The Unbelievably True Story Of How Craigslist Murdered Over 100 People

from the the-real-killer-here-are-the-killers dept   https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160112/08430333308/unbelievably-true-story-how-craigslist-murdered-over-100-people.shtml

It's time to panic about Craigslist again. If it's not a key player in the human trafficking scene, it's the unwitting accomplice in over 100 murders.

[A]ccording to the Advanced Interactive Media Group, an industry watchdog and analyst, Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark just three weeks ago, when a 22-year-old man from Gary, Ind., attempted to rob the middle-aged couple who’d arranged to buy his car.

Frankly, I'm surprised the number isn't higher. Not because Craigslist is the best thing that happened to pimps and murders since the invention of the internet, but because it encompasses nearly every major and minor city in the United States.

And, seriously: "Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark?" I realize "users of Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark" is a much clunkier sentence, but this sounds like it was written by a grandstanding sheriff, rather than a journalist.

Not only is it accessible by a vast majority of the US population, but its reach goes far beyond the buying and selling of goods. It also handles personal ads, searches for roommates and dozens of other ways for two strangers to meet face-to-face.

Sure, the voice behind this latest "let's worry about Craigslist" isn't a misguided government official or law enforcement officer with an anti-sex worker ax to grind. It's AIM's Peter Zollman, who's put together a completely not-for-profit SafeTrade "initiative," which helps set up safe areas for meetups and transactions, usually with the assistance of local law enforcement.

But to suggest this is a Craigslist problem -- rather than a human being problem -- is off-base. Nevertheless, Zollman makes this assertion:

Zollman and other critics say Craigslist has done “next to nothing” to encourage safe use or deter criminals. Among other things, the site doesn’t provide safety information unless a user explicitly seeks it out, and the company has not endorsed any third-party efforts — like Zollman’s own campaign to create “SafeTrade” spots at local police stations.

Zollman wants the site to make safety warnings more prominent and to get behind some sort of "safe trading" program, whether his or someone else's. But his company's tracking of "Craigslist murders" tries to imply it is somehow worse than the old system of classified ads in newspapers -- which arguably led to an exponentially higher number of murders than Craigslist has, even given the limited, very local reach of most papers.

Zollman's take on Craigslist is decidedly more measured than it was a few years ago, when he referred to it as a "cesspool of crime." Unfortunately, his willingness to play into fearful narratives that sell better than more measured takes on the issue undercuts the sincerity of his "SafeTrade" offer. And it does nothing to dissuade law enforcement and other government officials from attacking Craigslist for the acts of a very, very, very slim minority of its users.

Even when Zollman takes into account the positives of Craigslist, he still undercuts his own arguments by saying things like the company's "ethos of anonymity" makes it prime territory for criminal behavior -- something that throws shade at Craigslist and anonymity, as if both of these elements were inherently suspect, rather than just being treated as so much thrown baby/bathwater by the SafeTrade founder.

Common sense and personal responsibility are in short supply, which is why people are always happy to suggest it's the platforms they use that should be doing more, rather than doing anything of their own will and volition. Meeting a stranger always carries a risk. Doing so while carrying lots of cash even more so. (However, given the ubiquity of asset forfeiture programs, I'd be somewhat wary about taking large sums of cash to a police station…) I agree Craigslist should feature safety information more prominently, but then again, nothing in its warning is groundbreaking or otherwise unavailable to potential users.
And Zollman's murder tracker would be a lot more honest if it were simply a list of people who've used Craigslist to facilitate their criminal acts, rather than giving the impression that Craigslist is somehow, in some very minimal way, responsible for these incidents.

Video Game Industry Embraces Internet And New Business Models: Others Should Pay Attention

from the game-theory dept

We talk a great deal around these parts about new business models at both the macro and micro level. Individual experiments and successes, as well as failures, are both interesting and instructive, but a good macro-level look at how entire industries can function in a digital marketplace should be equally useful. With that in mind, Chris Dixon has an absolute must-read post on Medium on the lessons other industries can learn from the PC gaming industry's success in recent times.

