Today in the Colorado Daily, Boulder’s local paper, there was an article about the arrest of a psychic from Lafayette.  Now, I use the word “psychic” because that is what these people call themselves, not because there is the slightest shred of evidence that such people are anything other than walking swine.  In fact, to call them swine is an insult to the noble species that is sus scrofa domesticus, the domestic pig.

Never would I stoop to such a level.  I resent such an implication, and so does my daffodil.  We bid you good day.

Psychics are what I like to think of as second-tier irrationality.  The first of said tiers is religion.  I’ve made my position on religion abundantly clear in the past, and I see no need to keep beating a horse that should have died centuries ago but, for some reason, continues to stagger onward, other than to distill most of the problems with religion into one brilliantly concise rebuttal, for which you will thank me: it doesn’t make sense.  That crystal clause, that sparklingly scintillating sentence serves almost solely to explain why so many problems in this world carry on existing, save for the accompaniment of this follow-up: things that don’t make sense should be ignored.

Allow me to clarify ever so slightly, in case you lost yourself in the floridity of my diction.

A) Postulations and opinions that do not make sense or are irrational (pleonastic, I know, but bear with me) should be dismissed as irrelevant to our daily lives and, therefore, ignored.

B) Religion does not make sense, and in a sweeping host of ways.

C) Religion, ipso facto, should be ignored.  QED.

Now, the second tier of irrationality is, to me, even more infuriating.  It demonstrates that one is willing to apply reason to one’s life to a sufficient extent to banish the arcane preachings of ancient parchments from one’s world view, but not to commit to such reason for the rest of one’s thinkings.  There are an astounding number of people who will say that they don’t believe in religion because it doesn’t make sense, but will also take only homeopathic remedies that have been successed to 30C or greater because their horoscope told them that it wouldn’t clash with their current crystal healing regimen.  These people are idiots.

That brings me to my quandary.  On the one hand, I hate psychics.  I think they, in the same vein as religious authorities, homeopaths, magnet healers, people who sell those little things that go on your cell phone to block the electromagnetic radiation from your brain (more on that later), chiropractors (mostly), energy healers, etc, make a living from willfully deceiving other people for their own gain, and that’s absolutely despicable.  Making money off of dishonesty, especially if you’re fucking with people’s worldviews and emotions, is unacceptable.

On the other hand, this psychic got one guy to give her $240,000 by telling him that money is evil (so he should get rid of it), and made most of her money using other people’s credit cards to buy stuff.  How did she get their card numbers?  She told them that she needed to see if their card numbers had too many sixes in them.

So really, these people kind of deserve it.

And thus the quandary.