Michael Prescott's Blog

Faster than a speeding bullet

I experimented with StripGenerator, a free program that lets you create simple comics online, and voila - a new comic book superhero is born! 

Three silly arguments

Regular readers know I'm of the opinion that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. This position is, to put it mildly, controversial, and among the academic community it has not found many takers. Some of the arguments put forth by Shakespearean scholars are quite complicated and interesting; these arguments involve such things as the dating of the plays, factual errors in the plays that suggest the author was not too well-educated or worldly wise, and the testimony of the First Folio linking the plays to William Shakespeare of Stratford.

I think there are effective counter-arguments to all these positions. For instance, in my opinion, the dating of the plays, if done properly, argues very strongly in favor of dates of composition that would be too early for the Stratford man;  the so-called errors of fact, particularly pertaining to geography, turn out not to be errors at all on closer inspection (see The Shakespeare Guide to Italy by the late Richard Paul Roe); and the the testimony of the First Folio is far more ambiguous and problematic than it might appear (see Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography, by Diana Price). A very long–in fact, endless–argument can ensue in fleshing out any of these points.

But there are some other arguments made by the academics that aren't complex or interesting at all. They're just silly. Threw of the most common are examined below.

1. “The idea that Oxford wrote the plays of the works of Shakespeare originated with a fellow named J. Thomas Looney. His name was Looney; therefore his ideas are obviously loony.”

Actually, this position doesn't even rise to the level of an argument, not even a fallacious argument. It's just childish name-calling. Are we supposed to think that if the Oxfordian argument had originated with someone named J. Thomas Wise or J. Thomas Brilliant, the academics would regard the argument as wise or brilliant? It should be obvious that the man's name, even if it strikes us as funny, has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of his ideas.

For what it's worth, the name Looney is actually pronounced LOH-nee, and is a name of some distinction on the Isle of Man.

2. “Those who doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays and poems that bear his name are simply snobs.”

Here, at least, we do have an argument that rises to the level of a formal fallacy. The fallacy in question is the ad hominem–which means disputing the value of someone's ideas by pointing to some personal defect he allegedly possesses. In this case, the defect is snobbishness; we are supposed to believe that the anti-Stratfordian position is rooted in elitism and high-handedness. But even if this were true, it would not say anything about the facts and arguments made by anti-Stratfordians. It speaks only to their personal motives, which are irrelevant.

The clue that we're dealing with a fallacy here is that the position is buttressed with emotional language–that is to say, rhetoric. (The appeal to emotion by means of rhetoric is itself a logical fallacy.) The academics typically go on to say that those who are interested in the authorship question don't believe in egalitarianism or understand the genius of democracy. They don't realize that greatness can crop up anywhere, in any social class, in any conditions, at any time, in any place. They are out of step with modern, democratic society; they represent a backward-looking, retrogressive, rearguard action. Etc.

All of this, as you can see, is just a lot of handwaving meant to inspire an emotional response. It's a collection of populist platitudes, akin to a campaign speech. And it's all irrelevant. As far as I know, nobody who questions the authorship of Shakespeare's works has ever said that genius is confined to the upper classes. It's obvious that a very large number of artistic, musical, and literary geniuses have originated in the middle-class, at least in relatively modern times. (If you go back far enough in history, there's not much of a middle class to speak of.) No one doubts that as the middle class has become proportionately larger, and has grown progressively more affluent and educated, the number of creative geniuses produced by that class has risen.

The question, however, is whether the works of Shakespeare are the sort of literary products one would expect from a member of the middle class. This is a very different issue from the strawman position that a middle-class writer cannot possibly be a genius.

Suppose that the works of Tolstoy had been published anonymously, and we were left to figure out who authored them. We would certainly look first at the Russian aristocracy of the period, because it is obvious that the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina was intimately familiar with the lives of aristocrats, viewed social issues from the standpoint of a (reform-minded) aristocrat, and chose aristocrats as the leading characters in his major works. Conversely, if the works of Charles Dickens had been published anonymously, no one would think to look for the author among the British aristocracy, as it would be obvious that the author was intimately familiar with the conditions of the poor, that he had almost certainly suffered severe hardship himself, that he was sympathetic to the struggling underclass and the upwardly mobile middle class, and that he was unsympathetic to the very wealthy and the privileged elites.

