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Made by Nicole Hart working alone

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Definition: is when people believe something to be real or true because a celebrity has claimed it to be.

Connection: Donald Trump has been in the news a lot lately and many people believe the things he talks about. I am sure many people have had their opinions changed because of how Trump talks about Climate Change being fake.

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Donald Trump has tweeted climate change skepticism 115 times. Here’s all of it.

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Turns out the guy who snickers about global warming every time it’s cold … might not be great on the environment.

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Definition: is when people can be given information about something and disregard it because they and stuck in what they believe despite the evidence.

Connection: Psychic Zoe was able to scam two victims out of $800,000. The reason is because both victims needed badly to believe in what she was telling them was possible. For example the first victim desperately wanted to believe she would find love and did whatever the psychic asked.

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Photo of Ann Thompson's business card. Photograph: Bob Nygaard

Psychic Zoe has not had a very good week. On 9 May the fortune-teller, whose real name is Ann Thompson, was arrested by the New York Police Department on suspicion of defrauding clients out of over $800,000. You'd think she might have had a premonition the police would be knocking at her door but, alas, the future isn't always crystal clear.

The police were notified of Thompson after two of her victims contacted private investigator Bob Nygaard, who specializes in psychic scams (you can read about his work in a feature we published in 2016).

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Both victims would like their names to remain anonymous, however one is a mother in her late 40s from Canada who was defrauded of at least $740,000. The second victim is a professional man in his 30s from the midwest who met Thompson while on business in Manhattan last year, and who was scammed out of $72,000.

But what exactly is a "psychic scam", you might ask? Surely any trip to a psychic involves a large leap of faith and no guarantees? That's certainly true; it is difficult to take a fortune-teller to court because the tall, dark, handsome stranger you were told was definitely in your future never materialized. You can, however, charge a psychic for grand theft or larceny when they've taken a large fortune from someone via deception or false promises.

Bob Nygaard during a long day fighting fortune-teller fraud. Photograph: Bob Nygaard

Thompson's Canadian victim, for example, initially went to the psychic because she was having relationship problems. Why not pay $5 for Psychic Zoe to read her fortune, she thought?

Thompson, sensing a broken heart and a naive nature, quickly took advantage of the woman's distress and drained her life savings. She convinced the Canadian that she'd never find love again unless she bought the psychic a 9.2 carat diamond ring.

She also convinced the victim to spend large sums of money on spells that would vanquish demons, as well as on building a "golden pyramid" that would protect her and her loved ones from dying. Needless to say, the golden pyramid was entirely fictitious.

While Thompson is currently awaiting sentencing, Nygaard has already helped put a number of fraudulent fortune-tellers behind bars. By his count, he has helped successfully prosecute 30 psychics and recovered more than $3.5m for his clients to date.

Despite his track record, Nygaard still finds it difficult to get law enforcement to take clairvoyant chicanery seriously. While he says he "received excellent cooperation from a NYPD detective, in regard to this particular case", all too often the police tend to treat psychic fraud like a joke.

However, Nygaard stresses, psychics conning desperate people out of large amounts of money is a serious problem. "The prevalence with which these psychic scams are occurring, and the exorbitant amounts of money of which vulnerable people are being defrauded, not only in NYC but all over the USA, is absolutely astonishing," Nygaard told the Guardian. "Police and prosecutors need to wake up [and] realize that these self-proclaimed psychics are often part of organized criminal enterprises."

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She didn't see it coming: psychic arrested for $800,000 fraud

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Psychic Zoe has not had a very good week. On 9 May the fortune-teller, whose real name is Ann Thompson, was arrested by the New York Police Department on suspicion of defrauding clients out of over $800,000. You'd think she might have had a premonition the police would be knocking at her door but, alas, the future isn't always crystal clear.

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Definition: The medical treatment of some sort of self healing energy in your body that is seen as better medicine.

Connection: This article is actually about how many people have had 'mystical energy' and it has failed because of the lack of evidence proving it to be effective.

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opinion: alternative healing or quackery? - cnn

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Opinion: Alternative healing or quackery? - CNN

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Although non-traditional therapies can be valuable, sometimes a line is crossed.

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Definition: The lack of evidence to support a clear conspiracy theory.

