Money and Justice.

If you get the chance to see 'O Lucky Man' (1973), don't miss it but be warned - in parts it goes far beyond simply weird.

The UK news sites often link to stories from around the world, and this one illustrates the establishment obsession with money very nicely. The judge made the right call, I think, in jailing this 15-year-old in this case, even though he only stole seven cents.

No, I am not turning into a Victorian flog-them-and-hang-them type. Despite the bleating of his lawyer -

“For seven cents, now you’re making someone a felon for the rest of his life,” she said.

He was not jailed 'for seven cents'. He was jailed for beating up an elderly man, then forcing him at gunpoint (they say they were BB guns but in that situation, would you take a chance?) to hand over the contents of his pockets, then denying it even though both the victim and his accomplice identified him.

The contents of the victim's pockets are not relevant. If they had stolen no more than a piece of string, or taken a million dollars, they were not convicted by the amount. They were convicted for what they did. They assaulted an elderly man and robbed him at gunpoint. That is what they did, not 'stole seven cents'.

Trying to use the small amount stolen as a defence is pathetic, but it is typical of the attitude of so many these days. It is good to see a judge who takes the right approach, not so good to see a lawyer grade crimes by the amount stolen rather than by the severity of the attack.

Unfortunately there is a lot of this happening now. Keep in mind if you're ever in court, you are less important than money.

Except in Judge William Walsh's court. I hope his attitude catches on.

Facts and fiction.

Another washout summer is nearly over, and the economic woes have ousted anything paranormal from the news. There's been little to investigate and apart from a new experience of my own that's keeping just out of sight so far, nothing at all for me to do. So I've been writing some short stories and novels instead. Well, why let all that research go to waste? If I can't use it on facts I might as well use it on fiction.

For me, though, it is important to distinguish fact from fiction. An attitude that seems sadly lacking in many areas of alleged science lately. Often, the science is twisted to fit a political agenda and objectivity is abandoned in favour of preconceived conclusions supported by tortuously twisted figures.

So we hear that biscuits cause cancer and that fat people cause global warming, the reduction in smoking prevalence that matches with the exponential rise of asthma means that smoking causes asthma, the gradual decline in alcohol consumption is evidence of an outbreak of binge drinking and aliens are going to kill us all because they don't like us having power stations.

That last one is not something I made up. Neither are any of the others. They are all things that were made up by people employed as scientists. Paid, I might add, from tax revenues. I would prefer to have the likes of Clive Barker or Stephen King paid through taxes. At least they make it clear they are just making up stories.

Not all scientists are like this. There are still quite a few who believe in the actual principles of science and who seek the truth rather than the money. There are still some out there.

You won't hear about them very often and when you do, you will hear them decried as heretics. They are not following the plan.

I remember a head of department retiring in the days before I became self-employed. One line of his speech really stayed with me. He said "When I started in science, we were chasing knowledge. Now we're just chasing money."

Since he retired, things have become much worse.

The truth has a way of coming out no matter how hard the control freaks try to suppress it. They never learn.

Money and reality.

I'm often told, in my line of interest, that 'ghosts don't exist'. That I should concentrate on real life and the here and now and making money. So I can buy lots of things I don't want.

A long time ago I had a running argument on this blog with an Australian and missed a golden opportunity. When he gave me three options, one of which was true, I should have told him which was true without letting on how I did it. This was a case of transglobal cold reading. He had already told me the answer without realising. I could have pretended that the online 'readings' were all genuine and he would not have heard me scoff and snort as I typed it. I have demonstrably achieved cold reading from the other side of the planet and I was playing for free. Do you really imagine the phone lines and internet readers are about anything more than money?

The world is obsessed with money. Every lifestyle choice is derided as 'costing the health service money' even though we (in the UK) have no option but to pay into that health service whether we use it or not. I've made a little use of it but if I hadn't had to pay for it, I'd have gone private and had change to spare.

Problems in the world? Oh, we'll send money. No matter that sending money into a corrupt regime simply makes the corrupt richer and the poor notice no difference. We've sent money, the problem is solved. Oh, it isn't? Send some more.

