I have to admit, this really does not amount to much of a story, since it’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind, but god I love watching something like this…

Interesting that she brought up the “M or J” thing.   I mean, how can you mistake an M for a J, which one is it?  And why do spirits always provide things one letter at a time?    The funny thing is that it actually would apply to me to a huge extent.  My deceased paternal grandfather was named Joseph Joyce.  My grandmother is Mary Joyce.  I have an uncle whose name is also Joe Joyce, I have an aunt named Mary Anne, a cousin named Megan and my brother’s name is James.  It might be more of a stretch (although that never stopped a psychic from claiming success), but my sister’s middle name is Marie and my paternal Grandmother’s maiden name was Moriarty.   I have many J and M names in my relations, although names starting with either one of those letters are extremely common.

I love how she says she didn’t know the age of the anchor woman’s daughter and therefore couldn’t know if she had a boyfriend.   The whole damn point of being a psychic is you’re supposed to know stuff without being given all the information necessary to figure it out.   If you know a person’s daughter is seventeen, for example, it’s not a long shot to guess she either has a boyfriend or has some kind of romantic interests.   If she’s six, you can probably guess she does not.    It’s so ridiculous to think a real “psychic” would need to be primed with the information to know this.

The best part is the other news anchor who actually takes her to task, pointing out that she didn’t guess the name of the woman’s daughter but only guessed J or an M for someone relating to the woman.   It’s very common for a psychic to claim success for something they didn’t get outright but were lead to.  It’s also rare to get a news personality who will take them to task for this.  I wonder why she wants to do his reading off camera?

I really hate to do this, and I realize that it’s a bit unprofessional to openly ask for help with editing a page that is not even officially up.  However, as readers here may know, I’m not the best speller in the world, although I may well be the worst.

I am about to launch a website for my bid for the US Congress.   However, I’m sure it has spelling errors in it and I can’t find them alone.   Paying for editing would be expensive and likely delay things even more.   That’s why I am asking to crowd source it from anyone kind enough to point them out.  I can be e-mailed or you can just point them out in the comments here.

The website (which is still not up as the main page) can be found at http://www.packard2012.org/test/

Once I am pretty sure there are no horribly embarrassing spelling errors I’ll move it to being the main page of the site.

I know that there are also parts of it that are lacking.   It does not have a full photo gallery yet, the donations service is still pending on having the account finalized.  The “policies” section needs a few additional ones added.  I’m aware of that and working to add them.  Right now what I need help with is spelling.

Thanks to anyone who will help out.

For those of you who do not know, I live In Connecticut. Recently my area was hit by Hurricane Irene, which caused the most extensive power outages in the regions history. Much has been made about how forecasters allegedly over-hyped Irene, because, as it turns out, it didn’t cause much flooding in New York City. While that may be true, it still decimated much of the East Coast and caused massive flooding elsewhere and damage to infrastructure to a massive extent.

In Connecticut, every single city and town experienced some power outages with the Shoreline being hit hardest. In Guilford CT, the town my parents live in and where I am employed, 100% of customers were without power by morning of Sunday, August 28. The damage to the power grid was extremely extensive. I drove down one major street and in a single mile I counted five locations where either power lines were down or trees had fallen and come into contact with power lines. In all, over one hundred of line breaks were reported in the town of Guildford. Many of them were more than simple line breaks. In at least a few circumstances, large trees came down and took down major distribution polls, crushing transformers and ripping wires down from several poles on each side. This is only one town! In the neighboring towns of Branford, North Branford, Madison, Clinton, Old Saybrook and all throughout Southern Connecticut things were just as bad.

Restoration of power was painfully slow, though this is understandable given the circumstances. The day after the storm, power was only beginning to be restored to a handful of customers, mostly in cities. By Wednesday, August 31, power began to be restored to a few of the central areas of the Southern Connecticut suburbs. On Tuesday the 30st of September, power was restored to my employer, which is located on a major road in the downtown area of Guildford CT. Residential areas began to flicker on this same day.  Also on Wensday, power came back at my apartment in Hamden Connecticut, a somewhat more urban and commercial area than Guildford. By the end of the week power was restored to the majority of Guildford and the surrounding area, but certainly not all of it. When I went to the bank on Friday the 2nd, they were running off a generator.