Connection: There is clearly evidence that this came as a complete shock to everyone involved and there is 0 evidence that Bush had any knowledge of the attack. This is a conspiracy theory.

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9/11: Conspiracy Theories & The Unanswered Questions | Documentary

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Definition: When people believe that things like energy, herbs and natural sources can solve medical issues better than modern medicine.

Connection: Medical specialists talk about the risks of all natural remedies and how modern medicine can be beneficial.

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The truth about alternative medicine

As the saying goes, "It's important to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out." We asked doctors and researchers from across the country-including those who use or at least approve of complementary methods-to share alternative medicine experiences that frustrated, saddened, or simply astounded them. On the flip side, these are alternative medicine therapies doctors strongly recommend.

Any remedy can be overused

"I had a patient with migraines who didn't want to take drugs-she wanted to deal with them by arching her back. There actually is a yoga treatment that involves arching your back to help certain kinds of headaches, but not migraines. The worse the migraines got, the more this woman arched her back. She kept doing this until her back hurt as much as her head, and she agreed to take the medication." -Loren Fishman, MD, doctor of physical medicine and rehabilitation in New York City

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Piggy-backing alternatives can have major side effects

"A patient of mine was having hot flashes and feeling absolutely lousy. She didn't want to take medication, so she went to a health food store and emptied the shelves of everything that mentioned menopause. Whatever she took did stop her hot flashes, but the remedies clearly contained estrogen because one day she came into my office with significant vaginal bleeding, and her blood estrogen level was sky-high." -Mary Jane Minkin, MD, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale University School of Medicine

The treatment may not really be "natural"

"Patients ask my opinion all the time regarding colon cleansing. There's nothing normal or natural about it. The bacteria in your colon are important for your health-sending a tsunami down on them is unnatural. When my patients tell me they've had a coffee enema, I'm not sure what to say. 'Would you like cream with that?'" -Patricia Raymond, MD, gastroenterologist in Virginia Beach, Virginia

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Alternative Medicine: Facts Doctors Want You to Know | Reader's Digest

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As the saying goes, "It's important to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out." We asked doctors and researchers from across the country-including those who use or at least approve of complementary methods-to share alternative medicine experiences that frustrated, saddened, or simply astounded them.

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Definition: Our emotions over rule our rational way of thinking.

Connection: This article talks about the long island medium and how some of the things being said were taken well by some and not so convincing for others.

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Long Island News from the Long Island Press

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After my father died suddenly five years ago, I found myself sitting in the upstairs alcove of a high ranch in Kings Park that was decorated in gaudy crucifixes and adorable cherubs. Across from me sat the medium a friend had sworn by. A medium who had told my husband the day before that she'd been visited by my father and that he wanted to talk to me.

She wasn't the first psychic medium I'd been to. And most certainly wasn't the last. She described my father as a veteran (he was), who liked to cook (he did). She gave details about how he died, and described how he'd lived. The message she said he wished to relay to me resonated, quite deeply, but it was what she said to me as we were talking about my budding writing career that turned me into a believer.

"She gets it from me," the medium told me my father had said. As a joke.

A wiseass even in the afterlife? That was what cemented the unbelievable truth to me that my dead father was right there in the room with me.

And so it was with an open mind that I attended Theresa Caputo Live! The Experience at the NYCB Theatre at Westbury on December 17. The packed house was rife with nervous laughter and quiet murmurs as the audience filed in an hour before she came onto Westbury's iconic round stage, set with a high table draped in white cloth, holding lit white candles and a white floral bouquet.

Caputo finally walked out in sky-high sparkly Christian Louboutins and a flouncy dress to thunderous applause. She briefed the audience about what to expect, counseling us to please accept anything we could connect to our lives as messages to us from our departed loved ones from "beyond the physical world." She said she couldn't stress it enough, and she was true to her word, as she continuously reminded the audience throughout the next two and a half hours to interpret her words as direct messages, especially if she failed to address each of us individually.

"It's so nice to be home," the Hicksville mom told the Westbury audience. "Everybody understands my accent!"

The audience laughed in recognition as she enunciated words like "feather' and "father" as "feath-ah" and "fath-ah."

