Purple Monkey Dishwasher is a joke from the Simpsons, in relation to chinese whispers and distorted messages.
In the episode where Bart incites a teachers strike so that he dosen’t have to go to school:
Bart starts a whisper about the teachers strike that was something like “Skinner’s hasn’t got the guts, he’ll crack!”.
It gets whispered along the line until it reaches Principal Skinner, and the message is " Skinner’s hasn’t got the guts, he’ll crack! purple monkey dishwasher".
I know- I was misremembering what Krabappel said in response…
<blanx’s brain> “look sad and say D’oh.”
D’oh.
Thank you very much Meatros for your sincerity, I will answer your post and quit the thread, the insults and belittling are growing and I don’t want to stir them up any more.
It is strange, but most psychics have had near death experiences, in fact, that is how they discovered the spiritual world.
Psychics are like any other profession, some are better than others. The really good ones rise to the top, like any other profession. So yes, it is their performance that makes them top psychics. There are also people who fake being psychic for what they believe will be a great deal of money. But if they can’t produce they will fail. Miss Cleo is a good example of a fraud. She was an entertainer and not a psychic, but her ads, and her crooked policies did produce a lot of money for a short period of time and it’s things like this that hurt the honest psychics.
There are frauds in medicine and other professions also, they too hurt the profession.
Thanks again, It is easy to see the hate levelled in this thread at psychics, I don’t know if that is a result of the teachings of science or encouraged by scientists to hate and ridicule belief systems that don’t agree with them or what.
I like the saying of Yoda.
Fear leads to anger,
Anger leads to hate,
and Hate leads to suffering.
Yoda is right, those who hold hate suffer from it.
Love
Leroy
lekatt- I don’t think that anyone here really hates psychics. I think that any hate, if there is hate, is for people who take advantage of other people who are suffering. Many of the popular “psychics” are certainly guilty of this. See Miss Cleo, for one.
What I would like is for you to prove to me that an individual has psychic abilities.
blanx
How do you distinguish between “real” psychics and “fake” ones? Why do you assume Ms Cleo was a fake, simply because she used it to make money? Jon Edwards certainly uses his talent to make loads of money. If JE got busted for deceptive advertising, would that prove he too is a fraud?
Thanks for answering my question, although I still have more about psychics.
I’m not familar with Praagh at all, I’ll assume he had a NDE though. Do you, or anyone, know if John Edwards has claimed to have a NDE?
Forgive me, maybe it’s because I’m a skeptic, but I still don’t see the difference between Miss Cleo and Edwards (or other psychics), except that Miss Cleo got busted for her shady business practices. I suppose my question was one more garnered to “skill”, I would assume that their is a difference in skill levels between psychics. How do you tell the difference between a “real” psychic and someone who’s just trying to pull the wool over your eyes?
Miss Cleo still claims to be psychic BTW:
http://www.local6.com/orlpn/news/stories/news-188240420030110-130118.html
I don’t think hate is being levelled at psychics per se; if you put yourself in the shoes of the skeptic, how would you think the psychics morals rated? If you were to believe that psychics don’t exist, then what would you think their motives would be?
Put it this way: I don’t believe in psychics, because I don’t in the phenomenon I question why the individual who is a psychic does what he/she does. Most of the reasons that I can come up with for “faking” psychic abilities are dubious ones.
Lekatt, I still think I had a hery good question for you, could you please answer it?
If they eliminate the language barrier in the spirit world, and have a complete system of symbols that all spirits understand, why would it matter if the spirit was an english speaker when alive or not?
I think this statement alone tells us all we need to know about Leroy’s ability to think for himself.
Along with the words “science”, “evidence” and “fact”, lekatt has redefined the word “hate” to mean “not taking everything I say, no matter how incredible or unlikely, at face value”.
Leroy, how can you/I tell if a psychic is genuine or a fake?
Suppose that I, an innocent chile, a babe in the woods, am confronted with a person who claims psychic abilities? How do I know this person is genuine and not a fraud?
The “real” ones are the ones that tell him what he wants to hear, obviously.
hmmm
Not always. “Real” psychics have been used by our government. Have you heard of remote viewing, or Ed Dames?
People who open their minds in this way are putting themselves in a dangerous position. These psychics think it is their own brain power that gives them access to secret knowledge. They are being deceived.
Correction. Supposedly real psychics were tested for a time by our government, and found wanting.
“Remote Viewing” was abandoned by the CIA after it was discovered to be an abject failure. The head of the CIA specifically said that Ed Dames was dismissed because he had done nothing whatever to help the government.
