An Honest Liar: A Great Documentary About The Well-Known Skeptic And Professional Debunker James Randi

James Randi who is arguably the most well-known (and the most successful) individual debunker of paranormal claims and pseudoscience is the main subject of a very interesting documentary by Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom. Titled An Honest Liar, the movie documentary chronicles Randi's journey from a stage musician to a professional debunker. If you watch BBC, you may have seen the documentary under the title Exposed: Magicians, Psychics, and Frauds in November last year.

For people who are not too familiar with Randi and what he does, An Honest Liar makes for a great introduction into his work. Running for an hour and a half, the documentary discussed Randi's most well-known antics such as his shaming of televangelist Peter Popoff on national television, his numerous take-downs of the Israeli spoon-bender Uri Geller, and the elaborate hoax he perpetrated around a made-up spirit channeler named Carlos.

Several well-known people (mostly magicians, skeptics, science educators) make an appearance on the documentary. The rock star Alice Cooper was interviewed about the stunts that Randi cooked up for him. Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame, writer and science educator Michael Shermer, and magician Penn Jillette were also around to give their thoughts on Randi's work. Bill Nye the Science Guy got onscreen to say "James Randi is in love with the truth."

A still from the documentary An Honest Liar.

It's a well-made documentary that can be very fascinating if you are interested on things like skepticism, debunking paranormal claims, and fighting pseudoscience. Around halfway through the documentary, the focus got directed more on Randi's personal life, most especially on his relationship with his long-time partner Jose Alvarez. This abrupt change in the flow of the documentary can disinterest some people but if you are one who wishes to see a more personal side of the Amazing Randi, it's definitely worth seeing.

You can watch the official trailer for An Honest Liar here. It's unlikely that the film will be screened in theaters near you so check out the film's official website to learn more on how you can see it.

ABS-CBN Seeks Health Advice From A Tarot Reader For Their Medical Television Program "Salamat Dok"

One of the things about Philippine media that is deeply saddening is the prevalence of pseudoscience being pushed down people's throats. The writers and journalists manning the country's newspapers, radio stations, and television stations are very lazy when it comes to policing the superstitious stuff that they put out there for public consumption.

A perfect example of the Philippine media's incompetence when it comes to dealing with the superstitious is the claimed demonic possession of over a dozen students in Cebu last November. News outlets in the country feasted on the story with headlines such as 14 Students Possessed (Philippine Star), 'Demonic Possessions' Result In Cancellation Of Classes (Sun Star), and Exorcism In Cebu After Students 'Possessed' By White Lady (ABS-CBN News).

Notice how overly enthusiastic these new sources were in putting the words "possession" and "possessed" in their reports. Dave Tumulak, a councilor and chairperson of the Cebu City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council reviewed the incident and made the suggestion that it's a case of mass hysteria. This is the most logical explanation to what transpired. However, you don't see the phrase "mass hysteria" in the media reports.

What's worse, superstition is also rampant in Philippine television. It's fine if they are part of fiction programs or paranormal-based shows. But it's outright wrong to find them being pushed in medical shows like what just transpired on Salamat Dok, a long-running medical television program on ABS-CBN.

You would think that since the show's goal is to teach people how to stay healthy, they'd be showing stuff that are science-based. This is not the case. In a recent segment of Salamat Dok, they brought a certain Master Hanz Cua to teach their viewers some health lessons. Cua doesn't work in the field of health or medicine. His website says he practices feng shui, astrology, chakra meditation, tarot reading, and face reading.

Screengrab from ABS-CBN's show Salamat Dok.

The obvious question here is why is a tarot reader giving health advice in a medical show called Salamat Dok? They should change their program's title to Salamat Tarot Reader. There are people who would read this article and probably say it's just for fun and we should not think too much about it. No. This man is out of place. Let real doctors give advice in Salamat Dok. Cua can give his in shows that deal with his tarot stuff.

Getting a tarot reader to give health advice in a medical program is like inviting a creationist to explain evolution in a science program.

You can watch the segment featuring Cua here. It runs for nearly eight minutes and he talks about your health being affected by your birth time and birth date, health stars, problematic illness stars, ...... basically things that don't belong in a medical show.

Jaime Licauco Claims That His Telepathy Courses Generate Positive Results 60% Of The Time

In his most recent article for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Jaime Licauco tackled telepathy. The gist of the whole piece is that telepathy is real and that it has been proven through experiments in laboratories. Licauco dropped two names in the article - the astronaut Edgar Mitchell and the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller. According to Licauco, these two individuals have demonstrated in the past that telepathy is real.

