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Media Watch for August 2007 (Issue 69)
Psychic Storm: Alerted to an obscure state law banning fortune-telling “for gain or lucre,” Philadelphia’s Department of Licenses and Inspections closed sixteen psychics, astrologers, phrenologists and tarot-card readers who where charging money for their services. Deputy L&I Commissioner, Dominic E. Verdi, said that most psychics were not little old ladies with kerchiefs on their heads but clever con artists capable of stealing large sums of money from grieving or otherwise vulnerable people.
One week later a lawyer for one psychic shop had convinced city officials that a law banning such shops applied only in cases of fraud. The City Solicitor’s office advised the Department of Licenses and Inspections to back off because the state law banning fortune-tellers seemed better suited to fraud prosecution than to regulation. Divisional deputy city solicitor Andrew Ross said that while the law was useful in fraud cases, “We felt it was hard to say what kind of evidence might be needed to prove someone was pretending to tell fortunes.” From: www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_stories , “Who knew? An old law shuts psychics,” Fri April 27
Bob Woodruff Reports Near-Death Experience: ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff was nearly killed on January 29, 2006, while reporting on U.S. and Iraqi security forces when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle near Taji, Iraq. In February 2007, just 13 months after being wounded in Iraq, Woodruff returned to ABC News with his first on-air report, “To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports.” The hour-long, primetime documentary chronicled his traumatic brain injury (TBI), his painstaking recovery, and the plight of thousands of service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with similar injuries. When answering questions about the experience he said, “When it actually exploded, I don’t remember that. But I do remember immediately at that moment that I saw my body floating below me and a kind of whiteness.”
Religion Afraid of Near-Death Experience Research: University of Illinois philosophy professor and author, Dr. Neal Grossman, explained in an interview regarding near-death experience research, consciousness and skepticism, why many religious groups are unfriendly toward near-death experience research. Grossman says that “Both the scientist type and the devote religious person have something in common, they both think belief in a spiritual reality is a matter of faith … To the religious person, the very idea that some religious beliefs might be capable of being investigated by science, to determine whether they are true or false, is threatening … This is the kind of mindset that’s deeply threatened by near-death experience research because the concept of God, and the afterlife and how it works is very, very different from what they want to believe.”
Grossman also explained why our culture has difficulty accepting the near-death experience phenomena: “All near-death experiencers come back claiming to know what the purpose of life is … ‘the Golden Rule’, treat people decently, and grow in our ability to give and receive love. There’s something in our culture that’s very antithetical to that message. We judge our sense of self worth not by how loving we are, but by how much money we make, how much prestige we have, and how much power and influence we have. This is part of the resistance to near-death experience data … they don’t like the message of universal love, so they kill the messenger.” The interview is available for immediate free download at: www.skeptiko.com/index.php?id=20 .
Veteran’s Near-Death Experiences (NDE): An article in Vital Signs, the Newspaper for The International Association for Near-Death Studies, discussed a project being readied by Diane Corcoran, a retired colonel in the Army Nurse Corps who is concerned about soldiers who have NDE’s in Iraq. Corcoran says that “… barriers exist in the military setting because the NDE and its consequences run counter to military culture … When providers do not know about NDEs, they may think you’ve got a mental illness and treat it with medication or other inappropriate intervention.” She relates the experience of one soldier who told a nurse about his experience and wound up sedated for three days and then sent to see a psychiatrist. She goes on to say that talking to a commander about an NDE may be the end of a serviceman’s career. Relying on her service history and extensive clinical and administrative experience to open doors at military and veterans’ hospitals, Corcoran intends to go to the major centers that have educational programs and provide training materials on NDEs. To donate or for more information contact dianec@iands.org. From: Vital Signs, “Combat NDE Project Readied for Launch as Iraq/Afghanistan Casualties Mount,” V26, N1, 2007
Treating the Dead: What doctors know about death is changing. General knowledge about heart attacks is that if a patient can’t be revived within four or five minutes they will suffer irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This idea has gone unquestioned until recently when researchers at the University of Pennsylvania looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope and found no cell damage.
But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? The answer is that we die when the oxygen supply is resumed. Dr. Lance Becker says that it was that “astounding” discovery that led him to his post as the director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine’s newest frontiers: treating the dead.
Researchers are looking at better ways to reintroduce oxygen to the body which includes keeping the heart in a state of suspended animation. A study in which thirty-four patients where placed on a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain until the heart could be safely restarted resulted in eighty percent of them being discharged from the hospital alive. From: Newsweek Health, “To Treat the Dead,” www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186
Reaction to Closing of the PER Lab: We wrote about the closing of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR)* Laboratory which studied low-level psychokinetic effects in the May issue of this column. In that item, we quoted Robert Jahn, the founder of PEAR Lab, as saying, “We’ve done what we wanted to do, and there is no reason to stay and generate more data. If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”
Closure of the PEAR lab by no means marks the end of unusual human potential research, and it is important to note that experimental results reported by the lab have been replicated in other labs—both academic and privately funded. Nevertheless, the response by the scientific community provides an important lesson in what can only be described as intellectual prejudice.
The prestigious science magazine, Nature included an article in the February 2007 issue titled, The lab that asked the wrong questions, by Lucy Odling-Smee. According to the author, “Many scientists think the lab’s work was pointless at best. But the closure highlights a long-running question: how permissive should science be of research that doesn’t fit a standard theoretical framework, if the methods used are scientific?” The article was largely unfriendly toward the lab, and the underlying assumption of scientists interviewed by the author was clearly that, “the phenomena are impossible, therefore cannot exist.”
In his February 10 blog at http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html , IONS Scientist, Dean Radin discounted the article with, “What the article does not ask is whether the PEAR Lab’s results have been independently confirmed by other scientists. The answer is clearly yes, as anyone can discover with a bit of homework, or by reading Entangled Minds or The Conscious Universe. This makes the Princeton lab’s interests not so anomalous after all, and their empirical results not anomalous at all.”
Having been a scientist with PEAR, Radin also noted that, “Scientists who attempt to study controversial topics will find that they do not get tenure, or if they already have tenure they will not get promotions, and if that fails the administrator will attempt to avoid embarrassment and try (usually unsuccessfully) to fire the violator. In this sense the PEAR Lab showed incredible fortitude by simply surviving within an environment that tried every trick in the book to make the lab disappear. This emotional side of supposedly rational academia is a hidden and shameful secret, not often seen by those outside the ivory towers.”
Prejudice comes in all forms. For instance, in scientism, it is claimed that only science can provide truth about the world and reality. Only the empirical, or testable, is allowed. Scientism sees it necessary to eliminate most, if not all, metaphysical, philosophical and religious claims, because the truths they proclaim cannot be studied with the scientific method. *See: “Princeton’s Pear Laboratory To Close,” www.princeton.edu/~pear/press_release_closing.html February 10, 2007
Smog Eating Cement: It’s not paranormal but something that sounds like Science Fiction is true and may be a start in saving the environment. An Italian cement company has developed cement that can reduce pollutants. The cement is being used on the facades of buildings and in streets in Italy and tests have shown pollution can be reduced by over sixty percent. Several companies are now working on other smog eating products like paint and plaster. From: Business Week, “A Concrete Step Toward Cleaner Air,” www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2006/
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