There are those in the world who are religious. I'm not one. I've seen ghosts (spirits/demons if you prefer) and experienced things that convince me there is much more to life than we can normally see, but I have seen no evidence that anyone is in charge. I don't 'deny God', I just have no evidence. So I don't call myself atheist because that's becoming a religion too, and one of the nastier ones. I'm an apathist. There might be a God but as long as he leaves me alone I won't bother him.

The religious are also subject to this 'get into reality' mantra. Get a job, knuckle down, earn money. Money is the only thing that's real.

You know what? Money isn't real at all. Most of it simply does not exist. At all. If everyone wanted their money out of the bank in cash there is nowhere near enough cash to achieve this. Most money is numbers on a screen. It's not real. Look at your national debt. You do not owe all the money in the world. You owe more money than exists. Every country owes money. To whom? To banks.

You go into the bank for a loan, the bank says okay, and what happens? Do you walk out with a bag of cash? No, the numbers in your account go up - but there are no numbers going down anywhere else. That money has not been transferred, it has simply been created out of thin air. You have to pay back the non-existent money plus interest, and the interest is real money.

Okay, you can claim that you can spend the loan but how? With cheque, credit card, bank transfer, online account? Where's the cash? You go to the car dealer, show them the loan certificate, sign the form and you have a car. But where's the cash?

So you repay the loan plus interest, all from the products of your work. If you can't pay, the bank takes your car and then what? They write off the loan of money that didn't exist and they now own something that does exist - your car. Or your furniture, your new kitchen or even your house.

Modern money is no longer backed by gold or silver. It made the transition from there to paper and from paper to database digits. It is less real than telepathy, remote viewing, ghosts, religion or Bugs Bunny. You can at least see some evidence, whether you agree with it or not, for all those things. Money? No, you can't see it. You can see numbers that represent it but that's all. No, not even a cartoon rabbit. It never manifests into anything close to reality.

Why do governments insist we have to keep the economy going? Well, because if we stop using credit cards and other means of moving this ghostly currency around, it will stop moving. If it stops moving we might see what it actually is. Illusion. Fake. A charlatan's greatest confidence trick. We have swapped faith, life and independence for nothing at all. Some paper with famous people's pictures on them. We are trading bubblegum cards and calling it investment.

The modern obsession with money is a religion. A Puritan one but backed up with neither scripture nor science. We must stop people smoking/drinking/putting on weight/eating things we deem bad for them and it is not about health, although many have been fooled into believing this is the reason. No, plebian, nobody cares about you. They care about Money.

Look at any report on smoking, drinking, the overweight, anything. Look at the comments. Do you see 'Oh, these poor people, we must help them,' or do you see 'Kill them all in the most appalling way imaginable and do it now'?

About health? No. It's about money. 'Our tax dollars'. Have you ever paid tax? I haven't. I've signed cheques, I've authorised bank transfers to the taxman, I've worked where tax is deducted before you get paid but I have never handed over one single thing I actually cared about, and not one note of real cash. All I have ever done, where tax is concerned, is move numbers around. That is all it takes. That is all there is where modern money is concerned.

Money is everything and nothing. The appropriate demon here would be Mammon, I believe, although I have yet to look into that in detail.

It used to be said that 'the love of money is the root of all evil'. Often corrupted to 'Money is the root of all evil' but really, neither is exactly right.

The worship of money as if it were the Saviour of the World is the problem. Throwing money at drug barons to stop them dealing drugs cannot work, but we do it anyway. Throwing money into regimes where the problem is the creaming off of money by officials cannot work but we do it anyway. In the UK we had riots by Reebok-wearing and designer-hoodie clad thugs who believed they were entitled to more than they were ever interested in earning. The Great God Money must come into their wallets, not their hearts (I doubt they have any) and feed them plasma TV and laptops they have no clue how to use.

Yet when faced with real life's astounding events, pictured in the news, all Mammon's disciples can shout is 'Photoshop'. To them, nothing amazing can happen unless Money is involved. At the same time, they claim to despise religion while following one of the most fundamental religions in existence. Money. Is this not a religion? Tell me why.

