The Unorthodox Website Blog

This BBC4 program mixed fictional sci-fi and ghost stories with mediums, illusionists and reality TV ghost-hunting programs. It therefore said nothing useful at all, but gave the overall impression that we like to be scared out of our wits, but really there’s no such thing as ghosts or the afterlife.

The technique was familiar to all who have watched TV shows about the paranormal. Any mediums/psychics were discredited, with claims they used tricks and cold reading which illusionists could easily duplicate.

Of course no evidence to counter these assertions were ever presented. Evidence such as I’ve had personally from Colin Fry, or which have been shown on his TV shows. Is a man standing in his pajamas wearing a knitted balaclava the kind of image one would get from cold reading? Yet it was 100% accurate – the strange outfit a woman’s father wore when decorating.

Armed police units are being sent to patrol no-go areas on troublesome estates/areas in London where teenage gun gangs rule the roost. Yet the do-gooders are screaming blue murder about it, saying it will ruin race relations and will not stop gun crime.

What a bunch of crap! I’m a pacifist, but I fully support this move and have been calling for it on this weblog for ages. My only slight worry is that the police are armed with light machine guns as well as pistols. I would have preferred just pistols – machine guns are too indiscriminate, and seem over the top.

Nevertheless, I would feel much safer in these areas if armed police of any sort were patrolling. But they need to do more than patrol – every teenager in the area needs to be stopped and searched, and if found with a weapon, arrested and put away for years, put in care if under age.

Last night I dreamt I took a friend to Margate, where we had most of our Summer holidays as kids. I was showing the friend where we used to stay, and then started crying thinking of all the happy memories. I woke up still crying.

The whole family spent many happy times in Margate, which to me was a truly magic place. It has, like so many places, now changed almost beyond recognition. Gone are the many colored lights, including the peacock in the gardens by the clock tower. Gone is the pier, the Sun Deck, Dreamland with its fairground and Thursday evening firework displays, Punch and Judy, Anderton’s bakers where we got juicy steak and kidney pies to eat on the beach.

Gone are the crowds who packed the beach and the public address system appealing for parents to collect their lost children from the First Aid hut in the clock tower.

The BNP leader, now an MEP, is to appear on a future edition of BBC TV’s ‘Question Time’ along with panel members from other political parties, etc.. This has resulted in a lot of criticism, with the certainty of demonstrations outside and possibly inside the studio.

There’s an old saying: ‘I don’t agree with what you say, but I respect your right to say it’. Of course there are limits to this freedom of speech. We can’t have people coming on TV and radio inciting murder and other atrocities, or libeling people.

On the other hand, ‘political correctness’ has perhaps gone too far. The BNP is a racist organization, also a homophobic one (despite the presence of homosexuals in the organization, and in similar ones in the past such as the National Front). But provided they stick to the guidelines of the program, I see no reason why they should not take part in a public debate.

As Alice said thru the Looking Glass, or was it when she entered Wonderland? Anyway, subjects such as the afterlife and the nature of our eternal selves/consciousness is far more complex than we ever could imagine or comprehend with our human minds.

It seems there are many facets or parts of each individual human spirit for instance. Certainly higher and lower aspects, but maybe many more as well. It also seems, according to communications from the Other Side (an entity claiming to be Martin Luther King Jr for instance) that there is a universal pool of knowledge/experience which can be tapped into sometimes. This could possibly explain reports of reincarnation.

Spirit told me last night that in order to practise or perfect certain traits or skills, some of us have access to a ’skeleton key’ which enables us to tap into the memories/experiences of other individual lives.

I just saw a film ‘comedy’ today with a friend. The film was called ‘The Invention of Lying’. Though it has some funny lines, it is essentially a mockery of those who believe in the afterlife, and also of all religions and those who believe in God or as the movie calls the concept ‘the man in the sky’.

Meant as a comedy about a world where people never lie and always believe everything, the Ricky character invents lying, and the chief message the film portrays is that all talk of the afterlife or a Supreme Being is a big lie, a comforting fairy-story.

Senator Joseph McCarthy

Senator Joe McCarthy was the notorious Witchfinder General in the early 1950s who persecuted and ruined the lives of many famous singers,  Hollywood actors and other celebrities thru his House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. McCarthy was, in fact, a mirror image of another Joe – Joseph Stalin, then ruling the Soviet Union and its satellite states with an iron hand, and seeking out and destroying ‘enemies of the people’. Joe McCarthy, of course, sought out and persecuted liberals and leftwingers he suspected of being ‘Communists’, whilst a paranoid Stalin sought out people he felt were a threat to his power. These were not just anti-Communists. Sadly many true Communists and Socialists suffered and died under Stalin’s regime, whilst many opportunists and careerists only interested in the privileges of power remained in high positions in the Party with no loyalty to Socialism at all.

The trouble with religion is it is so divisive. I made up my mind, as a teenager, that Christianity couldn’t possibly be the only religion which was right, and all the others wrong. Much less that Christians would go to Heaven, and everybody else go to Hell. In actual fact it was more divisive than that, since Madge, a Catholic friend of the family, once came on holiday with us to Margate, watched me and my brother as little boys playing in the sand and commented to my mother and my grandparents: ‘I can’t bear to think of those two little boys going to Purgatory because you’re not Catholics’.

However, there is a philosophy, science, movement – call it ‘religion’ if you like – which encompasses all religions and none. It explains absolutely everything. It is called Survivalism or Spiritualism.

I attended the Saturday evening of clairvoyance at the Clapham Common Spiritualist center tonite, and got a message from a very nice, but rather nervous, obviously gay medium called Martin. He felt he wasn’t getting accurate messages for people, but I suspect he was rather better than he thought.

In my case he was, on reflection, pretty good. He mentioned how I felt more at home on the coast, had many friends there, and might move there some day. This is exactly how I’ve felt, especially recently. I have three friends in Hastings, one of whom has just gone into a care home and it seems very unlikely he’ll ever return to his flat, where he lived with his gay partner for about 40 years till the partner died. That flat has been a home-away-from-home for me for some 38 years, much longer than I’ve ever lived in any of my own homes.

Who? Hoodlum youth gangs armed with guns and knives. I read in a local paper this week about a report that kids under the so-called age of legal responsibility, 10 years old, are being sent to a council estate near where I live by older gang members armed with guns to shoot at rival gang members, and the police and legal authorities say there is nothing they can do about it.

Has the country gone COMPLETELY mad? Nothing they can do? Well for a start they could put armed police and soldiers on the streets, especially the estates and areas where these youth gangs operate. Next they can round up all gang members, whatever their age, and take them off our streets permanently.

The older persistant gang members and leaders could be put on remote island prison camps, with electric fences, barbed wire, watchtowers and gunboats to make sure they don’t escape, while they are re-educated and made fit to live among decent people.