If we look at the works attributed to Shakespeare, we find (I think) both the point of view and the constellation of interests typical of an aristocrat of his day -- and not a very forward-looking aristocrat, at that. Even by the standards of his time, Shakespeare was feudalistic in his thinking, placing immense emphasis on the importance of “blood” or pedigree, and insisting that everybody should know his place or his station in life (see Ulysses' famous speech about “degree” in Troilus and Cressida).

Shakespeare knew a great deal about the sport of hawking or falconry, which was practiced exclusively by nobles, and the music and dance in his plays were the types found at court, not in public taverns. The main characters in nearly all of his works are members of the aristocracy or royalty. His sympathy lies with courtiers and princes. His view of the common man varies between condescending amusement and dread; commoners, when viewed singly or in small groups, are a source of humor, with their malapropisms and uncultured ways, but if they gather together into a large crowd, they can threaten to become a mob and destabilize the social order. Shakespeare shows no sympathy for social uprisings such as Jack Cade's rebellion, which he mercilessly satirizes in Henry VI, Part Two, reducing the historical Cade's justifiable grievances to such idiocies as a making it a felony to drink small beer.

We also find that Shakespeare appears to have traveled extensively throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, at a time when foreign travel was largely limited to wealthy aristocrats (and some traveling merchants, but there is no indication that the man from Stratford ever engaged in foreign trade or travel). Shakespeare seems to been fluent in several languages, including Latin, Greek, Italian,  French, and possibly Spanish, which would not be unusual for a leading nobleman of Queen Elizabeth's court but would be almost unheard of for a commoner, especially one with no university training. Shakespeare was clearly educated in the law, as aristocrats routinely were (they were expected to attend the Inns of Court so they could administer their states), while there is no indication the man from Stratford ever studied law. And so forth.

In other words, the belief that the Shakespearean works were written by a nobleman is not grounded in some obstinate snobbery but in a close and sensitive reading of the works themselves. Love's Labour's Lost alone should be enough to establish that the author was a courtier. The play, which is incomprehensible to modern readers without extensive annotations, consists of topical allusions and in-jokes about the goings-on in Queen Elizabeth's court circa the early 1580s. Not only is this date too early to plausibly ascribe the play to the Stratford man (born in 1564), but how could the son of a glove-maker who grew up in a provincial town three days' ride from London in an age without newspapers or other mass media possibly know any of these private jokes about the foreign ambassadors and their quirky personalities? It should be obvious that the play was written by a gifted courtier for the amusement of Queen Elizabeth and her entourage.

If snobbishness is the root of skepticism about the authorship of Shakespeare's works, it's hard to understand how such figures as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Charles Chaplin have all entertained deep suspicions on this score. I don't think any of them is generally regarded as an anti-democratic elitist. Whitman, in particular, was distressed at the prospect that the great plays had been written by “one of the wolfish earls” of British history; as a vigorous champion of egalitarianism and democracy, he was dismayed to think that the world's greatest writer could have been his intellectual and social opposite, but his close study of the works led him to that strong suspicion.

3. Finally we have the oddest of these three silly arguments: “Those who suggest that the man from Stratford didn't write Shakespeare's works are simply jealous of Shakespeare and are trying to demean him, belittle him, and undermine his reputation.”

This again is a logical fallacy, though it may not be quite as obvious as the last one. The fallacy  is begging the question–that is, beginning  by assuming the point at issue. In this case, the open question is whether or not the author William Shakespeare is the man from Stratford. The academics who make this particular argument are saying, “We already know that the author William Shakespeare is the man from Stratford. Therefore any attempt to deprive the man from Stratford of credit for his works is an attack on the author.”

The conclusion does follow from the premise, but the problem is that the premise is question-begging. The anti-Stratfordian argument would go this way: “We believe that the author William Shakespeare is not the man from Stratford. Therefore our attempt to deprive the man from Stratford of credit for Shakespeare's works is an attempt to right a long-standing injustice by giving proper credit to the actual author.”

There's no doubt that many anti-Stratfordians do belittle and demean William Shakespeare of Stratford, and I would say this is one of the less attractive aspects of the movement. There's really no reason to put down the Stratford man, who appears to been a very successful moneylender, grain dealer, and theatrical impresario, and who was able to raise himself up to a position of some prominence in his hometown, eventually purchasing the second most expensive house in Stratford. He must have been a real go-getter, an aggressively upwardly mobile individual who pursued various avenues to wealth and eventually gained the title of a gentleman by purchasing a coat of arms for his family. I don't think he was the author of Hamlet, or any sort of author of all, but that's no reason to characterize him as a sneaking lowlife, as some anti-Stratfordians unfortunately do.

