Peterson, Priestcraft, Profits and the Paranormal

[Rivendale]

Dowsing videos? How to curate your own ideomotor effect to produce what appears to be tangible evidence it actually works! I actually reproduced something similiar to this. A man who worked for the city routinely dowsed for water lines entering properties using L shaped coat hangers. I asked him to describe how he does it. He said he first looks for an outside spigot and that along with his memory of where the waterline he could get close. And sure enough if I had two containers one with water and one without the rods would point to the one with water....but it only worked if I knew which one had the water....damn...so close.

[drumdude]

Well known professional dowsers provide professional never before revealed to the general public.

LOL folks you can’t make this stuff up. This is straight out of a 1980s late night infomercial.

[Tom]

One wonders if the Afore's interest in dowsing was sparked by this dvd set:

Author and world renowned Remote Viewing training instructor, Major Paul Smith, is proud to announce the NEW Learn Dowsing DVD Training set. As a military trained expert during the top secret dowsing and Remote Viewing programs, Major Smith has been featured in countless news publications, TV programs and interviews.

Never before has an expert of this caliber disclosed these scientific dowsing secrets to the public in an extensive and comprehensive dual DVD home instructional set!

Major Paul H. Smith's Learn Dowsing DVD set provides the most professional, effective, comprehensive and up-to-date scientific research and instruction in the world! This program has been designed to provide specific lesson plans and blind practice targets utilizing modern training methodologies for optimal home training. The Learn Dowsing DVD set was built entirely from the ground up to offer a user friendly experience that provides easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions and interactive lessons as you proceed through each training segment. After each lesson, you will execute a blind practice target that incorporates what you have just learned; conducting each dowsing practice session right along with a filmed class of students! After each session has ended, detailed feedback is immediately provided and the hidden dowsing target is revealed. This also provides you with the opportunity to compare your session results with the results of the classroom students! The feedback segments will show you how accurately you hit the targets and where your pitfalls may have been so that you quickly and continually become more accurate! Each lesson segment expands upon the previous lessons to truly provide the most complete dowsing training program in the world!

Also included is an exclusive in-depth documentary that brushes away the mysteries and misconceptions surrounding dowsing and explores new groundbreaking research and theories in Quantum Physics to unlock the mysteries behind this incredible skill and why it works!

Well known professional dowsers provide professional never before revealed to the general public. This is a behind-the-scenes look into dowsing that you do not want to miss!
https://www.remoteviewingmatrix.com/learn-dowsing

A few lines earlier in the promo:

Forget everything you thought you knew about dowsing and the misconceptions surrounding this ancient secret.

I am reminded of a Mitch Hedberg joke: Forget everything you know about slipcovers

[Physics Guy]

Also included is an exclusive in-depth documentary that brushes away the mysteries and misconceptions surrounding dowsing and explores new groundbreaking research and theories in Quantum Physics to unlock the mysteries behind this incredible skill and why it works!

This part might be a hoot, but it’s probably just the same nonsense that woo merchants usually say about “Quantum Physics”. That stuff is too familiar to be funny any more.

What’s still funny is how many people seem to imagine that quantum physics is as unfamiliar to most scientists as it is to them. Thinking that scientists only dismiss woo because we haven’t heard the latest Quantum Physics is like being sure that Germans don’t understand Goethe because the guy wrote in German.

[drumdude]

I think we owe it to Paul and Dan to provide a simple Remote Viewing target for them to display their skills on. Hell I’d be happy to have Paul let anyone who has ever taken his course give it a try too.

Perhaps someone can place a random playing card in a particular location such that it can be both hidden but also verified when the target is “found” by remote viewing.

Surely this should be a very easy target, since Paul claims Remote Viewing is used for much more complex targets like military action and finding missing people.

How about it Dan and Paul? Do you have the cajones to put your supposed skills to the test?

[I Have Questions]

Speaking of falsifiability, this quote offered by Scratch is hilarious:

I’m quite interested in the subject, though not deeply committed to the truth of such psi capability. If remote viewing proves to be illusory, nothing in my worldview is threatened. On the other hand, if there is something real in it, that would seem to suggest that strict naturalistic materialism is unlikely to be true.

Isn't this typical of the Afore? Popper said for science to advance it must "stick its neck out" and take risks. Notice how the Afore so often goes full ostrich. Does he carry a portable box of sand with him such that he's never caught unable to bury his head?

He famously frames his positions exactly in this way, such that he's never at risk of being wrong about anything. He's spent his "career" as such making Mopologetics unfalsifiable. Well, more than that, his most serious care is to make sure that he himself is never at risk of being wrong about something.