My parents home was unfortunate in being one of the last to have power restored in the area. The primary through street that feeds their street power had service by Friday, but a fault was detected in an underground cable on their street. I’m told by a utility worker that water from the saturated ground had found its way into the cable conduit and into a cable splice. The cable ended up needing to be dug up. It was not until Monday the 5th that power was restored to their home.

As of this posting, power has finally been restored to approximately 100% of the state.

Here are a few of my observations from what was the longest outage I’ve yet experienced:

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Click here if your browser does not support embedded videos to see the Yotube page.

Some Background:

You can also read more about this by searching Google News for the numerous stories this has generated.

If you are at all involved in the skeptic, atheist or science advocacy movement, there’s a good chance you’ve received some communications from a man by the name of Dennis Markuze. He sometimes goes by the name David Mabus and has been sending out various threats, hate messages and just spam for almost twenty years. Now 36, it seems Markuze started in the early days of the internet, spamming bulletin boards and mailing lists, before the web was even established.

His targets include anyone associated with skepticism, atheism or who he believes has somehow come out against his rather twisted belief system. He’s a rather big fan of Nostradamus who he seems to believe has predicted the end of Western Society. He’s also at least something of a doomsday “end-is-near” believer. He commonly talks about events like the attacks of 9/11 as being some kind of indictment against modern society.

His spam seems to come in waves on this site. He often will send dozens of messages. Most of these are blocked by the automatic spam guards, as mentioned here. He also sporadically e-mails me and sends tweets addressed to me. He does this to almost anyone who’s email address he can get and who he associates with skeptics or atheists. This includes prominent skeptics like Phil Plait, PZ Meyers and James Randi, but also people indirectly associated with them, such as James Randi’s former office manager and people who have mentioned these individuals favorably in blog posts.

He actually started spamming me after I wrote an article which was published by the JREF in which, amongst other things, I called Nostradamus vague and unimpressive. He didn’t like that, and upon seeing that I trashed psychics and other such phenomena on my page decided to go add me to his spam list.

Markuze’s basic belief is that he is part of some kind of propaganda war with skeptics and those who dismiss prophets and psychics. He believes he is a gifted prophet who has an important role in proving that Nostradamus and others are 100% correct.   He believes those who speak ill of them are committing blasphemy and must be stopped.

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Tonight the ABC News program Nightline Primetime will be featuring a segment called Beyond Belief: Psychic Power.

I happened to have the opportunity to go to attend the taping of a portion of this program. It’s actually a bit of a long story but they needed 12 men to participate in a psychic evaluation. I volunteered but it turned out they had more than 12 as it was (additional persons were called in case someone could not make it.) Thus I became an “alternate” and ultimately was not used for their evaluation group.

However, I still did get to hang around and help out a bit in the psychic evaluation, which was done by the James Randi Educational Foundation as part of their Million Dollar Challenge. Several self-proclaimed psychics were tested to see if they could read the test subjects accurately. I can’t actually tell you if any won the million dollars. You will have to watch to find out.

I’m really looking forward to seeing this show. Although it’s hard to tell what it will be after it is finally edited, the producers and reporters were generally very friendly to the skeptical side of the story. It’s a rarity to have skeptic organizations made a part of any media report on the paranormal and when they are, they usually are only given a chance for a token comment. In this case, skeptics were a major part of the production and the producers were extremely accommodating of the JREF’s protocol to assure the tests were valid and properly controlled.

I feel very privileged to have been a part of this production.  You *might* even see me in the background when the psychics are being lead into their interviews.  I don’t know if the footage with me in the background is actually going to be used.

The show will be airing at 10 PM Eastern, 9 Central in the US.

Check local listings outside these time zones.  If you are outside the US, the episode will likely be available after it airs.

Finally, for what it’s worth, if anyone happens to come out and claim the psychic tests were rigged, then all I can say is that I’ll attest to the fact that they were not.   Documentation of this can be provided, of course, but I’ll also say that I was there, I saw the items being places in envelopes and the sequestering of the test subjects.   Everything was double and triple checked, agreed upon protocols were followed to the T.

There is a segment of the show where a psychic works with pictures of persons in sealed envelopes.   Each picture was placed in two folders and then in the envelope.   *I* personally put them in the envelopes.  This was witnessed and verified by an ABC news producer, production assistants and members of the JREF staff.   They were then sealed and placed in a secure area until they were used.   This is how the challenge is always done:  extreme measures are taken to make sure it’s unquestionably valid.

