is a question that is answered, "No, until he provides proof that he is."
That question seems to me in a way similar to, "Do paranormal phenomena exist?" In the latter case I think the strictly epistemological reply is that we don't know until tests provide us good evidence for them. Without positive evidence we'd have to be agnostic about the existence/reality of the paranormal. (And I don't know if there is a way to disprove the possibility of the paranormal.) But then we'd also have to be, strictly speaking, agnostic about the existence of green zebras with wings, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Geller clones living in the star system Zeta Ridiculi, .... On the other hand, if the said characteristics of paranormal phenomena are in conflict with our best - meaning scientific - understanding of how the universe is and how it works, then that would be a good reason to be very skeptical about it.
So vis-a-vis your question, is it appropriate to answer, "We don't know until Geller proves it"?
Much as I would like to likewise say, "No there is no such thing as ESP and no, Geller is not a psychic, until there is proof for these," I feel that to do so is to stand on shaky ground, just as being an atheist I can't declare that, "The supernatural does not exist." (Yes, there are of course "strong/positive atheists" though I don't know how robust their arguments are.) I'd really like to hear from you whether we skeptics can safely answer that "No, until Geller provides proof that he is," and what our rationale for this is.
I responded to Edwardson:
The difference is that for years there existed much hearsay, many articles in the popular press – and even some seemingly-scientific evidence – that Geller was really paranormal, and there was some convoluted “reasoning” done by otherwise reputable scientists that might explain the phenomena he exhibited, if any of it were anything but simple sleight-of-hand; however, there’s none of that at all for green winged zebras…
Edwardson had another point of interest to tell us about an item I ran here: www.randi.org/jr/2006-05/051906sylvia.html#i13 :
Lastly, for the past week or so that Filipino "psychic judge" Florentino Floro has been posting in a discussion board for Chinese Filipinos. Among his various claims is that he has healing powers (I think he should become a masseur.) He says:
Mr. Jaime T. Licauco (you can click his name in google/yahoo), paranormal expert, testified that I am the sole healing judge worldwide; in Court, he testified that he investigated the authenticity of my healing, since out of 15 samples, 14 were cured of incurable illnesses. I do not use prayers or cult but simply my HANDS and coconut healing oil; my hand emits extreme heat over the afflicted area; examples, arthritis, gout, rheumatism, migrane, etc. the pain could be alleviated by medicines in 5 hours, etc. but with my hand, only 2-4 minutes. My healing is complementary with orthodox medicine. If you desire, you can invite your friends and I am willing to demonstrate the healing here (123 Dahlia, Alido, Malolos, Bulacan, Philippines, (044) 662-92-03). www.tsinoy.com/forum/showpost.php?p=457725&postcount=299)
14 out of 15 people with supposedly incurable conditions were healed. Super hot hands. Those must really pique your interest.
I invited him to take the Million Dollar Challenge and provided him the pertinent link. But he didn't seem at all interested, even though he advertises that he's a poor man. Face it Mr. Randi, your million isn't big enough a carrot for some woowoos. He seemed more interested in CSICOP and may have contacted them already. I never mentioned to him how closely related you are to that org. By the way, Jaime Licauco is a paranormal expert alright – as an expert in believing in paranormal claims and anything pseudoscientific: http://j.licauco.tripod.com/)
The Australian Skeptics National Convention this year will be held Saturday 18th & Sunday 19th November, 2006, in Melbourne, and will discuss “Science, Truth and the Media.” Their speakers will include scientists, science journalists and some well-known media personalities. The Melbourne Museum is sponsoring the convention at The Age Theatre. Registration can be done online at the secure Australian Skeptics Shop, or you can download a registration form. For up-to-date convention news, you can go to: www.skeptics.com.au/vic.
The Skeptics' Circle is a special event among skeptically-minded bloggers that occurs every two weeks. Bloggers take turns hosting the Skeptics' Circle on their own blogs. Hosts describe and link to other bloggers' essays and commentary on topics such as critical thinking, quack medicine, urban legends, and bad media reportage on topics that touch on science, history and math. Recently, the Skeptics' Circle was hosted at www.autismdiva.blogspot.com. Even a brief look will convince you that there’s more you should understand about this matter of autism. I know that I was informed by going there.
