Fortean Phonics

There was an e-mail I received the other day from a listener who wanted to know just what my deal was. I mean that was vague enough. Someone who wonders what my deal is seems to have some sort of agenda behind it. I could only determine that the agenda was to pin me to some sort of philosophy or religious affiliation and of course there is the stupid question of my political beliefs which I immediately dismiss with a very loud “who cares!”

But, of course, later another e-mail came to me from the same guy saying that he was a “god-fearing” man and that he worried that listening to my show would send him straight to hell because I talk about many issues that he believes are satanic or demonic in nature. I finally wrote back and said “I am not right wing or left wing, I am neither a believer or atheist, and I most certainly don’t like politics because they are all corrupt so I consider myself a Fortean.”

“Fortean” is a word which is based on the name of Charles Fort, a writer of the early twentieth century whose work “damned” science and skepticism as being too narrow and unable to deal with occurrences that seemed to be outside of the norm.

Fort spent years scouring the great Public Library in London looking for articles relating to certain phenomenon such as falls of frogs and fish, stones being thrown at houses from nowhere, animals from one continent being seen on another where they should not exist, as well as ball lightning, spontaneous human combustion and other oddities.

He felt that science was not being true to its own tenets since almost all such incidences were washed over with banal and mundane explanations that were simply pulled out of the air by scientists refusing to sully their hands with further research.

I know that I have been called a conspiracy theorist and according to Google lists I am Number 4 in the top 50 truth tellers on the radio. The bad news with that is that I am lower on the list than Alex Jones and higher on the list than Jesse Ventura.

Forteans are mostly creative and imaginative and we are also highly speculative. We go through life like children do on Christmas day. Everything we see from the darkest doom to the most funny and inspirational as a joyful experience that sums up all things that is living on planet earth.

We talk about the weirdest things and collect some of the most bizarre stories and save them in boxes. One day we may be able to reference them. I tend to use the rusty Rolodex in my brain to tell stories. That is why at times I may not be as accurate as I like with regards to names and places, however I do know the stories and I do seem to find a way to connect the dots and demonstrate how the world is being toyed with by what I call the ‘cosmic trickster‘.

I do find myself to be slightly annoyed by skeptics who are not really skeptics but people who have made their minds up about the mysteries of life not being so mysterious. As I have grown into the fringe areas of life I have realized that skeptic” of the here and now finds a sadistic joy in their ability to funnel everything that happens in this infinite universe into to some finite simple explanation. It is also necessary for the skeptic of our generation to tell people to “calm down” and “not to worry” feeling that it is their duty to be the comforter and guardian of all things that they believe is magical thinking.

Let’s face it: the world is a magical place and, like a true Fortean, I see all things as constantly changing – and beliefs do too. It’s just that they change so slowly that sometimes it is hard to figure out how the zeitgeist abruptly changed and thereby making you crazy, ill-informed or old fashioned.

To this day, I have such a fascination with carnival fortune tellers, people who see ghosts, the possibility of alien life, strange animals that defy explanation, and stories both political and religious that seem to be so crazy they need to be exploited as such.

Defend the actions of authority if you wish, but they are only human and least we forget that the apotheosis has made them external saviors in suits, when really they are nothing more than human bags of blood and sweat. The value is in their souls and in the ocean of souls; there really isn’t anything in Washington D.C. that would even get your feet wet.

The human experience, according to Fortean thinkers, is actually some vast interwoven matrix of probability and possibility riding on a wave of cause and effect – and in some cases the effect is before the cause. That is, if you believe in retro-causality and, as hypothetical as we are told it is, I am beginning to see that it is very real. It becomes the tool that approximates the future.

We are always told by skeptics and those who wish to ridicule that we should use a little something called Occam’s razor when exploring the unknown.

Usually it is believed that Occam’s razor defined is the simplest explanation being the most likely to be correct in cases of extraordinary claims. However, it is more likely to be the explanation that least contradicts established scientific theories and that doesn’t anger “has been” magicians and or four-eyed mathletes.

The simple things to believe is that while some say the truth is out there, there are others who don’t take the time to have truth pointed out to them and while we cannot know all truth it is best to be open to being teachable because sometimes we don’t fully recognize the impact of something until we have taken time to evaluate in our heads just what is really going on.

more here: http://www.groundzeromedia.org/fortean-phonics/