James Ray: Locked Up for 2 Years

Motivational torturer, James Arthur Ray, has been sentenced to two years in prison for three of the four lives he snuffed out. (Also, a wrongful death civil lawsuit is taking the place of charges which the San Diego Police Department didn’t bother laying in relation to the death of Colleen Conaway.)

Ray’s million dollar law team based their defense on attempting to cast doubt on the cause of death, and openly and cynically attempting to get Ray off on a technicality. After the judge ruled the state had technically committed “Brady violation” (failure to disclose evidence), which could have led to a mistrial, Ray tweeted:

Judge ruled it was Brady… That’s in our favor. Now he needs to decide what to do. Woohooo!! (13 April 2011)

At the sentencing, however he was suddenly blubbering apologies to the bereaved and claiming he

didn’t know anyone was dying or in serious distress

– A statement he chose not to make during the trial. He also didn’t say anything like that when the event occurred, preferring to tell police that the firekeeper was in charge of his fake sweat lodge. And although his defense attorneys also claimed before the trial that he didn’t know anyone was in distress, they also decided not to expose that claim to cross examination. Luis Li certainly made no mention of such an idea during his seven hour closing statement.

Ray’s tears, however sounded genuine, as did his statement that “If there was anything I could do to turn back the clock I would do it.” But that comes more than two and a half years too late, and only with a jail term staring him in the face. Check out Ray’s twitter account, if you think he feels any more remorse for these lives than he did for Colleen Conaway. All four of his victims were admitted to hospital or the morgue labeled Jane or John Doe because Ray valued PR damage control more highly than human life.

The legal justice system has been kind to James Ray. The court excluded relevant evidence from previous life threatening sweat lodges and decided Ray was unaware of the danger of cooking people to death, as he was merely trying to cook them to within an inch of their lives. The court prevented the jury from hearing about Colleen’s death and Ray’s reaction to it. The court allowed the defense to waste endless months on their absurd theories about the deaths having resulted from unknown toxins, and forcing the state to cut important witnesses due to time constraints.

Despite these constraints, state prosecutor Sheila Polk presented a sound case for manslaughter. Such was her and her team’s dedication; and such was the overwhelming amount of evidence for Ray’s culpability. Nevertheless, a couple of the jury members wanted to cut Ray some slack and held out for the lesser the lesser charge of homicide, thereby reducing the maximum sentence from 39 to 9 years. Later they were shocked to learn that important information was withheld from them.

Judge Darrow then decided to cut Ray even more slack, ordering him to serve three two year terms “concurrently”. This is a very mild sentence indeed for a reckless, remorseless four time killer. The legal system’s bizarre notion that he can serve the sentences concurrently is also a quirk of the legal system that works in Ray’s favor. It sounds to me more like something out of New Age fake quantum physics than a part of reality.

Just as Ray exploited people’s basic trust, his million dollar defense attorneys exploited the legal system’s commitment to giving him a fair trial. But thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Sheila Polk and her colleagues, James Ray has been forced to serve at least some of the time he deserves.

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UPDATE 19.11.2011 

This document (also linked to above) outlining the civil case against Ray and his staff relating to Colleen Conaway’s death is well worth reading. It details very clearly the way in which Colleen was scammed out of her money, psychologically broken down and humiliated to the point where she felt she had lost everything. This is the way the scam works: they steal your dreams and then sell them back to you, using fake expertise and fake magical “scientific” powers (the law of attraction etc) to make you believe they hold the key in their hands.

It is an unfortunate aspect of the hard wiring of human psychology that as soon as we perceive someone to be “spiritual”, we tend immediately to have higher trust and lower standards of skepticism. (Anyone can fall for it. It’s the quirk that all conmen use, and it works just as well with perceiving people as a friend or authority figure.) No one need be that shocked to learn that it turns the New Age industry into a hotbed of crooks and scammers.

What is truly shocking though is that it took only two months for James Ray and his team to utterly destroy Colleen’s life. Shocking beyond words is the way those named in the law suit – Megan Fredrickson, Michele Goulet, Greg Hartle, Aaron Bennett among others – worked swiftly to deceive the police, the other participants and even other staff members about the simple fact of Colleen’s death. Colleen gave Ray her money with the agreement that he help her plan a new life. It finished with Michele Goulet giving police the impression that Colleen didn’t want to live anymore.

James Ray and the above named people preferred to leave Colleen’s family dealing with a “suicide” rather than risk PR problems.