Caputo announced that she wasn't out to prove anything to anybody or to make anyone believe in mediums, echoing a sentiment she'd expressed when I'd interviewed her over the phone a few days earlier. She explained that she was there to validate for us all the feelings that, essentially, there was more to life than life. If we'd thought that maybe we'd seen the shadow of someone who'd died in the halls of our homes, we had. If we could have sworn we heard the voice of our dead mothers, or had been visited in our dreams by loved ones who'd passed, we weren't crazy.

"It's real," she reiterated, over and over, throughout the "experience."

And then she was ready to get started. A team with microphones and video cameras flanked her every move, anticipating to whom she would speak, and transmitting their faces on screens to the whole audience so that we could all watch the magic up-close. She approached a section in the front of the stage, asking, "Who connects with a brother figure?"

Two people immediately raised their hands. She told them that the fact that she was channeling the souls of their brothers meant that those souls were at peace.

"Do you understand that?" she asked, an oft-repeated refrain throughout the night.

They nodded.

Caputo moved on to a man who said he had lost his wife to Alzheimer's disease. She told him that she saw the woman jumping up and down, symbolizing that she was free in the afterlife, no longer bedridden.

"She doesn't have Alzheimer's anymore, do you understand?"

The man nodded.

Caputo asked a well-dressed woman wearing a pink button-down blouse how she could connect with the color mauve. She told the audience that she was seeing a woman in a mauve-colored suit or jacket. The woman nodded, saying that her mother had been an executive secretary. She was sure, she said, that she must have had a mauve suit at some point. But she wasn't sure.

It didn't seem certain that the mother's fashion sense matched that of her daughter.

Caputo moved on, peppering the audience with questions like, "Why am I connecting with a mother figure over here?" and "How does the number three connect?"

Hands shot up all over the theater and Caputo made busy work climbing the steep aisle ramps in her stiletto heels. Her husband Larry, easy to spot as a frequent co-star on her show Long Island Medium, lurked along the edges of the crowd, moving around.

Caputo made quite a few direct hits, like when she asked a man, "Did you mother work in fashion?" to which he replied, "She was a seamstress."

"Perfect!" was Caputo's reply when it seemed she made an exact match. It was her version of "Bingo!"

Clearly emboldened, Caputo continued, making some more specific claims, like, "I have a young woman who is telling me she was shot by her boyfriend or spouse."

Three audience members stood to claim that soul as their own, which perhaps says more about the issue of rampant gun violence than it does about psychic ability.

Caputo stood on the round stage, looking up into the audience. She walked over to a section she hadn't been in yet and started talking to a young woman who was sitting beside her mother. The woman had lost her uncle and had come for some closure.

"Why do I feel like he drowned?" she asked, clutching her chest. She relayed that she felt fluid rising in her chest, and that this was the spirit communicating how he'd died.

The niece shook her head no. That wasn't her uncle.

Caputo insisted, refusing to move, saying that the spirit was instructing her that the person he wanted to connect with was there. She questioned the surrounding people, asking again about a drowning.

Then she announced that she wanted to speak with the mother of a young child who had drowned in a backyard pool during a party.

The audience gasped in both horror and delight. This is what we had come to see.

Yet no one seemed to fit the bill. A woman said that she lost someone who had drowned in river runoff, in about seven feet of water, and she wondered how, as the deceased stood about 6-foot-4. Caputo shook her head. That wasn't who she was looking for.

She approached the woman with the dead uncle again.

"My uncle had a boat?" she offered.

That wasn't it.

"He built pools," the woman said, pointing to her mother. "He built her pool."

That wasn't it, either. Finally the mother told Caputo and the audience that when he had died (of pancreatic cancer), his lungs had filled up with fluid.

"Perfect!" Caputo declared.

The doubt that had started to creep into my mind early on in the show now made a full-court press. I wasn't buying it, any of it.

Caputo threw out more questions to the audience, asking specific questions that, when they weren't met with nods of agreement, became described as merely symbols of other, more general things.

For example, she asked a grieving mother who had lost her grown son, "Why do I feel like you are holding him when he died?"

When the woman shrugged, Caputo quickly covered by saying that that means he believes that she was always there for him.

"Do you smell him?" Caputo questioned another.

When there was no response, she immediately clarified that this meant that it seemed as if that person was still there, even though he had passed some time ago.

