I've run out of titles.

I see that remarksman thinks I've offended those crippled supermen Tom Smith peoples the world with. But I have lots of troubliing dreams without annoying the mentally unusual. Besides, I didn't do down any spazs, as he says I did.

Something good about working in a charity shop: I get a discount on anything I dredge up from their stores. Don Bradman's Book today. A couple of others too. I notice the woman, the student girl, who works there is, as they say around these parts, "well fit". Average face, tremendous body.

I wonder what happened to Jeff Well, from over Rigorous Intuition blog way. He wrote a very good post called "The Strength of Venezuelan Steel", excellent it were. I don't think he'd write it now. He's obsessed with the idea that controlled demolition is irrelevant, as if the truth can ever be irrelevant. Just a distraction. Chaff, as that bloke who supposedly drove David Kelly to his death might say. Doesn't matter if it's true or not, it take's up too much time, or so Wells would have us believe. I don't know what changed his mind. He was once a died in the wool CDer (controlled demolitioner, of course).

Trouble is there's no one way to pursue the truth. If there was, though, it probably wouldn't be by ignoring and suppressing it in the interests of respectability. Communism tried that. Claimed to be the scientific way to run an economy. The one absolute truth. That's why people who disagreed with it had to be put in mental institutions, because they couldn't disagree and be both honest and sane.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
-- Orwell

I know it says intelligent, but it's close enough. Maybe they would just reeducate someone they thought to be stupid or ignorant, but someone who's intelligent and opposed to them is a danger to their position in the public eye and in their own world view. Must, therefore, be mental.

It's the same with capitalists now, although in the capitalist system it tends to be the oppressor class with their psychobabble based hypochondria who get the psychiatric treatment and the dissidents just get ignored. Laughed at, too. Look at George Galloway. I'm no big fan of his, but he's a proper dissident. There was a half-hearted effort by the intelligence services to wash his hands in Iraqi blood, of which they have a plentiful supply, but even that was mostly for the stand-ups.

"The Sun", 23 April, 2003:
*Sun can’t bribe George to come out of his £1/4m villa on the Algarve*
Traitor George Galloway refused to talk to the Sun at his Portugal hideaway yesterday - even after we offered him a tempting wad of 50,000 Iraqi dinars.

Spiritualism tried the same kind of trick, called itself the scientific religion. Claimed to be the first religion based entirely on reason and empirically proven fact. Problem: only room for one scientific religion per planet, and this planet was spoken for by close-minded empiricism. Spiritualism never stood a chance, poor little mite, no matter how many tricks the demons played.

Mind you, science hasn't done that much better. Like most priesthoods, especially those based on the initiatory principles of the mystery religions (universities taking the role of the Eleusinian caverns) they have become obsessed solely with form, not with content. Their lack of knowledge is greater than their knowledge, and whole fields of study they prefer to ignore. Mainly those with no major profit centres. Artemesinin cures leaukemia, it turns out, as well as malaria. You won't be hearing that on the cover of the New Scientist any time soon.

Geographers in Afric-Maps
With Savage-Pictures fill their gaps
And o'er inhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.
-- Swift

Of course, mapmakers are a bit more knowledgable these days, but scientists still write wordier versions of "there be dragons here" on there terra ingognitas. Not conducive to exploration. dont' want to get gobbled up by the dragons. Don't want to get lynched by the mapmakers' guild when you get back.

Now I've run out of content too.