Money was devised as a tool. Let's say I catch fish and need a table. The guy who makes tables doesn't like fish. So I sell my fish for cash and use that cash to buy a table, and the table maker uses the cash to buy chicken. That was how it was supposed to work.

It was not supposed to become a god variously described as 'our money, who art in tax heaven, wasteful be thy spending' or as 'economy'. It has. We can think of nothing else. We have become thirteenth century peasants spending every waking minute worrying about whether God (Economy) will permit our crops (Investments) to grow this year. Go on, explain why I'm wrong.

In olden days, some people became hermits and just said 'The hell with it' to society. The reasons might have changed a little but I think I can understand why they did.

When the reality you are ordered to embrace is less substantial than the one you are expected to leave, you have to wonder if there is really any other sensible way to respond.

The most pointless thing in the world.

There are many toys and models based on film characters and old comic book heroes and villians. I don't have any because I'm too old and too uninterested.

I have a friend's birthday approaching so I was looking for something inconsequential and generally just fun as a present, and happened across the most pointless item that has ever been on sale.

It's a little slab of black plastic. It's a 'model' of the black slab from '2001: A Space Idiocy' and it does... nothing at all. Not a thing. It's a slab. That's it. An extraordinarily expensive lump of plastic in a packet.

For the price, I'd at least expect to see stars inside it.

What would make an interesting study for me is this - is anyone really stupid enough to buy it?

Midsummer night drenched.

Tomorrow is midsummer day. Normally I like to stay up to watch the sunrise. Not for any religious reason, it's just that sunrise is around 4 am and staying up to see it isn't much of a task.

I'm not bothering this year. The heating is on, the outside temperature is 7C / 44F and that's from the sensor that's inside the greenhouse. The sky is completely overcast and it's raining. There's no point staying up to watch the clouds get brighter.

Meanwhile, the cost of heating is going up even more to counteract 'global warming' even though in years past, I spent many evenings drinking cider in the garden at this time of year. In my attic is an electric fan that has not been used for the last three summers. The heating used to be switched off completely from May to September but not any more.

Global warming has been the biggest con trick of the century. It kills more and more old people every winter because they can't afford the huge cost of heating. It's destroying businesses with ridiculous carbon taxes and setting us all up for no power at all in the future when all we have to rely on will be solar panels in the dark and windmills in calm weather.

Al Gore should be facing charges in every country that's fallen for his scam.

Heads up!

Literally.

There has apparently been a bit of a fuss on the surface of the Sun and while the eruption isn't aimed in our direction, some of it might come our way.

Possibly enough for a decent Aurora on the night of the 8th, 9th and maybe 10th June.

At the moment it's after 2 am on 10th June (GMT) and no sign of activity here. If it happens, it might happen tonight in other parts of the world or it might be tomorrow night.

Although with the current state of science, it might not happen at all.

I hope it does. It's years since I last saw it.


Update 12th June: No sign of any auroras here. Looks like it was just another baseless scare story.

I suppose we'd better get used to them. So-called 'science' gets most of its funding this way now.

It's not the end of the world.

The end of the world came and went again and nothing at all happened. There have been a great many of these. It's a bit like the boy who cried 'Wolf'. One day someone will be right and nobody will take any notice.

My own prediction was absolutely correct. I didn't win the lottery.

Saving the world.

I bought a lottery ticket today. First time in a very long time. I won't win, never have and never will. I am convinced God finds it amusing to make sure I have the numbers right next to the winning ones every time.

The draw is at 7 pm tomorrow. Unfortunately the end of the world is scheduled for 6 pm (UK time). So, if God wants to continue his unbroken run of ensuring I just miss the lottery numbers, he will have to postpone Armageddon.

There you are, I have just saved the world and it only cost one shiny British pound.

So on Sunday, assuming we are all still here, six billion people each owe me a pound. I think that's a fair price for saving everyone and it'll be the easiest six billion I've ever made.

There is one possible drawback. If I have the winning ticket, we're all doomed.

