Facilitated Communication: The Fad that Will Not Die
By Stuart Vyse via The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry – CSI
Many readers will remember facilitated communication (FC). Back in the early 1990s, a new treatment came rushing onto the scene making promises that were enormously attractive to parents of children with autism. Proponents of FC claimed that many people diagnosed with autism were actually suffering from a physical rather than a cognitive disability. Trapped inside their faulty bodies were high functioning—and in some cases exceptionally intelligent—people. All that was required to free the person inside was to create a communication pathway.
That pathway turned out to be someone else’s guiding hand. Equipped with a keyboard and a facilitator who supported and steadied the communicator’s hand, children and adults who had never spoken a word began to type out full sentences and, in some cases, poetry and novels. Many psychologists and special education professionals were so taken with the results that they began to question their basic understanding of autism. The media quickly seized on the phenomena, reporting heartwarming stories of recovery from the prison of disability. Word spread rapidly, creating a strong demand for training, facilitators, and keyboards.
Then things turned ugly. Some of the messages typed out by communicators included serious accusations of child sexual abuse. Judges ordered parents removed from their homes, and children were placed in protective care—all based on the testimony of previously mute children and adults with autism who were now using FC. Suddenly it became very important to determine who was doing the typing—the person with autism or the typically functioning facilitator. Shockingly, the question of authorship had never been examined . . .
Are there living dinosaurs?
By Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know via YouTube
According to mainstream science, dinosaur populations were wiped out eons ago. Or were they? Discover why some cryptozoologists and theorists believe that dinosaurs still exist today in this episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know.
Vacation Time (5/18/15 thru 5/31/15)!!!! Yaaaay!
Okay everybody, it’s that time of year for my long awaited VACATION!
Beginning Monday, May 18, 2015 i’m taking about two weeks off to enjoy the conspiracy-filled world of chemtrails, false flags, secret societies, men in black and reptilian aliens!
I will do my best to make the occasional post, but just in case i’m a little less attentive than usual or a little slower with the posts, you’ll know why 😉
I’ll be back in action about May 31th!!!!
In the mean time, with almost 2,200 current posts, use the search tool, links and keywords to the right to find some worthwhile reading.
ALSO . . . do stop by the iLLumiNuTTi facebook page. I should be able to post a few stories over there when the family isn’t looking.
🙂
Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB)
What is eloptic Energy?
By Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know via YouTube
Most people probably haven’t heard of the inventor T. Galen Hieronymus, but according to his advocates his machines are able capable of everything from remote analysis to remote healing — so what is eloptic energy?
10 Unsettling Teachings Of The Eccentric Aleister Crowley
By Debra Kelly via Listverse
Regardless of anyone’s religious or spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof, Aleister Crowley is an incredibly fascinating figure. There’s as much myth and legend surrounding him as there are facts, and sifting through the stories is a strange, strange look into one of the most notorious lives of the 20th century. He left behind an incredibly rich history of teachings and beliefs, not to mention more than a few outrageous claims.
10 • Claimed To Have Developed The ‘V For Victory’ Sign
There was some pretty powerful symbolism going on in World War II, and according to Crowley, the Allied “V for Victory” sign was his creation. Since we know what happened at the end of the war, it goes without saying that he was right—if, that is, he did do what he claimed.
At the time, he was friends (or at least acquaintances) with real-life super-spy Ian Fleming. Just what kind of impact Crowley had in the war years is up for debate. There are some claims that he was a spy and some saying that, even going back to World War I, he was posing as a German supporter to drum up a significant amount of crazy in order to help sway the Americans to join the war on the side of the British.
Aleister also said that he had the ear of Winston Churchill, and when it came time to develop a symbol that would rally the Allied troops, he was the one that came up with the “V for Victory” salute. More than just an inspirational sign, it was also designed to strike fear in the hearts of Nazi occultists. The swastika, which gained its power from the Sun and solar energy, was a powerful thing; that’s why the Nazis chose it, after all. Crowley stated that the “V for Victory” sign was just as powerful in its opposition. Supposedly, it was a magical, mystical sign that invoked the power of Apophis and Typhon and channeled their destructive forces to fight for those who wielded it.
