Double vision

After ten years of writing this blog six times a week, you'd think I'd be inured.  You'd think I'd long ago have stopped running into weird ideas that I hadn't heard of.  You'd think it'd be impossible to surprise me any more.

You'd be wrong.

You've heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  Well, just yesterday, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to the homepage of the Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society, which takes it one step further:

Many prominent individuals are actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced.  That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection.  Clones can mate and reproduce clone children.  A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children. 

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion.  They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others. 

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill.  Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior. 

The eye is the window of the soul. In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within.  As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source.  Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment.  The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light.  They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, notwithstanding the fact that the last paragraph could be describing me before I've had a cup of coffee in the morning, the whole thing seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little shaky in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point.  (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.)  The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950’s.  This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor.  Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells.  To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change.  Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell."  The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed.  They developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment.  By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all. Not only do we have fake people walking around, some of them are actually robots. Jimmy Carter, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics.  Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff.  For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President.  On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter.  By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Brad Pitt and Jimmy Carter synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or something, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyoncé (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me choke-snort coffee all over my computer, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's rather tenuous grasp on reality?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone.  We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff.  Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry.  Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof.  Also the different color of his skin.  Its [sic] a very fine difference of the color.  Also the distance between body and head is now different.  Also his psychology while talking.  We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this.  We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then. They did lots of "stuff" and found out that (amongst other things) David Icke's head has moved farther away from his body.  Plus, they say they're being objective, so pretty much q.e.d., as far as I can see.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less blank and hollow-eyed, and hopefully fool more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.

**********************************

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Depression, sadness, and kickboxing

If I chose to comment every time a celebrity said something stupid, I'd be doing nothing but responding to idiotic statements all day long.  But every once in a while, a totally unqualified and apparently ignorant person, who is only in the public eye because of some other (sometimes questionable) talent, makes a statement so egregious, so catastrophically dumb, that I just have to say something.

This is the situation I was in when I heard about kickboxer Andrew Tate's pronouncements about depression.  Here's how it started, in his own words:

It's seldom that I've seen someone pack so much bullshit in to so few words.

First, depression is not sadness.  They're not even close to the same thing.  I'm "sad" when it's cold and rainy on a day I wanted to go for a run.  I'm "sad" when a friend cancels a get-together I'd been looking forward to.  I'm "sad" when my dog is sick.

Depression, on the other hand, affects everything.  It doesn't matter what's going on around you.  It doesn't matter how many friends you have or how your job is going or what the weather is.  Depression makes everything colorless.  Worse, it makes everything -- even the things you know are important -- seem pointless, not worth the trouble.

So you can't just "move on."  You can't just "change it."  If it was that simple, there would be no depressed people in the entire world.

Depressed person:  I feel like life's not worth living any more. 

Psychologist:  Stop feeling sad. 

No-longer-depressed person:  Oh!  Wow!  Thank you!  I'm all better now!  Doctor, you're amazing!

So as you can imagine, Tate received quite a well-deserved backlash for his idiotic statement.  But as you might expect from someone who makes a living beating the absolute shit out of other people, this just made him double down on his original position.  Here are his followup comments:

• There are very few fat lonely man [sic], aged 60.  With no money or family or hobbys [sic].  Who arnt [sic] depressed -- this is not a clinical disease.
• It is a circumstance which they must change.  Most "depressed" people are unhappy with their lives, too lazy to change it.  That simple.
• Then they pretend they caught some disease to absolve all responsibilities.  ITS [sic] NOT MY FAULT IM [sic] SAD.  Yes it is.  
• People will do anything to absolve responsibilities.  ITS [sic] NOT MY FAULT IM [sic] POOR/SAD/FAT/STUPID.  Yes it is.
• So people defend depression.  They get angry when I say this.  Because they need this bullshit to justify their own failures.
• By admitting I'm right, they need to work hard to make themselves happy.  To avoid the work -- argue with me and pretend depression is a thing.
• Sure.  Natural sometimes to FEEL depressed.  It doesn't make it a DISEASE.  I feel hungry sometimes.  Then I change it.
• Modern think bullshit has made trillions giving anti depressant pills when all they need is a better diet, exercise and a life purpose.
• How can you be too depressed to work when people in war zones arnt [sic]?  With dead family all around them?
• Now come back and call me names and defend your safety crutch with all you have.  Or accept fact and change your life.  The choice is yours.