A Robert Harper, PhD, made a frivolous and irresponsible criticism of the JREF million-dollar prize offer via e-mail to prominent Canadian skeptic Dr. Terry Polevoy, in Toronto. Nothing really new there, just the same baseless old errors, but I must share with you here the exchange, which you may find useful to send to others who, equally uninformed, choose to repeat the tired canards that we have to handle from time to time. Bear in mind that these are persons who desperately need – because of their beliefs – to try invalidating the JREF challenge because they see no way around it. I can’t verify that Harper has the PhD he claims, but I don’t doubt it.
Here is the exchange, two sessions of my responses to e-mail sent to Dr. Polevoy. It is I, trying to talk sense to someone who doesn’t want to hear it. The “Adam” referred to is Adam McLeod, a kid whose parents have been promoting his miraculous healing powers and running seminars on the claim. It reminds us all of the Marjoe Gortner scam of the late 1940s, and I refer you to wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjoe_Gortner. Here are my recent exchanges with Harper, one of Adam’s enthusiastic supporters:
Mr. Harper: though I have no idea who you are, I've been forwarded a most peculiar statement attributed to you. I'll take a moment to explain how the real world works – an aspect apparently foreign to you, either from ignorance or from obstinacy... You make six statements:
(1) Re your speculation that Adam and family are after Randi's $1m…:
If this refers to the "healer" Adam, be assured that he fears and avoids coming to grips with the million-dollar challenge. He knows he can't apply and try, because he'd have to prove his case – which he cannot do.
(2) …if you're right, we may conclude that Adam is either a fake or self-deluded for assuming that Randi's bet is a fair one.
Really? Both those alternatives are possibly true, but not for the reason that you give. Have you any evidence – or is that a foreign word to you – showing this to be an “assumption”? It's a common canard, used by those who cannot face up to the fact that none of the "big" operators – or "Adam," for that matter – have applied. And your designation of the challenge as a "bet" shows your desperate need to misrepresent it; there's no "bet" involved. This is a prize, pure and simple: you can do it, we pay. You risk nothing, you invest nothing.
(3) James knows perfectly well that all empirical sciences are structured as open inductive systems in which no number of experiments prove anything.
So? Where does it say that we intend to do any "experiments"? We only require that the claimant perform as claimed. Nothing more, nothing less. There's nothing to be "induced." Either he/she does it, as mutually agreed – and wins – or not.
(4) All he [Randi] has to do is sit back and say that.
No, no, elusive one! That's the kind of refuge YOU would take, not I! By the rules – which you should read – I am not permitted to do this, though you would try...
(5) Should the evidence for the reality of psychic phenomena continue to accrue, he moves the goal-posts back accordingly.
And where is the evidence for this bold claim, pray tell? You appear to know much more about the matter than I do, for this has never come to my attention! Again, read the rules... But you won't, of course. Ignorance is your refuge.
(6) Three-card Monte would be an infinitely safer bet.
If there were any "bet" involved, yes, any card game would be a better investment. This is not a game with me, though it appears to be, for you; I'm serious.
Soon after I sent this, it was followed by another barrage that showed Dr. Harper was still not grasping our reasoning, and I made another attempt to inform him:
Dr. Harper: More? Again, point-by-point, but this time, 13 points...
(1) After all, you [Randi] have been accused of making false allegations in the past at, I believe, some cost to you.
As usual, you “believe” – at least partly – incorrectly. Yes, I've been thus accused, and sued several times. I've won all cases except for one, and in that one the plaintiff was awarded one-third of one percent of the amount asked – which I didn't pay because he was subsequently required to drop the case. None of the others cost me anything. Sounds like a win, to me.
(2) It may well be, of course, that as with your ilk in CSICOP, you claim the very clairvoyance you deny to others.
This is a meaningless statement. As expected.
