Oh Shut Up and Keep Marching

There's a new theme for the faithful few at the Academy for Psychic Studies:

For a little more information on this topic, I'd ask you to get in touch with the Academy for their side of the story.  In fact, there is a "church" service this coming Sunday that has endurance as its theme.  It's a great opportunity to go see how warm and nourishing they really are.  Just don't go there without at least 50 bucks in your pocket because after all the donation buckets are passed around and the sales pitches for the after-church trance experience (which is available for a donation of 20 bucks or so), the helpful recordings are sold to you and whatever else has been laid on you, you'll need that much to pay for it all.

Considering the current straits of the Academy, I think endurance is a topic that fits - if the remaining eight or ten or whatever fearful souls don't hang in there, the Witches will lose out on a chunk of income.  And you know how much they hate that.

So, it's a good time to tell the remaining few to stick to their guns or whatever their weapon of choice and keep dumping their spare money into the cauldron.  At least, it's a good time for the Witches to do that.

After considering what that church service may contain, I looked around on the interweb and found a piccy that might be a bit more apropos...

The things they wish for are the things that are out of reach.  Things like public interest; public adulation; getting the public to come on over to experience the warmth, nourishment and pickpocketing that only our beloved Academy for Psychic Studies can provide.

Looks like all these kinds of orgs are having some kind of crisis.  Interest in the wacky and weird teachings these guys have are not exactly setting the world on fire - especially now that Oprah is off the air and that sweat lodge guy is sweating it out behind bars.

But there is some good evidence that good PR can indeed reform and re-establish a once tarnished image.

Take a look at the Berkeley Psychic Institute site.  Not only are there smiling pics of their ministerial staff (it's on their DejaVu site and one of them can possibly be called HOT) there is a sense of activity there, a sense that there is a mission (what that mission is, I don't know but you'd have to ask PsychDoctorate about it) and a sense there is an atmosphere of warmth and nourishment you wouldn't find at a Victorian house a few blocks away.

And amazingly, there is a piece that aired on ABC's Nightline right there up front.  It's not scandalous.  Not in the least.  In fact, it puts BPI in a pretty favorable light.  It's exactly the thing BPI needed to maintain their position of prominence in the psychic world.

Of course, it took a while to get that piece and it required some luck and some good PR to gain the visibility to interest Nightline.

I always considered BPI to to the smart thing.  That's not to say I endorse their teachings or methods.  But if you really look a t their activities from a marketing standpoint, it's all the right things to do.

So, here is really no need for BPI to round up the troops and inspire them to continue a Death March straight to hell. BPI doesn't have a Death March at all.

I just wonder what those unfortunate faithful few in that Victorian house down the street are marching towards besides the edge of a cliff.

   

As we are near the 2 year anniversary of the day we powned the Spiritual Rights Foundation, I thought I would give you all a look at the document that did it.

Below is the anti-SLAPP motion we filed in response to the Spiritual Rights Foundation complaint.

In the interest of fairness (or maybe a good laugh), the SRF complaint is available for download here:

Reverend William "Bill" Duby's Duby-ous Achievements at the Academy for Psychic Studies

 Yeah, I know it's not St. Paddy's Day
but a pic like this make me want a Guinness.

In honor of the Academy for Psychic Studies' attempt to re-write their own crooked and perverted history, I thought I would recycle an older article describing just a few of the outrageous and unlikely miraculous accomplishments claimed by the Academy's founder.

Bill Duby (Reverend Bill to his followers) made several claims that were dubious.  He claimed to have once de-materialized with Angela Silva.  Of course, he did it before any of us met him and he never did it again because we would disintegrate if we knew the truth so there was no way he'd show us how it happened but of course, he did it and you'd better not question that fact or even joke about it or he will completely destroy you because Bill was a minister of peace.

Yeah, right.

Bill claimed several accomplishments that were miraculous or very difficult to have attained.  It wasn't just one or two of them.  He had a whole bunch of them.  Anyone who questioned his dubious achievements were relentlessly hounded, demeaned and pummeled into submission before being dragged out the door and dropped in the gutter.  While Bill's claims of great accomplishments were questionable, that he would utterly destroy anyone who doubted them, wasn't.