It's worth noting before we start here that the past five years or so have been chock-full of hand-wringing over every potential danger to the PC gaming industry you could imagine, from casual mobile games to piracy. And, to some extent, I can understand that fear. After all, PC gaming has perhaps lower barriers to entry than other entertainment mediums, making competition more heavy, while the average consumer of PC games is likely going to be more familiar with the ways of piracy and the technical workarounds to DRM than the average music or movie consumer. Too bad for all that fear that, as Dixon's article notes, the PC gaming industry has enjoyed healthy growth over these past several years (something like 50% revenue growth since 2012). Much of that has to do with the innovative ways gaming companies have found to do business.

Even if you have no interest in video games, if you are interested in media, you should be interested in PC gaming. Over the past decade, PC gaming has, for a variety of reasons, become a hotbed of experimentation. These experiments have resulted in a new practices and business models — some of them surprising and counterintuitive — that provide valuable lessons for the rest of the media industry.

Those experiments will sound quite familiar to the Techdirt reader. They include free-to-play models, with game extras being sold to gamers. They also include the development of strong and convenient selling platforms, like Steam and GOG.com. The so-called "freemium" model is particularly well done in PC games, in part because many of those games respect gamers enough not to use the model to break the integrity of the game itself.

The PC gaming world has taken the freemium model to the extreme. In contrast to smartphone games like Candy Crush that are “free-to-play,” PC games like Dota 2 are “free-to-win.” You can’t spend money to get better at the game — that would be seen as corrupting the spirit of fair competition. (PC gamers, like South Park, generally view the smartphone gaming business model as cynical and manipulative). The things you can buy are mostly cosmetic, like new outfits for your characters or new background soundtracks. League of Legends (the most popular PC game not on Steam) is estimated to have made over $1B last year selling these kinds of cosmetic items.

Medium also goes on to point out PC gaming's latest foray into money-making in the form of live events. In what will sound familiar to anyone who has read our posts about the music industry, live gaming events are fantastic revenue generators, especially as they've become massively popular in the past few years.

Add to all of this the relatively permissive attitude in PC gaming circles that companies have towards mods of their games and you have a recipe for violent adoption and the willingness to buy by the gaming public. Mods make games more attractive to wider audiences, increasing purchases. Some mods indeed become their own games, increasing purchases. Most game companies encourage this modding culture, generating good-will within the consumer-base. No other industry does this as well.

Contrast this to the music industry, which relies on litigation to aggressively stifle remixing and experimentation. Large music labels have effectively become law firms devoted to protecting their back catalog. Sometimes this means suing their peers, and sometimes this means suing communities of users. The end result is a strong chilling effect on new experiments. Almost all new music-related tech products are minor variations of preceding products. It’s too risky and expensive to try something genuinely new.

And finally, there is the embrace of crowd-funding. Crowd-funding has been adopted in virtually all entertainment mediums, but I struggle to see any of them doing crowd-funding as well as the PC gaming industry. From experiments done by household PC gaming names like Tim Schafer, to diverse tiered-rewards for funding, to the willingness of some to forego offers from traditional game publishers to go the crowd-funding route, PC gaming is full of these success stories.

The point of all this is that new and innovative business models can work for other industries as well. There's nothing unique about the PC gaming industry that won't translate over to some degree for music, movies, television, etc. They just have to try.         https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151117/09353932838/video-game-industry-embraces-internet-new-business-models-others-should-pay-attention.shtml

No, The Internet Hasn't Destroyed Quality Music Either

from the panic-panic-everywhere dept   https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160110/23460433294/no-internet-hasnt-destroyed-quality-music-either.shtml

At what point will the music industry stop crying wolf? Remember that part of the reason behind the 1909 Copyright Act in the US was the arrival of the player piano, which some feared would put musicians out of business. Same with the phonograph. Remember, John Philip Sousa told Congress in 1906 how those darned "talking machines" were going to stop people from singing:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy--I was a boy in this town--in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape. The vocal chords will go because no one will have a chance to sing, the phonograph supplying a mechanical imitation of the voice, accompaniment, and effort.

And, of course, basically every other technological innovation was a threat of some sort. The radio was supposed to kill music. "Home taping is killing music" was a slogan! The RIAA undermined digital tapes and tried to limit CDs. It sued over the earliest MP3 players. It's sued countless internet companies and even music fans.