UPDATE 30.11.2011

LaVaughan has now written a typically thorough and astute run down of the sentencing procedings As always highly recommended. (See also the rest of her James Ray category for the most thorough coverage of the entire trial.) About Ray’s speech she writes:

Ray’s performance went on like that for some time with him appealing to both family members in the gallery and the judge. Although I could not see his face during most of it, the voice was enough. His meter never varied, he sniffled with metronomic precision, he never stumbled on a single word. He was in total control the entire time… I did catch a glimpse of his face as he turned to go back to his seat and I saw the dead eyes, steely determination, and barest hint of a smirk, that was so incongruous with the dramatic display he’d just given the court.

From a news article about criminal psychopaths:

“Psychopaths are so adept at “putting on a good show” and using crocodile tears that they can be convincing to psychologists as well as other professionals. They use non-verbal behaviour, a “gift of gab”, and persuasive emotional displays to put on an Oscar award winning performance and move through the correctional system and ultimately parole boards relatively quickly, despite their known diagnosis…

“Further, we need to acknowledge that psychopathy is largely unchangeable. It isn’t possible to miraculously create a ‘conscience’ in adults who have not had a conscience previously. It’s the cold, hard truth. Acting ability should not be a criterion for release.”

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Documentary Film: The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back

I’ve devoted some space on this blog to the bizarre case of Marlo Morgan, enemy of the indigenous people of Australia. Her fake story about the extinction of “true” Aborigines (along with her claim of being their guardian and messenger to the world) is the most sickening case of identity theft and cultural assassination in the history of publishing. 

Morgan’s book Mutant Message Down Under is also the most widely read book on Australian Aborigines. It’s been translated into 26 languages and been read by tens of millions of people the world over. Clearly the majority of readers fail to pick up on the surreptitious but profound racism. Clearly too, most readers lack the knowledge of the subject matter that would allow them to quite swiftly see through the hoax. (Not only is Morgan’s representation of Aboriginal culture inaccurate to the point of being surreal, but even her mere descriptions of the Australian landscape are so inaccurate as to almost be offensive.)

The biggest tragedy is that her success is built upon a genuine worldwide interest in the subject. Millions of people read that book on the understanding it’s a true story. In fact readers have paid for a dose of racist poison. Aborigines earned the interest themselves through two centuries of struggle in the face of genocide and oppression that continues to this day. International recognition of their culture is important to their continued survival, especially given that their real history is little known, even within Australia.

A series of documentaries made in Australia about Aboriginal history, oppression, and survival has recently been made available on the internet by the film maker. I will be posting them here, with a little commentary for each.

The first is The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back, from 1985. It deals with the Aboriginal resistance to the invasion and colonization of their land.

James Ray Trial: Pre-sentence Hearing Nov 2011

Update: This post covers the last part of the pre-sentence hearing. For some extra details on his two year sentence, follow this link.

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The sentencing hearing for James Ray, the “broke” wealth teacher who managed to kill four people at his “motivational” events, is finally underway.

Those following this case will recall that Ray managed to avoid a police investigation into the death of Colleen Conaway during a seminar, when he and his staff lied to police and fabricated evidence. He never bothered calling Colleen’s family, but swiftly called his lawyers instead. Two and a half months later Ray had to call his lawyers again during an event, after cooking several people to death in a bogus sweat lodge ceremony. He told police that the fire keeper was in charge of the lodge, a ruse which failed to shake investigators, but which set the tone for his subsequent defense.

Ray’s attorneys have attempted to pull every trick in the book to help Ray avoid justice, and while they managed to get enough evidence excluded from trial to save Ray from being convicted of manslaughter, he is still facing a maximum sentence of nine years for three counts of negligent homicide. He may also be let off with probation.

Scroll down for updates.

James Ray Trial: Pre-sentencing Mitigation Hearing Sept 2011

James Ray, “philosopher”, motivational tweeter, “practical guru” and negligently homicidal manslaughterer, will be sentenced at the end of September (probably) for the three counts of negligent homicide he was convicted of. Judge Darrow denied the defense’s motion for a retrial, without further comment. The mitigation hearing will begin on September 19 and the defense will call 19 witnesses to explain why when James is really not such a bad fellow after all, despite the fatherless children and lives destroyed through his idiotic and sadistic negligence.

I will post updates below, but for now here is a list of the witnesses who will be hoping to gain something from appearing for their demented colleague.

David McCall, Kathy Fleig, Robert Procter, Dr Matt Bynum, Amy Grothe, Genpo Roshi, Jeff Asshead – sorry, Adshead, Dr Tony Allessandra, Alex Smyth, Wayne Parker Donneta Parker, Ward Smith, Jason Tabeu, John Watkin John Ferriter, Tony Parinello, Jon Ray, Joyce Ray.

