This happened a couple of weeks ago, but watching this particular 'current affairs' (the quotation marks denote: sensationalist populist bullshit) show last night reminded me of how much it pissed me off.

Their test consisted of rounding up a bunch of gullible saps and letting this chic do her best Jon Edward impression on them (she hears dead people's voices in her head too, apparently). After the ghostly communication session, we had the honour of hearing the aforementioned saps' impressions of her magical powers. Not surprisingly, we heard comments such as: 'Wow man, I never believed in psychics before but this chic's for real, far out,' and 'there's no way she could have known that stuff about me and that dead guy I knew.' Wrong, morons.

That wasn't what pissed me off however. The ACA guy tried to expose her crap, he really did, the poor dumb bastard. He pointed out that she threw out heaps of vague guesses searching for a hit and that the skeptics call this method cold reading. Her response to this was very convincing: 'I wouldn't do that.' Cool, I believe you, but that just means you're a self deluded moron rather than a full blown liar, fraud and scumbag. What is so bloody frustrating about all this is that ACA guy must have spoken to the skeptics, or at least read what the skeptics have to say. BUT, why couldn't he spend 30 seconds talking to them about the proper methods for testing these fuckers. Painful.

The point is that if these people really could talk to dead relatives and gain information, they could very, very easily prove this in a proper scientific double blind test. They can't, ever, and they're all full of shit.