Unfortunately for Harold Camping, he is doomed either way because what he is predicting is not Armageddon, but the Rapture. That's the part where the faithful get called to Heaven before all the nasty and weird stuff begins. Actually, looking at the news, I think the Rapture must have already happened some time ago.

The thing about the rapture is that unless you're included in the Holy Removal Company's list, you won't know it's happened. Some living people will vanish but most of those on the list are already dead. So even if he's right, nothing will happen at 6pm Saturday, at least nothing anyone will notice. Harold Camping is going to face ridicule whether he's right or wrong. Unless, of course, he's on the list.

Camping, a civil engineer who once ran his own construction business, plans to spend the day with his wife in Alameda, in northern California, and watch doomsday unfold on television.

Somehow I very much doubt that God planned to distribute Armageddon via reality-TV, although these days it's the only thing he could use that most people would notice. I have planned a book called 'The Armageddon Show' but I don't think I can finish it by 6pm. I certainly can't get it published by then. It would be intensely irritating to find the story on TV before I've even finished writing it.

I was going to cut the grass tomorrow. I don't think I'll bother. If Harold is right, I'd have the deaths of millions of blades of grass to account for.

If he's wrong I can do it on Sunday.

Of ants and men.

There are many fungi, and some worms, that infect insects and take over their brains. It's not just insects. There is a parasite that can force a snail to expose itself to danger and make it flash its eyestalks so a bird will easily find and eat it. The parasite needs to move into a bird for the next stage of its life cycle and rather than leave it to chance, it actually takes control of the snail's physiology. Pretty impressive for something that has no brain of its own.

I wonder if there is one that makes people become politicians. But then that would assume a politician has a brain, of which there is scant evidence anywhere in the world.

Here's an interesting story. It's in a UK newspaper (well, more of a hack-rag but they do have some interesting things sometimes) and includes a video that could have come straight from the set of an alien-style movie, but it's real. I hope the article is available outside the UK or this whole post is going to look pretty silly.

Once you've been horrified at what a lowly fungus can do to a much more complex organism, consider something else. Consider the narrator. He's not just some reporter reading a script, he's a well-known nature expert and he didn't get to know as much as he does by having the attention span of a caffeine-laden fruit fly. In-depth study of anything needs concentration and application. That's how you make progress.

How confident would you be crossing a bridge built by Insanity Prawn Boy? How happy would you be in a skyscraper designed by Cornholio? 'Not very' is the answer I'd expect there. (You can find them on YouTube if you haven't met them before. Insanity Prawn Boy is in a series called 'On the Moon' and Cornholio is from 'Beavis and Butthead').

So you would think, faced with a class full of children who struggle to read something engrossing like Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and can't hold interest in any book for more than a hundred pages, you'd want to do something about it. These are future bridge-builders and architects and doctors and okay, a lot of them are future supermarket-trolley-collectors and some won't even be much good at that but even so. Some will progress into life-critical jobs and we really need those people to be paying attention.

The solution proposed is to take away the hard stuff and put the whole class back on 'Janet and John' books. What is the point? As an ex-lecturer, I despair. I used to teach people who had reached physical, if not always mental adulthood and I would not compromise. I was teaching B.Sc. and if you were not able to keep up, then you weren't B.Sc. material. Try HND. A perfectly respectable qualification which I also taught, but biased more towards practical application rather than head-filling theory.

In those days, the B.Sc students were expected to go on to be scientists and the HND students would be technicians. Now it's seen as some kind of failure to become a technician. I don't see why. Scientists cannot function without technicians. The scientist comes up with the idea but the technician knows how to work the machinery and knows how to fix it when it (inevitably) goes wrong. They are two parts of the same thing and one part struggles when the other is missing.

You can take it to any level. Sure, the big architect can design a town but someone has to sweep those streets or it'll be a pigsty within weeks. A world full of architects and no street-sweepers is going to be a very unpleasant place to live. Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine what it would be like if nobody wanted to work on sewage disposal.

The current rubbish about 'no child left behind' ensures we will one day see buildings created by people who have learned the first hundred pages of a five-thousand-page series on safe building design. Old houses will soar in value. New ones won't be worth the number on the door.