9 • Crowley And The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn
Once a major player in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley’s falling-out with the secret society within only a few years of his 1898 induction set a pretty good precedent for just how many different stories have been developed around him. According to Crowley, his disillusionment with the organization came when he realized that the people who were initiated didn’t necessarily know what they were dealing with when it came to mysticism, rites, and rituals. He stated that while the founder, S.L. MacGregor Mathers, did have some mystical powers, he had essentially bitten off more than he could chew and had started mucking about with evils over which he had no control. His actions had destroyed the Order, and Crowley left.
The Order tells a very, very different story. According to their official biography of Crowley, his rather over-the-top personality and his sexual orientation were already causing problems when there was a falling-out between two opposing factions within the organization. Ultimately, Crowley didn’t actually leave the Order, not as he described, but finished off his alienation of the group by publishing some of their secret documents. To add insult to injury, he wasn’t just revealing secrets, but he was giving himself credit for works that Mathers had written. Crowley claimed to be doing it because Mathers was actually under the influence of the evil that he couldn’t control.
Lawsuits soon followed, but since Mathers hadn’t copyrighted the works outside of the organization, Crowley won.
8 • Invisibility And The Lamp Of Invisible Light
After his falling-out with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley fled first to Paris and then to the Americas. While in Mexico, he was absolutely inspired by what he found there and established his own order—The Lamp of the Invisible Light.
According to Crowley, his time in the Order of the Golden Dawn was just a warm-up. He likened his exodus from the Order to putting away “childish things” and went out to learn on his own. Once he was freed from the shackles of the already organized society, he did a lot of things with inspiring names.
He learned to wield the “all encircling chain of the Great Brotherhood” and the “Sword of Flaming Light,” killing the serpent that had started the downfall of Christ, while taming good and evil bulls, sowing dragons’ teeth, and acquiring the Golden Fleece. It was while he was writing his self-initiation ceremonies for his new order that he also discovered how to make himself invisible, which is apparently pretty easy once you know the tricks. Crowley says that it doesn’t have anything to do with truly making yourself invisible but just controlling everyone else around you and making them completely uninterested in making eye contact with you or noticing you in any way. He says that once he figured out how to do it, which he could gauge by the faintness of his own reflection, he could don his red robes and golden crown and walk the streets of Mexico, where no one would ever, ever make eye contact with him or initiate a conversation.
Clearly, this was because he was invisible.
7 • Aiwass
Aiwass meant several different things over the course of the evolution of Crowley’s beliefs. In 1904, Crowley wrote The Book of Law, supposedly with guidance from the otherworldly Aiwass. At the time, Crowley painted him quite clearly as something that existed outside of himself rather than as a part of him. It was necessary, after all, as The Book of Law was designed to be the new religion that he had hoped would make all other religions obsolete. This religion, Thelema, was to be world-changing, and for that, it needed to come as a message from something outside the world. Aiwass was painted as the messenger, but as the doctrine developed, so did Aiwass’s role.
Fight Over WiFi In Public Schools
by Steven Novella via NeuroLogica Blog
A Los Angeles middle school has turned WiFi off in a classroom to accommodate a teacher, Anura Lawson, who believes she has electromagnetic sensitivity. Now Lawson is petitioning to have WiFi turned off in every classroom in California. That’s what you get for catering to pseudoscience – more pseudoscience.
Electromagnetic (EM) sensitivity is a controversial disorder; well, controversial in that the scientific community has investigated it and concluded that it does not exist, but some individuals still believe they have it. Like many spurious disorders, the symptoms are mostly non-specific. Lawson claims she experienced, “dizziness, migraines, and heart palpitations,” while her daughter claims that her “brain was running slower.”
