How to predict the future

Magicians are always claiming to read minds but (I know this will come as a shock) some of us are cheating, some of the time. Not always, of course. Most of us are magic.

Personally, I am magic, but I’m still impressed by the idea of Remote Viewing. Could it be the real deal? If you’ve seen or read Jon Ronson’s “The Men Who Stare At Goats” you’ll be familiar with the stories about secret military units who use psychics for spying. Ronson found soldiers are being trained to walk through walls and kill goats just by staring at them! The Stanford training unit was closed down in 1995, but research into this stuff is still going on.

The Farsight Institute, for example, get lots of interesting results.  They’re doing a psychic climate-change study at the moment, and they do seem to have detected a LOT of disasters before June next year. Luckily there are several different timelines, so we might be OK.

Check out Project Stargate, and these pictures of sketches people have created while remote viewing. Even if you think all this is nonsense, you have to admit some of the predictions are pretty amazing…

Could you be a psychopath?

A really good book came out last year called The Psychopath Test. It’s the journalist Jon Ronson‘s investigation into madness. You learn loads about personality disorders, but it’s quite difficult to come away from it without diagnosing yourself with a few of them!

The book talks about Bob Hare’s checklist, the criteria that psychopaths usually meet. They tend to be cunning, manipulative, lacking in guilt or empathy, narcissistic, abusive – and very charming. So it’s obvious why you tend to find these people at the top of professions. Ronson suspects there are lots of psychopaths in positions of power (but then by the end of the book, he does start to see them everywhere. And so will you.)

Before Dexter, the amazing US series about “the serial killer with a heart” there was a show called Profit, about a psychopath who manipulated his way to the top in a big corporation. Have a look at how deviously he cheats the lie detector in this clip!