That said, from the anti-Stratfordian position, any discussion of the personality, character, or talents of the Stratford man is quite irrelevant to a discussion of the author William Shakespeare, because the author was someone entirely different.

Moreover, those who are skeptical of Shakespearean authorship often seem to hold the author William Shakespeare in higher regard than the academics do. The academics, because they have to fit Shakespeare's works into the timeline of the Stratford man's life, are led to believe that Shakespeare was an incorrigible plagiarist, borrowing turns of phrase, characters, and even whole plots and genres from authors who'd come before. The Oxfordians, by contrast, fit the works into the timeline of Oxford's life, which allows them to be dated much earlier and to be viewed as original–indeed, highly innovative–creations. The academics believe that Shakespeare was careless and sloppy when it came to details of foreign geography and customs, while the Oxfordians have gone to some lengths to show how accurate Shakespeare really was on such details. The academics say Shakespeare was writing only for money, grinding out potboilers as fast as he could with an eye to the box office returns, and trying to appeal to the unsophisticated tastes of the general public; Oxfordians, by contrast, believe the author wrote from the heart, dramatizing complex emotional and personal issues from his own life, and attempting to sway the Queen's position on a number of controversial topics, and that he was unconcerned with money or popularity.

Academics, of necessity, are inclined to say that Shakespeare, as a man, was a bit of a cipher, a nonentity, a Walter Mitty type who lived almost entirely within his own head and made so little impact on the people around him that no one recognized his genius or lamented his passing until years later. Oxfordians, on the other hand, see the author as a vibrant, larger-than-life figure who was closely involved in the major political and social upheavals of his day and lived a life of drama, color, action, and emotional intensity; moreover, they hold that his genius was certainly recognized by educated people of his day, but that few comments were made about it in print because he was writing politically sensitive material and was using a rather transparent pseudonym.

Now, which portrait of Shakespeare the artist is really more flattering to him? The conventional view sees him as a not-very-well educated hack writer who stole prolifically from inferior playwrights and poets, made up key details because he couldn't be bothered to get his facts straight, pandered to his audience for money, and made little or no impression on his colleagues or on educated readers and playgoers of his day. The Oxfordian view sees him as a highly educated and strikingly original writer who wrote from deeply felt personal experience, a world traveler who remembered and accurately reproduced even the smallest details of his wanderings, a political activist who tried to influence the great events of his day by speaking directly to his queen, and an influential genius who was heavily imitated by inferior writers but rarely acknowledged because of the cloak of secrecy that surrounded his persona.

I think the second view is the one that honors Shakespeare, while the first is the one that actually demeans and belittles him–that is, demeans and belittles the author of the Shakespearean canon by making him out to be much less than he was.

As I said at the beginning, there are other arguments made by Stratfordian academics that deserve to be taken seriously and considered in depth. By no means am I trying to suggest that all of their argumentation consists of fallacies, name-calling, or childish psychologizing.

These particular arguments, however, which show up over and over again in both popular and scholarly treatments of the controversy, really don't do credit to the academic community. They're not true arguments at all, but merely cheap debating tactics intended to cloud the issue and engender a knee-jerk emotional response. I hope to see less of them in the future. 

A cryptic post

To celebrate another year of blogging, here's a cryptic crossword with themes drawn from this blog's contents. Click on the image to see a full-size pop-up.  

When the puzzle is done, the red squares, read from left to right, line by line, will spell out a message. 

If you haven't done a cryptic crossword, here are some hints on how to solve one. 

Print out the image and the clues, and sharpen your pencil. Answers will be provided in a later post. 