Still, Bill Duby was honored and deified as the psychotic founder of his psychotic church, the Spiritual Rights Foundation.  Bill's visage was plastered all over the building and on the web site, newspaper, audio recordings, video recordings and anything else where he could be seen.

SRF headquarters looked like Pyongyang (that's the capital of North Korea, you fucking SRF troll) with the portrait of Bill displayed just like portraits of Kim Jong Il.

Today, there's a whole different face of the Academy for Psychic Studies presented to the public.  There's no face displayed.  Look at their web site: a few names, no pictures and no personal stories from the trained psychotics of the Academy.

Most prominent:  no pictures of the psychotic founder.

What's that all about?

It's the Academy for Psychic Studies trying to un-ring the bell they started clanging so many years ago.  While it's nice they finally stopped all that racket, it tells you something about them.  After the Academy assaulted our hearing with their long and annoying testimonies of the benefits of all they have to offer, they have been falling silent.  They are sounding more and more ashamed of the perverse legacy of their founder, Reverend William (Bill) Duby.

I'm not the first to write about Bill Duby's odd and utterly destructive manner of psychological manipulation.  I'm certainly not the only one who has exposed the crazy practices behind the iron gates of the Academy for Psychic Studies.  I'm just one of many and I am one of a few who are writing about this crazy group online.

But to the Academy for Psychic Studies, when their own history is exposed the only response is silence.  In fact, their silence is so strong those who are looking for information on the Academy have nowhere to look but right here.

The Academy for Psychic Studies has completely eliminated all reference to Rev. William (Bill) Duby from their website. They have also removed all reference to Angela Silva and Robin Dumolin.

The Academy's commercial site offers audio recordings, videos and books on meditation and spiritual matters.  Materials featuring Rev. William Duby are still offered for sale.  Recordings featuring the soothing presence of Angela Silva and Robin Dumolin are very absent from the product line.  Why is that?

When Bill Duby was still around to annoy us he presented Robin Dumolin and Angela Silva as not just heads of his psychotic church, he presented them as the embodiment of his psychotic church.  Any affront to the perverse belief system he presented to us as divine information found only through his personal interpretation of the Bible and his ability to channel the spirit and presence of God Himself and Jesus Christ was also a personal insult to Angela and Robin which would be punished with water boarding and crucifixion.

Despite the above women holding prominent positions at the Academy for Psychic Studies, they choose to hide in the shadows.  They would rather pretend their founder never existed.  They hope that people would ignore what is being said about them here and choose instead to ring the bell on the iron gate in person to experience for themselves the warm and nourishing love and acceptance of the Academy for Psychic Studies.

The folly of the Academy's response is pretty clear:  by not getting ahead of the story, by not defining themselves in the public eye, they are allowing this blog and the others who write about, collect stories about and otherwise document what is said about the cult that is the Academy for Psychic Studies to provide un-challenged opinions and they are allowing themselves to be defined.

And that definition isn't always something they'd like to see.

When any interested party Google's the Academy, the Spiritual Rights Foundation, Rev, Bill Duby, Angela Silva or Robin Dumolin  they wind up right here on this blog.  And this blog isn't exactly their friend.  They've gone so far as to remove their Facebook page.  There's no Twitter feed for them but I guess there never was one.  The public access TV talk show has been removed and so has the infamous radio show "Total Prosperity".

After so many years of blasting their faces online, in print, on public access television, on the radio and everywhere they can try to look good, they are now pretending to have never existed.  As far as Bill is concerned, he has gone from their beloved founder to "who's that?"

Well, none of his followers knew much about Bill - he never told the same story about himself twice.  All I know is that Bill claimed to be a lot of things - things he could have never been.

As for his Witches of Ellsworth Street - it's pretty clear who they are and what they are feeling right now.  They are empty shells of themselves in fear of the world and in fear of the things said by the people they have touched with their gnarled hands.

The time has come for the Witches to close that den of perversion, greed and spiritual dominance.