Remote viwing basically consists of vague guesses and generic claims about geographical features. (“I see water.” “I see a mountain.”) They failed absolutely to get anywhere close to Saddam Hussein during the Gulf war, nor have they ever found anything else which was useful to the government, or even anything which was not useful. They simply can’t strike anything specific, and have invariably been wrong when they’ve tried to be specific.
The government (like law enforcement) has been known to try to use psychics on occasion, but that only illustrates the fact that ignorance is not limited to civilians. The Reagans used astrologers, does that make astrology credible?
Anyway, excepting a rare lucky hit (purely within the range of chance) psychics always turn out to be worthless, whether they’re looking for a body or Osama bin Laden.
BTW, Ed Dames is one more of the many well known “psychic” performers who has refused to take James Randi’s million dollar challenge.
There isn’t any “secret knowledge,” and the only deception is being done by the psychic.
But what about Dr. Allan Botkin’s results? He is a clinical psychologist at a veteran’s hospital who works with people who have post-something syndrome–specifically, they were in the wars but now get unsolicited flashbacks of horrible war scenes and situations.
Botkin you can look up on the internet but in a nutshell he found that when a patient goes through anger feelings to guilt and can be induced to go down to I think it’s sadness?? and is given certain eye movements, that in most cases if he stays with it long enough?? he suddenly sees people in the Next World.
These comfort him. Like he sees a buddy that got shot right next to him and blown up and the buddy in the war says I’m fine. Believers in relgion but also agnostics and complete atheists see these people in the Beyond and it relieves them so much that they are cured.
I saw a lecture he did near Chicago in like Evanston or Wilmette, I mean I saw a tape of it and I don’t get the idea that he is making any money with this. He was just speaking to a group of well-meaning people many of whom have had NDE, OBE, and especially sudden spontaneous unworked for contact with the spirits of the departed.
They seem to be living their lives, and one of the departed talked to a veteran for a while and said he had to leave and as he left and walked off he was holding a child’s hand and saying I have to take her to the carnival.
My only problem is I wonder if since the mind can make up dreams that seem very original and completely real and not even about topics the person may think about or anything, then it probably can make up cathartic scenes and does them better than mere conscious imagination could do and does them so they seem to come out of the Beyond, all because of this back and forth eye movement thing. A researcher before Dr.Botkin had wondered about the rapid eye movement back and forth in dreams and said I think I’ll see if I get people to do these eyen movements while awak what will happen. He found out many things, and although the eye movements are best, you can do it with other lateral things. Look it up on the interanet and I predict you will find it very interesting.
—The really good ones rise to the top, like any other profession. So yes, it is their performance that makes them top psychics.—
But the problem is that good trickery can look exactly as good as what you claim the real thing is. This isn’t the case in medicine: a fake surgeon can’t fool people into thinking he’s just done a heart transplant.
It’s post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. (they used to call it “shell shock”) It sometimes causes hallucinations, and these hallucinations are often a defensive response by the subconscious to unmanageable psychic pain. It is common, for instance, for soldiers dying in battle to “see” their loved ones (living and/or dead) beckoning to them. Some people may also angels, or Jesus, or Krishna. In ancient times, soldiers saw Apollo and Zeus and the Elysian fields.
Botkin’s “research” is really no more more revealing than anecdotal NDE experiences, and he actually makes a lot of speaking appearances addressing that community which believes in psychics, NDE’s, UFO’s, etc. This does not mean that he has actually proven anything.
South Park Episode 615 settles this once and for all. Jon Edward is the biggest douche in the universe. Preying on the weak with cheap carney tricks. Asmodeus has a warm pit of BS for people like him.
Well, I see that Lekatt still doesn’t understand the whole point of the SDMB – to fight ignorance, not propagate it. And I see he still wants to insist that he knows the truth and skeptics are just nasty people. Sigh. I guess I shouldn’t have expected much to change in a week or two. I mean, it’s not like evidence is going to do anything for him.
Still, for the rest of you, here are a few links that I didn’t see posted here yet (if they were and I missed 'em, I apologize).
Here is an article I wrote on Psychic Parasites regarding the way many so-called psychics behaved after 9/11. If this isn’t a reason to “hate” them, I don’t know what is.
Here is a Straight Dope Staff Report I wrote on government use of “psychics.”
Here is another one I did on police use of psychics, which goes into, among other things, different types of “predictions.”
Here’s another Staff Report I wrote, this one on Edgar Cayce.
And here’s one on Jeane Dixon’s supposed prediction of the Kennedy assassination.
And finally, one on Ganzfeld tests.
Excellent set of links, David. Collectively, they not only crush any argument for scientific verifcation of psychic ability, they jump up and down on the pieces.