by anewme 17 Replies latest jw friends
I have never heard of the lady but I do believe some people are more intuitive than others. Mainly because I feel I am one of them. I know a lot of things for no reason. I would like to think there is a scientific explination for it, like using a new part of the brain or picking up on hormones emitted or something like that.
I don't know about spirt guides yet. I am still deciding on that one.
The url I posted earlier is about how her "reading" about the kidnapping and death of someone's son was completely wrong. The son was found alive 4 years after his abduction. The incredible hurt that the parents suffered because of Brown's deception and egoic need to be viewed as someone "special" cannot be measured. Even Montel says he doesn't buy into it yet he allows it to continue on his show - gee, I wonder why? Could it be because it boosts ratings? What a hypocrite he is.
The url I posted earlier is about how her "reading" about the kidnapping and death of someone's son was completely wrong. The son was found alive 4 years after his abduction.
That just sickens me and I'm surprised they didn't sue her. Can you imagine the horror they must have lived through after listening to Sylvia Brown's bullshit reading? She's got about as much 'insight' into future events as the WTS does.
The fact that not one supposed 'psychic' has succesfully claimed James Randi's prize money tells me that all psychics are frauds. Not one of them can prove any ability whatsoever, under controlled conditions. Until one of these con artists can actually prove an ability I will happily dismiss them for what they are, charlatans.
I do think people can be very intuitive (People can also be very niave on a not entirely un-related note), although not to some supposed spiritual realm that has no quantitative value. The question that I would ask is what does intuitive mean to you? I am assuming you mean some type of spiritual intuition but what does that phrase (or whatever you mean by the original question) mean to you?
Spirit guides? If I hear voices in the night I just bang on the wall and ask the neighours to to keep the noise down! But seriously, anybody who has someone else in their head telling them to say or do stuff needs professional psychiatric help, these sorts of mental disorders are well documented. Of course the other explanation is that they don't exist and that the person is just looking for attention or money.
The dead are just worm food and since all neural activity ceases after death then the dead aren't 'interested' in anything. If you have empirical evidence that this is not true please feel free to provide it.
SYLVIA BROWNE ON THE ROPES
My participation has been requested on several shows recently – Larry King Live and Anderson Cooper 360, plus some radio interviews – discussing the current problems befalling the Sylvia Browne Corporation. And, all sorts of comments have been coming in from those who saw those appearances.
Reader Kate Gladstone deals with a Biblical quotation offered recently by Sylvia:
Sylvia and her heavenly angel pals apparently don't know their Bible very well. No statement including the phrase "mills of God" appears anywhere in the Bible: not in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament, not in the Apocrypha.The quote comes from the poem "Retribution," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1845 translation of "Vergeltung” ["Retribution"] written by Baron Friedrich von Logau in 1624... and he got it from the third/fourth-century Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, who said: "The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind small."Ms. Browne not only misattributes, but misquotes. She presents as a "Bible quotation" a nineteenth-century American translation of a seventeenth-century German paraphrase of a third-/fourth-century Greek thinker (of very un-Biblical ideas).My, my, I would have thought that such a holy woman could do better than that! Does this call for some sort of divine retribution, we must wonder?