It's simple. Some people are attuned to literature and some are not. Some people rave about Homer's Iliad and I found it the dullest block of print I have ever seen. Some dismiss the Gormenghast trilogy as the product of a swivel-eyed lunatic (which is fair enough) and I thought it was great. People are different and that applies right from birth.

This is not eugenics. Eugenics is a ridiculous concept that seeks to only breed the brightest and best of humanity and to cull the rest. Yeah. Great. So who sweeps the streets? Who deals with sewage? Who collects the trolleys in the supermarket - in fact, who works in the supermarket at all? Who works in the farms and factories that supply the supermarkets? Eugenics does not lead to Utopia, it can only lead to a Hell in which everyone has great ideas and nobody ever does anything about them.

That is not what the current system is creating. We are creating a generation of trolley-collectors because anyone who looks as if they might be better than Dim Jim in the corner is branded 'elitist' and denied the deep education they could cope with.

It is not wrong to teach the able to the best of their ability. It is neither wrong nor shameful to take a career as a sewer operative or a bin collector or a bus driver or a street sweeper. Civilisation needs all of them. It might be fashionable to tell children that growing up to be a grave digger is beneath them but someone has to do it. It is an essential job and one which, sooner or later, we would all like to have done by a professional. Not by some blundering idiot with five degrees and a professorship but who doesn't know one end of a shovel from the other.

The real solution is competition. I used this to great effect on a PhD student who was not working to her obvious potential. I told her I didn't expect too much because she was only a woman. Now I would be hauled before a disciplinary committee for saying it but you know what? She sailed through her thesis and produced a boatload of publications on the way just to prove me wrong. I have never told her I knew I was wrong all along. There is stuff in that thesis that is not yet published and there is a journal's worth of work that isn't even in the thesis. She was far better than she ever knew and although I have lost touch, I expect her to still be doing brilliant things.

If she's not, and if she happens across this, it's because you're only a woman, Shortly (she'll know what it means). If she is sitting at home doing nothing I will find out where she lives and come around and insult her in person. She already knows what that means.

Competition does not only bring out the best in the brilliant. It moves everyone up a notch. That future trolley collector might put some effort in and become a till operator. You may sneer but if you've experienced a North Scotland winter, indoors is far better than outdoors and the pay is better too. You have to deal with idiots, sure, but we all do. There are a lot of them around.

Civilisation needs people who can think up new stuff but it also needs people who can make the new stuff work. The brain is a wonderful thing but with no hands it is absolutely useless. It's all very well to design a sewage system that means nobody has to have a pile of poo in their garden but someone has to run it.

The future technicians, sewage workers, trolley collectors, till operators and street sweepers are now children. So are the future surgeons, scientists and architects. They are all essential and they have all been born.

Forcing sameness on children does not mean equality.

It means Hell.

"If you're good at something...

..never do it for free."

So said Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman film 'The Dark Knight'. I confess I had to look it up even though I've seen all the Batman films.

I will never charge for an investigation of the paranormal beyond travel and accomodation and I don't need any of that first-class nonsense. I will travel by bus and I will sleep on your sofa. The biggest expense will be whisky, and bacon sandwiches. Most of the time I probably won't find a ghost anyway, just a rattly fridge, a dodgy electrical connection, a vent transmitting the neighbours' voices or a faulty motor in a fan. Besides, any attempt at charging will let the sceptics lump me in with sideshow fortune tellers and TV 'psychics' and that is not my aim.

I have other ways to earn money. One that was my hobby has now become a serious matter because the first novel is published. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it proves I'm doing it right but on the other, it's not a hobby any more because the taxman is involved now. It feels a bit like having your train set taken over by the railway company and forced to run to a timetable. Sure, you can make more money but that hobby is now a job.

