Avoid Las Vegas between May 17th and 20th. There’s a conference going on there that will be like a black hole of stupid, with both Sylvia Browne and Deepak Chopra and a host of low-wattage luminaries of woo in attendance, and there may be a kind of intelligence implosion going on. Your brain may get sucked into the dark pit of delusional dimness if you’re too close.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I saw Chopra last week on Bill Maher’s HBO show; he was saying that consciousness was like a television–? I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve heard him speak in person, and it was awful.
Consciousness is so like a television. I don’t know about you, but there’s sure a beam of electrons in my skull exciting a bunch of phosphorous on the backs of my eyeballs.
It also scares the children away after dark.
Wait, what if there’s leftover intellect waves from The Amazing! Meeting 5 still there?
Head for the hills! There’ll be a massive intellectual/anti-intellectual brainwave explosion!
Oh, wait, forgot. No one’s claimed the million for proving the existence of that sort of energy.
Consciousness is like television? Damn, between reruns and PBS pledge month, I gotta find something else to do.
Fluff and nonsense. At this very moment, the US Peace Government is radiating happy beams from the Bhramistan of the United States in Kansas. The force carrying particle of positive psychic energy is the prozon, and it was discovered by Dr. John Hagelin, the world renowned quantum physicist.
One of the hosts of The Atheist Experience visited one of these events called the “World Wellness Weekend” a few weeks back in Austin.
He recounts the experience and a speech from Deepak Chopra. It’s pretty interesting.
http://www.atheist-experience.com/archive/index.php?full=0
It’s the 11 March show.
I don’t know, if Choprah brings up that indecipherable quantum stuff again, I’m inclined to be persuaded. There might actually be a powerful reality distortion field surrounding those people.
On Bill Maher’s show last week, Deepak also made a joke about how he was a prophet and then he proceeded to spell it out, “P-R-O-F-I-T”. How honest he was.
There’s a virtual particle associated with a reality distortion field. It’s called the GW-Boson.
He also said it on the Colbert Report.
At what point is it a good idea to not be avoiding Las Vegas?
“We were somewhere outside of Barstow in the middle of the desert when the woo began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘My chakras seem a little out of alignment. Maybe you should drive.’ And then the air was full of screaming bats. . . .”
frorm what I have read about Choprah he rather carries a flat screen on his shoulders
I see that Candace Pert, discoverer of brain opiate receptors and longtime New Ager, is one of the speakers. Pert is a good scientist with some intriguing ideas who has unfortunately succumbed to New Age silliness. I’m reminded of Lynn Margulis, another good scientist who became convinced by quack ideas; in Margulis’ case, HIV-AIDS ‘skepticism.’
Wait a minute. A huge group of psychics, and people who can manipulate reality through the Power of Intention, and folks with Invisible Guardian Angels are all going to go to the GAMBLING CAPITOL of the WORLD and the casinos are just going to let them??? They can walk right up to the crap tables and roulette wheels and slot machines and do their stuff and the Las Vegas hotel owners are not in total panic???
I find that incomprehensible. They must be beefing up the bouncers and passing around photos.
LOL. Except unlike a real black hole, this one doesn’t so much remove all of the stupid from the nearby observable universe as accrete and then amplify it.
If only what happened in Vegas really just stayed there :)
This will be an orgasmic meeting of spirituality, unversal oneness and metaphysical quantum consciousness. The stars and planets are in perfect alignment for a positive global connection! I hope you all can attend. You too can know the Secret!
Gag. Wretch. Choke.
Somebody get me a bucket.
[lying]I don’t mean to pick on people and their appearances[/lying], but this page:
http://www.icandoit.net/speakers/index.php
Looks like a set of pictures from a lobotomy ward.
Doreen Virtue, Ph.D., is a spiritual doctor of psychology and lifelong clairvoyant who works with the angelic realm. She’s the author of Daily Guidance from Your Angels, Realms of the Earth Angels, Angels 101, Goddesses & Angels, and Angel Medicine, among other works. Doreen has appeared on Oprah, The View, CNN, Good Morning America, and other programs. She recently released the How to Give an Angel Card Reading Kit, Connecting with Your Angels Kit and the Angel Guidance Board. Doreen also has a weekly call-in talk radio show on HayHouseRadio.com®. http://www.angeltherapy.com®
AHHHHH hahahahahahah! AHHHHH!