However, the boldest claim in the article goes to Licauco's proclamation that he has been teaching telepathy courses for several decades and that around 60% of the results from the experiments he did in said courses are positive. This is Licauco saying that his courses prove telepathy 60% of the time. There is of course no way of verifying if Licauco is telling the truth. But if Licauco has such a very high success rate in his experiments, why won't he take James Randi's One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge? This way, he'll prove once and for all that telepathy is real. The fact that he hasn't taken the challenge says a lot about what he can and cannot actually do.

First of all, there is no scientific evidence that telepathy is real. There's zero evidence supporting it. It's only real in modern fiction and science fiction. The superhero Aquaman has it. But no real man has ever displayed it satisfactorily. 

Let's go back to the two names that Licauco dropped in his article - Edgar Mitchell and Uri Geller. Mitchell's purported ESP experiment is rife with lies and misleading data. It has been debunked several times and the people who support it has been caught lying and manipulating information numerous times.

Aquaman is the only man known to have displayed telepathic abilities. Unfortunately, he's a fictional character.

As to Uri Geller, he has also been debunked several times, most popularly by James Randi. Geller is not a psychic. He is but a talented magician who has been trying to pass off his magic tricks as paranormal abilities.

It's still mind-boggling why the Philippine Daily Inquirer continues to serve as a mouthpiece for such pseudoscientific beliefs. What's dangerous is that Licauco drops still unproven information in his articles as if they are facts. We need real science being talked about in our national newspapers, not these nonsense.

Deepak Chopra Says That The Kind Of Skepticism Advanced by James Randi, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, And Jerry Coyne Is Harmful

It "does far more harm than good". This is how Deepak Chopra described the kind of skepticism being advanced by the likes of James Randi, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss and Jerry Coyne. Chopra wrote an article for the San Francisco Chronicle as a follow-up for his one million dollar challenge to skeptics. In the article, Chopra argues that there is no real need for the skeptic movement to exist. It has a "very small, even insignificant role to play" he adds.

Proclaiming himself as "one of the major confronters" of this skepticism, Chopra sends a warning by saying that it is his "primary goal to defend the truth of spirituality". He compares skeptics to Elmer Gantry, a character from a novel by Sinclair Lewis. This character in the book is a minister who is a greater sinner than the lost folks he preached to. The skeptical movement, according to Chopra, is "much more close-minded and blindly irrational than anyone they expose". Chopra is basically saying that James Randi is more close-minded and blindly irrational than Uri Geller and Peter Popoff (two of the most prominent figures that Randi debunked and exposed for the liars and frauds that they are).

Chopra also tagged the skeptic movement as a "society for the suppression of curiosity". The rest of the piece has Chopra expounding on his One Million Dollar Challenge to the Skeptics. He describes his challenge in a variety of ways:

1) He is offering one million dollars to "any skeptic who could prove how electrochemical activity in the brain produces the appearance of a three-dimensional world, the point being that debunkers of the paranormal can't come close to explaining the normal."

2) He says his offer focuses on "What is consciousness, how does it create reality, and how far does this reality extend?"

3) He calls it a "challenge against materialism".

Chopra's challenge for skeptics generated mostly negative feedback. The challenge video which Chopra posted on YouTube has 1,096 dislikes and 286 likes. The feedback for the follow-up video is identical, that is it got more dislikes than likes.

In the article he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, Chopra dismissed this negative feedback saying "Within twenty-four hours, my challenge met with the predictable reaction. My skeptic fans decried the video as silly, ridiculous, a publicity stunt. But in what way was my offer any different from Randi’s?"

Well, Chopra asked for the difference between his challenge and Randi's so a viewer of the video and reader of the follow-up article named Per Nordin has stepped up to the plate and answered the question.

Here's Per Nordin's answer in full which he posted as a comment on the YouTube video of the challenge: "In a very fundamental way. Randi's challenge does not ask for proof in how the paranormal abilities work. His only challenge is to show that it works! He does not ask even for any attempt to explain how it works, let alone any proof of the scientific underlaying mechanisms and absolutely no demands on peer-reviewed scientific papers on how it works. He asks only to show that one can demonstrate paranormal powers of any kind. 

Your challenge - in stark contrast - does not ask to show that consciousness works, but for proof positive scientific peer-reviewed explanation on how it works! The equivalent challenge (as you want to know about consciousness) would be "Show me you can think, that you are conscious, and you win". That you falter to see the difference between his and your challenges is amazing."

Chopra ended the article on The San Francisco Chronicle with a "To be continued." He said he will further explain his challenge in his next post.

Here's Chopra's challenge if you haven't seen it:

Here's the follow-up video:

James Randi has responded sort of to Chopra's challenge by posting a meme photo on his Facebook page which says "Woo shall not pass." See the meme photo here. Woo is a term often used to describe pseudoscience and paranormal claims.