I also agree that he doesn't show true open mindedness about anything, only opportunistically to advance his own prejudices or beliefs. Along with a an occultist he should invite a Calvinist to share their non-naturalist views.

I think you’ve hit the bullseye on the Afore’s ultimate driving force. It is not to prove the Church true. That’s a secondary byproduct. It’s to prove to everyone that he, the Afore, is right and not wrong. No matter the subject, he cannot tolerate the notion of being wrong. It was, fundamentally, why he was ousted from the Maxwell Institute, and trying to prove that the MI was wrong about that has become the his whole purpose. It’s what he spends his donors money on trying to prove. Interpreter is about sticking it to the Maxwell and to the Church. Because he was right and they were wrong to jettison him.

I think we owe it to Paul and Dan to provide a simple Remote Viewing target for them to display their skills on. Hell I’d be happy to have Paul let anyone who has ever taken his course give it a try too.

Perhaps someone can place a random playing card in a particular location such that it can be both hidden but also verified when the target is “found” by remote viewing.

Surely this should be a very easy target, since Paul claims Remote Viewing is used for much more complex targets like military action and finding missing people.

How about it Dan and Paul? Do you have the cajones to put your supposed skills to the test?

Here (from the Proper Citations Poison Everything file) is how Wikipedia describes it:

A remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person, or location hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.

This, if it were real, would be an incredible advantage for the world’s military. For market traders. For industrialists and CEO’s. But none of them use such a thing, or a specialist trained in the process. Why not? Because Smith is just the Fortune Teller at the Carnival.

Has the Afore signed up and paid for a course - yes or no? And will he declare it one way or the other? So far he is keeping that information from his readers during his ongoing sales pitch on behalf of Smith’s con job business.

I have a much simpler and easier way for Smith to enhance his credibility. On his website Smith makes the following claim:

What is Remote Viewing?

Remote viewing is the perfect fusion of practical application and transcendent consciousness. It is a form of “psychic” functioning, a skill based on ESP (“extrasensory perception”). Originally developed by the US military during the Cold War in what became known as the Star Gate Program, it was first used to hunt out foreign threats that were inaccessible in any other way. But it proved to be so much more than simply a tool for espionage, having many other practical uses, and much profounder implications.

It should be very easy for Smith to provide his best declassified example of Remote Viewing identifying a specific foreign threat that people were unaware of and could not have found out about any other way. Just the best example is needed. I predict Smith won’t provide that.

Smith goes on to list some practical uses.

Some learn remote viewing as an investment tool, or for altruistic purposes, such as finding missing people or helping police.

Can Smith point us in the direction of someone on Wall Street gaining an advantage by using Remote Viewing? I’m guessing not. What about a missing person who’s finding was credited to remote viewing by someone other than the remote viewer themselves? I’m also guessing not.

When you have your first remote viewing success, you will instantly confirm for yourself the truth that we humans are much more than just our physical bodies.

Has the Afore paid for courses and had his first remote viewing success yet or not? He claims to be interested, but I’m guessing he’s not $12,000 interested. He will want a freebie in return for pushing this nonsense down the throats of his unsuspecting reader(s). Imagine John Patrick Lambert (his main commenter) throwing $12,000 at this because his hero, the Afore, promoted it.

And finally…why hasn’t Smith located Bigfoot yet?

I think we owe it to Paul and Dan to provide a simple Remote Viewing target for them to display their skills on. Hell I’d be happy to have Paul let anyone who has ever taken his course give it a try too.

Perhaps someone can place a random playing card in a particular location such that it can be both hidden but also verified when the target is “found” by remote viewing. Surely this should be a very easy target, since Paul claims Remote Viewing is used for much more complex targets like military action and finding missing people.

How about it Dan and Paul? Do you have the cajones to put your supposed skills to the test?

A gift-wrapped opportunity for Smith to demonstrate the credibility of his remote viewing abilities has presented itself.

Steven Koecher, a 30-year-old member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, parked his car in a Nevada retirement community two hours away from his Utah home in December 2009. He hasn't been seen by his family since.

With no evidence on why he left or where he was going, the devout Mormon's disappearance has been shrouded in mystery, leaving his family devastated and questioning how well they knew him.

Was Steven running from something? Where was he going? Is he still alive?

Smith, on his website has asserted that his remote viewing skills can help locate missing persons “Some learn remote viewing as an investment tool, or for altruistic purposes, such as finding missing people or helping police.”

So come on Smith, let’s see you use your remote viewing abilities for altruistic purposes and find Steven Koecher and demonstrate to all the doubters and potential customers that it works. Or do you lack the courage of your convictions?