I suppose it's understandable that I became apoplectic with anger reading these comments.  I've struggled with depression my entire adult life.  I was suicidal twice, once when I was 17 and once when I was 20, something few people know about me, even people I knew back then.  I was twice to the point of having a plan to kill myself, plans I abandoned simply out of what I perceived then as cowardice.  I have gone through the gamut of antidepressants, as one after another gave me unacceptable side effects -- complete loss of sex drive, excruciating acid reflux, and (one of them) hypermanic and uncontrollable angry and violent thoughts.  I am now on an antidepressant that works, takes the edge off my depression, and has resulted in no side effects.  Friends and family have told me they see the difference in my overall outlook, energy levels, and approach to life.

So don't tell me "depression isn't real."  Or that it's the same thing as "being sad."  Or that it can be cured with work/exercise/diet.

Or that it's circumstantial, that it comes from being "unhappy with life."  I have had depressive episodes when I was in horrible situations, bad relationships, stressful jobs.  I have also had depressive episodes when everything in my life was going wonderfully.  Depression might be easier to deal with when everything around you is good, when you have a support network and little external stress.

But that doesn't make it go away.  Depression is internal, and (very likely) caused by alterations in neurotransmitter levels in the brain.  If it could be cured by walking in the woods, I fucking well would have done that when I was 17 instead of swiping my parents' bottle of sleeping pills, then sitting there on my bed with a handful of them, gazing at them and chiding myself for not having the courage to swallow the whole lot.

I guess it's unreasonable of me to expect that celebrities are going to be any more likely to say smart things than stupid ones.  They run the gamut of intelligence levels just like the rest of us.  But dammit, given their visibility, they have a responsibility to think before they speak, to consider the effects their words will have.  Whether it's reasonable or not, the public listens to them.

And the idea that an athlete like Andrew Tate could have, by his defiant ignorance and his insensitive and incorrect statements, shamed one person out of seeking help for depression is about as reprehensible as anything I can think of.

Double vision

After four years of writing this blog six times a week, you'd think I'd be inured.  You'd think I'd long ago have stopped running into weird ideas that I hadn't heard of.  You'd think it'd be impossible to surprise me any more.

You'd be wrong.

You've heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  Well, just yesterday, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to the homepage of the Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society, which takes it one step further:

Many prominent individuals are actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced. That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection. Clones can mate and reproduce clone children. A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children. 

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion. They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others. 

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill. Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior. 

The eye is the window of the soul. In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within. As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source. Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment. The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light. They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, notwithstanding the fact that the last paragraph could be describing me before I've had a cup of coffee in the morning, the whole thing seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little shaky in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point. (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.) The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950’s. This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor. Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells. To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change. Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell." The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed. They developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment. By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all.  Not only do we have fake people walking around, some of them are actually robots.  Jimmy Carter, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics. Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff. For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President. On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter. By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Brad Pitt and Jimmy Carter synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or something, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyonce (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me sit up and take notice, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's rather tenuous grasp on reality?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone. We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff. Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry. Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof. Also the different color of his skin. Its a very fine difference of the color. Also the distance between body and head is now different. Also his psychology while talking. We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this. We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then.  If they say they're being objective, I'm convinced.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less blank and hollow-eyed, and hopefully fool more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.

Publicity stunts and "Aura Babies"

Ordinarily I don't pay any attention to celebrities.

Part of it comes from not having a working television connection.  I live too far out in the middle of nowhere for cable, and I'm too cheap to get a satellite dish.  Besides, if I did have satellite, I'd just spend hours watching The Weather Channel and updating my wife about weather systems in North Dakota, and she has to put up with enough of this kind of thing already, given that my internet browser's homepage is the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So there's the lack of access, but a big part of it also comes from a lack of caring.  My general impression is that a lot of celebrities are talentless hacks who will do anything to remain in the public eye, and I just don't have a lot of patience for that sort of thing.  But when Sharon Hill, over at the wonderful site Doubtful News, posted a story on a couple of "reality" television stars, I thought, "If Hill thinks it's worth paying attention to, I should probably see what it's all about."

