Posted By Farencue on 27 Mar 2010 08:11 PM
Her attitude toward LiD really is quite astounding.

I had to laugh at the part where Anita attacked LiD's academic credentials...and then offered to buy LiD a cup of coffee and 'treat'  his/her migraine.

Perfect example of just how skewed Anita's reasoning is.

Posted By Farencue on 27 Mar 2010 08:54 PM
It made me feel kinda ill to see all those people lined up for her perusal and pretension of "detecting" missing kidneys at the IIG test.
The above post of Anita's just illustrates her contempt for the wellbeing and safety of any migraine sufferer. It also illustrates that should you volunteer for her "test", you are to be used and possibly abused, all for the glory of Anita. Absolutely sickening.
Why the JREF allows this kind of solicitation by Anita, or indeed anyone, on their boards is beyond me.
It appears Anita is being duly aided and abetted in her recruitment drive for "test subjects".

Exactly.

Look, my dad was a good guy-average Joe, worked hard, paid his taxes, voted in every election, etc. He grew up during the Depression-when he was a kid, his family came out of the Texas Dust Bowl to become migrant fruit pickers in the California citrus groves. (Drove across country in a Nash Rambler with a mattress tied to the top.) There was no money for doctors, and he was raised with the Native American beliefs in holistic medicine, so, as a result, he had a lifelong wariness about seeking conventional medical care.

The last several years of his life, he had severe dementia, and he lived with us so I could take care of him. But, it finally got to the point where he needed more care than I could provide-I needed to work, and he'd do things like wander off, or try to cook and burn stuff, etc, etc - so I put him in an assisted living facility. I didn't want to, and I hated having to do it, but he was endangering himself. About a year after, I had to go out of town to cover a trial, and it went on longer than expected, because the jury deadlocked at the eleventh hour and the case had to be retried. I was gone about two months. My husband and the kids went to visit Dad every weekend, and, just about the time I was getting ready to come home, my husband called and said Dad wasn't looking so good, and the doctor at the facility had examined him and referred him to an oncologist, but my husband couldn't get Dad to go. Dad was a stubborn old coot that way-I could usually get him to do something that he was resistant to, but, even for me, it took a lot of insisting. It was hopeless with other people. 

When I saw Dad, I was shocked - in those two months, this 6'5 man had gone from 230 pounds to less than 150, and his skin was so gray, he looked as if he was covered with a residue of ash.  When I started piecing the story together, this is what had happened: Not long after I left, Dad started feeling unwell. Pains in his stomach and his abdomen. The gal in the room next door to him believed, like Anita, that she could see into the body and 'diagnose' people. She didn't charge for it, but, of course, she was in the midst of a bunch of old people with various ailments and old fashioned beliefs in homeopathic cures, so they ran to her at every opportunity-and she reveled in the attention they gave her. She was one of those keen old biddies who have to have their finger in everyone else's pie, and knows everything - we all know the type. She'd lost part of a leg to diabetes, and she didn't have any family, so that was why she was in the facility, but the only addled parts of her mind were her delusions and her need to be the center of attention.

She convinced Dad that he had an ulcer, and that being pressured to go to the oncologist by the 'quack' resident doctor was making the ulcer flair up. Dad was already wary about doctors, and his mind was more than half gone from the dementia-there were days he didn't know his own name-and she took advantage of that. She'd 'diagnose' him, he'd forget what she had said, so every day, she was able to play the miraculous medical dowser and present him with the solution, which just delayed the inevitable.

Well, it wasn't an ulcer - it was cancer of the bladder. I got Dad to the oncologist right away, and they scheduled him for a colostomy. But, about four hours into the surgery started, the oncologist came out to the waiting room, shaking his head. He had opened Dad up, and discovered the cancer had mestatisized everywhere. Bladder, kidneys, liver, pancreas, lungs, prostate, colon. The best we could figure was that Dad had been having some pain for much longer than we were aware of, and keeping it to himself and this moron medical dowser. He relied on her repeated diagnosis until the cancer had spread to the lungs-he had, literally, holes in his ribs from the mestatises, and his appearance started to reflect what was going on internally after the cancer had spread to his pancreas.  Even then, he was so addled that he bought into her crap until I got home and forced him to go to the oncologist..

So, the surgeon closed him up, since there was nothing to be done, and he died about three weeks later. Thing is, though, if he had told us about the initial pain, and not relied on this woman telling him she 'saw' an ulcer, we would have gotten him to the oncologist much sooner, and the cancer probably wouldn't have spread any further than his bladder. He would still have had to have a colostomy, and some treatments, but he would have lived.

Mind you, I take a lot of the blame myself. I should have paid closer attention, and been more tuned into what was going with Dad. But, it happens - we get sidetracked by other obligations, and we miss things in the shuffle. I don't mean that as an excuse to duck responsibility-it was just the way it was. 

Obviously, I'm suspicious of medical dowsers to begin with, but, if Anita had shown even one sign that her 'abilities' might be genuine, I'd support her being tested. But, she hasn't. Nothing that this woman claims is genuine. It's all delusion-and those that support any further testing are just furthering her delusions and her attention seeking.