Caputo told a woman who was mourning her mother that she was seeing "red spots all over her body." But the woman stated that her mother had had ALS. When Caputo said, "I don't know," the woman clarified, "Lou Gehrig's disease."

Caputo nodded. A debilitating disease all over the body. Perfect, she said.

Caputo told a woman who seemed quite obviously gay that her father approved of her lifestyle, did she understand?

We all understood.

She seemed annoyed when a woman answered the question about a "father-figure" with the fact that he was her uncle.

"It's your uncle. That's a father-figure," Caputo dismissed. "Same thing."

She approached a mother and son and began to talk with them about the man's brother. She hit on a few questions, like when she asked if he wore a religious medallion in honor of the brother and the man produced it right there, from under his shirt. Then she asked what the number three meant to him, and he responded that he had a 3-year-old daughter.

"I Googled that!" she wise-cracked to the crowd in self-congratulation, a wink and a nod to allegations that she and her staff research details about audience members in anticipation of her shows, only to produce them later as part of the psychic act.

As the session wound down, Caputo continued in the same vein, joking with the audience, her signature Lawn Guyland-ese carrying over NYCB Theatre. The people seated around us, and up onscreen, dotted their red-rimmed eyes with tissues fished out of pocketbooks, while still others exited the theater before the performance ended. The reviews, it seemed, were mixed.

After the show, Caputo announced that two lucky audience members had been randomly chosen to meet her backstage. I had been lucky enough to have been given meet-and-greet passes as well, so I waited along with perhaps 20 or so other people after the show ended for the chance to meet Caputo in person.

She emerged from backstage, her outfit changed from the dress to a black jumpsuit, the Louboutins mercifully gone. She chatted with small groups as her staff brought them to her, one by one.

When it was our turn to meet her, I introduced myself as a reporter from the Press, and reminded her that we had spoken a few days before.

"I hope you enjoyed the experience," she told me. "It was a lovely article, I appreciate it very much."

I took the opportunity to ask if she ever came into contact with spirits who were not at peace and that if the souls she encountered were in Heaven, did she ever speak to those who were in the opposing resting place?

"I don't channel those souls," she said, flat-out. "I only channel souls that walk in God's white light."

Then she said to me something oddly curious.

"You know, the first two people that just came? The one girl-it was a mother and daughter-and she said the kid that drowned in the backyard at the pool party? She said, 'That was my son, I just couldn't even speak.'"

"She says, 'I want to thank you because he died many years ago at a pool party.' She left, she's like, 'You have no idea. You changed my life.' It's amazing," continued Caputo.

Amazing coincidence indeed that this particular woman had possessed one of the few backstage passes. Perhaps even more so-and pretty convenient, too, I'd say-that Caputo was able to relay this conversation to a reporter who'd witnessed what had seemed to be a pretty big miss earlier.

Was this an incredible coincidence or merely an attempt at damage control?

For me, this unbelievable experience was simply that: not to be believed. In my humble opinion, Caputo is a damn good performer, and she's got undeniably likeable sass and charisma.

I just don't think she speaks with the dead. Or she didn't the night that I saw her.

But my father probably could have told you that.

Jaime Franchi is the Executive Editor of Morey Publishing. She covers education and contributes news and entertainment pieces for the Long Island Press, along with occasional op-eds when she's in the mood for some hate mail. Her work can also be found on Salon.com, Milieu Magazine, Huffington Post and The New York Times.

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My Not-So-Psychic Experience With 'Long Island Medium' Theresa Caputo

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After my father died suddenly five years ago, I found myself sitting in the upstairs alcove of a high ranch in Kings Park that was decorated in gaudy crucifixes and adorable cherubs. Across from me sat the medium a friend had sworn by.

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Definition: Assigning meaning to a high authority.

Connection: in this video a dad is frekaed out because a swing is moving alone. Of course the natural train of thought is to suspect a ghost or demon etc.

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Freaked Out Dad Captures Eerie Video of 'Ghost Swing' Moving In Playground

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Definition: Seeing patterns where there are none because humans are pattern seeking beings.

Connection: The tree looks like it is a sleeping face, when in fact its simply the placement of the bumps on the bark that make it look this way.