35 Replies to “The Amazing Randi”

  1. Hush your mouth…
    They, like politicians are NEVER wrong.
    You have to prove it as the media to too complacent with being bought off.

    Schools too bought off to capital investments.

    Poor kids are treated as suckers with poor to inaccurate education.

  2. The entire business about consensus and the way the climate change farce has been used to smear the fair face of science has sickened me from day one and continues to do so. Science has been infested by subsidy and grant whores like ticks killing a horse. Real science left the state a long time ago.

    1. I saw that more than 20 years ago while I was still a grad student. The only things that were considered worth investigating were those that someone else footed the bill for. Woe betide the scholar who looks at what interests him or her and uses his or her own money.

  3. Climate change has been going on since the Earth acquired an atmosphere.
    Exploiting climate change for power and monetary gain – aided and abetted by the gullible – has been going on since certain people desired such gains.

    1. The first great mass extinction, which killed 90% of all life on Earth including single cellular life, was the result of the atmosphere becoming polluted with a deadly, highly corrosive gas. You call it “oxygen.”

      1. “Deadly corrosive gas” – Produced in a greenhouse from carbon dioxide with the help of water, sunshine and photosynthesis.

  4. I’ll give James Randi props for righting himself of this.

    I used to be a regular lurker on the JREF site. I remember how, shortly after An Inconvenient Truth was released, Randi did a post where he said that he had marveled at the great presentation made by Gore (the phrase, “a true statesman” sticks out in my memory) and how Gore had made an irrefutable case for global warming being an emergency that we all have to come together to fight.

    I, presumably along with many others, sent him an email voicing concern that he might become a shill for the AGW crowd. His reply was, “Thanks. See the next newsletter for my response.”

    The next newsletter was a partial mea culpa – admitting that he had spoken with some science-friends and was taking a step back to review before becoming embroiled in the hype.

    He obviously stuck to his word. So much better than Carl Sagan of 25 years earlier. A great skeptic.

  5. Well that’s sad. Always liked Randi and as far as I know, no one has claimed his $1M prize to anyone who could display psychic or paranormal powers.
    There’s a cool story how Randi teamed up with Johnny Carson to put a shiv into noted key bender, Uri Geller…watching it on YouTube is always good for a laugh, you can almost see the panic in Geller as soon as he sat down.
    Nice to see he was one of the good guys by not buying into the Global Warming B.S.
    “Skepticism is the chastity of intellect”

    1. Agreed. But no one should be surprised that Carson demolished Geller. Carson was a professional stage magician, and he knew what to look for from a potential fraud such as Geller. You can still readily find on Youtube that episode. It’s one of the best.

      1. Indeed. I thought of Carson and Geller when skeptical folks with deep statistical knowledge started looking at climate change studies. Geller had bamboozled “experts” at Stanford Research Institute but even a non-practicing knowledgeable magician was able to see through him.

  6. Science was never about consensus but physical reality.
    Even when the scientists were accepted by the powers that be of the moment, it was still about their individual effort:
    Newton’s work on classical mechanics, Mendel’s work on genetics, Mendeleev’s work on the periodic table, Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism, Einstein’s work on modern physics. Notice there weren’t even such fields per se until their work. And Einstein met with derision by the physics establishment when he first published his theory.
    Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of the last half of the twentieth century, famously said “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” In contrast, warmists “harmonize” the data to fit their theory. They have to cook their data because the data have shown them to be wrong for half a century. (And the slang term “cooking the experiment” is quite apt here.) If only he had lived long enough to repudiate them, as his long time friend and colleague, Professor Freeman Dyson, managed to do. It is well to realize the latter was always addressed as “professor” because he did NOT have a doctorate. Feynman always envied him that distinction.

  7. If you have any friends who took science in Uni, I’ll bet a lot of them have stories like the one my friend told me. No need to go into detail, but very simply his prof deliberately and obviously conducted his experiment so that it would prove his hypothesis. In other words, he lied.

    Folks like that don’t make the news like e.g. the French scientist who “proved” homeopathy works by lying and getting his grad students to lie, but I’d bet it’s a hell of a lot more common than CO2 in the atmosphere. Grants, tenure, and ego are all at stake. The media, NGOs, and politicians all just saw the potential hog trough and the rest is history.