Turns out it was worth the effort.  Because that's how I found out that plastic-surgery-queen Heidi Montag and her partner, Spencer Pratt, are trying to conceive...

... an "aura baby."

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

I'm not making this up.  And in the time-honored fashion of couples everywhere, she posted details about what she and Pratt were doing, on Twitter.  Here was the first tweet:

1 reason we're trying to get fit is Spencer & I are trying to conceive #speidishow

But she hastily followed it up with additional tweets, that they weren't just trying to have a regular old boring baby, but an "aura baby."  What is an "aura baby," you might ask?  Do you conceive one from having aural sex?  No, but Montag has the answer:

An Aura Baby is a product of the soul born out of the bio-chemistry of the universe! #speidishow

Oh!  Okay!  Because that clears it right up!  But fear not, she went on with a more detailed explanation:

An Aura Baby isn't the child of your fame, not YOUR Aura & NOT Aura like when they say a  painting has an Aura #speidishow

I...  what?

An Aura Baby is born of 1 thing – the love of 2 people channeled & focused to go out to the whole world!  #speidishow

 Just... stop...

Since i beat @spencerpratt in yoga he's carrying our aurababy! #speidishow

And so forth and so on.

Now, I'm aware that this is just a publicity stunt.  A weird publicity stunt, but a publicity stunt.   But apparently some of Montag's fans don't.  I looked at her Twitter feed, and while there were a few people who seemed to react with disdain (including more than one who questioned Montag's sanity), most people who responded seemed ostensibly to think that she was somehow talking about reality.  One woman, in fact, said she was "Soooo excited" about the upcoming happy cosmic event, and hoped that they would "televise the delivery" when Pratt gives birth to his new little astral offspring.

Okay, that could be an example of Poe's Law, but given some of the other insane things people believe, I'm not entirely sure.

So, that's the news from Hollywood these days.  Further reinforcing my determination not to watch television, which in my opinion went into a tailspin, quality-wise, the day The X Files went off the air.  I'll just stick with my online news reports of weather systems in North Dakota, which at least have a basis in reality.

Guest post from skeptic Tyler Tork: The Psychic's Psychic

Hi Skeptophiles,

I'm back from Malaysia, and tomorrow will be back in the saddle again, fueled in my vocation of neatly poniarding woo-woos by such powerfully magical substances as Malaysian Death Curry and Durian, The Fruit From Hell.  To gear you back up, today I present a guest post from my friend and fellow skeptic Tyler Tork.  You should all check out his website (link posted at the end), and I hope you enjoy his post as much as I did!

**************************************
 

The Psychics' Psychic

 - by guest blogger Tyler Tork

"SuperPsychic Wendy!"[1] is on your side, O Consumer of Psychic Services. She wants to prevent bogus psychics from cheating you, so she's written a book, The Naked Quack! [2]. It explains how people get fooled by charlatans. Why waste your money on a fake medium when you can instead pay $400/hr for the real thing – her?

She also wants to license psychics, a proposal that many of the readers of this blog can probably get behind. I, for one, would be glad to issue a professional psychic license to anyone who can prove their powers in a controlled test (and who swears to use them for good). The many genuine psychics in this country, concerned about fakers who give their profession a bad name, surely must regard Wendy! as a heroine.

The James Randi Foundation could create a testing regimen for licensing. I'm sure a psychic as gifted as Wendy! must know about the million dollars they offer anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities, so I'm not sure why she hasn't applied. Odd. It's not about the money, of course; she could give that to a charity. It's about credibility.

Lacking such a test, we must evaluate psychics as best we can by other means. Fortunately, a rare few are bold enough to go on record with predictions for the coming year. As we know, the reading public always clip or bookmark such articles, and at the end of the year they go back to check whether the predictions were accurate. So this is a gutsy thing for a psychic to do.

Never let it be said that Wendy! is timid. Witness her predictions for 2011. Now we can see how good she really is.