I will post more about some of these people.

Blogging “The Power”: A Critique of Rhonda Byrne – Part 4

Here we are again, bogging our way through Rhonda Byrne’s new book, The Power.

The previous post covered Ms Byrne’s claim that her “like attracts like” principle governs not only the supposed Law of Attraction, but also governs everything in the entire universe and all the laws of science.

This of course is pure bullshit.

In fact, I would argue this is probably the most spectacularly wrong notion ever to find its way into print. Byrne went into considerable detail, explaining how everything from plant nutrition to cell biology, to astrophysics is governed by this singular notion.  If this were true, the consequences would be way beyond anything I could conceive, let alone write about in a few short sentences.

But here’s a start. If electrons started attracting instead of repelling each other, we would instantly and permanently meld with everything we touch. Light would disappear entirely from the universe, and in fact there probably wouldn’t even be a universe. Rarely is an an idea so immediately and obviously demonstrably wrong. You don’t even need to read a science text. Just the fact that you can open your eyes is already enough.

Unfortunately Ms Byrne’s book centers on using this extraordinarily stupid idea as the launching pad for her great conception of the the Law of Attraction. The fact that this book even got published is a testament to the general lack of standards in Byrne’s appallingly slack profession.

This also makes it a bit tricky to review. I didn’t have high hopes for this book anyway. I was expecting lots of hollow assertions and empty rhetoric mixed in with some specious, self-serving lies; I was hoping to deftly show how people have been seduced into believing something that might initially appear plausible, but disintegrates on closer examination.  Instead, Rhonda Byrne herself has completely demolished her own ideas without any help from me at all. Should I even continue?

Blogging “The Power”: A Critique of Rhonda Byrne – Part 3

This is the third installment of a series of posts looking at Rhonda Byrne’s new book, The Power.

As we saw in Parts one and two, Byrne claims to have discovered the most powerful force in the universe; a force every bit as real as the force of gravity. Strangely, however, she also claims it actually IS gravity, too.  And it is love. That’s right. According to Rhonda Byrne, love is the same thing as gravity. But that’s not all. This force also governs the “law of attraction” and all the known laws of science. And it finds you are parking spot. It IS a parking spot. And so much more….But above all, it is love.

Now, after confusing everyone including herself, Byrne is ready to add the final element to our understanding of the law of attraction: like attracts like.

Blogging “The Power”: A Critique of Rhonda Byrne – Part 2

The first post in this series covered the introductory pages of Rhonda Byrne’s Secret follow-up, The Power. This post covers the opening chapters, including Byrne’s ideas about everything in the universe being either positive or negative, and finishes up with Ms Byrne’s extremely unusual claims about the nature of love.

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As always, Byrne starts off chapter one in her usual bold “assertion-as-fact” style.

You are meant to have an amazing life! You are meant to have everything you love and desire. Your work is meant to to be exciting, and you are meant to accomplish all the things you would love to accomplish…

She continues in this vain for quite some time. Now this all sounds very nice, but there is a hidden agenda in all this inspiring motivational talk. If your life is not the way she says it was “meant” to be, there’s something wrong with you. You’re not using the LoA the way you “should” be. The reader is to measure their unhappiness against the amount of joy they imagine they would feel if all their wishes were granted. The difference shows how much they are going wrong, and how much they need Byrne’s help.

Soon, the ground is laid for this assertion:

Your life is made up of only two kinds of things – positive and negative things.

Everyone who believes in the Law of Attraction has swallowed this notion whole. But a little reflection would make it clear to anyone above the age of five that life doesn’t cut up so neatly into good and bad. How we experience an event at the time, reflects neither its real significance nor its actual consequences. Yet Byrne instructs the reader to label events according to their spur of the moment emotional fluctuations. Learning a measure of equanimity when faced with apparent good or bad fortune is not one of Byrne’s goals.

She’s also no fan of self acceptance or self awareness. Instead Byrne endorses jealousy, envy and a narcissistic sense of entitlement:

Blogging “The Power”: A Critique of Rhonda Byrne – Part 1

Rhonda Byrne has written a follow up to The Secret, called The Power. In it she claims to have discovered “the most powerful force in the universe” and that her readers can learn to manipulate this “Power” to make all their dreams materialize.

