Place of Stuff

Who he? You may be asking.  Robert Lancaster is the mastermind behind two great sites:

Stop Sylvia Browne!

“StopKaz” and “Stop Sylvia Browne“.  If you read any sceptical sites, particularly the James Randi Educational Foundation site, you will know about him.  Read on and you will discover why the second reference looks like that.
Continue reading ‘News on Robert Lancaster’ »

Read the following paragraphs and think on them for a few minutes and then rate the statement as it applies to you:

You often try to leave an impression on your surroundings that you are stern and rigid, while you are actually an emotional and vulnerable person. Sometimes you are bright, communicative and social, but you can turn into yourself, and in those times it is hard for people around you to reach your thoughts. You live changes and dynamic, and lack of freedom can make you discontent, even melancholic and depressive. You know that you are a person that has an attitude and you don’t take random opinions without hard evidence. You have an amazing ability to understand people who surround you and who you love. You also have a well-developed sense for rightfulness, and it is hardest for you to accept human greed and a lack of feeling for others.

In your love life you had lesser problems. Still, aside for a few weaknesses, your inner strength provided you with means to successfully diminish them. You are often expressing criticism about yourself, even more than it is necessary. The main cause is that you have a strong need to be accepted and loved, and you turn too strict when it comes to your character. You are aware that you hold significant potential that you still haven’t completely put to work because of your reticence and insecurity. Soon you will learn how to put your abilities to full use.

Continue reading ‘The Forer Effect (aka The Barnum Effect)’ »

For some time I have been toying with a post about the skeptics out there, faithfully blogging and writing and debunking. But I couldn’t think of a post I could bring out of their writing without either massively plagiarising them (a very bad thing, by the way) or just providing a bunch of links in a post.

What to do? I have created a new section on my Links page - Skeptical Links. In there you will find a random sampling of links to pages which aim to debunk such things as psychics, mediums, homeopathic medicine and a glut of other things which end up with you paying money for nothing except some (hopefully) kind words and little else.

I would like to thank the following people for getting and maintaining my interest in these things: The Two Percent Co whose entertaining rants kept me reading, the James Randi Educational Foundation who strive to discount false mediums and psychics and other tricksters and to teach the world to use their brains and finally, Robert Lancaster of StopSylviaBrowne who spends an awful lot of time researching and investigating the claims of Sylvia Browne (if you’re a Montel fan, you’ll know of her) and finding the flaws and the misleading and plain wrong information she disseminates.
Continue reading ‘Skeptical Links’ »

As a long time reader of The TwoPercentCo - a bunch of wacky sceptics - I was naturally drawn to their article entitled Beating a Kiai Master About the Head and Neck With the Foot of Reality. For those of you who are hard of reading, it tells of a martial arts Master who has developed a style in which he can beat an opponentwithout having to physically touch them. Yeah, very cool.

There’s a video where the first part shows the Master throwing his students around and beating them up without touching them and the second part shows the fight between him and a challenger. Now, we have all met at least one self-deluded imbecile - the one who believes that s/he is the best looking one/most intelligent/most successful etc etc. Often they will convince themselves that they are in some way hard and will try to pick fights. Guess which category this guy falls under?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDaCIDvj6I nolink]
Continue reading ‘My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable’ »