fortune-telling
psychic abilities
Uri Geller

In the annals of spoon-bending psychics, there is only one whose name is known by believers, non-believers, the curious and just about everyone else – Uri Geller. Though he is a skilled magician and has participated in CIA mind control experiments, it is his demonstrations of curving cutlery that have brought Geller fame, fortune and occasionally ridicule. Nonetheless, he has legions of fans for his attempts to not only predict the future but, in a sense, bend it with his own mind to force events to happen or to stop others from occurring – as he did in 2019 when he threatened to telepathically stop Brexit from happening. This week, Uri Geller has proposed his greatest combination object-bending, future changing feat yet – he claimed he will stop nuclear missiles fired from Russia with his mind. While the world would be most appreciative, it is claims like this that give psychics a bad name and this couldn’t come at a worse time for those in the U.S. state of Tennessee, where it looks like ancient anti ‘fortune teller’ laws may finally be repealed. Will either of these events happen? Will they have an effect on each other?

“If you resort to the use of Nuclear Weapons and decide to target Scotland – or any other country else in the world – your plans, and your missiles, will backfire on you! I will use every last molecule of my Mind Power to prevent you from launching a nuclear attack!”

That menacing Twitter threat from Uri Geller could have been directed at a number of world leaders with access to nuclear weapons. The “target Scotland” should provide a hint … but who with nuclear weapons is upset with poor Scotland? Well, the golf-loving, Nessie-hosting country is also the location of Her Majesty’s Naval Base, Clyde (HMNB Clyde), which is the home of Britain’s nuclear weapons — nuclear submarines armed with Trident missiles. That base could conceivably be the target of missiles fired from Russia at the command of Vladimer Putin as a retaliation for any sort of assistance, perceived or otherwise, to Ukraine. That’s enough of a reason for Geller to focus his powers to put a psychic protective shield over the base … and probably Lamb Island in the Firth of Forth which Geller bought in 2009 because he believes that it is a hiding place for ancient Egyptian treasure.

We’re gonna need a bigger dome.

“As well as harnessing this immense energy of all of our combined Mind Power, there are also forces far, far greater than you can imagine that I am sure will intervene to prevent you from starting a nuclear war.”

It is at this point in Geller’s threat when he becomes a disappointment – he won’t be beaming the protective psychic force field by himself but is enlisting the help of like-psychic-minded people around the world to join him for five seconds to “visualize a radiant, energetic force field” over HMNB Clyde, Lamb Island and any other places they’d like to protect. Moreover, he also hints to other “forces” that will join in the psychic fight. No, not military or CIA mind control experts or psychic powered missiles – aliens.

“Aliens are not going to allow us to go into a nuclear war. I don’t think they would have to land for that – to stop Putin from pressing the button.”

Back in June, Uri Geller revealed he believes ETs will interfere with the Russia-Ukraine war and prevent Vladimir Putin from launching a nuclear strike. There hasn’t been a nuclear attack as of this writing, but if aliens are helping, they seem to have brought an extraterrestrial knife to a fight that needs laser weapons or better. Geller isn’t concerned. When the time comes, he warns Putin that “they will stop you.”

“Your mission control computers will crash, your navigation systems will fail and your missiles will malfunction.”

Those would be welcome events … but they sound like things that a well-planned cyberattack could do. Is Geller laying the groundwork to take credit for uniting aliens and psychics to cyber-destroy the Russian military? That type of deception is exactly what those claiming to be legitimate psychics want to avoid.

Which brings us to Tennessee … Clarksville, to be precise. It is there that Trisha Butler of the Clarksville City Council is fighting to repeal a 1986 footnote to the city code that requires a practicing fortune teller in the city to have been a Tennessee resident for ten years, a Clarksville resident for two years, have a college degree, a clean bill of health from a Montgomery County doctor and be “of good moral character.” The statute covers all people “telling fortunes, or practicing clairvoyancy, spiritualism, palmistry, phrenology, card reading” as well as “tattoo parlors, or any similar business or occupation.” A college degree to provide tattoos? We’ll leave that for another discussion. Butler tells Clarksvillenow.com that these are “crazy things for someone who is just intuitively reading cards for somebody” and has drafted a repeal order for the city council to vote on.

Is it legal? That depends.

Will it pass? The city of Petoskey, Michigan, recently repealed its own obscure fortunetelling ordinance in April. However, similar laws are everywhere and at multiple jurisdiction levels.

Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Carolina prohibit all forms of fortune-telling is flatly prohibited by state law. In Arkansas and Mississippi, fortune-telling is regulated by local governments, as is the case in in fortune-teller loving Louisiana. On the other hand, in California, a state appellate court rightly struck down prohibitions on fortune-telling under the First Amendment, but localities may still choose to license it. The First Amendment should actually help fortune-tellers and it does … if they write books predicting future events. That also seems to be the case for television psychics. However, storefront psychics and fortune-tellers don’t get the same protection, despite the fact that believing in psychic power could be considered a religion and enjoy the same constitutional protection. The bottom line is that battling laws against fortune-tellers and psychics is a local whack-a-mole fight designed to fail.

Would governments be more open if Uri Geller could prove his team of psychics built a force field that saved the world from nuclear destruction?

It couldn’t hurt.

MU*