Anita's defense that she doesn't charge for this crap, and that she just wants to cure mankind of migraines is grandstanding, and it is ridiculous. She's not making any attempt to find out the truth about herself. She just plays at retracting her statements and becoming a skeptic for the further attention it brings her. We know she already targeted one migraine group, and i suspect she's targeted others. We know that she took the "Alenara" show on the road, so I have little doubt that she would do the same for the "VfF" show if given the opportunity. And her other defense that she would always advise people to rely on conventional medicine and not her 'diagnosis' is solely self serving. There are so many people out there, like my dad, who are wary of conventional medicine to begin with, and/or whose minds no longer have that capacity for rational thought-her advice to seek conventional medicine wouldn't mean squat when it comes to them. 

People need to stop encouraging this whackjob. There are folks who are dead as a result of this kind of delusional nonsense.

Anyway...putting my soapbox away now...

Posted By Farencue on 27 Mar 2010 08:54 PM
I agree desertgal, she is totally whacked.
I think the JREF is totally whacked too. I may be wrong but it appears they are aiding and abetting Anita in her recruitment drive for test subjects. They are allowing her to promote what they stand against, or at least what Mr Randi stands against. It's total madness and as I said, if I disappear from the JREF at the hand of Darat or some other moderator I couldn't care less. Hypocrisy exists everywhere, even in organisations like the JREF. I'm sure Mr Randi would not personally approve of Anita in the slightest, nor would he approve of her attempts to hijack the JREF with her rubbish.

It's become a lovely haven for the woos and crackpots of the web, hasn't it? 

 Just like they want it, apparently.   What other Forum on the internet would give a platform to the likes of VfF, Rramjet,  mayday, and that vegetable, rorylee, and then actively prevent anyone from engaging them as they deserve to be engaged?

Well, in fairness, there are probably a few, although none of them purport to be either sceptical or educational forums.  It seems to me that Annie is at least being more honest than the JREF in that regard.  When you visit her site, what you see is what you get, but who would suspect that clicking a link to the JREF Forum would lead to a site that's become something like a hybrid of Fark.com and 4 Chan. 

Hard to understand why they want it that way though, although my best guess is that they want to drive all the sceptics away so there won't be too much of an outcry when they close the Forum down altogether.

Won't be much longer, I suspect.  Randomly infracting people like Audible Click should aid the process considerably.

Posted By Daylightstar on 29 Mar 2010 05:10 PM
By the way, I am under the impression that her current picture is an altered picture, that it doesn't represent her facial features correctly.
It's not Heather this time, but to me it also seems not quite Anita.

The picture's probably genuine. Annie has an Aura of Altered Reality™ surrounding her.

 

I will be making a guest appearance on the Radio Show at the Rational Alchemy, starring Skeptics Jeff Wagg, Brian Walsh, and Nigel Aves. We discuss my IIG test for an entire hour!

Posted By Farencue on 30 Mar 2010 07:18 AM

We hear about the ghosts, and how she is "actually hoping to go to a supposed haunted site and quickly reveal whether something interesting is going on or show that it is nonsense and falsify it".

!!!!!

Like, oh, I don't know, a Revolutionary War battlefield?

(Bangs head on desk)

The reason the claim that was tested by the IIG is NOT falsified by Anita is because she guessed correctly in trial 2.
Anita says that "ironically I was hoping to fail trial 2 so it would be over" (falsified).
So folks, because she guessed correctly (and she says she "had to guess" that means that the X files are not closed.

And here we thought the demonstration was intended to demonstrate her alleged ability to 'see' kidneys.

The host of the show says that in Trial 2 she beat 1 in 12 odds and in Trial 3 she beat 1 in 6 odds.
Anita started rambling that some people guessed the same as she did.
BUT that if a group of 50 people is guessing at home (like we all did here during the streaming) and 1 or 2 got it right (is that you Geemack) then that is not as good as her guessing alone.

Uh...why not? I 'm guessing she didn't clarify that statement and no one asked her to, either?

Well, I guess the real purpose of the JREF is not to debunk false psychics, but promote pseudo skeptics. Who knew?

Posted By Farencue on 30 Mar 2010 07:47 AM
There are grown men calling themselves skeptics who think Anita should be "given credit" and that it is "unfair" she failed Trial 3. WTF?

Given credit for admittedly guessing, no less. And "unfair" that she failed because she guessed half right and half wrong

Well, hell, they should just give her credit for Trial 2, as well. I mean, one of the subjects WAS missing a kidney.

Jesus, if the skeptics are going to allow for the claimants to just come in and get credit towards having a paranormal ability for admittedly guessing right and wrong, then there is no point to holding these demonsrations, and the IIG looks like a completely bogus organization. Unless guessing has suddenly become a paranormal ability?

You're right, Farencue. WTF?

Posted By Farencue on 30 Mar 2010 08:17 AM
Desertgal, in answer to your edited post ^^^
Nobody asked Anita to clarify what she said.
They just let her ramble on and on, word for word what she posts. It was boring.

Boring and a joke of an interview, as well. Anita will dine out on that for years, though.

"Never wrestle with a pig—you get dirty and the pig likes it."