Skepticblog

Did You Ever Wonder About Those Phone Psychics?

I want to be the Andy Rooney of the paranormal. Things just keep going from bad to worse in the media. Isn’t it about time that we had some counter-woo on prime time? All I’m asking for is a two or three minute segment once a week that blows the whistle on the latest cons, frauds and psychic scams that continue to surface across America. Is that too much to ask? Like what Andy Rooney does with his dry commentary and with humor attached to the situation ala John Stewart, skeptical might even become the cool way to think.

Three or four minutes at 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning isn’t likely to be seen by too many people, but I can hope that the viewers who do manage to see this piece between their poptarts and coffee will be seeing the best of what I can offer. The Psychic Friends Network is still very much in business. Fortunately, they don’t own me money and I’ll hope that they don’t send one of their goons after me for telling America what they should have been listening to fifteen years ago. If I mysteriously disappear in the next few days, ask Dionne Warwick where they buried me. I have been assured by ABC that they will protect me and that what is eventually aired will be a “balanced” program viewpoint. Uh huh.

Jeremy Hubbard: Psychic Investigator?

How can anyone offer anything “balanced” about phone fraudsters? I’m expecting to be quoted out of context or highly edited. I would have to have my words twisted severely in order to be part of anything “balanced”  as far as 900 psychics are concerned. It’s all in my book; Chapter III: The 900 Years in “Psychic Blues” and that’s another reason I’m going to spill the beans on the once all-powerful PFN. It’s unbelievable that no one has ever spoken up until now. I originally wrote a tell-all manual for dealing with this racket back in 1998 and called it “Confessions of a 900 Psychic.” My literary agent (a woo Priestess of Isis believer no less) thought it would be better in a novelized form rather than as a handbook, so it morphed into “Blues.” I want ABC to hear the truth about how the owners of  900 lines operate. Such a revelation may be ten or fifteen years too late, but in this case – better later than never.

As I told Jeremy, 900 workers are liars who learn to lie for a living. There’s no balance involved. In all likelihood we will be treated to a few fleeting seconds of the skeptical point of view whilst other believers fawn and whine on for precious minutes about how helpful their psychics are. I will do everything possible to make my part in this piece a total send-up of whatever psychics I’m put up against.

The 85 Million Dollar Dowsing Con: Who Cares?

Never mind the other huge cons that are going on that the network news should be covering: like the 85 million the U.S. government just spent on worthless dowsing rods to detect explosives. Or how about that pesky BP/Halliburton blow-out oil spill? I suppose I’ll have to content myself and the early risers to smaller cons to begin with. The psychic phone line business may be a small fish in the big critical thinking picture, but it’s a symptom of where we are going wrong in our society.

I cannot resist an analogy: Like the oil slick that is creeping up on the Gulf that threatens to impact all of our lives for decades, I suggest that the black ooze that flows forth from the mouths of bottom feeders like Sylvia Browne, Chip Coffey and John Edward does some serious long-term damage of its own. It may take years to show up in our collective “food chain,” but the abundance of mental health issues that can potentially spring from screwing with peoples’ bereavement issues must eventually result is a sea change in how we ultimately choose to honor our dead.  Exploiting missing and murdered children to make a buck has to be the lowest human-kind can go. We are being robbed emotionally as well as economically. Like that bit of sand in the oyster shell, maybe I can irritate some people enough to eventually see the pearl of skepticism. Tall order? Yep. But I’M DOING SOMETHING.

Well, I’ll tell you who I am: I’m  a former 900 worker who knows full well the damage that can be done. I’ve seen it and heard it close up and personal.  It’s not about feeling good for a few minutes, it’s about the long run and what meaningless generalities coupled with greed can do when a previously reasonable  person becomes a psychic junkie. Listen to the psychic junkie “Suzie” on this Morning News segment. She insisted to me in our conversation that, “…there’s bad in every business,” as if there’s just a few rotten apples in the psychic barrel – but the rest are good. She has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on bad psychic cons.

I know if you are reading this you probably don’t need to be reminded, but in case you are new to this blog or my interests in all this, go to Tim Farley’s excellent www. whatstheharm.net and click on the “psychic” button. There you can find 1, 315 people who were harmed by not thinking critically.

Do something.