Such non-specific symptoms can be the result of anything stressing out the system: poor sleep, lack of physical activity, an unrecognized chronic illness, anxiety or depression. They may also be purely psychological. There are no specific symptoms or objective signs to indicate that there is any pathology present. Once treatable pathology has been ruled out, it’s best to focus on treating symptoms and improving quality of life.
Charles “Chuck” McGill (Michael McKean) suffers from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity on the AMC series Better Call Saul. Photo Credit: Lewis Jacobs/AMC
Giving someone a dubious diagnosis can be harmful. It may lead to unnecessary treatment, may delay or prevent making a correct diagnosis of an underlying disease, may delay or prevent optimal treatment, is often expensive, perpetuates false ideas about health and disease, and fosters mistrust of medical professionals, often to the point of conspiracy theories.
There have been a number of provocative studies of what is now called idiopathic environmental intolerance with attribution to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF).
Out-of-Body Experience Is Traced in the Brain
by Tanya Lewis via livescience
What happens in the brain when a person has an out-of-body experience? A team of scientists may now have an answer.
In a new study, researchers using a brain scanner and some fancy camera work gave study participants the illusion that their bodies were located in a part of a room other than where they really were. Then, the researchers examined the participants’ brain activity, to find out which brain regions were involved in the participants’ perceptions about where their body was.
The findings showed that the conscious experience of where one’s body is located arises from activity in brain areas involved in feelings of body ownership, as well as regions that contain cells known to be involved in spatial orientation, the researchers said. Earlier work done in animals had showed these cells, dubbed “GPS cells,” have a key role in navigation and memory.
The feeling of owning a body “is a very basic experience that most of us take for granted in everyday life,” said Dr. Arvid Guterstam, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and co-author of the study published today (April 30) in the journal Current Biology. But Guterstam and his colleagues wanted to understand the brain mechanisms that underlie this everyday experience.
Rubber hands and virtual bodies
In previous experiments, the researchers had explored the feeling of being out of one’s body. For example, the researchers developed the so-called “rubber hand illusion,” in which a person wearing video goggles sees a rubber hand being stroked, while a researcher strokes the participant’s own hand (which is out of sight), producing the feeling that the rubber hand is the participant’s own. The researchers have used a similar technique to give people the feeling of having a manikin’s body, or even an invisible body, as they described in a report published last week in the journal Scientific Reports.
In the new study, Guterstam and his colleagues . . .
Also See:
Agenda 21
Does Agenda 21 want to save the world or take it over?
by Kevin Hoover via skeptoid
Read transcript below or listen here
“Agenda 21.” Well it certainly sounds ominous. Someone has an agenda, and if this is the 21st, are there 20 others that we aren’t in on? And just look at Agenda 21’s goals – nothing short of a global shift in thinking that aims to put the way we live on planet Earth on a whole new footing. It does this by providing certain… plans guiding the actions of political leaders on every level, even in your neighborhood.
On its surface, Agenda 21’s goals are hard to fault. It purports to provide a framework for stewarding the environment and bettering the human condition on an enduring basis, all while protecting liberty.
Agenda 21 repeatedly affirms “freedom, dignity and personally held values,” emphasizing personal wealth, improving the health of women and children, protecting cultural and natural assets and keeping the world’s economy stable into the future. That cryptic number 21 simply refers to the 21st century. What’s not to like?
Well, with a name right out of a Robert Ludlum political thriller, Agenda 21 is also something of a conspiracy theory toolkit. It’s backed by the dreaded United Nations, proposes 
wealth leveling with developing countries, an array of ambitious environmental goals and loads of other changes to traditional ways of doing things, all riding in on a raft of politically charged terminology.
The 300-page document uses the word “sustainable” 647 times and “environment” more than a thousand. The word “science,” by the way, gets 64 mentions, including index entries.
