Re: testing psi.

From: fudley (fuddley@fastmail.fm)
Date: Tue Jan 03 2006 - 10:41:27 MST


On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 "Thomas Buckner" <tcbevolver@yahoo.com> said:

> Robert Anton Wilson has a side project called
> CSICON, or "Committee for Surrealistic
> Investigation of Claims Of the Normal."
> He's been down on Randi for decades

This is exactly why people like me hold psi researchers in such low
regard, they use ideas of people like Robert Anton Wilson as authorities
to support their claims and as peers for their
“peer reviewed journals”. The man is a fool and I’ll tell you why.

Even by junk science standards the work of Immanuel Velikousky is really
really stupid. He says that in historic times the planet Jupiter spit
out a "comet" that collided with Earth and bounced off and then, through
various gravitational gymnastics, parted the Red Sea and somehow caused
all the miracles in the old testament. This "comet" then went into a
circular orbit around the sun and became the planet Venus! To call this
idea idiotic would be a unjust insult to all the fine self respecting
idiots of the world. The late great Carl Sagan had great fun pocking
holes in this ignorant theory, not that that's what made him great, it
was too easy, like shooting fish in
a barrel.

While poking around in the Science section of my local bookstore some
years ago I ran across a misfiled book that belonged in the "new age"
section next to the UFO and Bigfoot books, it was called "Carl Sagan and
Immanuel Velikousky" by Charles Ginenthal. I didn't read it, but after
thumbing through it for 5 minutes I could see it was a revolting attack
on the life of Sagan and a deification of Velikousky. On the back of the
book was a blurb by Robert Anton Wilson, he said this trash was "an
excellent and erudite destruction of Saganism". If a man like that also
doesn’t like Randi then Randi must be doing something right.

John K Clark

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