The little book called 'Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator' really just happened because I was sick of reading books that tell you to form some kind of Mission Impossible team, with uniforms and gadgetry and battle plans. None of that is necessary and none of it is any use. There is no such thing as a ghost detector. Until we have some idea what ghosts are made of, such a device cannot exist. It hasn't sold many copies but I didn't expect it to sell any at all. People like to believe that their EMF meters jolt because there's a ghost around, not because the fridge just switched on and sent a voltage spike through the house electrics. They like to believe that their laser-aimed infrared thermometers read the air in front of them, not the wall they're pointed at. They don't like to hear that in the modern world, there are many, many things that might appear to be paranormal but aren't.

Most of all I was sick of hearing the idea that every investigation must produce a result, as shown on TV. Ninety-nine percent of investigations get you nothing more than cold and tired. Orbs are a delusion, not a result. They are bunk. If you can't see the little light, it's not there. Your camera does not have magical powers to see things you can't, it just has dust in front of the lens. I've been working on a new and extended version of that book but writing it was a hobby until now.

As were the short stories I'd been producing. They earned nothing or nearly nothing. I didn't do it for the money. I did it for fun.

When I put the first load of short stories into a book, I did it because they had dropped off the internet or gone out of print. Magazines, print or internet, only keep the stories up for a little while and then they're gone. Often, the magazine shuts down too so all trace is gone. I put a collection together so I wouldn't lose those stories and I did it with a hastily-made cover because it was only to be for me. I didn't expect it to sell so I made the download version free. It did sell. Not much, but it moved. So I updated the cover into something a bit more professional-looking and put a small price on the download. If you have the old cover with the blue sky, look after it. It might be worth something when I'm dead. The new cover looks like this:





It's the same photo I used for the old cover. I grafted in a new sky, darkened the image and added some lighting effects. The name? Never publish under your precise name and never sign books with the same signature you use on cheques. To a modern fraudster, that's worth a lot more than the price of the book. A nom-de-plume protects much more than your privacy these days.

That cover, and the cover of 'Ghosthunting' is the reason I don't like digital cameras. It is far too easy to manipulate a digital image to add in a 'ghost'. With film you have an original negative that can be verified as un-tampered but with digital you can change the image, change the date of the file, change anything and it's hard to prove whether it's real or fake.

One thing I have found is that people don't regard writing as work. This mirrors Southern Writer's experiences with astrology. People think that since they don't see any effort, they don't have to pay you for the work. I've already lost count of how many people have generously offered to read my writing as a favour to me, because that's all a writer needs. Writers don't need to eat or live in houses. All they need is someone to read the words they write. Readers aren't entertained by the stories, they are only reading as a favour to the writer.

Well... no. The taxman wants his cut and the electricity company want to be paid for running the computer I type on and food isn't free. Writing is work, even if it only appears to involve moving fingers around. If you don't want to read it you don't have to pay for it. I have no such option with taxes, food, utilities and housing.

It's not a hobby any more. It's another business and businesses don't last long when they're done for free.

Song for Bin Laden.

Although it could apply to most world-leading figures too...



If you haven't seen the film this came from, it's worth it.

Profiting from the nearly dead.

Another explanation for near-death experiences has appeared. Surprisingly, once more, it's from someone selling a book.

I wish I could start a scandal or do something controversial. Apparently it's how books are sold now.

The thing about near-death experiences is that they are intensely personal and only happen while someone is unconscious. There is currently no way to study them directly, as they happen. They might have a completely physiological explanation, they might not. As things stand there is no way to be sure.

Several such cases include the experiencer relating things they should not have been able to know. Pick the physiological explanation out of that.

At the moment there is only one way to know for sure what happens after death. And when you know, you can't tell anyone.

I can wait.

Time-lapse apology.

Never post when in a rage. You just have to go back the next day and edit the red-mist blunders out of it.

Anyhow, I have calmed down a little because I have avoided looking at the newspapers today. If you do read the papers always save the cartoons for last. You don't want to use up the only smile-inducing thing in the whole paper too soon.

One story I did pick up on another blog was the news that the Spanish have apologised to the Jews for the Spanish Inquisition.

Yes, I stopped and paused for a while too. Yes, it was over four hundred years ago. Yes, the Inquisition targeted Muslims and Protestants and atheists too - in fact, it targeted all non-Catholics and quite a few Catholics for good measure.