(3) You are partially correct. It's not a two-sided bet but, on your part, one-sided.
No, dense one. It's a prize, not a bet, nor a one-sided bet. It's a prize to be awarded. I'm not making any wager. I'm offering a prize. (Why am I trying to get this across to you, a PhD...?)
(4) My point nevertheless holds: you CAN'T lose because no experiment nor demonstration proves anything (Philosophy of Science 01). That is why "probative" statements in science are in reality consensual judgements by the community of scientists.
Thank you for – again – firmly re-establishing your total misunderstanding of my offer. In all the test procedures, it has been mutually agreed, in advance, what will constitute the evidence of the validity of any claim – no other framework, philosophy, or "judgments" are brought in. The protocol is designed so that no decisions are required by any judges. The results must be self-evident. For examples: the man could not fly off the building using an eggbeater, the dowser could not find the landmine in the field [boom!], or the mind-reader guessed 3 numbers out of 20 correctly, when we'd all agreed that he should get at least 5 correct. No decisions, no re-examination, no wondering or re-thinking – BY EITHER PARTY.
(5) That is also why falsifiability is a primary condition for consideration of any theory.
When theories are being considered, yes. (Philosophy of Popper 01). We have no interest in anything but results. Either the spoon bent by being looked at by the man, as was mutually agreed in advance, or it did not bend. No theories apply.
(6) I credited you with knowing THAT slice of the real world and still do.
Thank you. I do. And it does not apply, nor does the half-life of thorium apply...
(7) Granted this, all you need do is demand more and more proof as the evidence piles up or, as in the Targ-Puthoff experiments, find holes (literally) where they don't exist.
Oh, unwashed and incalcitrant one! BY THE RULES – you obviously haven't read or haven't understood them – BOTH PARTIES ARE BOUND TO ABIDE BY THE AGREEMENT, MUTUALLY DECIDED IN ADVANCE! I can't "demand more and more proof," under any circumstances – nor can the other party demand less and less! TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS, PLEASE! IT'S NOT DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND! As for the "Targ-Puthoff experiments," as we now know, those were demos done by Mr. Geller at his whim, not designed-and-controlled experiments. All of that was riddled with holes. Get informed.
(8) It is no mug's challenge for you but as they say, the real world never runs short of suckers.
Ah, now you see at least one of my contentions. Congratulations.
(9) A final word: ad hominem attacks carry two risks: the first is being written off as a pathological believer or skeptic, the second is running into someone like me who can hand it out.
I've no idea what "ad hominem attacks" you refer to, but I agree with your first point, while assuring you on the second that anyone who can "hand it out" better be able to avoid it blowing back in their face...
(10) To me, the "real" world of which you speak is a stage.
Yeah, I know, and all the men and women merely players. Been said before. Get on with it.
(11) Gone with the crowds are the evening dress, cape and wand. But ya gotta make a buck, and as you said so eloquently on television, bashing psychics pays more than pulling rabbits out of a hat.
Hey, ya got me there, in a way. Though I never used a cape, nor a wand, but tails and tux, yes. As for my having made this “bashing psychics” statement on television or anywhere else, this is your overactive imagination – or your eager acceptance of someone's invention – at work again. I never made such a statement. Remember that "real world" I mentioned, Robert? It's time to take a look at it... Oh, and I never pulled a rabbit out of a hat, either...
(12) And yet, and yet, smoke and mirrors still make the best of props and James, you still use them with an imagination worthy of a Copperfield.
[blush] Ah, shucks! I'm all a-twitter...! You smooth talker, you!
(13) Out of common decency, no copy of this will go to poor Terry.
Robert, Robert, Robert! I detect a ploy here whereby I'm expected to fire off a copy to “poor Terry”! I'll do even better. I'll publish this whole exchange on SWIFT, so that my readers can experience what it's like to confront someone who has no grasp of the real world – there it is again! – and yet flaunts "PhD" as a protective invocation.
