Why are fortune tellers, psychic hotlines, and other cons on quackery legal anywhere in the United States? We impose laws regulating liquor, gambling, smoking, and 0ther activities, so why are charlatans allowed to steal and ruin lives?
Driving down La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles at about 1 am tonight and while waiting at a red light, I pulled up alongside this veritable lighthouse of crime. That’s when it hit me.
Look what’s open for business 24-hours a day, seven days a week: A self-professed “psychic.”
How in the fuck are these businesses legal? And more important to the current discussion facing so many of us in what’s become a time of crisis, how is there an active movement and well-oiled machine to outlaw playing poker on your home computer here in the United States of America, but there’s no such even remotely comparable righteous indication targeted towards the swindlers and liars and con artists and menaces to society that makes those who run these cathedrals of exploitation? Where are the Sheldon Adelson’s of the world on this subject?
Can someone please explain this to me?
How is it illegal to play a hand of poker on my computer right now in 47 of 50 U.S. states, but shakedown artists like the “Psychic Temple” are free to rob and steal those who are gullible enough to walk into such a wasp’s nest in the middle of the night? Seriously, what kind of miserably desperate person walks into the “Psychic Temple” on Thursday night at 1 am and wants to know their future? Answer — someone who’s painfully lonely and not thinking rationally. These sick people should be protected and perhaps even given counseling and treatment. Meanwhile, those who prey upon them purely for profit while lying to them should be expunged from society.
Here and now, I want to push for a new federal law. Line up the sponsors. Get out your pens. Start the campaign. I want all these swindlers shut down. Imprison them like drug dealers. They contribute nothing to society. But far worse than that, is the toll they take on humanity. They take advantage of the most vulnerable among us, especially those who are weak and desperate (and in many cases — wealthy). These psychics possess no verifiable supernatural powers, and moreover — they know it. Psychics are well aware they’re frauds. So instead, they resort to trickery and deception, and gimmickry, which leads to con games, and ultimately to theft. These prowlers target the weak in particular, and for that, they must be punished.
I say — run them out of business. Ruin them. All of them.
Now, it’s fair to ask what online poker has to do with psychics — and the prospective outlawing thereof. Well, nothing really — unless one considers the rationale that the vulnerable among us must be protected by laws and restrictions. Something like 92 percent of the U.S. population is forbidden to play a hand of poker, but any cheat bold enough to rip off the most desperate among us can set up a storefront in just about any city in America, hang up a neon sign, and then falsely promise to see into the future. This all amounts to a hoax that’s been going on within the fortune-telling culture for centuries. But this isn’t some parlor game. It’s a form of a psychiatric Mafia. Countless victims have told stories of being scammed for enormous sums of money — and those are just the ones brave enough to step forward and press charges. The vast majority of crimes go unreported because the victims are too embarrassed. The only fortune involved in fortune-telling are vast “fortunes” that have been swindled by these pieces of garbage who operate storefronts in almost every city in America.
Close them down. Arrest them. Charge these psychics with fraud and theft.
They are the scum of the earth.