Sometimes I wonder if all politicians everywhere spend their time looking for something to apologise for. Sooner or later some idiot is going to apologise for the apocalyptic effect on the environment caused by the invention of the wheel.

It seems an Israeli group asked for this apology. What astounds me is that they got it. So when is Italy going to apologise for the Roman Empire? When are the French going to apologise for the Norman Invasion? And the Vikings - oh, you guys are going to need kneepads for the apologies you have to make.

The human race started in Africa and spread from there all over the planet. So it's all Africa's fault and they should apologise. If you're religious, the human race came from Eden which would have been around the region of Iraq/Iran so to you, it's their fault.

Since Christianity and Islam both sprang from the original Judaism, when are the Jews going to apologise for the Ottoman Empire and the Crusades?

How far back does this ridiculous guilt-fest have to go before someone says 'Okay, it's just getting silly now'? For me it passed that point quite some time ago.

One day there will be demands for God to apologise for the Big Bang. He probably will because by now, even he must be thinking that it wasn't such a good idea after all.

Enough!

These days, it's all about asteroids.

We are supposed to live in terror because an asteroid won't hit the planet but might pass close enough that you could see it with a telescope. All this is probably great for selling newspapers but the ghostly hints are being pushed aside.

You know that scene in 'Men in Black' where they pick up a trashy paper for clues? It's no joke. Only the trashy papers will publish those stories and while most are junk, there are a few gems to be found in there. Not lately. All we have are asteroids and terrorists and other imaginary things to be frightened of.

Now, it's hard to find a ghost story anywhere that is not a blatant photoshop-type hoax. The hoaxes were always around and always fairly easy to spot but once in a while there was that odd, inexplicable one. They're all gone. Vanished among the terror of smoke, salt, booze and fat.

I have therefore been spending a lot of time just making stuff up. Well, everyone else does these days. Science is now more about imagination than reality so I have switched to imagination. At least I label my efforts in this direction as fiction and separate them from real science, which these days seems to make me a rarity.

The climate science debacle, the tobacco, fat, salt, alcohol and so on nonsense, have all brought mainstream science into depths of absurdity that have never been plumbed by the paranormal, nor even by witchcraft, alchemy nor even Celtic shamanism. Compared to much of modern science and the rigour by which it reports its results, I am not only mainstream I am at the top!

I should be pleased but in fact I am sickened.

There is no point attempting to prove anything through science when science is so corrupt. Third hand smoke. Passive obesity. Obesity epidemic. Stuff that Kafka would have dismissed as too incredible. All of it is such absolute crap and yet we have heads of important institutions nodding and saying 'Yes, this utter crap must be believed'.

I have to prove to these people that the ghosts I see are real? Why? I might as well try to prove to a lunatic that the jewels in his milk are just refractions of the sun. Which I could, but these days, why bother? He is as sane as the major leaders of any scientific institution in the world. Perhaps more sane. And less dangerous.

So the hell with it. I will continue to search for proof but in the current climate of science, I will apply my own rules. There will be no fake stats or imaginary conclusions here. I might become the last outpost of a forgotten dream called 'science' but I will hide it behind fiction that holds clues.

That's the game now. Somewhere in the fiction are the things I have really found out about life, afterlife, otherlife and non-life. I will hide them in plain sight but I will call it fiction.

Science, which believes so much trivial nonsense these days, will dismiss me as a crank as they always have. Then they will earnestly discuss passive drinking as if it could actually exist.

Some of the fiction will just be fiction. Some of it will not be. There is a lot here that should be told but cannot be told through a twisted modern science that follows Paganism but not Pan.

There will be changes here.

The Mountain.

If you haven't yet seen this video, I recommend it. An amazing example of intermittent video. How he can get a smooth video while moving a camera that's taking intermittent shots is beyond me. Then there are the night-sky shots. Usually you'd need a long exposure and a motorised camera mount to follow the stars. He seems to be able to take one-off shots of the night sky that are nothing short of astounding.

This man has some very expensive camera gear, I think.

I confess. I am jealous. However, he does not, as far as I know, have a picture of a wood pigeon on a red pergola.



So nyah.