Bless the Beasts, and the Children…

There has been a bit of talk lately about the Psychic Kids program on A&E  (or was on A&E, it was canceled I  hope. )

I haven’t actually watched an episode of Psychic Kids, I’ve certainly read a lot about it and I have seen bits of the show on YouTube. On the surface it strikes me as just another Paranormal-a-rama reality show where they cue the spooky music, drag out “psychic-guy and pretend to scare each other with lousy video.

I mostly ignore this junk. Really it’s not very interesting. None of these clowns come even close to using scientific methodology in their quest to find ghosts, prove ghosts are real or whatever the hell they are doing  (I honestly don’t know.)  All they seem to be doing is putting on a show, a pretty boring one at that as I suspect people will soon be seeing. Ghost hunting I think is little more than a passing fad.

But this Psychic Kids thing is another kettle of fish altogether, and a pretty stinky one.  Psychic Kids explores kids who think they have super powers being validated by “famous” cold readers and illusionists like Chip Coffey.

James Randie and a number of other people call this child abuse. They maintain that it’s wrong to encourage vulnerable kids to believe in a bunch of unsubstantiated nonsense. Psychics and paranormalists claim that these are crystal children.  A possible next step in our evolution.

Now, I try to maintain an open mind about  this. A lot of people seem to think that I’m just a ‘psycho skeptic” and I’m out to destroy the paranormal as a field. Some say that I want to wipe out paranormal abilities by attacking children with those abilities. That’s just stupid, fearful, barking moonbat talk. I don’t want to wipe out the paranormal fields, I want YOU people (who make the wild claims) to start producing real evidence. I want you to and stop hand waving and screaming. I want you people to succeed, but succeed honestly and truthfully. Not with lies and deception!

Is that wrong? Yes it is, to the people telling the lies, it’s VERY wrong and I should shut up about that.

I don’t want to join this pile-on against Mr. Chip Coffey. While  I don’t think he’s any more “psychic” than I am. I do think he’s a shrewd entertainer, a self promoter and a show person.  He does a kind of magic show where he pretends to “read” the minds of gullible people using age-old “magic” tricks and probably Facebook.

I don’t have as much of a problem with this as you might think. It’s no more deceptive than say a gambling casino, a church or a bingo hall. If you are an adult and you want to believe in tripe, knock yourself out. You have a right to be foolish and gullible. Who am I to say you can’t do that.

Children however hit a particular hot button in me. I don’t like seeing kids getting religion, racism, bigotry or any number of other deranged “traditions” that some adults subscribe to, drummed into their heads. That really irritates me and what I see on Psychic Kids really irritates me in the same way that I find  “Jesus Camp” irritating.

Look at it from this perspective, some people that I have had displeasure of dealing with in the paranormal biz  are NOT normal IMO. Some of them are are mean, spiteful, they make up and falsify nearly every aspect of their lives beginning with statements like  “I have been a psychic since the age of three…”

No you were not! You were learning to WALK and how to use the bathroom at the age of three. Imagine  a heart surgeon telling you that “I have been a doctor since the age of three.” I mean – what the hell did you practice on at  that age? Of course, aptitudes ARE  discovered in people very early.   But doctors also go through almost a decade of med school while a “psychic counselor” just declares their so-called “abilities” and goes into business.

And all these three-year-old psychics  were encouraged to believe they were magic- mind readers since they were children. NONE of these people show even a glimmer of any “abilities” outside of normal intuition or empathy (and most of these people seem to have little or zero empathy too.) Many of them can’t hold jobs, drive a car or even figure out which end of a lawyer to throw at people  (hint, it’s the front end, the rear end is what YOU get to look at.)

From another perspective, let’s say you lived next door to a family of skinhead-neo-Nazis. One day you discover that they are training  kids to hate just like they do. Perhaps showing them old German propaganda films and playacting the burning of Jewish people in the backyard barbecue grill.  I’d feel like calling somebody about that and I think any reasonable person would.  (I really  don’t force religion on my kids. )

The prevailing “Catholic- light” faiths in my neck of the woods do not have clean hands either and I would not dream of installing “good Christian values” into my kids, they can read Leviticus for themselves when they are old enough.

Where am I going with this? Simple, people like Chip Coffee have no business indoctrinating kids into playing hopscotch let alone HIS business of deceiving people. If Chip were more like James Randi, who does exactly the same magic tricks but first tells his audience, “my magic tricks meant to deceive you- as a form of entertainment.” I’d have a modicum of respect for Mr. Coffey. But since he has chosen to lie to people about how he does his magic tricks, I don’t think very much of him.

The fact that he passes on his bullcrap onto little kids fills me with dread. Children do not need an adult to teach them how to lie.

I don’t care about him or the people he bilks so much, they can make their own choices, but children are dependent on us as adults. They depend on us not to lie to them.  They depend on us to teach them to be truthful to  themselves and others.  They depend on us to not  lead them astray.

We are responsible into making our children into productive, happy adults. Not sad, paranoid, delusional folk who think they have special powers as they pay for groceries with  their welfare cards. If you think I’m making this up, look around you. I know several people like that, far better than I’d like to.

For every successful charlatan there are a thousand  failures. Remember and mark that because it is SO true.

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The Odd Emperor