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Miscellaneous things we talked about when recording the 6 July  2015 podcast, including more about how diseases are idiotically portrayed on TV, why going with alt-med is a bad idea, Apple vs. Microsoft (or, Why They Both Suck), why smartphones and tablets are more secure, and products that should not be named “Trojan.”

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Our aftershow this week: just some bits that were cut from our already-lengthy discussion, including airline security, government’s technological incompetence, LastPass issues, copyrights and communism, free markets in California, and Marxists in Seattle.

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The song featured in the most recent Bogosity podcast is reproduced here in its entirety, with permission. Here are the liner notes from DJ Shanek:

Sylvia Browne is one of those fake psychics (well, okay, all psychics are fake) who’ll talk to the dead, give medical advice, or whatever else she thinks her victims will buy. I’ve had a special hatred of her for years, as this entry on my personal blog shows. Now with the facts of the Sean Hornbeck case showing just how wrong she is (the perpetrator is not tall, does not have long hair and dreadlocks, is not dark-skinned, Hornbeck was not between two boulders, was not dead…), I was inspired to tear her apart musically.

I figured I couldn’t just use this one example of her being wrong, since her excuse that her manager has been telling everyone is that she’s ”not 100% right.” So I needed lots of examples, and there are plenty! But I found it was too awkward to play a recording of her reading, and then play something showing how it’s wrong. So I focused on three examples where she is clearly wrong, just by listening to the reading.

The first is just a funny case of her telling a caller to Larry King Live that her mother is dead when she’s alive. The second, where a Montel Williams audience member is told to look for her boyfriend in water when he really died in the WTC attacks, makes me want to rip Sylvia’s throat out. And the third one, where Sylvia tries to convince a grieving couple that their daughter was shot, just breaks my heart. The song is called Sylvia Browne Must Be Stopped, because, well, she must be stopped!

Tying all of this together is her refusal to take James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge, which she agreed to take in 2001, agreed to the protocol for, and has been ducking it ever since. The song starts out with a recording of her telling Larry King she’ll take the test, and then her manager telling Anderson Cooper that Sylvia won’t take it because she has ”nothing to prove to James Randi.” It ends with Randi and Sylvia’s manager arguing about it, seemingly endlessly. John King wraps it all up with one quip that was just too good not to include.

Here are all the voices appearing in this song:

The Amazing James Randi
The Pretty-Cool Anderson Cooper
The All-Right-I-Guess Larry King
The Questionable Montel Williams
The Contemptible Linda Rossi
The Total-Piece-Of-Crap-And-She-Knows-It-Plus-She’s-Ugly-Too Sylvia Browne
The Got-In-A-Very-Good-Quip-At-The-End John King
Some Very Sympathetic Callers and Audience Members

I should mention that none of these have given their permission or endorsed this song in any way. This is a parody of material (and thus fair use under USC 17 § 107) that really sends itself up. My voice does not appear because, well, how could I possibly add anything to that?

I hope you enjoy it, I hope it breaks your heart, I hope you both laugh at and hate Sylvia Browne when it’s all over, and I hope you’ll agree that she must be stopped! You can keep track of all of her goings-on at the website StopSylvia.com.