Curses, New Jersey, Detroit, and Palm Readers

“Gimme all your money!”

One of the many divisions among skeptics is on where we place blame for the proliferation of the woo industry. When a psychic makes a living doing cold readings, is that the fault of gullible people doling out cash or is it the fault of the fraud raking it in? I usually fall in the former category. But in this case I’ve gotta side more with the free market libertarian enthusiasts and blame the moron who gave a few thousand dollars to a palm reader halfway across the country because she thought she was cursed.

Jersey Shore Psychics Get Busted, Never Saw It Coming

Jersey Shore Psychic is one of those shops on the boardwalk that rips off drunken teenagers by selling them touristy junk and, obviously, phony psychic services. Guess which one of those two lines of products got them into trouble with the law?

Sally Morgan & Other Frauds

“Gimme all your money or I’ll crush your head!”

One of the more celebrated debunking instances among skeptics is when James Randi and his cohorts caught the notorious scam artist / phony “faith healer” Peter Popoff red-handed lying to his audiences. For those who don’t know this story, Popoff’s staff would ask the audience as they were arriving to fill out “prayer cards” with their names, contact info, and which ailments they were hoping to cure by showing up. Popoff’s wife would collect them and during the performance, she would read some of the more promising entries and transmit the information to a receiver Popoff had hidden in an earpiece.

Witch Hunts! Psychics! AGW Deniers! Hindu Nationalists!

So I had originally thought of calling this regular column This Week In Fucked Up Religious Shit, but a few problems came to mind. For one thing, there are lots of non-religious infuriating, hilarious, or otherwise crazy shit I would have to ignore: psychics, alternative medicine, fringe politics, conspiracy theories, North Korea, and a lot more. Also, I’d eventually collide with the problem of trying to delineate between what does and does not qualify as a religion, which can be tricky at times. I’d rather leave that problem to the IRS.

Anyway, I’m going to try to regularly write about some of the craziest shit that happens throughout the week. When I’m feeling more patient, I’ll try to actually explain how people’s thinking has gone wrong and how we can actually know that, but there will be plenty of mockery too. Sometimes that’s the most appropriate response.

So let’s get to it:

4 Ways the Alt-Med Industry is Fucking With Animals

Animal testing is a tough subject. For the most part I’m for it, although there are probably a lot of unnecessary ways it goes down which should probably be stopped. But when it comes to developing new drugs to treat diseases, there’s a certain amount of acceptable harm to non-human animals which in my opinion can be justified in the interests of a greater good to humanity.

Probably some readers disagree with me there, and we can have a discussion about the moral ambiguities and grey areas, and maybe learning more about it might cause some of us to change our minds. But when you get into how animals are used in the alternative medicine industry, all these potential nuances are wiped away since by definition alternative medicine doesn’t even work. If any of the practices I’m about to get into had shown efficacy through real scientific evidence, then they wouldn’t be alternative medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. So what we’re talking about here isn’t about whether we should sacrifice X number of Y species to save Z number of humans; it’s just about how much we should let the quack industry harm animals for the sole purpose of profit.

Sylvia Browne’s Q & BS

Sylvia Browne recently trolled Orange County and the local presswere successfully baited into giving her free advertising for her new book about how she lived in “two worlds.”

“I want people to know that I’m a real person,” Browne says of her motivation to write her new memoir.

Oh, and also the money. GIMME GIMME GIMME!!