This man has gleefully chosen to accept just about every canard that has ever appeared on the Internet about me and the JREF challenge. All of his points can be found there, snapped up and believed in desperation. And this is how a PhD works to understand the real world?
Finally – one can only hope! – comes this sad little note, which was followed by Harper’s confident assumption that I’d edit the exchanges above (not a word has been edited), and that I wouldn’t dare to publish what follows – which I do now. Harper fired off this rationalization of his comedy of errors, trying to show that I’d fallen for his clever (PhD, remember!) trap:
If you play chess, you will be aware of the Poison Pawn Gambit where the novice grabs what appears to be the gift of a free pawn. If he does, he loses. In this particular game you play, the free pawn was my presumed ignorance of the rules of your "challenge." I wanted you to sieze [sic] it and then blast me in print.
And you did.
And you lost.
I answered:
Gee, I didn't even see my King being checked. I still don't. Um, the consensus is that you're still ignorant...
Check.
Reader “Joey,” responding to my suggestion last week that readers might wish to look up the ordinances about the legality of fortune telling in their local areas, reports:
In the Canadian Criminal Code, under the section covering False Pretenses, we have the following:
365. Every one who fraudulently
(a) pretends to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration,
(b) undertakes, for a consideration, to tell fortunes, or
(c) pretends from his skill in or knowledge of an occult or crafty science to discover where or in what manner anything that is supposed to have been stolen or lost may be found,
is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
R.S., c. C-34, s. 323.
Adds Joey, “So it looks like you can safely practice woo, as long as you really, really believe in it.” Yes, I find that language very imprecise. If the accused genuinely believes he/she is supernatural, how do you prove that he/she “fraudulently pretended” to cast a spell, remove a curse, tell the future, or find lost articles? I think a good lawyer could have a fine time arguing the wording here.
Mark Wiffen, of Kitchener, Ontario, went a little deeper into the Canadian law. He attached some cases dealing with this law, and its predecessors. One, “R. v. Pollock,” which traces the history of the law back to 1736, determines that it would be alright if the accused was merely "communing with spirits," so long as she wasn't trying to discover lost or stolen property in this manner, although this is for the older version of the law.
Good friend Mike Hutchinson, in the UK, tells us that there, the pertinent ordinance is referred to as the “Fraudulent Mediums Act,” but he asks, “What other kinds are there?”
Reader Robert Edwards tells us:
The text of the New Zealand legislation quoted in the current edition of your Commentary can almost be taken word for word from the United Kingdom's Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951.
And, Robert sends us to friend Tony Youens’ very interesting and informative discussion at www.tonyyouens.com/fma.htm , which I recommend you to read.
There exists an 82-second video extracted from a series I did for Granada TV in the UK, years ago. It deals with the matter of the Cottingley Fairies, which subject can be found at www.randi.org/library/cottingley in the SWIFT library. To view the TV clip, go to http://tinyurl.com/lmwpd.
Just got back from the gym where I’m doing my prescribed Cardiac Rehabilitation. Funny bit: I got a call from Ed Lu – the astronaut – inquiring about my progress, and I told him I estimated that in the gym I’d bicycled all the way to Mexico City and back, as well as rowed half-way across the Atlantic – without moving a foot. He reminded me that he bicycled for days aboard the ISS, and he was traveling at 18,000 miles an hour in orbit at the same time. I had to admit that he’d outdone me by quite a few miles…
Seriously, the gym work has made a lot of difference. I actually look forward to it. My legs and arms – which had rather badly wasted – are coming back well, and the 22 pounds I lost are better off, wherever they went, believe me. I’m at 136 pounds now. Wow!
Still a few minor problems with controlling my handwriting, and I’d hate to try a complicated card trick just yet, but soon…
For TAM5, both Banachek and Jamy Ian Swiss will be back to entertain us! And we’ll have John Rennie, the editor of Scientific American, along with Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine, and Scott Dickers, editor of The Onion! Peter Sagal, of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” and Lori Lipman Brown, from the Secular Coalition for America, will be in attendance.
How lucky can we get?
Next week, Satan pursues a politician in Utah…!