I’m always startled — though I know I shouldn’t be — when people can go on and on about going to church, their mainstream perfectly acceptable religion, even getting highly righteous and demanding rights like after school programs, etc. (Bible study, what have you) and no one rolls their eyes, snorts, makes rude comments or just out and out calls you a kook.

Even if they do think that, they keep it to themselves.

Mention UFOs or the paranormal and people think they have the right to say whatever they like. Which is usually rude.

(Except for those who come to you later, privately, to tell you about their UFO/missing time/abduction/ghost sighting/Bigfoot encounter that they’ve never told anyone else, and don’t want you to tell anyone else either.)

Which brings me to “mainstream” reality’s reliance on television as mind control — creating this passive alpha-state right-brain scenario that just soaks up all the CIA propaganda (a la alien invasions and evangelicals promoting genocide).

I was just rereading “Witchcraft and Sorcery” edited by Max Marwick (Penguin, 1970). There’s some amazing analysis in that book, especially the chapter on political witch-hunting.

The basic tenet “innocent until proven guilty” is just so frail in “mainstream” reality. First of all “innocent until proven guilty” relies on some strict left-brain logic which St. Thomas Aquinas might have successfully melded onto Platonic metaphysics but most of us commoners still fall back on ye old right-brain mythology. Secondly to test this “innocent until proven” tenet, you need a fact-finding technology process (observer NOT included, is a paradox we won’t delve into) and supposedly the trust-worthy Poison Ordeal is not acceptable.

Well maybe a little windex is in order.