Through it all, the refrain is always the same: if we don't do this, "music will go away."

But, of course, throughout it all, music only expanded. In the first decade of the 21st Century, more music was recorded than all of history combined, and it's likely the pace has increased over the following five years as well.

And because of that, we've started to hear a new refrain from the same folks who insisted before that music was at risk of "dying" because of new technologies: that maybe there's more music, but it's clearly worse in quality. Some of this can be chalked up to the ridiculous pretension of adults who insist that the music of their youth was always so much better than the music "the kids listen to nowadays." But plenty of it seems to be just an attack on the fact that technology has allowed the riff raff in, and the big record labels no longer get to act as a gatekeeper to block them out.

However, as pointed out in an article in The Age down in Australia, not only is music doing phenomenally well these days, but a recent study suggested that the quality of music continues to increase as well. Now, obviously, quality is a subjective thing, so it's difficult to "measure," but here's what the report noted:

Yet all these years on we are still surrounded by music. It follows us throughout a day from our bedside to our commutes to our earphones at work to our drive home to settling into bed.

And an astonishing amount of it is new. A decade after the arrival of file sharing, US economist Joel Waldfogel charted what had happened in a paper called Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music since Napster.

There is no doubt that recording companies are making less money since file sharing, he says. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are making less music, or even less good music.

Assembling data on the quality of songs from the "all-time best" lists compiled each year by Rolling Stone and other magazines he finds that the albums regarded as good tend to be recent, and increasingly so as the internet age wears on.

The good new ones aren't even by old artists. He says around half of the good new albums are by artists who only started recording since file sharing. It has neither killed new music, nor frightened people away from beginning to make music.

Now, there are reasonable quibbles with this methodology. You can say that of course newer lists of "all time" best music will weigh heavily more recent favorites, even if they might not truly last the tests of time. But, at the very least it does suggest that plenty of people (myself included) are still finding a ton of new music to listen to that we find to be just as good, if not better, than music from decades ago.

NBC Exec: Netflix Poses No Threat To Us, God Wants You To Watch Expensive, Legacy TV

from the not-just-a-river-in-Egypt dept      ~ hehe from the "old" biz model is go~in the way of the doo doo bird ?

The traditional cable and broadcast industry's chief export is no longer quality programming, it's denial. First the industry denied cord cutting even existed. Then it acknowledged it existed, but pretended it was only something losers living with mommy had any interest in. More recently the cable industry has acknowledged that yes, there is something that vaguely looks like a mammoth tsunami looming on the horizon, but people are totally overreacting because the cable industry is just so god damned innovative.

Historically, the cable industry has needed all the help it could get when it comes to laboring under the delusion that the legacy cable cash cow will live forever. And, as Nielsen's failure to provide real data on cord cutting has shown, the industry employs plenty of people happy to take money in exchange for telling industry executives precisely what they want to hear. Lending a hand this week was NBC's president of research and media development Andy Wurtzel, who proudly told attendees of the Television Critics Association's winter press tour that neither Netflix nor YouTube pose a "consistent" threat to cable.

His only evidence? That Netflix's top shows still only get a fraction of the viewership that traditional cable gets:

"Symphony measured the average audience in the 18-to-49 demographic for each episode within 35 days of a new Netflix series premiere between September and December. During that time, Marvel's Jessica Jones averaged 4.8 million viewers in the demographic, comparable to the 18-to-49 ratings for How to Get Away with Murder and Modern Family. Master of None drew 3.9 million in the demo and Narcos was third with 3.2 million."

Nobody denies that cable TV's audience still towers over that of streaming video services. That's never been in dispute. Nor has anyone really debated the fact that cord cutting is a slow but steady phenomenon (NBC's parent company Comcast lost 48,000 video subscribers last quarter). But that doesn't really change the fact that the threat obviously exists, or that cable needs to dramatically change to adapt to it. But Wurtzel for some reason seems convinced that because viewership for Netflix hit shows drops off after a few weeks of binge watching, this somehow means cable has nothing to worry about:

"Wurtzel said Symphony's data also revealed that most viewers of those SVOD shows return to their old viewing habits by the third week. "[By then], people are watching TV the way that God intended"—that is, via traditional, linear viewing—said Wurtzel. "The impact goes away."