That shit is Hysterical!!!
That’s like saying mold appeared on five month-old mayonnaise.
Looking at the link Dustin so kindly (?) provided, I see that they’ve even got Dr. Masaru “my water has better vibrations than your water” Emoto!
Dustin wrote:
*screams*
AHAHAHAHHHHH. AHHHHH. That link is a smorgasborg of woo and absurdist comedy!
Dr. Steven Farmer is the author of the best-selling Power Animals: How to Connect with Your Animal Spirit Guide, Power Animals, Power Animal Oracle Cards, and Sacred Ceremony: How to Create Ceremonies for Healing, Transitions, and Celebrations, as well as several other books and articles. Dr. Farmer is a shamanic practitioner, professional speaker, ordained minister, and former psychotherapist with over 30 years experience as a professional healer and teacher. He makes his home in Laguna Beach, California, with his wife, Doreen Virtue. Dr. Farmer offers workshops and lectures on a variety of spiritual and shamanic topics. He recently released his latest Meditation CD: Messages from Your Animal Spirit Guide and launched his own weekly talk show on HayHouseRadio.com®. For further information, go to http://www.PowerAnimals.com
He’s married to Virtue! Ahhh! Do you think they have arguments about which is more important, the Animal spirits or the Angels?
I think this needs a version of the blasphemy challenge…
I deny the existence of animal spirit guides and angels. You freaking loons!
Can’t make the conference, and, oh, gosh darn it, I missed the Certification Course in Angel Alignment this weekend, too!
And it was a piddling $295!
http://www.claimyourpower.net/candy/pdf/Flyer%20march%202007.pdf
Man, there are looney people out there!!!! :)
Which church allows that? Scientology?
Which church allows that? Scientology?
Blizzard. They can bust my warlock down all they like, but they won’t nerf the damn shamans, nooo.
I would pay actual cash money to be able to sit at a poker table with these guys.
The phrase “black hole of stupid” is a beautiful thing.
Holy Crap.
Dr. Wayne Dyer is on PBS talking about high and low energy.
The power of intention? It’s fricking mindless stuff to sell stuff!
Did you know we all started out as an intention?
God writes all the books and builds all the bridges?
Well guess I won’t be donating to WLIW this year.
I never thought I’d say this, but that sounds like a good time for a visit from Mr. E. Coli, Caterer.
Steve “The Salmon Mousse!” James
Steve, I haven’t given one single penny to PBS since Wayne Dyer started showing up on every affiliate on my dial a few years ago. Nova is nice and all, but I can finance them by buying a DvD copy of the really good episodes.
NPR will start getting my money when Prairie Home Companion goes away, and our local classical station (KCME), gets nothing until the Bach cantatas come back on Sunday mornings.
I’ve alse e-mailed all of them to let them know it.
The Science Pundit declared:
Well then, as your attorney, I advise you to rent a fast red car with no top, fill the trunk with the Erowid catalog, run a thousand-dollar room service tab at the woo-fest hotel, and sign “Deepak Chopra” on the bill. Screaming “You people voted for Ralph Nader — and you killed Jesus!” into the botox faces of channelers and homeopaths is optional.
Dr. Steven Farmer’s book is called Animal Spirit Guides, which I’m sure is required reading for everyone here. Anyone know what his PhD is in?
In addition to being a licensed psychotherapist, he is also an ordained minister in the Circle of Sacred Earth Church, and has conducted a number of ceremonies in his role as minister and shamanic practitioner.
Dr. Farmer’s education includes a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, an M.A. in Counseling Psychology from Chapman University, and a Ph.D. from Madison University.
From his PowerAnimals website. Doesn’t say what his Ph.D. is in. Anyone know anything about Madison or Chapman?
Distance learning. Credit awarded for life experience. Fast track degree programs.
http://www.madisonu.com/
In short: Degree Mill.
I suspect that’s how most of them get the Ph.D to attatch onto their name.
“My crazy aint so crazy! I got a PhD!”
Yikes — for a minute I thought you meant “prostate specific antigen”.
The only good thing about all them scam artists(I’d go nastier, but this is a family blog) is they will all be in one place so we can swoop in and arrest them all for scamming millions from millions.
