All part of whose Master Plan?!

Yesterday I mentioned getting The Idea which will not only rescue my haunted house book, but make something special of it. It needs more work, as I said -- which leads me into a little judicious research into the world of parapsychology.

So I got online and started looking at spooky stuff...

There's a lot of weirdness out there, guys.

Not the ghosts. They're perfectly normal. I mean, they're dead, but otherwise they're as normal as you and me. We have it on the best authority of mediums who work hand-in-glove with the FBI and the CIA: they basically hang out in places they either liked or hated while they were alive, and try to make contact with the dense humans, which is virtually impossible to do when you're transdimensional. (It even gave phase-shifted Star Trek characters a challenge, and god knows, if they can't do it, what hope is there for the rest of us, dead or alive? Anyway, the bottom line is that dead people are as normal as the rest of us.)

No, the weird ones are the military scientists. OUR military scientists. As in, the USA and the West, the free world, you and me. We. Us. A shiver runs up my spine as I type this, because I've written a lot of this stuff. I really can say, as can many an SF writer, "Been there, done that. Didn't like it, had my heroes punch out the Bad Guys at The End." But this time around, WE are the bad guys. (Who's going to punch us out? Now, there's a nasty thought.)

A couple of days ago a report was issued, with the offbeat, euphemised title, "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies." What the hell do they mean by that?

Dig a little deeper (which is to say, bother to read the damned thing) and you discover that these bast-charming folks are experimenting in mind reading; mind control; mind-machine interfaces (I coined the term "biocyber," and gave this field of research to Dr. Yvetter McKinnen in the NARC books ... she who was the burr under Jarrat's saddle and the thorn in Stone's foot, until time and necessity made them work together and, hey, they discovered they're on the same team).

Now, you know me. I'd be the last voice on the planet raised against the kind of high-tech you see in IRON MAN ... I love the AI interface depicted there -- Tony's computer. And I have something of a vested interest in empathy (again, NARC), and by extension, telepathy. I have to tell you, I've had a few strange experiences myself, which keep my mind w-i-d-e open on the subject.

But, mind control? That's the 'noir' aspect of SF ... it's never been something the good guys (you know: us) did. Mind control was something foisted on us by THEM, those out there, the Bay Guys, the nasty ones the heroes and sheroes get to flatten in the last reel.

Here's a little outtake from the Wired Science blog I catch up with once a week: "Mind control. Largely pharmaceutical, for the moment, and a natural outgrowth of cognitive enhancement approaches and mind-reading insight: If we can alter the brain, why not control it? One potential use involves making soldiers want to fight. Conversely, "How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight? [...] How can we make people trust us more? What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?"

Sure there is. I'm 99.999% positive we can make our enemies bark like chikens and cluck like dogs. The problem is, this sort of iffy, dodgy technology never stays under wraps for long. Espionage. Bribery. Theft. Super-spies ... 007. Suddenly the technnology is in the hands of THEM, the Bad Guys, and --

It's us who're doing the clucking and barking. Hmmm not so good. It gets worse, too.

Drugs and "cognitive enhancers" that make soldiers want to fight. Ooooh, boy. There's an old SF chestnut, but here's the thing: the people who were responsible for creating "heroes" like the poor guys you saw in Kurt Russell's SOLDIER, were the Bad Guys. Mind control, drug-induced jingoism, is what we resent them for ... it's the reason they get their nasty butts kicked.

Robots under thought control. Another SF classic. Automata the size of towns, controled by the minds of the aforementioned drug-modified soldiers. Yep, I've seen this one before; but we were always fighting against the robots, because where's the honor in mashing teeny little civilians under your monstrous treads?

And mind reading -- ditto. Here's a direct quote: "In situations where it is important to win the hearts and minds of the local populace, it would be useful to know if they understand the information being given them."

It certainly would. But what about if they understand oerfectly well, and just don't agree? Let's say they don't want to be commies ... or do want to be gay, or don't want to be Republicans, and do want to be peacefully pagan and go out on a tree-hugging expedition?

If the thoughts in your head aren't secure, you're potentially in deep doodoo. And if "they" decide they don't like what you're thinking, they can use the aforementioned mind control to change you into whatever they want you to be.

I'd love to tell you that this page is a hoax, but it ain't. Get the potted version of the report here: Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain, and chase down the report itself.

While you're on that science blog, take a look at something else: Military AI Could Rule the Internet. The military morons are actually trying to develop the SkyNet computer which SF predicted decades ago --

Thing is, SF predicted it as being an enemy so mean and rotten, Big Arnie couldn't knock it down, and it's gone to a fourth movie rematch! It's going to take Christian Bale to sort it out.

My point is, SF has predicted every last thing the military is currently proposing ... but our side, the Good Guys, were not supposed to be doing this stuff. We were fighting against it, in the novels and movies.

You have to ask, what goes on here? One bunch of our military genii is hard at work, using rat brain cells to drive little robots (same blog -- Wired Science) while the masterminds behind this stuff try to figure out ways to make SF's most bleak and horrifying scenarios into reality.

Like I said, it ain't the ghosts who are weird. The CIA's and FBI's own psychics report our deceased comrades to be entirely normal, albeit dead, life forms, (dead life forms? That's a good one), nothing to get one's underwear into a knot about. But the military scientists??? Chills down the spine.

One can only hope that something can be done about these idiots before we are ALL perfectly normal ghosts, phase-shifted into another dimension by being killed stone dead by a rat-brain-driven robotized jet-fighter controled by a drugged-out soldier using telephathy to target us for our non-conformative thoughts!