    2. I had such an experience in Science in my second year in Physical Chemistry. No matter what I did, I could not get a machine to produce the correct result. I went to the library, read up on the machine, did some tests with controls and determined the machine had not been calibrated properly. I wrote up my results, put in a correction factor and submitted my lab. I got a “D”. I went to the professor and she said “You didn’t get the right answer.” I replied it was impossible to get the right answer because the machine was not calibrated. She replied “All the other students got the right answer. However I will give you an opportunity to fix this. You can resubmit with the right answer and I’ll give you a higher grade.” Totally bewildered I approached my lab partner who laughed at my naivete and he handed me a sheet with the right answers. I asked him where he got those from given the machine was broken and he said that machine hadn’t worked in years and students just keep handing down the correct answers to the younger students. I reluctantly rewrote my experiment with the results, agonized for a time, and then resubmitted. I told the professor this was not my data. I got the data from my lab partner. The machine was faulty and needed to be recalibrated. She looked at me and took the paper with a smug little smile. I later got an “A” back. I learned a very important lesson that day and it wasn’t a pleasant one.

      1. I had a similar experience, but I was able to support my argument.

        In a lab session for an electronic devices course I took for my second master’s degree, we built a simple single transistor amplifier. As it turned out, the gain was 50% higher than what was calculated. From what I was able to determine, the circuit was put together properly, so there had to be a different explanation.

        I noted the tolerances of the different components and made another set of calculations and included the values of those parts plus or minus the possible deviations. It turned out that the results indicated that the actual gain could be obtained if one accounted for those tolerances, though I hadn’t expected them to have such an effect.

        The teaching assistant who graded my report accepted that explanation.

        However, there were lab sessions throughout the years where the TA gave dodgy advice (though I might have misunderstood what I was told) and things didn’t go as well for me.

          1. The circuit was for a simple amplifier (common emitter, I think) that students could put together in the allotted lab time. Getting it to work and checking the gain were the objectives.

    3. I still like the one about the grad student that came into class distraught, because he had dropped a bottle and now the whole ocean was homeopathic hot sauce.

  8. I have alienated just about everyone in my life, there are a couple of exceptions, regarding the fraud that is the whu who flu. the lie will be exposed at some point in time, I no longer give a fuck, get it and die, so I can get on with my life along with at least 7 billion 400 million other people.

      1. Something tells me that her “pre-existing condition” is a severe case of phonybaloneyitis. Those comments will be used to justify even harsher government policies.

  9. CCP19 risk in Alberta
    22000 confirmed cs. 288 deaths 1.3%
    If you consider unreported cases, some say it’s double. Then consider 80% of deaths are seniors with health conditions
    44000. – 58 deaths less then . 1%
    With children, even lower. We are bankrupting businesses and the country for a ridiculously low risk.

    1. “We are bankrupting businesses and the country for a ridiculously low risk.”

      Perhaps what we are ACTUALLY witnessing is EXACTLY what was desired.

      As H. L. Mencken pithily put it:

      “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

      FIRST they develop the solution. This is always potentially a “final” one, but they are “flexible”; albeit in a “Be reasonable, see it my way, or else”, sort of “flexible”.

      THEN they search for a suitable problem for which the “solution” can be offered / promoted.

      If none of the carefully massaged “problems” available “off the shelf” don’t make the grade, then extra effort will be applied to fabricating one.

      WHY? The usual; money and POWER.

      Hence the ages-old cynical line: “Solutions in search of Problems”.

  11. Carson a stage magician , didnt know that although thinking about it his standup deliver was similar , great timing

  12. Randi was an enormous voice for skeptics, he used his talent and stage presence to educate so many. His friends (student?) Penn and Teller still carry his and voice (or lack) from their stage. When restrictions end, their stage show in Vegas is a hoot and you can still see old episodes of bullshit on YouTube.

    I read Flim Flam at about the same time as Sagan’s Candle in the Darkness, just as my extended family fell under the spell (scams) of a ‘holistic healer.’ The perspective from these books was massively helpful.

    Randi’s story is very interesting. He was born in Canada but left and ultimately immigrated to the US. His biography is on Netflix if you haven’t #cuties cancelled it.

  13. “Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong. Failing in that, they arrive at a statement that appears — based on all available data — to describe a limited aspect about how the world appears to work. And not all scientists are willing to follow this path. My most excellent friend Martin Gardner once asked a parapsychologist just what sort of evidence would convince him he had erred in coming to a certain conclusion. The parascientist replied that he could not imagine any such situation, thus — in my opinion — removing him from the ranks of the scientific discipline rather decidedly.

