A Tale of Two Charlatans

I finally got something I wanted for Xmas: Grief vampire Sylvia Brown(e) blasted in the media, online...

"Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight – three women who went missing over a decade ago and were presumed dead – have been found to be alive. This item especially interested me because in 2004, on the totally irresponsible Montel Williams Show, “psychic” Sylvia Browne told Amanda Berry’s mom that her daughter was dead, causing her great shock and sorrow. And the mother, Jouwana Miller, went to her grave believing – only on Browne’s word – that her daughter had been murdered. She died in March of 2006, and friends were of the opinion that her passing was hastened by Browne’s totally uninformed and callous guess…"

SWIFT


Her non-explanation for this unfortunate lapse:

“I am so relieved that Amanda Berry and the other women have been found and are safe with their families. Of course I do feel very bad telling Amanda’s mother on the show that I believed her daughter was not alive, and I’m so so glad that I was wrong. I had a vision of her being held underwater, but I had interpreted it to have a different meaning. She was not being held under water but was being held down.” 

“Only God is right all the time but of course I’m wrong. But after 50 years of doing this work, I’d better be more right than wrong. I always say I hope I’m wrong. When it comes to this, I hope I’m wrong.”

Keep on hoping. What's especially rich is hearing other psychics blast her. (professional jealousy, perhaps?)

The Daily Beast


Here's the study Randi mentioned:

"This article is structured in terms of known and unknown outcomes. The criteria for a correct prediction is that it mostly matches a case referenced in a newspaper, and the criteria for a wrong prediction is that Browne’s claim is the opposite of what actually occurred. The metric for the final accuracy count is based on what is correct compared to the unknown or wrong claims. As this article shows, in the 115 available cases Browne was correct zero times and wrong twenty-five times."

CSI


BTW, John "Biggest Douche In The Universe" Edward [no letter 's'] was recently profiled on Glenn Beck's site. Strange world.

⚡☺⚡

In other glee-filled news, John "Dickless" McCormick has been convicted of fraud:

"A jury at the Old Bailey found Jim McCormick, 57, from near Taunton, guilty on three counts of fraud over a scam that included the sale of £55m of devices based on a novelty golfball finder to Iraq. They were installed at checkpoints in Baghdad through which car bombs and suicide bombers passed, killing hundreds of civilians."

Doubtful News

Eight years? He got ten:

"The biggest customer was the Iraqi government, which spent over £85m on thousands of the devices from 2008 to 2010. McCormick, who still insists he hasn't had customer complaints about the efficacy of the devices, also claimed in court to have sold them to the military in Kenya, Egypt, the prison service in Hong Kong, and border control in Thailand."

The Register


Meanwhile, in Thailand:

"Fraud charges are likely to be laid against Thai agencies which bought bomb and drug detectors from a discredited British firm... McCormick made an estimated 50 million pounds (2.1 billion baht) from sales of the device in countries such as Pakistan, Lebanon, Mexico, and Thailand."

Bangkok Post


Meanwhile, in Iraq:

"The Justice Department has warned against buying a variety of products that claim to detect explosives at a distance with a portable device. Normal remote explosives detection machinery, often employed in airports, weighs tons and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ADE 651’s clients are mostly in developing countries; no major country’s military or police force is a customer, according to the manufacturer. 

“'I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,' General Jabiri said. 'I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.'”

A legend in his own mind. I predict an unexpected detour in General Jabiri's career. Not that I'm psychic. Anyone care to guess how many people are dead because of this man and the denial of others?

NYT


And finally, back in the UK...

"An unemployed man has been convicted of making fake bomb detectors in his garden shed."

Portsmouth News

How many charlatans is that now?

 ⚡☺⚡

Our Wacky World—4/23/2013

Obits...

Roger Ebert. Storm Thorgerson. Here are some of Storm's album covers.

Oh, and some woman from the UK died, too.

See you in Hell

Now that all the important news is out of the way, there was a bombing in Boston. Cue the assholes on Twitter. Cue the conspiracy theorists. The inevitable call for torturing a US citizen (note the comments). OK, so they didn't actually use the word "torture" but we know.

Let's see—how far is Boston from Mexico?

"We know that al Qaeda has camps with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border," Gohmert agreed. "We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanics when they're radical Islamists. We know these things are happening, and it's just insane to not protect ourselves and make sure that people come in -- as most people do, they want the freedoms we have."