The power she is talking about is “the power of love”. This might seem like a let down to those who were hoping for nano-death-rays or a mini-black-hole-invisibility-cloak…..But surely Ms Byrne is just indulging in a little harmless rhetoric in order to encourage us to allow a little more love in our lives….isn’t she?

…Nope. Ms Byrne is not being rhetorical. Incredibly, she is attempting to talk straight science to her readers, presenting “facts” that no scientist on the planet (at least none over the age of eight) would take seriously.  Even more incredibly, she has taken a silly factual error from The Secret and instead of quietly correcting it, she has magnified it and made it the centerpiece of her entire teaching.

Worse still, her self-help advice is of an extraordinarily low quality, even by the low standards that genre usually maintains. Yet somehow she managed to achieve stupendous success.

This will be a fairly snark-free series of blog posts, focusing largely on the way Byrne achieves the effect with which she has won over so many people, rather than spending too much time debunking her factual errors. I’ll go into some detail in the first few posts, at times taking it line by line, and move a bit faster in the later parts.

Marlo Morgan: Lies Don’t Count as “Fiction”

I’m a little surprised to see that one of the most popular searches that bring people to this blog is “Marlo Morgan hoax” (and occasionally a rather hopeful sounding “Marlo Morgan true”). I am pleased about this, because there is surprisingly little on the internet about what is one of the more curious cases of fraud in the history of publishing. The fraud was unmasked before her book Mutant Message Down Under was even published, yet was snapped up by Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins and relabeled “fiction” to avoid prosecution.

(See my earlier article for more details, and this article by Cath Ellis, for a more detailed account of the whole story.)

One of the most common responses from fans when they discover that the story is a hoax is try and fudge the importance of its authenticity. They try to argue that it is “still inspiring even if it is a work of fiction”, or that somehow it could be true in some mystical sense. For example, this reviewer claims:

If the reader approaches the book as non-fiction, then he or she is challenged to believe that certain events could have actually occurred, even though they might seem implausible at first, and in the process challenges the reader’s worldview to expand to consider possibilities beyond the ordinary.  If read as a work of fiction, the tale becomes a mythical metaphor…

This kind of apologetics ignores not only the atrociously inaccurate and deeply racist portrayal of Aboriginal culture in the book, but also sidesteps the fact that Morgan has repeatedly and explicitly claimed her story is literally true, and her status as messenger to the world for the last “true” Aborigines is authentic.

Just to put this on the record, I am linking to and transcribing (below) the entire text of an interview in which Morgan makes these claims. Her stupid book has been on numerous university courses, including ecology and anthropology, not to mention being extensively and uncritically used in primary and high schools. She has toured the world giving lectures as an expert on “Aboriginal Culture”, a subject of which she is entirely ignorant. Her last appearance I am aware of was in 2004.

Her book has been translated into 26 languages. (Ironically, the book seems to actually gain something in translation. The original self published book was the worst piece of prose writing I have ever read.)

It is unusual for liars to be as blatant and brazen as Morgan has been, and the interview below is a demonstration of her skills in this regard. (She seems to come a bit unstuck in a different interview, where the interviewer doubts her and questions her unexpectedly on a few details. She is floored, for example when asked for details about exactly what kind of health work she was doing in Australia.) 

This, along with first hand accounts of her behavior and the general way this fraud has unfolded, make me suspect Morgan is suffering from a clinically identifiable form of psychosis, possibly bi-polar disorder. I offer this speculation merely as an attempt to comprehend how Morgan seems to have convinced herself of her story.

Here is a link to the audio of the radio interview. The transcript is below the fold.

James Ray Guilty of Negligent Homicide x3

James Arthur Ray, motivational tweeter and “philosopher” from the film The Secret has been found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide.

Ray has so avoided being investigated by police in San Diego in relation to the death of his first victim, Colleen Conaway who died in one of his seminars barely two months before he negligently caused three further deaths at a further seminar. Colleen’s death was inadequately investigated by police after Ray and some members of staff lied to police about the circumstances of Colleen’s death, after they had abandoned her body in a shopping plaza in San Diego.

James Ray and some members of his staff told carefully co-ordinated lies to the San Diego police and to participants (who only learned one of the death through the media). They also lied to some concerned staff members about it, instructing them to inform any inquirers that “We’ve found Colleen, she’s fine and decided not to return to the group”. That was after discussing the situation with his attorneys.

The cover up has been covered extensively on this site (see previous link), and a more complete description of events can be found here in a comment posted by a member of Colleen’s family.

