(10-25-2020, 01:59 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: good riddance, not-so-amazing Randi, given too much space here. not surprising to see such a long article on wikipedia about this charlatan.
There's plenty of evidence for psychic abilities and paranormal phenomena, but it is suppressed and not allowed on wikipedia; speaking from personal experience.
There is a huge amount of quackery in the paranormal, including faith-healing, much of it for questionable profit of fake prophets and medical quacks. Much of what passes as astrology is obviously gibberish. Maybe not your style. You know enough to have avoided him; dumb astrologers aren't wise enough to do so. You8 would figure that James Randi would be someone not to tangle with.
He exposed the possibility of fraud in worthless 'spoon-bending', he exposed some fraudulent medical procedures (these people could excise cancers from anyone, whether people had a cancer or did not), and he made a mockery of the faith-healing Peter Popoff by sending some man in drag to be healed of uterine cancer. Sure enough, Popoff healed the person. Men of course do not have uteruses, and Popoff could not even figure out that his supplicant was a man. It turns out that Popoff was getting help from his wife, as he was getting signals from "God", who had a female voice (a rarity in that business) through a small listening device as his wife was sending people up to him to be healed.
The point was that the "Amazing Randi" used not-so-amazing methods to expose some frauds. "God has a female voice and communicates on ----- Mhz". A partially-bent spoon can be shaken steadily until the weight of its bowl concentrates gravitational effects that weaken the bent area even more with every moment of shaking until the bend until the spoon breaks at the bend.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.