Reader Cynthia Wells says:
Caught your appearance on Larry King Live last night… I am writing you as an expert in the workings of both Ms. Brown and Montel Williams.I was one of her guests appearing on her first Sylvia Brown HBO presentation. This may have been before her Guardian Angel books, who knows. Each guest had something tragic to relate, whether missing children, unexplained deaths or another horrific event. I am one such party. In the room where we waited prior to show, everyone was prompted to not speak or directly talk to her – hard to do when one is on stage. Before I left the room, one of the producers said to me to simply "agree with anything Sylvia has to say, even if it is wrong." I was stumped, because I was a believer in her abilities up to this point.Aside from being the only one out of all the guests who does not have a guardian angel, my chance to prove to myself, was to just go along. She told me I had a spiritual guide whose name was Ernest. Thinking on my toes and certainly not wanting to disappoint, I exclaimed that it was so weird because that was the very name I had chosen for my son – before he was born. Everyone clapped, Sylvia glowed and inflated with pride at my BS. Her reply after the applause had died down was, "See, lifes full circle.” What I saw and felt was foolish and sorry for the others who believed her lies.Did she ever predict Montel’s debilitating disease, I wonder. If you ever need someone to personally state this.... do not hesitate to contact me. Keep up the great work. By the way her consult is $750 – as per her site info.A word here about Montel Williams. As I've said before, this is a well-educated, perceptive, intelligent man who most certainly knows exactly what Sylvia Browne – and other such "psychic" performers – are doing; I cannot imagine otherwise. That granted, he is either motivated by a need for ratings – and the resulting increase in advertising rates to his sponsors – or he simply enjoys the strange sort of prestige that accompanies his inclusion of Sylvia on his shows. A close acquaintance of mine, a former military man himself, as is Montel, has expressed his dismay that Mr. Williams is going against the general military code of honor that should in some way deter him from supporting and endorsing such flummery. My personal opinion is that Montel Williams should wake up, take a close look at his involvement with Sylvia Browne, and reconsider his position.
Reader Kelly Graves informs us:
We have started an online petition to encourage Sylvia Browne to take the JREF test. The goal is to amass a huge number of signatures and then send the petition to Larry and Montel. One signature for every dollar in the JREF prize would be great.An irony: since the petition service is paid for by Google ad revenue, you'll probably see automatically-generated click-through ads for psychic organizations along the right-hand side. Contrary to what you might at first think, this is a good thing. We should, in fact, encourage people to click on these: every click by a skeptic costs a psychic-promoter or bogus psychic a little bit of money. Here's the link to the petition: www.ipetitions.com/petition/cmonsylvia/index.htmlWhen I appeared the second time last week with the Anderson Cooper show on CNN, I was confronted by Linda Rossi, Sylvia Browne's business manager. Mind you, Sylvia herself declined to appear, and it was left to Ms. Rossi to flounder about desperately trying to blur and provide a “spin” on the very obvious facts about Sylvia's record as a fumbling psychic.
One question with which I was prepared – but had no chance to ask – was about the document we received from the Better Business Bureau of Silicon Valley. In their report they say that the Sylvia Browne Corporation located in Campbell, California:
...has an unsatisfactory record with this Bureau due to unanswered complaints. The company has resolved some complaints presented by the Bureau, however, the company did not respond to other complaints… the Bureau processed a total of nine complaints about this company in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period…I find this very surprising. The James Randi Educational Foundation, with an avowed atheist heading it, has never, ever, had any complaint registered with the Better Business Bureau! Yet, Sylvia's corporation has an "unsatisfactory record"? How could that be? Is God being offended by the BBB?
You see, these devout folks are constantly throwing up to me that I'm an atheist, as if that were the worst thing they could come up with. True, that may appear to be so to their multitude of believers, who in any case are not rowing with both oars in the water, anyway.
Host Anderson Cooper himself called Sylvia Browne an “alleged” and “self-proclaimed” psychic. And, Cooper fought for me. He correctly identified and threw away her shameless ad hominem attacks on my atheism, as irrelevant. This was a perfect example of the Ad Hominem Logical Fallacy , to which I refer you.
The problem with appearances like these is that there is never enough time to properly discuss the JREF challenge; couple that with the fact that Sylvia's website was listed several times, while that of the JREF never appeared. The plain fact is that Sylvia, if she is a truly legitimate psychic, could easily earn our one million dollar prize in less than a day’s work. True, “Sylvia doesn’t have to prove anything to Randi,” as Ms. Rossi pointed out, but there’s no better way to shut me up than to take the JREF money. There’s not enough time to debunk all the lies and misapprehensions about the challenge, nor to explain how a mutually-agreed-upon double-blind test is a fair way to measure claims, nor to tell the story of how Browne already agreed to take the test, six years ago. But we must understand that Sylvia and her flunkies are appealing here to their naïve customer base, not to thinking persons.