CLUES

ACROSS

1. “Cry, sis,” a parishioner said unerringly to a ghost 

6. Ghost hunters study things that go this in the night

8. I feel fart developing in postmortem existence 

9. Partic. sixth sense

10. Like a blog post or a legal case

13. Mystic river

14. Stock index dictated the way

15. Lore and complicated British clairvoyant 

17. Not the end? 

19. Control lapel flower in another life

20. Sounds like Santa’s vehicle will do Buffy’s job

21. Debunking project: no beta males need apply

22. Skeptic hides in lusher meringue

DOWN

1. K.C. announced sleeping prophet

2. Skeptic Asimov is a current designation

3. Boston medium and Irish exterminator 

4. Randi’s alter ego? 

5. His pony’s possibly a path to past lives

7. Mixed-up guerilla joins E.R. without a psychic showman

10. What 7D may do to dinnerware

11. My shrew upset by “F” from psychical researcher 

12. Charles’ pie

13. Starting with D-Day there’s no place like it, and there was no one like him

14. Russell’s goal omits E.T. 

16. Addled heart on physical plane

18. Declare a toast to psychic experiment 

Weinergate

The largest news of the past week is, of course, Weinergate. 

In all honesty, the number of column inches devoted to this story seems disproportionate to its subject. The story may be big, and it may continue to grow, but I doubt it has the potential to be huge. Even so, there is no doubt that the scandal will be hard on the congressman and his staff.

There is no need to magnify the story or extend it. The facts, laid bare, are straightforward enough. It appears that the congressman pulled a boner and was caught with his pants down. He issued a brief statement, which may have been premature and seems to have been a stretch. It appears he got overly excited and wasn't using his head. As a result, his story is encountering stiff opposition and has prompted penetrating questions from the hardened press corps, who see him as fair game for whacking. 

Though the media continue to pump the congressman, his answers have come up short. Even as reporters flog him, he has remained rigid in sticking to his story. Apparently he has decided to run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes, while trying to beat off all inquiries. In all of this, I can't escape the feeling that we are being jerked around by Congressman Weiner. It's almost as if he is trying to screw us.

If the congressman persists in dicking around, the situation may come to a head. He risks looking like a tool, even like a bit of a prick, as he tries to make us swallow a story that would choke a chicken. 

He needs to master the situation and not be baited into losing self-control. It doesn't help him when he goes off half-cocked. He must stand tall, straighten his spine, and do the hard work of servicing his constituents. The story may be large, but it's nothing he can't handle. He just has to grab hold of it with both hands. 

To be frank, Weiner needs to show some balls.

Thought for the day

Every day I am grateful that Charlie Sheen developed an interest in 9-11 Trutherism and not in the paranormal.

Sunday morning bird attack

You've probably already seen the trailer for Birdemic: Shock and Terror, an ultra low-budget movie that generated a lot of buzz on the Web when it came out earlier this year. But if you haven't, you really must.

And if you have seen it, you'll surely want to watch it again. And again and again.

Remember, it's from "visionary writer/director James Nguyen,  the Master of the Romantic Thriller ™."

Fascinating background on this unheralded masterpiece can be found at Wikipedia.

Rooting for JREF

I don't often root for the skeptics at the James Randi Educational Foundation, but an email I just received from Winston Wu of SCEPCOP has, for once, put me squarely in the skeptics' corner.

Here's the complete, unedited email:

Upcoming 9/11 team debate on Coast to Coast on July 31, which I'm consulting on

Hi all,

Richard Gage of AE911Truth.org and a team of scientists are scheduled to debate a team of JREF debunkers on the Coast to Coast program. Gage has put me on the mailing list after reading my suggestions to him in how to debate the JREF crowd, as a consultant to his team.

Gage and his team of scientists, which include Kevin Ryan and Neils Harritt, will debate a team from the JREF. All we know is that Dave Thomas will be on the other side. We don't know who else they will have on their team.

The debate is scheduled on Coast to Coast for July 31 at this point. So mark that on your calendar. I think you can listen in either on your AM radio station or the coast to coast website. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

I talked to Gage for an hour on the phone and gave him some insights and key strategies for exposing the JREFers and their kind, which are outlined on my SCEPCOP site: http://www.debunkingskeptics.com

I've also announced this debate in my SCEPCOP forum, which I will post further updates to:

http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1220

Anyhow, if any of you have any tips or suggestions for Mr. Gage and his team, feel free to post them here, and I will forward them to him.

Should he cover a few strong undebunkable arguments, or try to cover all ten of the features of controlled demolition of the WTC? Which arguments should be emphasized most?

The debate will be primarily about the WTC and Building 7 collapse, not about the other issues surrounding 9/11.

