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As I’ve said before, I’m quickly being disabused of the notion that nothing can surprise me. Someone named Pat Boyer has sent me a huge 2-inch-thick loose-leaf book with the title, “Q-Bee International Universal Language Decoder” in lavender on the cover. Thirteen CDs are bound within, which I’m urged to play, and there are a stack of pages with the most inane drivel I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen lots…
Says the introductory text, for example:
It doesn’t matter what language it is, the information is there. The score of God is built into the language. The purpose of the “Universal Language Decoder” is to demonstrate this fact.
It not only describes another realm of existence, it presents one that has the capability of destroying this planet.
Well! That would indicate that we’d better get to this problem immediately. And what results do we get when we apply these wonderful principles to words and phrases? To quote directly from the accompanying text:
Ma’ILL key’weigh = Milky Way, and Loose’ve WHORE is running ramp’HID.
That last one you’ll have to work on.
It appears that the author has identified “the people who made murder their business.” He/she lists them:
What? No lawyers or skeptics? But perhaps this is the best way to acquaint you with how nutty this project is: one of the accompanying CDs has a Gloria Estefan song in Spanish, “Mi Tiere Bella,” and Pat has applied his/her powerful mystical force to translate the lyrics. To examine how accurate his/her system is, let’s look at the first ten lines, in English, first using ordinary non-magical means of translation. Here’s what the song appears to be saying, to "we unenlightened" persons:
From my beautiful land
From my holy land
I hear that scream
From the cymbals and drums
And that cry that my brother gave
Because he lives far away from his land
And the memory makes him cry
A song that he keeps singing
From his pain, from his own tears
And we hear his sorrow.
Pat’s version of these lines is somewhat different. He/she puts the Universal Language Translator system to work, and extracts the concealed meaning. This is exactly the way it appears in the book:
Let me get a bad ya
Let me get a send a
Always a greet owe, they low stand gore
And see low, see valley, cycle man ya
Case, sat a gone game, come told E man know (E=ever)
K day, so tear up your very han(d) owe (K=kill)
K reek where dough, I said you are
Now parents see on, K-Bee bent owe NON'd owe
See, the Lord is a perfect end owe
He said, let's scootch up and are.
There! Without this great advance in science, how could we ever have known that, I ask you? I rest my case – and I assure you that I’m not about to bring any of those CDs anywhere near my personal computer. I’ll just have to remain unaware of the advantages of this theory, even though the author writes:
It’s not a different reality, it’s an extended reality that contains the plan for the construction of our world, and the mechanism for communicating it. It’s where God lives, and she is obviously pissed off.
And so am I…
Reader Przemyslaw Orwat, in Warsaw, Poland, who says he’s “a long time Swift reader,” sends us this article from a prominent Polish newspaper.
Clairvoyant helps the police.
Until recently, using the advice of clairvoyants, psychics or dowsers was very rare among policemen. However, presently this has become more common. There are no official data but according to our information, every 3-4 days on average a Polish policeman undertakes cooperation with a psychic. They do this usually when searching for a missing person.
"Not only policemen from the Suwalki region but policemen from all Poland seek my help," says Ms. Barbara Piasecka-Sowul, a clairvoyant of Suwalki. She took part in searching for the missing old woman of Augustow. There was no body in the lake she pointed out, but the police have not held a grudge against her. "We try to solve the difficult cases one way or another. If we got any new signal from a clairvoyant, we would take it up," says Mr. Andrzej Murawski of the Augustow Police Department.
Policemen from other towns such as Lodz or Szczecin also confess to using psychics’ help. Policemen from Kielce, for instance, used a map drawn by a clairvoyant as they searched for a patient who had disappeared from a hospital. "The missing patient's family brought us this map in despair. We could not refuse them," says Ms. Izabela Grabowska, the Kielce Police Department spokesperson.
How frequently do psychics find missing people? Some of them estimate their own rate of success to be about 50%, but the analyses performed by the General Headquarters of Police (KGP) show that psychics' predictions actually fail more than 98% of the time! "After analyzing 440 cases in which the police used the psychics' advice, we found that in 432 cases their advice was untrue, false or simply useless," says Mr. Pawel Biedziak of the KGP.
However, the KGP have not banned the use of psychics. They’ve issued guidelines according to which the police should use them "with much caution." Reason? The costs. Although of course the police do not pay for clairvoyants' advice, each day of the search for a missing person, run by a few dozen police officers with dogs, costs at least 4-5 thousand Polish zlotych [USD$1.3-1.6 thousand]. The other search action expenses, such as fire brigades, ambulance services, military troops or divers, must also be taken into account. That is why policemen, who to some extent feel put on the spot, also appeal to the common sense of missing people's families. "We advise them to use the psychics' statements with caution. It is better to seek the help of organizations which specialize in finding missing people," they say.