(Much to my surprise, the JREF received not a single e-mail message from any Browne supporters as a result of my three attacks on these major CNN shows! One might suspect that her fans may now be seeing through her pretensions…)
Ms. Rossi said that I should “go after the real charlatans out there” and leave Sylvia alone. Friends, that sounds very much like what Rosemary Altea said, on the Larry King Live show just a few days before. It seems that every psychic whose claims I question is a fraud, except for the one I'm talking to or about at the moment! It was hilarious to see Altea squirming about while trying not to damn Browne too obviously. I’m sure she saw the wide-open position on the psychic roster that Browne was preparing to involuntarily vacate, and could easily picture herself in that cozy and very lucrative spot!
Regarding my Larry King appearance dealing with Altea, note that though Larry asked Montel Williams to appear on his show, or to provide a quotation that could be used, Montel replied that he had no comment to make. Perhaps he’s worried about unwelcome data spoiling his upcoming TV Special dealing with Sylvia’s stupendous abilities? Also, I was a bit stunned when Larry said that Sylvia had “described the accused villain pretty well” in the Hornbeck case! (See www.randi.org/jr/2007-01/011907tam.html#i1 ) When he said that, I paused, waiting for the punch line; actually, Sylvia had said that Shawn had been kidnapped by a "dark-skinned man, he wasn't black – more like Hispanic." She’d said that the kidnapper had long, black, hair worn in dreadlocks and was "really tall," and that he was driving an older model blue sedan, a car with fins like on the late 1950's and early 1960's Chevrolets. Well, the kidnapper Michael Devlin is not Hispanic, nor is he dark-skinned. He’s a pale Caucasian, he’s heavy – 300 pounds – and not tall – and his car was quite the opposite of Browne’s invented notions: it was a white pickup truck. Larry also opined that Dr. J.B. Rhine had “invented” ESP…!
As for Altea, she said in one breath that her ability is a "very rare gift," yet a moment later she said that “many people have it.” Duh? Perhaps her spirit guide, Gray Eagle, had too much fire water and was confused? Or perhaps he was absent, hanging out with Francine, Sylvia Browne's spirit guide?
Sylvia's people are constantly deemphasizing and even denying the blatant fact that she demands – and gets – $700 for a 20-minute reading over the telephone. Well, what follows is from her own website. She uses the word "fees", which is not by any stretch of the imagination an optional “donation.”
FeesPhone reading with Sylvia – $750
Phone reading with Chris [Sylvia’s son] – $450A phone consultation with Sylvia or Chris lasts approximately 20-30 minutes.[mailing address follows]Always include a daytime phone number in your correspondence.As for the unexpected appearance on this show of Linda Rossi – the business manager of the Sylvia Browne Corporation – rather than the Great-and-Too-Spiritual-to-Appear Sylvia herself, I have to wish they’d let her keep babbling even more, because she was setting fire to her own nest much better and faster than I could ever hope to do. Her frantic interruptions and desperate state of mind was given away by her downcast gaze and fluttering eyelids – both indications of distress.
Mr. Cooper had done his homework. Though Ms. Rossi provided him – as requested by CNN – with two documents from “satisfied customers” which she believed would establish proof of productive readings by her boss, Mr. Cooper proceeded to tear them apart. For example, Rossi claimed that Sylvia had "predicted" the name of a WTC bomber using her psychic powers. A simple search on Google showed that this "revelation" was made two weeks after the suspects name had already been widely published in news sources! Lamely, Rossi claimed that Sylvia had not seen that name –seen that name, then she quickly added, "as far as I know.” Sure. Mr. Cooper also pointed out that Sylvia had "predicted" that Shawn Hornbeck was dead – he wasn’t – and that a missing person about whom Sylvia had been questioned, was in Tennessee – again, wrong. And remember, these were statements made by Sylvia for the “satisfied customers” provided by Sylvia’s own office! If these were the best Browne could come up with, I’d like to see the rest. Rossi also claimed that Sylvia didn't charge money for her readings when missing persons or children are involved – but she does, as we clearly see above.