Alas, as I peruse the article, I see that out of seven predictions, none of them are entirely correct. Now, nobody claims that precognition is an exact science, so perhaps it's unfair to take a paragraph of  prediction and count it wrong if not every statement is 100% accurate. So I broke the predictions into independent statements to see to what extent they might be at least a near miss. Here they are (paraphrased to avoid any copyright concerns):

•     Tom Cruise breaks his arm doing a stunt. Wrong.
•     There are a lot of photos of Tom and Katie arguing. Hard to evaluate since "a lot" is vague, but since I searched a bit and couldn't find a single such photo from 2011, I'm saying wrong on this one.
•     Tom and Katie are rumored to divorce. A search turned up nothing. There are always rumors of all kinds about celebrity couples, so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody said this. But did she mean one rumor, or a lot? I rule this one too vague to evaluate.
•     Tom and Katie run an ad to show that their marriage isn't in trouble. Wrong.
•     The stock market makes major swings at the start of the year. Wrong, basically flat.
•     The U.S. sends troops to Nicaragua. Wrong. (Huh?)
•     The stock market rises by April. Wrong; market flat thru April.
•     The stock market drops by early summer because of "some news". Wrong. Nothing notable before July.
•     Obama's increasing unpopularity makes markets nervous (unclear whether this is the news referred to above, but it precedes a prediction about August so I assume it means sometime during the summer, anyway).Wrong. Obama's ratings are flat, actually reaching a year high by July.
•     The stock market has another "shaky" period in late August. "Another" implies there's a non-shaky time preceding it, which was not the case. Wrong.
•     The stock market stabilizes by the end of the year. Wrong.
•     Arnold Schwarzenegger runs for President. Since he's ineligible, no surprise: wrong.
•     Arnold's daughter, Christina, goes into acting. Wrong.
•     Michael Douglas (already known to have cancer at the time) gets stronger as he battles cancer.  Wrong. He gets weaker, losing 32 pounds that he didn't need to shed. Unless she means strength of character, in which case see below.
•     Douglas wins an Oscar. Wrong.
•     Douglas does TV commercials against smoking. Wrong. In fact, he's sighted smoking, which seems to show that his cancer hasn't taught him much (see above).
•     Major floods in the Midwest in March or April. For a change, this one is close enough to count as correct. The floods were a little later than predicted, but I don't want to be too much of a hard-ass. Of course, NOAA, presumably without psychic assistance, was already predicting heavy snowfall, so spring flooding might not be much of a stretch.
•     Texas will have major floods in March or April. Wrong.
•     [The floods will cause] serious crop damage "everywhere". I assume everywhere means everywhere there was flooding. Since floods always cause crop damage, I don't consider this a separate prediction.
•     Accusations of tax evasion, and a scandal involving an anonymous informant, will make Sarah Palin drop out of the Presidential race. It came as a surprise to nobody that Sarah Palin dropped out, since she's a lunatic whom only a handful of people would consider voting for. However, it had nothing to do with taxes or mysterious scandals, so, wrong.
•     Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel get engaged. This one is correct. Wendy! successfully predicted the engagement of a couple who'd been dating for years and had talked about getting engaged on national TV.
•     Justin and Jessica have a baby girl. Wrong.
•     Justin writes and produces an autobiographical film. Wrong. I feel like I'm shooting fish in a barrel here. I don't want to be mean, but really?
•     Jessica is nominated for a 2012 Oscar.  Wrong.

Tallying that up, there were 22 predictions specific enough to evaluate, of which 2 were correct. That's an accuracy rate of 9%, and the ones that were correct weren't the ones I would've given long odds. If Arnold Schwarzenegger were somehow on the ballot, or if we'd invaded Nicaragua, I'd be a little more impressed. As it is, I don't know about you, but I like my psychics to be correct at least 15% of the time, to justify charging $400/hr ($600 if you just count face time).

–

Tyler Tork, occasional contributor of derisive comments here, writes speculative fiction and answers reader questions online. Every question deserves a silly answer. www.tylertork.com/qna

---

[1] The exclamation point is apparently part of her name.

[2] Some might suspect that she only knows one punctuation symbol, but she deserves some credit for correct use of apostrophe when she bills herself as "The Psychics' Psychic."