Good advice. That way, you’ll save money and get results…
A breathless article in the Sandyville, Ohio, “Repository” newspaper recently described “crop circles” in a soybean field. One interested kid standing by blamed the circles on aliens from outer space. Of course.
The newspaper article suggested, “The handiwork of aliens, or someone just clowning around?” Dozens of motorists pulled to the side of the road for a glimpse at these wonders, and found “no footprints, no tire marks, no weird edges.” Absolute proof, right? There was universal oohing and ahhing to be heard, each observer pointing out how this phenomenon just had to be, as the kid had said, extraterrestrial in origin. The local County Sheriff’s Department dispatchers said they received plenty of calls reporting the crop circles there. The man who first discovered the circles declared:
The only way you would see something like that is on TV on the Discovery Channel or something like that. Or maybe in that movie “Signs.” It’s too strange.
Fortunately for reality, four teen kids then admitted being responsible for the crop circles, and they weren’t little green men. Though the sheriff’s office hadn’t been actively looking into the phenomenon, they reacted when they received a phone call asking if they were interested in speaking to those responsible for the circles. They turned out to be local boys 16, 17, 18, and 19 years old, who said that their goal had been to get something about it in the press, but when they saw helicopters – from the media – flying over, and the circles started gaining a lot of attention, they figured they’d better say something.
The sheriff explained how the kids had created the hoax:
They said one held a rope in the center and the others used ropes attached to a piece of wood to step down the designs. They all said they got the idea of how to do it from watching television, and researched crop circle designs online to figure out what they were going to do.
One of the sheriff’s remarks was quite interesting:
I even told some of the teams of crop circle investigators that we found the persons responsible, and some of them got a little argumentative with me.
But some credit is certainly due here. Jeffrey Wilson, Director of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers’ Association [International], published a report after his group looked into the matter. It can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/q8zlk. Part of that report reads:
We found evidence consistent with what we have seen in mechanical man-made formations, including board marks, broken stalks in areas where visitors had not trampled, scrape marks on stalks from a board, and pathway “artifacts” left from the mechanical creation process, and we found no anomalies (no unusual plant damage, completely normal radiation and E-M fields, etc…) unlike what we have seen in previous non-man-made formations in soybeans. Essentially, we determined the formation to be man-made.
My personal opinion is that the kids were perhaps not as clever as some other calculating adults have been in the past when creating such a hoax, but, as always, the JREF stands ready to accept proper evidence of circles – or any other geometric shape or information – that can only be ascribed to visiting ETs or supernatural sources. I find it difficult to believe that visitors from the stars would choose to play about in soy beans, but I’m open to proof…
Okay, God works in mysterious ways, right? Though no one has any information on the appearance of Jesus Christ, nor of his mother, any outline or fuzzy cartoon of a bearded man or of a woman wearing a head shawl is quickly seized upon by the religious faithful as a representation of one of these historical persons. The psychological phenomenon – the delusion – that produces this excitement, is known as pareidolia. Now, that’s not to even mention Donald Duck being found in the grain of a plywood door, Che Guevara discovered in a stain on a plaster wall or Kermit the Frog on the surface of the Moon. Let’s just handle the “serious” images, folks.
We’ve had the profile of the Virgin Mary that showed up on a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich which sold on E-bay for $28,000. Mother Teresa’s portrait was on a burned bun, and in December of 2004, Jesus showed up in a dental X-ray! April of 2005 revealed Mary in a sewage-water stain on a Chicago underpass, May gave us Jesus' face in an apartment window, and in June he showed up both on a shower curtain and in a paint smear on an apartment wall. October brought us a fish bone with his picture, and in November he was perceived on a truck tailgate. The following month he was found in a nacho pan.
This year of 2006 has been good for spooky-picture finding, too, and it’s only half over. Back in May, in a painting of Jesus Christ, a portrait-within-a-portrait was discovered by the devout, who also discerned him in a piece of rock. In February, his profile was seen in a piece of sheet metal. This persistent man – or the imaginary image that has been conjured up – has been seen in plywood grain, on soiled sheets, clouds, potatoes, and even smoke stains.
Ready for the latest in street-level religious miracles? We now have a portrait of Jesus Christ “manifesting” – that’s the preferred term – for a California man “going through a nasty divorce.” He found it in a shrimp tail as he finished snacking on the critter. Why the divine powers in charge of titillating mortals with these glimpses of the infinite, would choose a boiled crustacean of the suborder Natantia to bear this comforting message, I cannot imagine. A handsome giraffe hide or a fluffy cloud would, to me, seem a more suitable canvas, but I admit that my efforts at understanding the Omnipotent have never been successful. Or perhaps God is playing some of his never-ending jokes…?