Closure would be the decent thing to do but when was the last time they ever did a decent thing for the people around them?  Would people who will host anniversary dinners, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas dinners demand the food be purchased by the ministers and staff who serve them (purchased with the personal funds of the staff and ministers' personal funds - not SRF's); people who demand their followers say nothing but praise for them and people who chase all their flock for the lunch money in their pockets do the decent thing for those who serve the church?

Well, I think we all know the answer to that.

As we wait to see how this nightmare will end, I'll dredge up some of the crazy and impossible achievements of the founder of the Academy for Psychic Studies, Reverend William Duby.

And as the Spiritual Rights Foundation, the Academy for Psychic Studies or whatever the hell they are calling themselves today, remains silent, they can't ignore that they were the ones who started all the noise.  They were the ones who contributed to the nutty and demented visage that is their public persona.  They are the ones who have the ability to rehabilitate themselves.

This is a open and public forum.  Despite the wailing of the Witches of Ellsworth, not one person has been banned from this blog.  No one.  Blogger doesn't allow for the exclusion of any individual commenter anyway.  And only one comment has been removed for cause.  That cause was because the commenter made a personal attack on a reader that did not advance debate or present a cogent and relevant position.  You may notice that I have retained several intelligent comments such as "fuck you" that are directed at me. I allow attacks on myself and will retain them and display them prominently.  Attacks on other readers are not allowed.



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update:  see the link at the bottom of this post

Rev. William Duby made several "Duby-ous" claims about his background. He claimed to be Psychic, Father and Husband, Soldier, Computer Programmer, Government Employee, Card Room Worker, Preacher, Construction Worker, Card Cheat, Stand-Up Comedian, student and simultaneously disabled for insanity all in a 16 year span of time.

In that period, Bill claims he took 7 years off (so the above actually happened in 9 years) to study all nine of the great scriptures. If you can name all nine, I'll give you a dozen Krispy Kremes. He also spent most of these 7 years meditating.  In bed.  In Bill's words: "I only got up to eat, sleep, shit and fuck."  So I bet he studied by putting the "scriptures" under his pillow so the words would float into his brain, then wiped his butt with the pages.

He also claimed to have healed some 25,000 souls while carrying on affairs with hundreds of women - far surpassing Tiger Woods' Duby-ous achievement.

Bill speaks of a close relationship with Lewis Bostwick, founder of the Berkeley Psychic Institute (BPI) saying often "Lewis took me under his wing." and that "Lewis" blessed him with the blow-off: "Now go out and learn."

According to those who saw it, Bill was near Lewis Bostwick only long enough to be considered a pain in the ass (who says they weren't a good judge of character?) and get dragged out of BPI HQ to be banished to the Walnut Creek facility and far away from Lewis Bostwick permanently.

We could confirm some of the things William Duby claimed (he was certainly married, a Soldier and a pest at BPI). Some we just knew was true - like his claim of insanity.

The rest of it was all blather. Mere fantasies of Bill's damaged mind intended to make him the holy man he could never truly be.

Maybe he's no different from the rest of them?

At any rate, Reverend William Duby exaggerated his background and applied a spin to the key events in his life to entrance and impress his followers and to trick them into elevating him into the spiritually superior, holy and blessed leader he never really was.

So if you can see Reverend Bill's Duby-ous achievements as what they really are, you might find a series of events that only a loser, a con man, a charlatan could have experienced.


Instead of idolizing losers, how about we all recognize the hero in all of us? Why not create a miracle of your own?

Do something simple: help a kid with homework. Feed someone. Pick up trash. Say good morning to your neighbor.

I'll bet your grandkids will idolize you for it. So will your neighbors.


What Duby-ous achievements do you know about?  Feel free to leave them in the comment field.  Let us know!


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Below is a link to another infamous article in American Spirit Newspaper describing having an experience called "the light".  An experience with "the light" was said to be the defining experience of spirituality, the holy grail of enlightenment and the peak of one's spiritual openness.  Despite that status, the spiritual significance of "the light" was never explained (not, at least, to anyone at the Academy for Psychic Studies) and whatever relevance this experience had to your belief in the things Rev. William Duby taught was never explained.  It was said that the experience was all you needed to believe.