Okay, I just got back from Las Vegas where I spent this past weekend with 1600 other skeptics, amateur and professional science enthusiasts, entertainers, magicians, free thinkers and other generally fun people.   I saw a lot of familiar faces and met many new ones.

And I’d really like to post about it, but I have work piled up, since I took a whole week off, and because I also didn’t get back until very early this morning and I really need some sleep.

In the meantime, I’d like to thank everyone from the James Randi Educational foundation for all the work that went into the Amazing Meeting 9 and all the speakers and presenters who contributed to it.

Sorry for the lack of posts for the past week. They will resume soon.

There have been a number of photographs taken of alleged “cryptids” such as bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.   Many are poor quality and could be anything.  Others are fairly good views of something, but are likely hoaxes with the photos either staged or doctored.   Now it appears that one group thinks offering 2,000 USD will change that.

Via io9:

This summer, io9 is going cryptozoological. We’re offering a $2000 bounty to the person who sends us the best authentic photo or video of a “cryptid,” or mystery animal. And that’s just the beginning of Cryptid Summer.

Illustration of Sasquatch by Rick Spears (get his book about cryptids here!); photograph of the beach by Pichugin Dmitry/Shutterstock.

A cryptid, according to Wikipedia, is “a creature or plant whose existence has been suggested but that is unrecognized by a scientific consensus, and whose existence is moreover often regarded as highly unlikely.” Think Bigfoot or the Montauk Monster. Cryptids are often urban legends, but there is a scientific side to these mystery animals, too. New life forms develop all the time, and in very unexpected ways. Many animals would have been considered cryptids until scientists began to study evolution and zoology. Think about Cryptid Summer as an opportunity to explore the strange side of evolution and life science.

The Bounty
io9 will be offering a $2000 bounty for the best photographic or video evidence of a genuine cryptid. In August, we will invite our panel of experts, including zoologists, the team behind excellent cryptid blog Cryptomundo, cryptid expert Loren Coleman, and a photoshop analyst, to judge which pictures are the most authentic. We’ll give the bounty to the one that they judge to be the most mysterious yet authentic creature.

How to enter:
Send the picture as a .jpg attached to an email explaining where you took the photo, what you saw, and how the cryptid behaved. If you have a video, we prefer .mov files. Please include your full name and a way we can contact you. Do NOT send photos or video that you didn’t personally take.

I fully expect them to get plenty of entries, but authenticating them? Well that depends on how gullible they are.

The problem with authenticating a photo:

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And another television news report, this one from NBC.

Note that in this earlier report the word “may” is left out and Fox News reports that bodies were found.

(Fox News should not be singled out in this case, however. Sky News, NBC, CNN, the BBC and other news outlets reported basically the same thing)

NOTE: NO BODIES WERE ACTUALLY FOUND

Numerous media reports indicated that a mass grave containing children “may have been found” (just like cell phones may cause cancer.) It has since been confirmed that no bodies were found. No grave was found. There was no evidence that a violent crime had been committed on the property

Here’s basically what happened:

Police in Texas were contacted by a self-proclaimed psychic who indicated that they had information, presumably from a psychic vision, which indicated that a mass grave containing thirty or more dismembered bodies could be found at a home in Hardin, Texas, about 70 miles from Houston.  The caller never gave their name but called at least twice.   It’s worth noting that there are no reports of 30 missing persons in the area or of ongoing kidnappings or anything else which might lead authorities to believe they were looking for a mass murderer.   None the less, the tip was apparently taken seriously.   It has been reported that the called seemed to know details of the property and the interior of the house.

The local sheriff’s office investigated and found that nobody was home at the house and the occupants had not been seen in about two or three days.  This is by no means sinister.  The couple who owned the home are long haul truckers and are often away for several days.  Their 16 year old daughter had also lived in the home until recently.   Background checks of the home owners came up clean and neighbors said that they never saw anything suspicious.   The owner was eventually tracked down – he was in Georgia on a trucking route and expected to be back in a few more days.

Police checked out the property and noticed an unpleasant smell in the back yard.   As it turns out, this was just uncollected garbage.   They also noted what appeared to be blood on the back porch.  The blood apparently was left from an incident that occurred about two weeks prior.   The ex-fiance of the couple’s daughter had apparently had some kind of domestic dispute in which he got drunk and slit his wrist in a suicide attempt (or possibly not a real suicide attempt so much as a dramatic act).  He didn’t die, but left quite a bit of blood which the home owners had tried to clean up, although it seems traces were left.   Of course, police were able to verify this as the incident had been reported and an ambulance called.