Crooks & Liars

One track

Chalk up another one for some idiot terrorists:

"Dzhokhar and Tamerlan's motive—or motives—is still unclear. But that's not the only unknown. Many of the Tsarnaevs' actions last week seem baffling in retrospect. Here are some of the most confounding things they did..."

Mother Jones

What does the rest of the world think?

"So for those of you keeping score at home – locking down an American city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties. All of this would be almost darkly comic if not for the fact that more Americans will die needlessly as a result. Already, more than 30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks)."

Guardian

"An analysis this year by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that 'in states that require a background check for every handgun sale, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners.' Six times more women were murdered by intimate partners than by strangers in 2010. A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in 2002 found that women were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun in states with high gun ownership than in states with low gun ownership."

Atlantic

Big noise from North Korea

The Scooter Store™ finally got nailed (I've been waiting a long time for this to go down):

"Those investigations came after a scathing investigative piece by CBS News about the company. Former salesmen and doctors who prescribed chairs in the past explained the company’s tactics: contact doctors’ offices incessantly to wear them down and convince them to prescribe scooters and power chairs whether the patient really needed one or not"

Consumerist

"The defendants assigned premature babies with low birth weight varying oxygen levels by 'the flip of a coin,' without disclosing the risks to their parents... The parents claim their children who were born or treated at The University of Alabama-Birmingham Hospital suffered permanent neurological and vision damage, and that other babies died as a result of the study."

Courthouse News

“Hermann Goering saved my life.” (amazing):

Turley's Blog

"...go into the desert or some other remote place, and shine a flashlight or laser at any light they see in the sky. If it appears to flicker back, that counts as an instance of interstellar communication... I once spoke with a fellow at a UFO meeting who had been through Greer's 'training,' and he was very impressed by it. He explained that, at first, he could not see any of the ET craft that Greer was talking about. But as the training progressed, he learned how to perceive them." (not so amazing):

BadUFOs

"...the eel reportedly chewed through the man's colon, perforating his large intestine, and became stuck in his body cavity. Medical team members reportedly said the eel, which was 'simply trying to find its way out,' was alive when removed but died shortly thereafter. According to The Sun, the man is still recovering at the hospital and might face animal cruelty charges."

Huffington Post

"My invention easily fits into the size of a personal computer case and can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users. It will not take you into the future, it will bring the future to you."

Telegraph

"...the FDA eventually concluded that the lab's violations were so 'egregious' and of such a 'pervasive nature' that studies conducted there between April 2005 and August 2009 might be worthless. About 100 drugs, including sophisticated chemotherapy compounds and addictive prescription painkillers, had been approved for sale in the United States at least in part on the strength of Cetero Houston's tainted tests. Stone said he expected the FDA to move swiftly to compel new testing and to publicly warn patients and doctors. 

"Instead, the agency decided to handle the matter quietly, evaluating the medicines with virtually no public disclosure of what it had discovered. It pulled none of the drugs from the market, even temporarily, letting consumers take the ibuprofen and other medicines it no longer knew for sure were safe and effective. To this day, some drugs remain on the market despite the FDA having no additional scientific evidence to back up the safety and efficacy of these drugs."

Atlantic

"The state announced yesterday that it has dropped its bid to privatize the state’s prisons because none of the four companies that wanted the job showed they could meet court-ordered requirements for inmate care... The private prison companies also proposed wages and benefits that are half what security staff at the prisons earn now"

Concord Monitor

You're irrelevant

"I am a guy that is becoming a pink disposable feminine pad, and later on I will be pressed against a soft vulva for a woman's period. I'm looking for more open-minded friends who are comfortable about this fate for me. I have wanted to become a pad since I was ten years old."

A Feminine Pad

"Wise Media is accused of placing unauthorized $9.99/month charges on wireless bills for so-called “premium services” that sent text messages with horoscopes, flirting, love tips and other information."

Consumerist

"The archbishop of the Washington diocese said Easter Sunday that he was concerned that Catholics would be shunned for opposing same sex marriage -- and that it was gay and lesbian Americans who need to "make room" for the very people discriminating against them."

Crooks & Liars


This was either a brilliant Poe or the most clueless shit I've ever read:

"Suzy's mistake, it seems, was interpreting the advice 'Just be yourself' literally. Like perhaps someone told her, 'Applying to colleges? Ah, just be yourself,' and she accepted this as an instruction to pursue no activities other than being herself.