Thanks,

Winston

For the record, I think the 9-11 "Truth" movement is literally insane. Tying this lunacy to the defense of serious parapsychological studies does infinitely more harm than good. 

I'm sure the JREF people will make mincemeat of the clueless conspiracy clowns who peddle this bilge. All of the supposedly "undebunkable" arguments for "controlled demolition" have been dismantled countless times. The best one-stop source for reasoned responses to these arrant claims is the now-famous Popular Mechanics article from 2005. 

Whatever value SCEPCOP might have had as a vehicle for informed criticism of skeptical positions has been nullified by the decision to side publicly with the "Truthers."

Good grief! When is "our side" ever going to stop shooting itself in the foot?

Sunday fun day

A scintillating smorgasbord of toothsome tidbits for your enjoyment and edification ...

I'm thrilled that teenage sailor Abby Sunderland has been rescued at sea. But she and her family need to brush up on their PR skills. Abby's first comment was that she wants to attempt her near-fatal solo circumnavigation stunt again. There's a fine line between courage and foolhardiness ... Meanwhile her dad responded to criticism of the venture by declaring that his family are "adventurers," not "accountants." However this was intended, it has the ring of: We want to have our fun, and we don't care who foots the bill. Not the way to win friends and influence people.

Rolling Stone has a lengthy, well-researched article on the oil spill and seems to assign blame pretty fairly. By the way, why don't we have a catchy name for this crisis yet? I nominate "Godspilla."

Less than two years into his term, President Barack Obama has already played more golf than George W. Bush did in his entire presidency. Maybe Obama would have visited the oil spill sooner if someone had told him it was in the Golf of Mexico. Ba-da-boom!

Speaking of golf, Tiger Woods' game is now officially in the toilet, which only makes my magnificent poem "Tigerwoodsias" more timely and meaningful than ever.

Still on sports, the L.A. Dodgers reportedly hired a Russian psychic to beam energy at the team and improve their performance. For his services they forked over a six-figure salary. This sounds flaky even to me.

You want flaky? Alvin Greene is the strangest political story of the year. He had no money, no organization, no advertising, no name recognition, and apparently did no campaigning. He is currently unemployed after leaving the military under a cloud, doesn't own a car, lives with his elderly father in the house where he grew up, is facing a felony charge that carries a prison sentence, and seems painfully inarticulate in media interviews. How the heck did this guy win the Democratic Party nomination for US Senator -- and with 60% of the vote, no less? Does it really come down to the fact that his name was first on the ballot? ... "There is something genuinely mysterious about this whole thing," says former DNC chair Don Fowler. I've got to agree.  

Legendary illustrator Frank Frazetta died in May. Growing up, I was fascinated by his evocative cover art for Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar books and Robert E. Howard's Conan series. Along with special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, who celebrates his 90th birthday later this month, Frazetta helped usher in the current era of eye-popping visual design in movies and videogames.

A movie version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was scheduled to commence filming last Friday. It's actually the first in a series of four, count 'em four, movies to be based on the epic novel. The producer is an exercise equipment tycoon with no movie experience. The director is a newbie. The screenwriter has two ten-minute shorts and an unreleased low-budget horror movie to his credit. And the cast? Well, as of two weeks ago they still didn't have a cast ... Again, there's a fine line between courage and foolhardiness. In this case, I'm thinking we may be looking at the next Titanic. I don't mean the movie Titanic, I mean the actual ship.

Dumb and dumber

I probably don't focus enough on the fraudulent side of the paranormal, so here's a reminder that not all psychics are what they claim to be.

From the Associated Press, via Yahoo News:

A New York man is suing a New Jersey psychic, claiming she defrauded him of nearly $250,000 he paid her to craft a golden statue that was supposed to ward off negativity. Charles Silveira, 38, of Seaford, Long Island, claims he never received the statue.

On Monday, he filed suit in New Jersey Superior Court in Morristown seeking to recover the money from 32-year-old Ava Miller of Mendham. Silveira also wants Miller removed from a $700,000 home he bought for her last year.

The lawsuit claims that Silveira met Miller online in 2007, and that he made several large cash payments to her over a period of several months.

Great. So this guy meets a purported psychic online, and before long has bought her a $700,000 house and "made several large cash payments," including a cool quarter mil for a mystical golden statue that she never even bothered to make.

That's some smart money management right there.

