{"id":1710,"date":"2011-03-26T11:52:36","date_gmt":"2011-03-26T15:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oddempire.org\/weblog\/?p=1710"},"modified":"2017-12-01T02:34:55","modified_gmt":"2017-12-01T06:34:55","slug":"bless-the-beasts-and-the-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/2011\/03\/26\/bless-the-beasts-and-the-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Bless the Beasts, and the Children…"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a bit of talk lately about the Psychic Kids program on A&E \u00a0(or was<\/span> on A&E, it was canceled I \u00a0hope. )<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t actually watched an episode of Psychic Kids, I\u2019ve 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 \u201cpsychic-guy and pretend to scare each other with lousy video.<\/p>\n

I mostly ignore this junk. Really it\u2019s 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\u00a0 (I honestly don\u2019t know.)\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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But this Psychic Kids thing is another kettle of fish altogether, and a pretty stinky one.\u00a0 Psychic Kids explores kids who think they have super powers being validated by \u201cfamous\u201d cold readers and illusionists like Chip Coffey.<\/a><\/p>\n

James Randie and a number of other people call this child abuse. They maintain that it\u2019s wrong to encourage vulnerable kids to believe in a bunch of unsubstantiated nonsense. Psychics and paranormalists claim that these are crystal children. \u00a0A possible next step in our evolution.<\/p>\n

Now, I try to maintain an open mind about \u00a0this. A lot of people seem to think that I\u2019m just a \u2018psycho skeptic\u201d and I\u2019m 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\u2019s just stupid, fearful, barking moonbat talk. I don\u2019t 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\u00a0succeed\u00a0honestly and truthfully. Not with lies and deception!<\/p>\n

Is that wrong? Yes it is, to the people telling the lies, it’s VERY wrong and I should shut up\u00a0about\u00a0that.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to join this pile-on against Mr. Chip Coffey. While \u00a0I don\u2019t think he\u2019s any more \u201cpsychic\u201d than I am. I do think he\u2019s a shrewd entertainer, a self promoter and a show person. \u00a0He does a kind of magic show where he pretends to \u201cread\u201d the minds of gullible people using age-old “magic” tricks and probably Facebook.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have as much of a problem with this as you might think. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Children however hit a particular hot button in me. I don\u2019t like seeing kids getting religion, racism, bigotry or any number of other deranged \u201ctraditions\u201d that some adults subscribe to, drummed into their heads. That really irritates me and what I see on\u00a0Psychic\u00a0Kids really irritates me in the same way that I find \u00a0“Jesus Camp” <\/a> irritating.<\/p>\n

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Look at it from this perspective, some people that I have had displeasure of dealing with in the paranormal biz \u00a0are 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 \u00a0\u201cI have been a psychic since the age of three\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

No you were not! You were learning to WALK and how to use the bathroom at the age of three.\u00a0Imagine\u00a0 a heart surgeon telling you that “I have been a doctor since the age of three<\/em>.” I mean – what the hell did you practice on at \u00a0that age? Of course, aptitudes ARE \u00a0discovered in people very early. \u00a0 But doctors also go through almost a decade of med school while a “psychic\u00a0counselor” just declares their so-called “abilities” and goes\u00a0into\u00a0business.<\/p>\n

And all\u00a0these\u00a0three-year-old psychics \u00a0were encouraged to believe they were magic- mind readers since they were children. NONE of these people show even a glimmer of any \u201cabilities\u201d 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\u00a0lawyer\u00a0to throw at\u00a0people \u00a0(hint, it’s the front\u00a0end<\/span>, the rear end is what YOU get to look at.)<\/p>\n

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From another perspective, let\u2019s say you lived next door to a family of skinhead-neo-Nazis. One day you discover that they are training \u00a0kids 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.\u00a0 I\u2019d feel like calling somebody about that and I think any reasonable person would. \u00a0(I really \u00a0don\u2019t force religion on my kids. )<\/p>\n

The prevailing \u201cCatholic- light\u201d faiths in my neck of the woods do not have clean hands either and I would not dream of installing “good\u00a0Christian\u00a0values” into my kids, they can read\u00a0Leviticus <\/a> for themselves when they are old\u00a0enough.<\/p>\n

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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 <\/em>his audience, \u201cmy magic tricks meant to deceive you- as a form of entertainment<\/em>.\u201d I\u2019d 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\u2019t think very much of him.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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. \u00a0They depend on us to teach them to be\u00a0truthful\u00a0to \u00a0themselves and others. \u00a0They depend on us to not \u00a0lead them astray.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0their welfare cards. If you think I\u2019m making this up, look around you. I know several people like that, far better than I’d like to.<\/p>\n

For every successful charlatan there are a thousand \u00a0failures. Remember and mark that\u00a0because\u00a0it is SO true.<\/p>\n

Share and enjoy Funseekers!<\/p>\n

The Odd Emperor<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been a bit of talk lately about the Psychic Kids program on A&E \u00a0(or was on A&E, it was canceled I \u00a0hope. ) I haven\u2019t actually watched an episode of Psychic Kids, I\u2019ve certainly read a lot about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","WB4WB4WP_MODE":"","WB4WP_PAGE_SCRIPTS":"","WB4WP_PAGE_STYLES":"","WB4WP_PAGE_FONTS":"","WB4WP_PAGE_HEADER":"","WB4WP_PAGE_FOOTER":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1710"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3350,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions\/3350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}