Preparing For A Failed Prediction.

Barbara Soblewski Garcia says she is a professional ESP consultant. She makes nebulous predictions that often lack enough specificity to call them wrong. Thus, she can claim they are successful hits. For example, she predicts that we will discover a new planet. Now that we've developed new techniques to measure the variations in the brightness of stars as well as to detect their perturbations, we've been discovering scores of new planets each year. So her prediction is a high probability hit.

In 1999, she predicted that a woman will be president by 2015. Of course, we have to wait another 7 years to check that prediction, but she's already prepared for a failure. In December 2007, she wrote (with emphasis added):

Election years have always been exciting years for Americans. I am expecting to see many twists and turns in the upcoming elections before the Republicans give way to our new Democrat leader. There will be events in the world that leave us wondering if we will even have an election. Back in the year 1999 I had stated in my forecast, "in the first fifteen years of the new millennium a woman will be named President of the United States" Psychic predictions are not fixed and can be altered. We can certainly alter this one! The candidates all look promising and wow check out who Oprah is supporting- how cool is that!

Psychic predictions are not fixed and can be altered? How convenient for the psychic. That how you build in job security. What would be the basis for altering a prediction? New facts coming to light? If so, then she's saying predictions can be changed based on observation, which amounts to making a new prediction. But if you make predictions based on observation then you start doing something I like to call: SCIENCE.

Ms. Garcia is no psychic. She simply uses the powers of observation that we all have and selects the most likely outcome, all the while leaving herself an out by changing her selection as necessary to fit the latest data. That's both shrewd and uncouth. I predict she'll keep on doing it.