The US rulers have always been a delusional lot. This is not new, it’s just becoming more obvious as the Empire reaches its end.
Anyway here’s James Randi easily proving Uri Geller to be a fraud
The ruling class and their cronies are not rational, they’re irrational capitalists that see the world in a similar way to how British monarchs in the dark ages did. That makes them even more dangerous to me, because they are in charge of power that they don’t understand.
A similar event involved Senator Claiborne Pell, a confirmed believer in psychic phenomena. When Randi personally demonstrated to Pell that he could reveal—by simple trickery—a concealed drawing that had been secretly made by the senator, Pell refused to believe that it was a trick, saying: “I think Randi may be a psychic and doesn’t realize it.” Randi consistently denied having any paranormal powers or abilities.
This is the Pell Grant guy. He served 6 terms in the senate. This is the US government sending it’s best.
I’ve changed my mind this dude rocks
Due to his fluency in Italian, Pell was assigned as a civil affairs officer in Sicily, where he became ill from drinking unpasteurized milk.
When Briggs called him a “creampuff” during their 1966 campaign, Pell turned that to his advantage and mocked Briggs by obtaining an endorsement from a local baker’s union.
at the conclusion of a meeting with Fidel Castro, Pell took Castro’s cigar because he thought it was a gift for him.
Despite being a terrible person, Pell manages to slide his way into the “dudes rock” category of men
One of the most pervasive aspects of American propaganda in media is how CIA and other government ghouls are always depicted as hyper-competent and logical. But even a casual reading of history reveals their real character as frat boys who think they’re the hottest shit ever.
I remember there was a documentary about someone who gamed a McDonalds competition a while back and it included a lot of interviews with an FBI agent that was involved solving the case.
Meatheaded fratbro is a very accurate description for how those dude talked. I was blown away by how unprofessional and immature he seemed.
I think there’s probably a lot of NatSec ghouls who love these psychics because it lets them do parallel construction. Like how Jimmy Carter said they once lost a plane over a jungle, contacted a psychic, and immediately found it. What actually happened? (this is just conjecture) US or allied anti-air brought down their own guy, maybe or maybe not on purpose, and they had to filter it through some other source of intel to obscure how they actually obtained that intel. Considering how much they want to hide their capabilities, being able to say they consult psychics just gives them cover for obtaining information in contentious ways.
While the espionage apparatus in the US is woefully incompetent in a lot of areas, it wouldn’t surprise me if they used whacky shit to cover up how they actually obtained intel, especially if it was in an unethical or illegal way. Some examples:
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The US used vaccination programs in Pakistan to find Osama bin Laden by collecting needles and doing DNA analysis to uncover his associates and relatives believed to be in the area. The CIA later tried to do something similar in Venezuela as part of their coup attempt a few years back, but the Osama bin Laden stuff had come to light so Venezuela told the US to fuck off.
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Soviet mole Robert Hanssen was given a bullshit appointment when the FBI began to suspect he was the source of a leak. The FBI managed to isolate him from important data while collecting evidence against him without him knowing until it was too late. So if the CIA were creating similar bullshit jobs for other nitwits, they would also need to create more bullshit jobs to maintain the ruse. After assigning some incompetent buffoon or a potential mole to a position in the “psychic division” to get them out of the way, you’d want legitimate people in place to avoid suspicion.
This could also be used for ideological reasons, like removing anyone with the potential to “go native” by setting them up to fail. Take potential communist sympathizers who realized “Hey wait maybe the Soviets have a point…” and make them want to quit before they flip sides.
Of course, maybe the CIA really is this unserious and the only thing they were good at during the Cold War was creating America’s future enemies.
The CIA’s only real strength in practice was having a functionally unlimited budget to spend on engineering, bribes, and gunrunning. They could spend piles of money on fancy listening equipment or projects to physically breach and wiretap secure comm lines, they could practically just stand waving a stack of cash and promising defectors a comfy life as special good boys in the imperial core and some disaffected official from the Soviet bloc was bound to take them up on it and grift all they could off it (although this was of limited value: defectors could only leak information they already knew, which the CIA likely also already knew from shit like listening in on people talking about it, and then stopped being an asset; that’s before you get to the grifters who just kept making up bullshit and trying to get more money and attention for it, the kind of people who’d now just be given a cushy job by fascist oligarchs to do talk show rounds), and on their real specialty: just grabbing the worst person they could see at any given moment and handing him a bunch of guns and money and telling him the US has his back as long as he does reactionary terror against people the US doesn’t like.
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I also think that people involved in projects for 3 letter agencies will say anything to justify their funding.
A bunch of cops also fell for a scam ”explosive detector” in the 90s and later a similar device was bought by the US-installed government in Iraq.
POW-MIA was essentially a scam too, one that the US government still believes in.