A point that I keep coming back to is that six years ago Sylvia Browne definitively and clearly agreed – on the Larry King Live show – to take the JREF test, she agreed to the protocol I outlined, and then she backed out; she's simply not a woman of her word. When Mr. Cooper asked me to define what would constitute a proper test of Sylvia's abilities, I briefly repeated what Sylvia had previously agreed to. Then when Cooper asked Rossi if Sylvia would take that test, Rossi said that she would not, even though Sylvia is firmly on record for agreeing to do it. Yet another lie.
Rossi, incredibly, suggested to Mr. Cooper that maybe Sylvia wasn't exactly wrong on the Sean Hornbeck fiasco, when she said that he was dead. Rossi implied that we “don't know everything about that case,” and that maybe Sylvia was getting “vibrations” from another dead kid! As a reader has pointed out, using that kind of mental gymnastics, anything can be counted as a “hit” – and will be, of course.
Sylvia’s fans will build up excuses in their mind to account for the gaffes their guru has been caught in. The more they've put on the line in endorsing her, the more their brains will spin the story to still see her as a person with a special God-given gift that the evil JREF is trying to destroy.
The indignation in Rossi's voice when she referred to me as “a magician" was laughable. What was that all about? She's probably trying to say that Sylvia does what she does via a “gift from God,” and Randi’s just faking it...
By the way, you should be aware of the latest pay-for-the-privilege-offer made by Ms. Browne on her web page. For a mere $10 charge, you can now hear her
…latest predictions for 2007, including her forecast on weather conditions in your area, the fate of our troops in Iraq, the presidential election, gas prices, and what’s in store for Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, and other popular celebrities… Find the answers you’ve been looking for.Oooh! Too much to resist! How can we not rush to learn about such important folks as Jolie and Cruise, especially in view of the remarkable record Sylvia has in the prediction business? See www.smugbaldy.com/?p=48 to refresh your memory…
Folks, when I concentrate on the name Sylvia Browne, I faintly hear the name "Waterloo"... Oh, do you hear it, too?
Before I left the room, one of the producers said to me to simply "agree with anything Sylvia has to say, even if it is wrong."
Hmmmm.........Why does this sound so familiar?
Before I left theSecond Schoolroom, one of theeldersproducers said to me to simply "agree with anything theGoverning BodySylvia has to say, even if it is wrong."
$700 for a 20 minute telephone 'reading' that wrong most of the time? Man, I'm in the wrong business......
Why do so many of these female 'psychics' look like overly used prostitutes?
It seems to me that this clapped out $5.00 hooker woke up one day and realised that by tweaking her lifestyle slightly she could become a $750.00 hooker. There are always the sad, the desperate and the mentally challenged to give substance to such plans.
Of course I could be wrong, but I doubt that this could be proven.
"Get off the table Mabel, the five bucks is for the beer".
HS
Thankyou everyone for taking time to reply to my inquiry.
Sylvia Browne's performance on Montel Williams is certainly good.
She is very good at assuring people of the future. And on the show there is no way to know if her
predictions turn out true.
People desperately wish to know the future so there is a huge market out there for her services.
Her website sylvia.org informs that her prices are $750 for a psychic reading.
She is actually located near where I live. I never knew that.
One thing disturbs me greatly. In her church services on Sunday, three times the attendees are asked to recite an incantation or invocation in a strange language that refers to Sylvia (I presume) as goddess or queen of the heavens or somesuch. As a former JW this worshipful chanting turns me off very much.
However I do admit to being an easy target for a powerful woman guru.
In this life I will always crave a god or goddess guide I guess.
I must be careful.
Anewme