HT: Ace of Spades.

Don't let the door hit you

Today I woke up to the welcome news that Oprah Winfrey may be ending her TV show before long.

It may surprise you that I would react favorably to this development, inasmuch as Oprah has had good things to say about paranormal phenomena, and has sometimes used her show to spotlight books on the subject. And it's true that in this regard, she has probably played a positive role.

But to my way of thinking, any praise she's earned for being open to psi is more than outweighed by the dim-witted New Agery that is too often on display on her program.

There is a difference between having an interest in psi and being a New Ager. To me, the New Age movement (with some exceptions) is intellectually vacuous, empty of critical thinking, stupidly conformist, and, at times, dangerously naive. The whole cult of self-esteem - the encouragement to feel good about yourself just because you're you - leaves me cold. Self-esteem can be a good thing, but unchecked it can easily metastasize into narcissism. New Agery is grossly narcissistic, and for years Oprah has been the narcissist in chief.

The dumbness of New Agery is summed up by the stunning success of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, a pulpish action novel dressed up with pseudo-scholarly "revelations" about the secret history of Christianity. Though Brown's claims have been thoroughly debunked and his sources are no more reliable than Graham Hancock's "alternate history" tomes, millions of readers ate up Da Vinci, treating it as a religious experience in its own right. When something that silly can be taken seriously by so many people, we see clear evidence of the debilitating effects of New Agery on our culture.

One reason I'm drawn mainly to psi research from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is that investigators of that era were less likely to be infected with New Agery, and accordingly more likely to retain their critical reasoning skills. Today we have too many writers like P.M.H. Atwater, who seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff.  In 2005 I posted a reader review of Atwater's book Children of the New Millennium on the Amazon sales page. I titled my review "Deteriorates into Nonsense." An excerpt:

Atwater blends UFOs, alien abductions, genetic modification, folklore, channeling, and wacky predictions in a fruity melange of New Age craziness. Here's a typical quote:

"A contemporary voice on the subject of the new race aborning in our time is Gordon-Michael Scallion. He is known as an intuitive futurist and modern-day prophet ... It was he who several years ago affirmed that the fifth root race [i.e., the alleged next phase of human evolution] is the blue race and linked it with the then soon-to-appear blue star, which he later identified as the comet Hale-Bopp. He associated the manifestation of both of these developments with Christian beliefs about the Second Coming of Christ, and also with the Native American prophesy of the White Buffalo and the portentous 1994 birth, in Jamesville, Wisconsin, of an all-white female buffalo calf ..." (pp. 211-212)

... Atwater's silly book cheapens the field and undercuts the serious work done by others. Read it for amusement only.  

Another Amazon customer, writing in 2001, felt the same way:

Essentially, the author contends that in order to bring on the next stage in human evolution, aliens are abducting children who have had near-death experiences and altering their DNA in order to create a human super-race....

[S]he asserts that globally, children born after 1982 are the most educated, smartest ever. And to support this she offers the following quote from a "Mexican Pediatrician": "The new crop of infants are coming in more aware...eyes focused and alert, necks strong, lying in bassinets no bigger than chickens and with a knowingness I can not describe. They are very special babies this new crop." ...

Later she describes this "crop" of children as the "Blue Race", because they represent the 5th of 7 (why did I know there were going to be 7?) stages in human evolution.... To lend support here she quotes another author as follows: "All children born after '98 shall be telepathic at birth. The physical body shall change to reflect the vibrational changes of Earth under the influence of the Blue Star...All races of people shall have a bluish tint to the skin as a result." She goes on to say these children will have mastered multiple languages by age 2 and will live 200 years....

Ultimately this is just a terrible, terrible, jumbled discombobulated amalgamation of loony metaphysical yammerings - masquerading as research. The only thing "near-death" in this book is the author's reasoning ability!

Bingo.

Atwater is hardly alone. There is a plethora of dumb books aimed at the New Age audience - everything from Sylvia Browne to Erich von Daniken. Oprah may not have endorsed every nutty, scatterbrained New Age celebrity-author and would-be pop guru, but it's not for lack of trying. Instead of encouraging serious, intellectually rigorous investigation of the paranormal, she has promoted airy-fairy, feel-good emotionalism.

Bye-bye, Oprah. Like Shirley MacLaine, you've done enough damage for one lifetime.