Useless trivia: Uri Geller inspired the design of the psychic type pokemon Kadabra, which is known as Yungerer in Japanese, wields spoons and has a Zener card symbol on its forehead.
Yeah he sued Gamefreak or Nintendo or something and as a result Kadabra didn’t appear on a trading card for 20 years.
Gamefreak didn’t want to mess with the CIA
Regime change in Japan over a children’s card game sounds so fucking funny though just imagine what we could cook with.
That would’ve made for an incredible arc in the Yu-Gi-Oh anime. The feds are trying to regime change Japan, the antagonists are CIA (but since it’s Yu-Gi-Oh, there’s of course an ulterior motive, they’re trying to get the Millennium Items or something).
I remember when Geller dropped the lawsuit and posted on Twitter like he was a hero to all Pokémon players.
Before this post, I’ve only known Uri Geller as a TV personality doing hokey psychic tricks that would be debunked by the same tv channel in a different programme about a week after it aired and you mean to tell me the CIA thought this guy was an actual psychic?
The feds have done experiments with psychics for decades and probably still have funding into it. The CIA, FBI, and various branches of the military have all had paranormal research wings at some point or another.
My favorite is General Albert Stubblebine, who was head of Army intelligence from 1981 to 1984. He was convinced he could selectively breed psychic soldiers and it was the main thing he wanted the army doing. He himself claimed he had various ESP powers, like that he could walk through walls, read minds, levitate, or that he could control the weather. The funniest thing was one time he was at some formal gala with some other high ranking Army guys. Stubblebine tried bending spoons and doing othet tricks and it completely freaked out the WASPs who were already freaked out since it was the Satanic panic. So Stubblebine got accused of doing witchcraft by other generals and was made to retire early because of it.
Also the US army was buying and using dowsing rods all the way up until at least 2006 or so.
He was convinced he could selectively breed psychic soldiers and it was the main thing he wanted the army doing.
“I have psychic powers. I need you to get me some women so I can, uh… genetically breed ESP. ESP genes work better with blonde or redhead women.”
how much does being an intelligence person pay? I’m starting to feel this is the closest I could ever possibly get to a mafia-no-show-job at this point
If you’re posting here on hexbear I’m not sure you could get security clearance since your account here would probably show up on a background check
Between this story and the one about Yuri Totrov I’m, at this point, fairly convinced I’d just bamboozle my way in. All I do here is fed-infiltrate leftist spaces to make them ride soycycles or whatever
Bro went XCOM mode
He was convinced he could selectively breed psychic soldiers and it was the main thing he wanted the army doing
This is literally F.E.A.R.'s plot lmao
maybe today’s army focuses on the tactical importance of drones or mechanized infantry or whatever blah blah
but they don’t understand the utility of sick-nasty karate kicks in slow motion while shooting a rail gun at a mech suit
The CIA was in a “get coked up and throw anything at the wall to see what sticks” phase then. Turned out a lot of it stuck to the wall.
Now it’s been taken over by Ivy League nerds who probably eat kale for lunch instead of 12 Whisky Sours laced with DMT.
“get coked up and throw anything at the wall to see what sticks” phase
despite their pretensions, irrationalism is the primary and enduring mode of the bourgeois mind
I know I keep asking this question but its more of a wtf to burgerland.
How TF is burgerland a superpower? Even the people in power are medieval peasants.
By being the only industrial economy not bombed in ww2
CIA chud after watching Uri do the bendy spoony thingy:
“Hey Herbert, I’ve got a great idea for another Castro attempt!”
And here’s the full Tonight Show segment mentioned in the Randi video
Seeing the whole thing uncut makes it clear just how much he’s squirming and stalling.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Are the kinds of psychics who claim to be able to talk to spirits still a thing? The kind that says names until someone in the audience says they know someone dead of that name? I’ve had an idea for a prank on them that I don’t think I have the means to do, somehow get the whole audience to never respond to any name or anything the psychic says and see what happens.
i’m gonna be a pedant about this, but out of interest, what british monarch of the dark ages were you thinking of?
dark ages: ~500CE - 1000CE
british monarchs existing: after 1707 (the ratification of the acts of union), a mere 700 years after the dark ages.
did you mean english monarchs of the dark ages? england unified in the 900s, so there were a few english kings in the dark ages.
or did you mean celtic monarchs in britain?
Nah I didn’t mean dark ages in the historic definition sense I just meant it in a looser sense as in “the dark times of the past”
oh. that sort of dark ages. then i guess you meant queen liz 2, since the UK is still deep in its eternal dark age.
I have some great news about Queen Liz 2
she was alive and queen in the 70s, that’s why i didnt say king sausagefingers what’s his face.
psychic powers is the hot new thing in UFO circles because of a “whistleblower” but they’re calling it psionics now.
Removed by mod
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