The potential for rhetorical redefinition hasn’t been overlooked by today’s hyperpartisan political writers and politicos. As an unintended consequence of the document, critics have figuratively deforested Earth to create millions of books exposing Agenda 21’s hidden agenda.
Does Agenda 21 forward the framework for a new era of international cooperation and perpetual prosperity for all, or is it really a sinister trick to take away our rights, abolish private property, squash our freedoms, destroy American sovereignty and usher the world into a dark age of dystopian eco-dictatorship?
10 Bizarre Claims From Scientology’s War On Psychiatry
By Debra Kelly via Listverse
Scientology’s hatred of everything psychiatric is well-known due to Tom Cruise’s infamous, controversial statements on the subject. Those statements just scratch the surface, however, and there is much, much more to the cult-like religion’s absolute condemnation of anything and everything that has to do with the mental health industry. It’s ironic, really.
10 • Psychiatric Meds Cause School Shootings
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) was formed in 1969 with the sole goal of exposing abuse and practices that put the lives and mental well-being of patients in danger. Founded by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, the commission claims to be a nonreligious organization that doesn’t force any opinion on anyone. It supposedly exists only to provide all possible information on a particular subject, in order to allow people to make educated choices and decisions for themselves.
It seems like a pretty legit organization, and one that’s probably needed—until you take a closer look and find things like their belief that school shootings are largely the result of psychiatric interference and medications. According to the CCHR, school shootings are mostly the fault of psychiatrists who are prescribing drugs with side effects like violence and “homicidal ideation.” An article published by CCHR International points the finger at 35 school shootings, where the perpetrators were found to have prescriptions for medications such as Prozac, Xanax, Zoloft, ADHD medications like Vyvanse, and plenty of unnamed medications.
The link between school shootings and medication has been so loudly shouted that it’s been investigated by groups like the Treatment Advocacy Center, the Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety Disorders, and the School of Psychiatry in Australia. The former study concluded that the annual murder rate in patients undergoing treatment for psychosis is 0.11 per 1,000. The latter concluded that mental illness was involved in between 5–10 percent of all homicide cases, and the overwhelming majority of those incidents involve people who weren’t being treated properly or were also abusing other substances.
But according to Scientology’s Los Angeles–based museum known as Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, psychiatrists are the reason that schools are no longer places for learning, but for controlling children with drugs that are prescribed not for the benefit of those taking them, but for the pockets of the psychiatric industry.
9 • Anti–Mental Health Laws
In 2005, the CCHR and the Church of Scientology made an attempt at getting legislation passed that would have helped to further their crusade against both psychiatry and specifically child psychiatry. Bills HB209 and SB1766 were put before the Florida state government in the hopes of tying the hands of schools when it came to even suggesting that a child might have some problems that need looking into.
The bills, which were fought wholeheartedly by organizations like Florida’s Office of Suicide Prevention, would have required schools to tell parents that any medication, treatment, or diagnosis of a mental health–related issue would follow the child for the rest of his or her life—which was only true because that was written into the bill, too. Parents would also be told that there was no medical basis for diagnosing mental illness, they would be entitled to refuse any and all treatment or evaluation, and the child wouldn’t be removed from classes in any way if treatment was refused. The bills would have covered anything and everything, even counseling through difficult times like divorce or a death in the family. They also specified that school officials would be forbidden from making any sort of referrals in mental health matters, and they had the backing of a handful of politicians.
Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, vetoed the bill, and it wasn’t the only Scientology-sponsored bill that he stopped, either. There was also a bill on the table for $500,000 in state funding to be directed toward a prison rehabilitation program based on the principles of Scientology, making it clear how Bush felt about the “weird little group.”
8 • Psychiatrists Caused The Holocaust
Photo via Wikipedia
This one’s a pretty roundabout theory, but at least we can give them points for creativity.