That's because Netflix has "a very different business model—their business model is to make you write a check the next month," said Wurtzel. "I don't believe there's enough stuff on Netflix that is broad enough and consistent enough to affect us in a meaningful way on a consistent basis."

But again, cord cutting isn't about just Netflix. It's about picking and choosing among a myriad of different options as an alternative to soaring cable rates. One fifth of pay TV customers are expected to cut the cord next year. Only 51% watch live TV (as "god intended"?). Consumers are tired of paying an arm and a leg to get 194 channels while only watching, on average, about 17 of them. And, to put it bluntly, cable's biggest customers are dying, and being replaced by "cord nevers" that have absolutely no interest in paying too much for too little.

The threat is more than just consistent, it's inevitable.

Fueled by the kind of bubbly optimism provided by Wurtzel, legacy cable honestly believes it's doing a bang up job adapting to the Netflix threat. Except that's not remotely true; the industry refuses to compete on price, consistently fights more flexible programming options tooth and nail, and still confuses proclamations of "Hey, we're innovating!" with actual innovation. Were I Netflix, Amazon, Apple, or any of a million other companies eager to jump into the field, I'd be thrilled that guys like Wurtzel continue to provide a false sense of security across an industry so desperately in need of a disruptive kick in the ass.    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160114/07044833341/nbc-exec-netflix-poses-no-threat-to-us-god-wants-you-to-watch-expensive-legacy-tv.shtml

What Accounts for the Saudi Regime’s Hysterical Belligerence? The Agony of Death               ~ hehe as Dr.Farrell calls them ..."the outhouse" of saud  ...U can have ALLL the $$$$   & still b wipe~in yer ass's wit rocks  ...sheet's wearing back~wards hilll~billy's stone~age cave~men  oops   "house of frauds"  hows can u have the NWO ... wit an bunch of stone~age hood~lums run~in an country !   Huh ?   looks like the "world" is gonna have ole saudy house   ...fer lunch  Oops

By Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh

Global Research, January 16, 2016

Region: Middle East & North Africa

Theme: US NATO War Agenda

The purpose of this essay is to explain, not describe, the frantically belligerent behavior of the Saudi regime. The goal is not to delve into what the regime and its imperialist enablers have done, or are doing; that unsavory record of atrocities, both at home and abroad, is abundantly exposed by other writers/commentators [1]. It is, rather, to focus on why they have done or are doing what they do.
In the Throes of the Agony of Death
The Saudi rulers find themselves in a losing race against time, or history. Although in denial, they cannot but realize the historical reality that the days of ruling by birthright are long past, and that the House of Saud as the ruler of the kingdom by inheritance is obsolete.

This is the main reason for the Saudi’s frantically belligerent behavior. The hysteria is tantamount to the frenzy of the proverbial agony of a prolonged death. It explains why they react so harshly to any social or geopolitical development at home or in the region that they perceive as a threat to their rule.
It explains why, for example, they have been so intensely hostile to the Iranian revolution that terminated the rule of their dictatorial counterpart, the Shah of Iran, in that country. In the demise of the Shah they saw their own downfall.
It also explains their hostility to the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia that ended the perpetual rule of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo and that of Ben Ali in Tunis. Panicked by the specter of the spread of those revolutionary upheavals to other countries in the region, especially the kingdoms and sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf area, the Saudi rules and their well-known patrons abroad promptly embarked on “damage control.” (The not-so-secret patrons of the House of Saud include mainly the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex, Neocon forces and the Israel lobby.)
The ensuing agenda of containment, derailment and preemption of similar revolutionary upheavals has been comprehensive and multi-prong. Among other schemes, the agenda has included the following:

 (1) brutally cracking down on peaceful opposition at home, including summary executions and ferocious beheadings;

(2) pursuing destabilizing policies in places such as Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen by funding and/or arming rabidly violent Wahhabi/Salafi jihadists and other mercenaries;

(3) trying to sabotage genuine international efforts to reduce tensions and bloodshed in Syria, Yemen and other places;

(4) trying to sabotage the nuclear agreement and other tension-reducing efforts between Iran and Western powers;

(5) pursuing policies that would promote tensions and divisions along ethnic, nationalist and religious lines in the region, such as the provocative beheading of the prominent and peaceful Shi’a critic Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr ; and

(6) seeking “chaos to cover terror tracks,” as the well-known expert in international affairs Finian Cunningham put it [2].