Or something even nastier and more befitting the karma that is way overdo to come at them like a tsunami.
Yikes. I’ll be in Vegas two weeks before for an unrelated conference. Too close for comfort.
Oh, and Chapman is a real university, though I don’t know anything about their psych program. A friend of mine went there, but it was for film.
Jerry Hicks and the wife look like a couple of Amway salespeople to be sure, but I would pretend to be buying whatever Cheryl Richardson was selling up until that awkward time in the morning (after breakfast) when she would ask for my cell phone number.
The Sylvia Browne pose, with the hand under the chin like she is “thoughtful.” Don’t like the lady, don’t like the pose.
Shows off the fingernails of which she must be proud.
You might not know this, but Sylvia Browne’s fingernails are made out of some kind of crystallized nicotine compound.
If you even touch her, you’ll get cancer and die.
It occurs to me that these people, regardless of what they might claim, are all atheists. No way could they believe god is watching what they are doing.
Even that deathbed confession thing isn’t likely to work if you are a lying, cheating sleezeball every waking moment.
No wonder people are so down on us.
They are not atheists. They’re just communal bong-hitting theists. They don’t work for The Man and they don’t trust any god over 30 centuries old. Tune out, turn on, Tinkerbell.
And they’re going to Nevada, the state with the most alien landings per capita! So “black hole” is appropriate, but if only it were true.
1st Alien: I don’t know, should we abduct these dorks standing in the middle of the parking lot and chanting? It would make us hit our quota ahead of time. Then we could hit Regula 4 and make the floor show in time.
2nd Alien: Man, don’t! Just pass over them. Believe me, you don’t want these people aboard the ship. They’ll eat all of our soybean product. I’m telling you.
They’ll eat all of our soybean product. I’m telling you.
and after they’re done eating all the soy, they always become gay, for some reason. Makes it really hard to maintain stocks.
Yeah, that really throws a wrench into their mating-with-humans mission. ;-)
Or maybe Deepak & Co. are actually cast away aliens? That would explain a lot.
If only they could get this meeting and TAM scheduled for the same time next year. Now THAT would be fun!
OEJ
This is one hell of a collection of wowsers.I suppose the guillible will turn out by the thousands.This collection of charlatans will eventually scam these marks for untold thousands of dollars.This meeting is nothing but a long con.As a young man I ran short con games that worked because of the marks greed.I could only get the money in the marks pocket.The con they are running works on the ongoing stupidty of their marks.They have the ability to tap not only the bank accounts of their marks,but also their assets.These people can dress the dreck they are peddling any way they want to,but in the final analysis they are as criminal as I was running short cons.I used greed,lust, envy,and jealousy to turn a buck.These assholes use stupidity and that reminds me to much of shooting fish in a barrel.
Blake Stacey: Yeah, gotta love that guy. Sheesh. As I told a colleague where I volunteer (a neuroscientist) who was listening with me to another colleague gush about Emoto – this guy is such a damn shame, since water is so important. And he’s now somehow gotten people (including himself, it seems) to believe that we can solve this crisis (and water is a growing problem, make no mistake) by merely thinking happily about it? What a waste of time and effort.
Indeed. Not even to mention the class, race, gender, and social justice aspects of who those problems are going to devolve onto through promoting distractions like this instead of real solutions to problems.
There’s so much to object to at that conference that it’s hard to just pick one to single out, but Louise L. Hay’s claim regarding birth defects has just always especially stuck in my craw. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, Louise–if you’re going to let all the known causers of environmental and nutritional teratogens off the hook by claiming that birth defects are the reincarnated soul’s attempt to learn its life lessons, you’re going to have to provide a metric assload of evidence to back up that particular anti-scientific victim-blaming polluter-excusing steaming pile of an assertion.
I’d actually be a lot more despairing about all this, though, if I hadn’t just come out of a productive weekend-long workshop* where we’re focusing on developing information systems for separating the wheat of the solid, verifiable, replicable knowledge in the field of massage practice from the chaff like Hay’s blaming-the-victim effluvia.
(with fair-trade coffee on tap provided by a small business that doesn’t feel the need to promote science-undermining ethically-impaired lying ID-sycophants on their cups [I’m looking at *you*, Starbucks] by the way :)