According to the CCHR, the Holocaust was engineered by psychiatrists. They point the finger first at a 19th-century psychologist named Francis Galton, who was one of the first to put forward the idea that the “best” specimens of the human race should be the ones to reproduce. And since humans clearly can’t control what they’re biologically programmed to do, a medical solution was called for. (Even in the United States, the results of the eugenics movement were terrifying. We’ve talked about them a few times.)
According to the theory, while there were eugenics movements in a frighteningly large number of countries, Germany’s movement was particularly dangerous because of the number of psychiatric professionals that were involved in the development of the doctrine. They were writing books on inferior races and on racial hygiene, and they weren’t shy about specifying who needed to be cleansed from the world’s population. The use of accepted psychiatric practices turned Hitler’s movement into something scientific, rather than just the rantings of a madman. Psychiatry gave him credibility, and a match made in Hell was formed. The Nazis needed official, accepted, medical justification, and the psychiatric community wanted money. It was only in Germany, where psychiatric input became key, that sterilization turned into murder. Once the groundwork was in place, the CCHR says, it was easy enough to expand the list of people that were unworthy.
Sylvia Browne’s FBI File: Examining Her Alleged Detective Work and a Federal Criminal Investigation
By Ryan Shaffer via The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry – CSI
During Sylvia Browne’s decades-long career offering psychic readings and doing television appearances, she made numerous claims about working with law enforcement to solve crimes. In an age before the Internet, fact-checking by television and newspapers was more labor intensive. It was difficult to find sources to support or deny many of her claims. 
While several articles in the Skeptical Inquirer have cast doubt on her psychic abilities, Browne defended herself by citing her “work” on cases and giving the media endorsements from seemingly respectable law enforcement members, such as former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Ted Gunderson. Recently obtained FBI files shatter her insinuation that she had a relationship with federal law enforcement and show that the only interest the agency had in Browne was investigating her for fraud.
Records about a person in possession of an investigating government agency, such as the FBI, are available with the person’s permission or if they are deceased. In all likelihood, Browne would not have consented to the release of her FBI file given her refusal to allow Robert Lancaster, of StopSylvia.com, to post a transcript online that her own office sent him in 2007 (Lancaster 2007a). 
In her haste to refute claims from an ex-husband about an alleged lack of higher education credits, Browne’s office sent Lancaster her St. Teresa’s College (now Avila University) transcripts. The transcripts, according to Lancaster, did show Browne’s ex-husband was incorrect about how long she attended college. Yet unfortunately for Browne, that transcript also demonstrated that she did not complete college and proved her often-made claim about having a higher education degree was false. Given Browne’s reluctance to make records her office sent to a critic publicly available, she probably would not have been willing to allow the release of her law enforcement records. Following her 2013 death, anyone can now obtain the government files concerning Browne.
I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI asking for documents about Browne, using her date of birth under her previous legal last name of “Brown” and her later addition of “e” to the name.
US Lowers Fluoride Recommendations In Water
Were Conspiracy Theorists Right?
By James Maynard via Tech Times
The federal government has lowered the recommended level of fluoride in drinking water for the first time in five decades.
The Department of Health and Human Services is now advising water supply managers to reduce levels of the mineral to 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/l). The previous recommendation, developed in 1962, advised communities to permit fluoride concentrations between 0.7 and 1.2 mg/l.
The reduction in recommended fluoride levels was driven in part because Americans now have access to fluoride in various forms, including toothpaste and mouthwashes, which were not in widespread use half a century ago. Because of this, more people are exposed to too much fluoride and can experience fluorosis, white stains in the enamel of their teeth, from too much fluoride. Mild fluorosis appears as scattered white flecks, frosty edges or chalk-like lines on teeth, while the white spots get larger with severe fluorosis.
“Fluoride is voluntarily added to some drinking water systems as a public health measure for reducing the incidence of cavities among the treated population. The decision to fluoridate a water supply … is not mandated by EPA or any other federal entity,” the United States Environmental Protection Agency wrote.