To the dismay of the Saudi regime, while these depraved policies have succeeded in causing enormous amounts of death and destruction in the region, they have failed in achieving their objectives: stability in the Saudi kingdom and security for its regime. On the contrary, the reckless policies of trying to eliminate its perceived opponents have backfired: the regime is now more vulnerable than four or five years ago when it embarked (in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions) on the vainly aggressive policy of trying to eliminate the supposed dangers to its rule.
The illegal war on Yemen, carried out with the support of the United States, has turned from what was supposed to be a cakewalk into a stalemate. Not only has it solidified and emboldened the sovereignty-aspiring Houthis resistance to the Saudi-led aggression, it has also considerably benefited al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Likewise, the War on Syria, largely funded by the Saudi regime, has fallen way short of its goal of unseating President Assad. Here too the aggression has handsomely benefited a motley array of mercenary and jihadi groups, especially those affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra, known as al-Qaeda in Syria, and the so-called Islamic State.
In both of these countries the power and influence of the Saudi regime and its partners in crime is in decline while the resistance is gradually gaining the upper hand, especially in Syria—thanks largely to the support from Russia and Iran.
Perhaps more tragically for the Saudi regime, has been the failure of its “oil war” against Russia and Iran. Recklessly saturating global markets with unlimited supply of oil in the face of dwindling demand and increased production in the U.S. has reduced the price of oil by more than 60 percent. This has led to an officially-declared budget deficit of $98 billion for the current fiscal year, which has forced the regime to curb social spending and/or economic safety net programs. There are indications that the unprecedented belt-tightening economic policies are creating public discontent, which is bound to make the regime even more vulnerable.
A bigger blowback from the regime’s “oil war,” however, goes beyond economic problems at home. More importantly, it has led to an unintended consequence that tends to make the regime less secure by reducing its economic and geopolitical worth to its imperialist benefactors. Cheap and abundant energy in global markets is bound to undermine the indispensability of the House of Saud to its imperial patrons. In using oil as a weapon against their rivals, the spoiled big babies of Western powers in the Arabian Peninsula may have pushed their luck too far.
Combined, these blowbacks and ominous consequences of the Saudi regime’s belligerent policies have made the regime and its allies in the region more vulnerable while giving strength and credibility to the resisting forces in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, supported by Iran and Russia. These unintended consequences of the Saudi rulers’ aggressions explain why they are panic-stricken and behave hysterically.

References

[1] See, for example, Finian Cunningham, “Saudis Seek Chaos to Cover Terror Tracks”; Jim Lobe, “Neocons Defend Saudi Arabia”; and Pepe Escobar, “Fear And Loathing in the House of Saud.”

[2] Ibid.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. 

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, Global Research, 2016

Parapsychology: Thoughts and Reflections

~folks sum~thin IS go~in ON & "it's" NOT the shit we R b'ing "taught" in school  ??? HUH !

• http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/06/parapsychology-thoughts-and-reflections/
•  June 7, 2013
•  Nick Redfern

