Can you please try to ‘see’ where YOU believe the plane went down?
- Uri Geller
“Malaysia Plane Crash: what do you all think? If the plane did not crash is it possible for it to have landed in either North Korea or Iran?? How many of you think it crashed how many of you think it landed somewhere.” – Uri Geller
The Last Spoonbender’s on the move again. How or why is Uri Geller relevant to the Malaysian Airlines Rescue Mission is beyon me, but according to Mr. Geller he was approached by senior officials from Malaysia in order to provide assistance in detecting a plane.
Now I know that certain celebrities have been approached for aid from official investigations before. The one I know about and have defended in the past is Ray Mears. See Ray Mears is a survivalist but a different sort. He is a critic of Bear Grylls and in the UK is quite popular because he has a different attitude to the wild. He doesn’t treat it as something to be tamed but something to test yourself and live in harmony. Ray Mears isn’t out biting the heads of snakes or leaping feet first into a waterfall, but is a patient demonstrator of skill. Whether it be the creation of fire or the construction of a bow or the usage of flints, Ray Mears brings a sort of respect of his craft. He collects skills and traditions from people across the globe and in his own right is an expert tracker and woodsman. Possibly the finest in the world due to his immense range since he has lived with hunter gatherer societies across the world and catalogued and experienced their lives and even enriched and tried to protect lost arts. The most touching scene was him sitting down with a native from the Amazon rainforest and utilising his experience and the teaching of a man who had “lost” the ability to make fire from scratch due to the presence of matches and redeveloping the art of fire generation. Ray Mears was critical of Bear Grylls because Grylls teaches “bad” habits. It makes for good TV, a man leaping into waterfalls and eating snakes raw but Ray points out the first thing every survivor did was “Sit down and make a fire”, doing what Bear Grylls does will destroy you.
Ray Mears was asked by British Police to track Raoul Moat, a killer hiding out in the wilds. Raoul was living off the land and had shot and killed three people already. He was a quiet part of it, unwilling to take credit or push his personal profile or agenda. His tracking helped flush Raoul into the open and brought him to bay when Raoul killed himself. The fear was that the spree killing would continue if not for Mr. Mears and the pressure he helped place on Raoul who was an experienced woodsman himself.
There is a difference between Uri Geller and Mears, in that Mears is an expert on a real thing. Bushcraft and Campcraft are real things, for us a hobby but for many cultures it was a way to live. It was life and death, and there is a rich culture of it world wide. You can see the genuine changes wrought by mixing of this culture such as when Ray Mears gifted a modern longbow to a Kalahari bushman to show him what we “shoot” with that’s similar to the Bushman’s pride of owning a tool that could keep him safe from even a lion and kill buffalo while being easier to use.
I have never seen anything involving Uri Geller that created a rapport with others in a positive manner. Geller has always been a source of ignorance rather than knowledge. I quote Dawkins in stating that the garden is beautiful enough without inventing fairies to live in it. Uri taps into everything from pseudoscience to conspiracy to cement his position of celebrity. Of vapid, talentless celebrity. I do not mind t he footballer because he has talent. The adoration of millions is due to his skill. But not Mr. Geller. The adoration is due to the delusion that there exist psychic powers and that Geller is a master.
The Malaysian Government and official line is being criticised. There are voices within the response team that are asking painful questions with regards to the mishandling of the situation. Particularly the sheer lack of rapid information. Among complaints are the relatively slow release of passenger lists, faulty information from radar data that should have been pulled up rapidly, poor information with regards to the transponders and most importantly the fact the search was directed in the entirely wrong part of the world.
Anyone from there asking Uri Geller to weigh in would do well to remember his needless and painful attempt to predict the location of Helga Farkas who was kidnapped where he told the world that she was alive and safe only for her body to be found later having been murdered by her kidnappers.
Remote viewing, or RV as it is known, is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant target using extra-sensory perception (ESP). This was subject to a series of experiments and was proven to be bunk. It’s claims lay broken like the weapons of Vercingetorix at the feet of Caesar. Okay, a bad analogy. Both were real men and did real things while psychics have generally been parasites who feast upon people who desperately miss and love their dead and who hope and wish that this is an existence where we can be re-united to those we love.
To ask and involve a psychic in any event is laughable, but to do this is an affront to people who have been waiting for news of their loved ones. Especially in light of accusations that the Malaysian Government has mishandled the investigation, bringing Mr. Geller in has done nothing to help and has only cemented the notion that some people in the Malaysian response are out of their depth.
Either that or Mr. Geller has lied about the request from Malaysia in order to raise his profile.
But Uri didn’t predict everything. The anti-Uri backlash on Twitter was rather large and many of his own fans consider his move to be insensitive and the subject too serious for a psychic to play with.
Uri is worse than a vulture, a vulture waits till something’s dead to profit from it. Uri couldn’t even wait.