Reader Kyle Wilson of Raleigh, North Carolina, notes a failure of God:
I'm not sure if you caught this story or not... basically, town officials in Lubbock, Texas, recently adopted resolutions asking residents to pray and fast for God to provide rain on Sunday, July 30th. The city claims to have had success with this process in the past. See http://tinyurl.com/zks3g.
How much rain fell? Yep. 0.0 inches of precipitation were recorded. God must have been busy resting...
Of course, none of the media outlets who ran with the "pray for rain" story bothered to report what ended up happening. Had Lubbock been hit with a torrential downpour, it would have been the "kicker" at the end of every local newscast.
Yes, Kyle. And Lubbock’s devout mayor, David Miller, was fully aware of his presumption. Said he, to show that he was enlisting the very latest in modern thinking and technology to serve the citizens of Lubbock:
Nobody is going to tell God what to do and what not to do, but we are in a serious drought in West Texas and since he is the man who controls the rain clouds, we're asking him for his mercy and his help.
Mayor Miller might have had the wrong attitude, or faced the wrong way, or entertained doubts. Who knows? But be sure that Lubbock will be back on its knees again when they decide they need something.
Reader Randy Scalise asks that I direct you to the video of my Collegium da Vinci talk, "The Search for the Chimera," which I gave at Southern Methodist University on September 29, 2002. It is now on Google Video, at http://tinyurl.com/r3scn. Randy adds:
Many other videos are collected on a subpage of our BS 101 Debunking Pseudoscience course webpage at http://tinyurl.com/rrznu. We would be honored if you sent your readers to our pages for a look.
Done, sir…..
Last week, at www.randi.org/jr/2006-08/080406move.html#i6, you read a discussion that mentioned a local dowser in Florida. Well, my ever-vigilant readers have pounced on me once more to provide sooth of which I was unaware. Reader Dave Ricci informs me:
I read your weekly newsletter... er... religiously each Friday morning and I am also a frequent participant in the JREF forums.
I note a small error in your latest column as regards the soi-disant dowser, Mike Guska, a.k.a. “Edge.” He has also frequented the boards and is undiminished in his faith in his dowsing skills. He has, however, moved to California, so he is not still in Florida as your column states. He has proclaimed that he is ready to apply for the challenge again, but obviously has not done so. His "requirements" are quite bizarre, such as:
The test will take place in Hayfork California.
The target will be black sands, both magnetic and non magnetic, gold, lead, platinum, mercury coated gold, iron and what ever else is in the black sands. This is what is found in the creek with the gold.
No one in the field, where the containers are set up will reach into they’re [sic] pockets at any time. I will have an observer to make sure no one tampers with the area that the tests are being done at when the tests are being done, because anyone can salt the ground with any metals and then I will get false readings.
You can use the information any way you want, but not the theories that are to come from this when I win, those are mine.
You guys are so sure that this is a loosing [sic] proposition that you should have no problems with this.
J.R.E.F. will pay for the testers motel and gas expenses.
Get rid of article 3 if I WIN!
Do we have a deal? Dates for the test are your chose [sic] as long as it’s before the rainy season that starts about the end of October. So between August and October.
When the protocol is agreed upon I will send in the application.
Though many [on the forum] have tried to explain that he needs to apply first before a protocol is set, (among other things) he does not appear to understand. If you or your staff are interested in related threads, they are here. The first one is his most recent.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=57364
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=40
From what I see here, Mr. Guska is plainly telling me that he doesn’t want to be tested again, and ensuring that he won’t. He’d rather enjoy his delusions, and he’s created a situation that he’s quite sure I’m not going to accept. Have a nice vacation in Fantasyland, Mike.
Reader Steve Sabotta reveals more about “Maitreya,” the bearded “god” embraced by the two woo-woos we discussed last week at www.randi.org/jr/2006-08/080406move.html#i3…
I suspect the McElroys have been reading too much science-fiction.
Maitreya is one of the names of the main character in Roger Zelazny's Hugo-award winning novel “Lord Of Light.” According to Zelazny, “Maitreya” means Lord of Light. In the novel, the Lord of Light, aka Sam, a human and iconoclast, sets himself the task of overthrowing the humans-masquerading-as-Hindu-gods who rule the world on which he lives.
It is ironic that the McElroys would choose for their spirit the name of a character utterly opposed to superstitious nonsense.
Hilarious. I’ll bet that Margaret and Alan also believe in Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins. They’ll have their followers worshipping them, next. Just you watch…
I hope you were tuned in last week for the Archimedes Palimpsest podcast. Getting a detailed account of the history of this valuable document, was very rewarding. There will be much excitement when the full contents of this ancient Greek’s brilliant book is finally published, and I’ve alerted many students to its imminent emergence.
The protocol on the comprehensive test of homeopathy that is planned this year, nears agreement. I cannot tell you more than that, but it will make really big news on the science front, I assure you. That is, as long as the homeopaths don’t pull a Guska on us and create an unacceptable situation in order to sabotage the agreement…