 The San Diego police did not investigate the death and Ray went on to cause three more deaths, for which he has just been convicted. The jury never got to hear about Colleen Conaway as the defense was successful in having mention of it excluded. A document from the Arizona prosecutors:

[The] Defendant also tries to disclaim any responsibility for the suicide of Colleen Conaway. However the significance [for the current trial] of the suicide is not in the tragedy itself; instead it is in the reaction of the JRI staff to the event. Participants report that they were never informed that one of the seminar participants had died and the seminar continued through the end without mention of this tragedy, including Defendant making sales pitches for future events.

Hearing for sentencing Tuesday June 29. [UPDATE Scroll down for coverage of sentencing]

Disowning James Ray, Defending the LoA

Meryl Davids Landau has written an article titled

Does the James Ray Trial Mean There’s No Law of Attraction?

Well, here are some quick answers: Yes, the James Ray trial, along with every other phenomenon in the known universe means that the LoA does not exist. Or, No, the trial itself has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of any proposition, but even if Ray had not been brought to trial there would still be no LoA.

The question Davids Landau really wanted to ask is

What should I think when I see a grand master of the LoA suddenly clapped in leg irons and led off by the police?

Did mysterious cosmic forces have a hand in it, or did everything happen for the more prosaic reasons that the prosecution outlined?

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 James Ray & Det. Ross Diskin: not much attraction, plenty of law

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By my reading, the evidence assembled by the state prosecutors sounded like a pretty complete account of events. If I was looking for evidence of mystical occurrences, the James Ray trial is not somewhere I’d go to look. 

Meryl Davids Landau does though, because…..well she’s not interested any mystic experiences anyway.

The LoA isn’t a mystical concept from the realm of subjective experience. It’s not even a theological idea from the realm of revelation. No, in Ms Davids Landau’s world, the LoA is science, which is woo-shorthand for you’re not allowed to question it.

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There are three main problems with the Law of Attraction:

1. It’s not true 

2. It’s dangerous 

3. Its “blame the victim” approach is utterly immoral

I will deal with each of these problems as revealed in Ms Davids Landau’s article. Blaming the victims, she says is a misconception about the LoA. She titles one paragraph:

There’s no blaming the victim involved.

Mysteriously however, the explanation that follows contains nothing at all to explain why victims are not to blame. She says the LoA can “empower” victims, but then actually affirms that the victim is in fact to blame:

It’s not that someone expects to get cancer; it’s that they spend much of their time feeling angry or disempowered about life, which attracts other, similarly low-vibration creations, including diseases.

So the heading should be:

Blaming the victim is involved, but I hope no one else will notice it, if I also decide not to notice it.

James Ray Trial Updates: Final Phase

See previous trial updates here.

There is excellent detailed coverage of the James Ray trial in Celestial Reflections blog (daily updates) and Salty Droid. I haven’t attempted to duplicate that here, but have been indicating a few of the salient points to come up on particular days and link to more detailed material.

Scroll down for earliest entries.

UPDATE: RAY HAS BEEN FOUND GUILTY OF 3 COUNTS OF NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE.

Further updates here.

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June 21 Salty Droid has edited a video of defense attorney Luis Li’s closing statement. For a sympathetic view of Li’s argument, see this post from CNN’s In Session. They saw it as “one of the most impassioned closing arguments you are ever likely to hear”. It lasted more than 7 hours, and parts of it were indeed impassioned, especially the bits about his father, his mountain climbing experiences, the birth of his first son (which was the best day of his life)….The only thing Li did not mention was why the hell his client acted the way he did. The central strategy from the defense during the entire process has been to attempt to hide as many details of Ray’s behavior before, during and after his deadly fake sweat lodge. The strongest parts of Li’s argument are that Ray did not think people would die, and that participants were “free to leave at any time”.

For a more balanced account of Li’s closing statement than In Session’s breathless fawning one, see the video below, and read LaVaughn’s three posts on it (one, two, three). Much of the media coverage of this trial has been skewed in favor of Ray, and/or limited to reporting when someone in the courtroom cries. LaVaughn has covered it way better than any professional news source, in far greater detail, and despite having a clearly stated set of judgments as to Ray’s guilt, her analyses have been far more astute than any of the journalists present at the trial. Salty Droid’s coverage is of a somewhat different nature, being more focused on his up to the moment tweets and video highlights. The video below gives a fair impression of the degree of lunacy that the defense has been pushed by the absence of any plausible explanations for Ray’s behavior, other than that he is culpable and guilty as charged.

State prosecutor Sheila Polk will make a rebuttal before the the jury retires. (Her closing statement was last week, see below.)

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