Read this mess carefully.  If your brain cells are still alive you'll see a shocking thing: the people in this article are describing their own dissociation from the real world (which can be a real mental disorder) and Angela Silva at least, describes what seems to be an LSD trip.  How do I know this?  Well, in speaking with people knowledgeable in psychology and with people experienced in taking LSD, I found that their descriptions of those events match what those in the article describe - especially the LSD hallucination.

And as one guy said, "Look at the guy in the picture.  He's gone.  You can see it in his eyes."

Bill being the ever-crafty con man, probably slipped Angela some LSD in a drink so he could impress her with his psychic prowess.  Who knows what else he did to her but if it all happened, it would explain a lot about them both.

It all happens for a reason - SRF's reason.

Props to Psychdoctorate for providing the inspiration I needed to write this article.

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Every time I have an evil thought about Sarah Palin, SRF takes a dollar from someone.  Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc!

Damn.  Now I have to get treatment Tiger Woods style. 

OK, so that's a crappy example.  Here are two much better ones:

From Attacking Faulty Reasoning by T. Edward Damer:
"I can't help but think that you are the cause of this problem; we never had any problem with the furnace until you moved into the apartment." The manager of the apartment house, on no stated grounds other than the temporal priority of the new tenant's occupancy, has assumed that the tenant's presence has some causal relationship to the furnace's becoming faulty.

From With Good Reason by S. Morris Engel:
More and more young people are attending high schools and colleges today than ever before. Yet there is more juvenile delinquency and more alienation among the young. This makes it clear that these young people are being corrupted by their education.

=================================

"Post hoc ergo propter hoc" is the belief that an event is caused by whatever happens before it no matter when that previous thing happened, no matter how it happened, no matter if that first thing is totally not connected to what happens afterwards.  It's like saying "step on a crack and break your mother's back" and is considerd a logical fallacy.  It can explain some predictable and reproducable events (like if I bash my thumb with a hammer, I curse loudly - it's true!  Ask Joy about it!) but not much more. 

Oddly, it seems to be a basis for people to believe "everything happens for a reason" - you know, like when the trained psychotics at the Spiritual Rights Foundation say "you mocked it up!".

Cults and "spiritual" organizations rely on the fallacy of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" to maintain the illusion of effectiveness and truth of their teachings.

When they have an example of a miracle, they rely on that delusion and kindergartener logic to support and promote their unreliable and morally bankrupt teachings by touting that a favorable and beneficial event was certainly a result of their enlightened and spiritual activities.

SRF used it all the time.  I encountered it from the day I wandered in the door, thinking I was visiting a hair replacement center.

The first thing I remember is the time William Duby was hospitalized for a diabetic crisis, having an elevated blood glucose level. Bill's blood sugars was claimed to be the highest ever seen and scared the living crap out of his doctors. He responded to treatment and was released. For years, his recovery was attributed to his strong psychic skills - not to good medical treatment.

I was hospitalized for heart failure. I came into the ER with a record-setting heart ejection fraction (EF) of only 15%. That is so low, my doctors nearly dropped from heart failure themselves - normal is about 55% to 65%.  With cautions that I would experience only a limited recovery, I responded to treatment and was released from the hospital with an armload of medicines and comprehensive treatment program to follow.

My recovery took much longer but was as miraculous as Bill's.  I can walk and do more than I expected.  While there is no complete recovery from a serious illness (Bill Duby and I had to take lots of medicines to remain in recovery and maintain our health - I will always need them), I had said and still say it's my strict adherance to my treatment plan that effected my recovery. I did receive psychic healings and all that. However even then, I was clear that I believed the miracle of modern medicine healed me - the healings helped me just calm down and focus on maintaining my treatment.

Of course, there were several oddballs who came by to offer new age and spiritual healing advice.  They gave recommendation for full body scans for nutritional deficiencies to Indian healing rituals to the use of vitamins, minerals, motor oil, recycled pond water and re-processed rat poison to purge my body of the negative forces consuming me.