    History supplies us with many examples where scientists were just plain wrong about certain matters, but ultimately discovered the truth through continued research. Science recovers from such situations quite well, though sometimes with minor wounds.” – James Randi
    ————————————————————————————
    L- Science, the scientific method is a process for testing and weighing evidence to determine if or to what degree that evidence supports the hypothesis in question. If there is no possibility of any evidence being able to count against the hypothesis or it’s completeness. The hypothesis posited does not meet the criterion of being a scientific question.

    It’s called the Falsification Principle elucidated by Philosopher of Science, Karl Popper

    When the Climate Crisis, or any variation of the Mother Nature pagan cult. It reversion to pre-scientific thinking is directly proportional to it’s proponents objections, the degree of zealotry against testing their claims against the evidence or data, present or future.

    The scientific method is the Crucifix that gets them hissing and collapsing in apoplexy. Equally so, when the supposed “science” of Cult. Marxism(identity politics) is subject to critical analysis.
    Hence, why the two groups inter-mingle and co-operate as Axis Powers.

    The current Panic-demic is a paradigm example of cancel culture, of failing to follow the data and science as it emerges. Huddling in fear, is their default posture.

    I opine that the Panic-demic sufferers also exhibit high scores on the neurotic scale of The Big Five Personality Traits. Now there is a hypothesis worth testing 🙂

    That trait is valuable but only when mediated or measured against reality by those not dominated by it. The interplay among The Big Five personality traits is what allow humans to survive and thrive… to adapt to reality.

  14. Thanks for all the comments on “getting the right answer ” when doing lab work. One of my classmates had trouble getting the right answer from an experiment but he knew what the right answer was. In his lab report, unable to show effective work, he wrote : “Using Cook’s Variable Constant, the answer is: tada! ” . The professor was amused but his mark reflected reality .

  15. I think the most important question right now is whether or not the whole COVID-19 response is really a climate emergency response at stealth levels, and if so who was in on the planning of this subterfuge, and who merely went along because they figured it out for themselves and it suited their politics.

    My contention is that COVID-19 was designed to look like something it actually isn’t, with enhancers designed to trigger off co-morbidities and create a death count, but also just the normal high spread rates of the common cold. A coronavirus is nothing new, it’s this particular one causing the pandemic.

    One could ask, who had the money and clout to organize this with the help of useful friends in Wuhan, China?

    The answer is almost self-evident, people with five letters in their surnames come to mind.

    So the prognosis is this — COVID-19 may or may not fade out of the picture but if and when it does, the political establishment will be ready to drop the bombshell on the sheeple, “the economic lockdown is now necessary for a response to the climate emergency, we were lucky COVID-19 came along and gave us a head start, look at the partial results already, we are winning the fight against climate change.”

    If this sounds farfetched to you, just google the words COVID-19 and climate change, and rather than finding analysis of how the responses are similar, you’ll find articles in progressive publications about how it would be a good thing to apply “lessons learned” from COVID-19 to the so-called climate emergency.

    This thought process may be alien to the conservative blogosphere but it’s quite normal thinking among the progressives in government and academia. It goes without saying that it is extremely dangerous.

    So the end result will be a sort of Green Party victory at the polls under any political leadership, and policies that voters would have rejected outright if given them to sort out in advance. This is basically a hijacking of the political process by elites with a one-track agenda based on irrational fears and economic doomsday philosophies that they can easily “weather” with their bankrolls. The rest of us? Well they do say the population of the earth is far too high.

    1. “….you’ll find articles in progressive publications about how it would be a good thing to apply “lessons learned” from COVID-19 to the so-called climate emergency”
      The 2 issues are the same in that they both hinge on the premise that we have to act because of all the things that COULD happen if we don’t act quickly.
      Bob MacDonald the host of CBC radio’s Quirks and Quarks guest today was Friederike Otto the author of the new book: Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change.
      The New Science is Attribution Science where computer models calculate how much climate change or how much extreme weather events have been influenced by CO2. The real goal of such an endeavor was revealed at the end of the interview. Those working on this farce are quantifying the amount of CO2 each energy company is responsible for emitting into the atmosphere. The end game is finding a court to accept this SCIENCE and bring suit against each energy company for the damage their respective emissions have caused to the environment. To date the cases brought forward against the energy companies have yielded nothing but if something like this could take root it would be a game changer.

    2. “… The answer is almost self-evident, people with five letters in their surnames come to mind. …”

      Smith and Jones?

  17. Sorry to hear this. The video where he debunks homeopathic medicine by swallowing a whole bottle of “sleeping pills” is terrific. RIP.

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