"Being yourself is not a talent. If you worked two full-time jobs all the way through high school and one of them was 'being yourself' and the other was 'trying your best,' you actually worked zero full-time jobs. It's important to make time for yourself, of course, but you should be making other things in addition to that. Like goals and plans and effort."

Gawker

This one's for real:

"DOUBLE FUCKING NEWSFLASH: SIGMA NU IS NOT GOING TO WANT TO HANG OUT WITH US IF WE FUCKING SUCK, which by the way in case you're an idiot and need it spelled out for you, WE FUCKING SUCK SO FAR. This also applies to you little shits that have talked openly about post gaming at a different frat IN FRONT OF SIGMA NU BROTHERS. Are you people fucking retarded? That's not a rhetorical question, I LITERALLY want you to email me back telling me if you're mentally slow so I can make sure you don't go to anymore night time events."

Gawker

FAIL

Our Wacky World—3/29/2013

More innuendo against rats (will it never cease?):

"A faulty switchboard was blamed for the incident, and in the kind of explanation that doesn't exactly inspire confidence, TEPCO says a 15-cm (6-inch) dead rat found 'near' the switchboard may have been linked to the failure. The company says it will further investigate the dead animal and possibly-associated 'burn marks' on the switchboard."

The Register

Here's a wider view of the alleged rodent. 

It's official: Jesus will show up this September—assuming this isn't another hoax site. And Obama looks like Satan (or vice versa). Even worse, he has a food taster.

CIA analysts recall the day they had to prepare for Dick Cheney:

"That month, Vice President Cheney scheduled a meeting with our Branch to discuss our assessment of Iraq’s relationship with al-Qaida and 9/11. It was his second visit to the Branch; there always seemed to be more questions. The Branch Chief called us together for a practice session in a bland conference room a few days before their arrival. At this so-called 'murderboard' session, we weren’t stripping down our analysis to find data we’d missed. We were practicing how to defend our perspective when questioned by the Vice President of the United States."

Wired

You meant to say the Sixth Commandment, right?

"The corpse of Modester Gida (30), who was from Nyamweda area in Mhondoro under Headman Mashingaidzwa's kraal reportedly left mourners shell-shocked after the deceased woman's vagina mysteriously disappeared and was replaced with a penis... 'What happened here was so scary. It's true a male organ grew on my aunt's body. We don't know what kind of a disease it is but we believe it's an act of witchcraft'"

My Zimbabwe

"Hearing all this, I was less shocked than intrigued. As an anthropologist who studies the region, I was familiar with the problem of penis snatching."

Alternet

"Johnson said in court Thursday that the trial will delve into the hip-hop music culture and the notion that a secret society called the Illuminati has control over the success of some performers. It was the belief that a sacrifice had to occur in order to join the Illuminati that allegedly incited El-Amin... Investigators recovered more than a pound of marijuana from the Athens Avenue home...as well as literature dealing with the Illuminati and its alleged connection to the music industry."

Richmond Times-Dispatch

"This man is a time traveler, James from the Future. He says he does not know what year he has come back from, but it is after the New Age or whatever you call it has already occurred, that great Transformation in Consciousness that will be happening any day now. (Many people expected it to occur in 2012, but were disappointed.) James says he does not know why he was sent back, but he thinks it is to act as a historian to make better records about what was happening before the Transformation."

Bad UFOs

"The National Rifle Association came under fire late Thursday from members of a gun-control advocacy group in Newtown, Conn., after reports surfaced of Newtown residents receiving robocalls and pro-gun postcards from the NRA."

Huffington Post

"Fifty-six-year-old Robert A. Lyzenga, a former pastor at Sunrise Christian Reformed Church in Lafayette, was charged Thursday with five counts of child exploitation and five counts of voyeurism... At least one external hard drive was found to have numerous videos and still photos of juvenile and adult females taken in the church’s restroom."

Dispatches From The Culture Wars

"...people are really overreacting about this there just some kids having fun all they did was break a couple of milk jugs the worst damage was that they knocked some cans down and break a single light it may be annoying for the employees but it certainly does not need SEVERAL misdemeanors maybe one thats all"

Gawker

"...a new utility sink is installed in the men's restroom outside the House chamber in the state Capitol in Nashville, Tenn. Legislative staffers and building administrators have sought to reassure some concerned lawmakers that the new sink was not installed as a special facility to support Muslim prayer rituals, but rather to make it easier for custodial staff to fill buckets and clean mops"

Tennessean

"...a federal jury in Alabama has found the president of the Republic for the United States of America guilty of a number of federal tax crimes."

TPM

Game over, man