For reasons unclear to me, one of the cult members, considered to be their resident "health and body healing expert" dropped in to deliver a special healing concoction and instructed me to take a full dose three times a day. 

Each dose of this new age mess of "healing minerals" contained about twice the amount of salt and potassium a healthy person should have per day.  For them, taking this stuff three times a day can lead to heart health problems.  Big problems.  Like what I had.  For those of us with cardiovascular issues (hypertension and heart disease) that much salt and potassium can lead to death.  Ask your doctor if you need to know why.

Yes, that result is  predictable and reproducable and no, I am not about to participate in your reproduction experiment.  However if you follow the next execution at a Texas prison, you'll see how salt and potassium are used to send a condemned person to meet his maker.

I never took the stuff and that person is still the SRF healer.  I recovered despite that person's help.

Unfrotunately, my recovery gave SRF a reason to believe their deluded, psychotic healing methods caused my heart to work a lot better. If they were responsible for my recovery, it would be the only time in medical history that heart failure was treated successfully by doing not a damn thing.

In fact, they gave me a "healing" just before I dragged my one-foot-in-the-grave ass to the ER of our local hospital.  That alone should tell you how effective that "healing" was - instead of a pathway to a prosperous life, it was a near-death experience I hope they will not foist upon you.

Despite being in a post-recovery haze of prescription medicine side-effects (which still plagues me) I wrote about that healing in the SRF organ "American Spirit Newspaper". In the past, they touted my recovery as the reason to come in to SRF for healing.  They've read my article on the air and proudly waved it in front of prospective victims.

Now that I am on the other side, all that changed.  As I am an official SRF infidel, my words are suspect, corrupt, blasphemous, deceitful.  Yet they remain on the SRF web site and is still prominently displayed on the American Spirit.  How in hell are they going to explain THAT?

I just love the irony.

At any rate, whenever someone has a small victory in thier life - one that would have happened even without SRF, they jump in front of the parade waving their arms and any other parts of their bodies exclaiming the power of their techniques and the strength of conviction that SRF and only SRF will heal your cracked-up life.
 
But if you have a personal crisis or encouter one of the many speed bumps along the road of life, those same caring, warm and nourishing psychics of the Spritual Rights Foundation turn away, blaming your troubles on your innate evil and your habit of "mocking-up" issues that are not in your best interest.  SRF healings are available, though, for a nominal fee and are recommended to you for the duration of your troubles - which is usually forever.
 
In order to prevent more evil from entering your un-spiritual life, you will be hounded to "bring your tithing space into present time".  You will be advised that by following God's law to give the head psychotics of SRF up to 30% of your assets every year and up to 30% of your income on top of that, you will remove the evil, deceit and overall bad energy from your life and will maintain a truly spiritual and holy existance.
 
Don't those women staring into crystal balls, chopping off chicken's heads and doing things with religious icons I don't want to hear about say exactly the same thing?  Aren't many of them jailed and sued as well?
 
Can you put your faith into an organization and a group of people whos only support for their dysfunctional operations and outrageous claims is "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc."?
 
Many of us did.
 
And because we did, we continue to pay the price in rebuilding lost assets and wages.  We struggle to re-establish the relationships with our families and friends that fell apart.  We pray daily we can continue to maintain the freedom of our lives.
 
If you believe that because one thing happened a subsequent event is always related, then the Spiritual Rights Foundation is for you.
 
Yes, if you knock over a glass of water, you will get a spill.  If you crash your car and don't wear a seat belt, you'll be injured.  Those kind of events are predictable and reproducable. 
 
But if you think a man who proudly called himself "legally insane" healed himself from diabetes by using the same psychic energy techniques he used to con you out of your life savings, your weekly paycheck, your spouse, your children and any self-respect you ever had maybe you might think twice about accepting that something happens for a reason.

If you think the wives of that same man are annointed to carry on the delusional and idiotic teachings of their spiritual husband, if you believe they and they alone must be presented with your hard-won assets and hard-earned wages because, well, their husband said they could and they have always done it so you'd better hand it over, please take some time to reconsider the reasons why.

Because many of those reasons are all the wrong ones.