The Works of Sylvia Browne

[swanflake]

Okay, she is an author so this thread is technically acceptable, right? But need I even bother to confess that I only wish to start this thread to share various ariticles and videos proving that she's a FRAUD!!!

Andersoon Cooper reports...

"She was shot." . . . "But she just collapsed in her room." . . . "I don't care... . . . She was so pretty." [/color]

[url=http://us.video.aol.com/video.index.adp?mode=1&pmmsid=1824725[/url]"The body is in water." . . . "But he was a fireman on September 11th. . . . "Well, they use water to put out fires." [/url][/color]

[Deleted]

She's one of Rose's favorite authors. 'Nuff said.

[Deleted]

All the debunking, on one convenient site

[sumire]

Thanks so much for the debunking links--I hate her, although I haven't actually read any of her books--just seen her on Montel a lot.

[Shanmac]

She's despicable. Just awful. That bit on Montel where she told the woman her boyfriend (a firefighter killed on 9/11) was just horrifying. She needs to shut her mouth, the money-grubbing phony.

[Deleted]

Browne's lawyers attempt to shut down stopsylviabrowne.com. I doubt that's going to work.

God, she's a loathesome individual. I wonder how someone gets into that line of work. I had this roommate who was always claiming she had psychic abilities. She'd do things like predict who the phone was for when it rang, and she was eerily accurate. I'm pretty sure she was just good at making unconscious connections, though - like, roommate A's mother called her every 3 or 4 days, and it's been a few days, so when the phone rings it's a pretty good bet it's A's mother.

I could see that someone might have pretty good intuition but attribute it to being psychic, particularly if the people around them reinforce it. They come to believe it, and maybe develop cold reading skills without even realizing it.

Then they end up consciously cold reading and eventually hot reading because they don't want to disappoint people when their 'gift' isn't working.

Anyway, just my idle speculation about how someone could wind up doing that sort of thing without setting out to be a huge fraud. I wonder if Sylvia believes in herself or if she knows she's full of shit?

[Deleted]

James Randi has a few books on hoaxes and psychics and speculates that quite a few psychics start out actually believing they have "the gift". They get positive attention for it, discover they can make a ridiculously easy living telling people what they want to hear, and they can't admit the truth without being exposed as thieves and liars.

I flipped through Ms. Browne's book at an airport gift shop once. Tedious drivel but no less idiotic than Deepak Chopra. Both in her books and on tv, she strikes me as quite dense.

[petals]

spordelia said:

She's one of Rose's favorite authors. 'Nuff said.

I was going to post that! [/whine]

The only "psychic" I hate more than her is John Edward.

[Smilla]

My take on Sylvia Brown is that she has some kind of schizo-affective disorder, though it's probably one that allows her to remain relatively high-functioning.

I think her predictions are right a very small percentage of the time. I mean, I can think of a handful of predictions she's made that I remember that seemed to come to pass or that "almost" did. Not saying it means she's a great or accurate psychic, but every once in a while she really pulls one out.

What freaks me out are her descriptions of the Other Side, which are remarkably like my impressions of it except, well, obviously I don't claim to be able to get the kind of information she says she can get from it. A friend of mine from our local psychic community, who HATES Sylvia Brown, says that if Sylvia talks to anyone on the Other Side, my friend suspects it isn't any of the "good guys."

What I can't figure out is the recent criticism of her in mass media. What did she predict to incur that? (Sorry, I'm kinda paranoid these days, and tend to suspect that no one, even psychics of questionable repute, gets targeted by the mainstream media for no reason.)

And topic? The last Sylvia Brown book I read mentioned a future in which many governments decide that their elected officials should undergo random drug testing while serving their terms. It might be another one of her big "misses," but hee.

[Deleted]

I think her predictions are right a very small percentage of the time.

I'm sure if I made a bunch of predictions a very small percentage of them would come true too, and I'm about as psychic as a doorknob.

Did you watch the clips in the first post? She's coming under fire for several high-profile and massive blunders - telling Shawn Hornbeck's parents he was dead, saying the miners were alive just before they were found dead, and telling that poor woman her fiance had drowned when the man was a firefighter who died on 9/11. She's bogus. Not to mention that if you look at her 'celebrity predictions' over the last few years, she's been right only for things anyone could have predicted, like Britney getting a divorce. She's been totally wrong about almost everything, like predicting John Kerry was going to be president.