Now here’s a good idea: what if a highly respected individual – with a PhD in Psychology – approached a select group of equally well respected individuals in the field of parapsychology? And what if the goal behind that same approach was to get the group on-board for an ambitious project? Namely, to submit papers for a book that would reveal current thoughts, ideas, theories and data of a cutting-edge nature in the parapsychology field? Well, the good news is that it has just happened!
Anomalist Books have just published a new book edited by Rosemarie Pilkington, PhD, and titled Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections, Volume 2. This is a superb release, running at a packed 422 pages, and which is essential reading for those fascinated by the mysteries of the mind, out-of-body-experimentation, poltergeist activity and much more.
Back in 1987, the first book in this series – titled Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections – was published to great acclaim (and republished in 2010 as Esprit Volume 1).  And, now, 26 years later, we have the sequel. The book is an intriguing one. Not only does it gets to the collective heart of the phenomena under the microscope, but it gives us first-class insight into the worlds of those that have dedicated their lives to unraveling the paranormal puzzles at issue.
Pilkington approached her cast of characters and requested that their papers be focused around five, specific questions: (a) how did they become interested in matters of a paranormal nature? (b) what has been their most significant contribution to the field? (c) how have their views changed, and what aspects of their research might they have handled differently? (d) what kinds of personal exposure to paranormal phenomena had they experienced? and (e) what types of advice would they give to the next generation of paranormal investigators?
It is with these questions firmly fixed in their minds that the team of contributors set about preparing their own, unique papers on a wide range of mysteries and conundrums of the paranormal kind. And a fine and illuminating job was successfully completed by one and all!
What I particularly enjoyed about Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections, Volume 2 is that it covers a wide range of paranormal phenomena. That’s to say, we’re not just swamped by report after report of a very similar nature that could quickly make for repetitive and tedious reading. Rather, by covering a wide range of issues, the contributors demonstrate the sheer, astonishing range of high-strangeness that dominates their – and our – lives.
So, with that all said, what do we learn from reading Pilkington’s latest title? And what are the highlights? For me, the most entertaining and intriguing paper was that of the long-time paranormal investigator and author, Guy Lyon Playfair. In his submission, titled Adventures on the Night-Side, Playfair takes us back to his childhood, his exposure to the world of the Society for Psychical Research, his extensive travels across the globe, and his studies of poltergeist activity.

Playfair also demonstrates the importance of undertaking firsthand, personal research. For Playfair that has included investigating such people and issues as Uri Geller, telepathy between twins, and the work of Andrija Puharich. Playfair’s paper is a highly entertaining and captivating one. It offers a fine, solid overview of his work, as well as revealing the key moments of his life’s work and the notable characters he has encountered over the years.
William Braud’s paper, On Exceptions and the Attraction of the Unexplained Residua, reveals much about the man’s opinions and thoughts on such matters as PK, the 1920s-era work of Leonid Vasilev, and his work with Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell on issues of an ESP nature. In other words, it’s a rich and varied account of Braud’s experiences, encounters, and conclusions.
Sally Rhine Feather’s contribution – Continuing the Legacy – is vital reading. She is the daughter of Joseph Banks Rhine and Louisa Rhine, two prominent and famous figures within parapsychology and without who, certainly, the field would not be what it is today. Rhine Feather gives us the kind of insight into the world of her father and mother that no-one else could provide. That, alone, makes her report a uniquely fascinating one. Rhine Feather makes it clear, too, that it was while exposed to the world of J.B. Rhine that she experienced many a strange thing that put her on the road she is now on.
Serena Roney-Dougal takes us on a captivating journey from magical Glastonbury, England to Bihar, India, where she taught parapsychology and deeply studied meditation techniques. She states of her life in the field of parapsychology: “What fascinates me is the mind and consciousness, and I see clairvoyance (psi) as that part of consciousness, which is more allied to the eternal, rather than our everyday here-and-now mind.”

Rex Stanford both informs and entertains us with his 24-page paper: Personal Reflections. Like so many other papers in the book’s pages, Rex Stanford’s is one that covers a wide body of issues, including the work (and influence on Stanford) of the aforementioned J.B. Rhine, extra-sensory perception, and psychokinetic-based phenomena.
And that’s just the tip of the paranormal iceberg. Collectively, Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections, Volume 2 includes more than 20 papers from a wide and varied body of individuals who, in their own unique ways, have helped to develop our understanding of the many and varied issues that fall under the banner of parapsychology. But, unlike so many books which cover similar topics, what I particularly enjoyed about this one was the human element.
The authors share with us not just their thoughts, data and theories relative to parapsychology, but also their inner-most memories and life-experiences that helped sculpt them into the people they are today. It’s seldom that you see both angles so successfully fused into one, but Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections, Volume 2 skillfully achieves exactly that.
In doing so, the book is as much about the people within the field of parapsychological research as it is about the phenomena they study. For that reason alone, Rosemarie Pilkington’s new release makes for fascinating reading.