None the less, police were able to get a search warrant for the property.   At least 15 police vehicles were on the scene.  They searched it, brought in cadaver dogs and found…. nothing.   Surprise?   No, not really.

Thankfully, the daughter of the owners was located and able to get to the scene with the keys to allow investigators in, thus avoiding a broken down door.

And to make matters worse:

Despite the fact that no bodies were found, it seems that there was some confusion over whether there was a tip about bodies or whether they were actually found.  A number of news outlets jumped the gun and reported that 30 bodies had been found in a mass grave.

Such as this press outlet, which is a fairly typical example of how this was reported in the US and around the world today:

Mass Grave Full Of Childrens bodies
There’s been a gruesome discovery in the United States.

A possible mass grave has been uncovered in Texas with up to 30 bodies reportedly found at the rural property east of Houston.

Many of the bodies are reportedly those of children who have been dismembered.

It’s believed US federal agents received a tip off from the public.

They want to search the home on the property but so far , the FBI says the residents have been “unco-operative’.

CNN Initially reported (before retracting the story):

At least 20 bodies, including those of children, have been found at a home in Hardin, Texas, a federal official told CNN. Officers are securing the scene, the official said.

Now, why this really really really bothers me:
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Alright, I am going to go out on a limb here and ask a question.   Can anyone provide me with even one single solitary example of a psychic cracking an otherwise unsolved or unsolvable police case?   Either criminal, missing persons or something else.    I hear all the time about how various individuals claim to have helped in investigations, but I have never found even a single example.

Here are my criteria for what I’m looking for:

• The information provided was pivotal, it didn’t simply turn out to be true after the fact.   Saying a body was in a field and it turning out to be in a field is no good, the advice had to actually result in the body being found by directing the police to the field.
• It’s not just a reiteration of already suspected information, like saying that the father did it when the father was already the prime suspect or even a possible suspect.
• The reputed “psychic” must be reasonably well proven to have not been part of the crime or had any other direct knowledge or at the very least not suspected of it.
• It can’t be something extremely vague like “they are already dead”
• It has to be documented.  No second hand stories or urban legends.

What I am looking for is a case where investigators had no idea at all that a certain person was involved or a certain piece of evidence could be found and a psychic directed them to it where they they would not have found it otherwise.

I’m willing to accept the possibility that there could be one, based entirely on sheer dumb luck that a random guess turned out to be right, but I’m still not aware of even a single example of this even happening once. Can anyone provide even one single example?

Oh, and by the way, there are still people who claim to have helped the police solve major cases. Some even charge money for their services. I’m not aware of any who actually have managed to do it though.

You may remember Sylvia Browne as the self-proclaimed psychic who managed to stay in the spotlight despite repeatedly being ridiculously wrong in damn near all of her predictions and providing entirely wrong information on missing persons to desperate loved ones.  One of her most infamous incidents was claiming that Shawn Hornbeck was dead and that she even knew some details of the location of his body – Hornbeck later turned up alive.   After this was revealed by our friend Robert Lancaster, Browne faced a harsh backlash in the media.

She had been a regular on the Montel Williams Show, but since the show went off the air, she has not been as prominent in the media.  She has, however, tried to maintain as much of a presence as she can and has continued to promote her books and speaking engagements.

It seems she has a new (and unexpectedly pathetic) pitch.  Inexplicably some media outlets continue to take her seriously enough to actually devote some precious air time to the fraudulent bitch.

She does not exactly look or sound good. Not that she ever really did…

In some ways, this route represents a safer scheme for Browne. Her claims are still sensational and touch on something that plenty of stupid people are very interested in: celebrity gossip. However, it’s also not falsifiable and can’t result in the kind of direct damage that claiming to know the location of a missing person can. The persons in question are not alive and can’t refute what Browne claims, and although the remote possibility of their estate suing may exist, that seems to be unlikely since there’s really no way to prove anything one way or another.

I do feel rather bad for the poor woman reporter who had to maintain a straight face and pretend to take this all seriously. I can’t imagine what she was thinking, but it may well have been “a masters in journalism and years of trying to work my way up and this is what I’m left doing.”

It still amazes me that the media will devote precious airtime to this pathetic joke. The public may not exactly be very skeptical when it comes to choosing what they watch, but I have to believe that most people can see through this BS.