I loved robots when I was a kid. They seemed to be everywhere in popular culture. From the Amazing Magical Robot Game, an educational toy that appeared in my Christmas stocking, to the weekly dose of “Danger, Will Robinson” while watching the cult American classic series Lost in Space, I was hooked. So when I was seven or eight years old and "Tricky’s" the local toy shop, put one in their shop window, I had to have it. Beyond the reach of my pocket money, I devised “The Robot Club” with school friends John London and Ian Collie, whose club subscriptions coincidentally covered the price of the robot, though I don’t recall John and Ian getting much time to play with it. (Sorry guys!)

Fast forward fifty-five years and the robots are here for real. However, the reality lacks the magic conjured by my childhood imagination. In fact, to me, the whole robot business seems just a little bit scary.

For starters, why aren’t there any purple robots? Or blue, pink, green, etc.? Even robots in black-and-white movies, like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, were clearly not monochrome. I don’t know what colour Gort was, but he had a metallic shimmer that suggested silver or grey, as did Robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Today, though, I bet you a Buffalo nickel that all the humanoid robots you’ve ever seen have been white, or worse, white with black faces. I don’t think this is an accident. I think the way in which robots are presented to us is a representation of the intention of the people behind them. The robots of yore were the product of the creative minds of science fiction writers, who cast robots as angels or demons as their narratives demanded. The folk behind the robots being sold to us today are the products of billionaire tech futurists. Their intended narrative appears to be somewhat different.

In the old stories, the robot was always a character. It could be comic or tragic, loyal or murderous, but it was always a someone. Even when it was a menace, it had personality. It had colour. It had a face you could read, even if it was only a blank mask of rivets. The robots coming to an online distribution outlet via your billionaire-controlled tech device of choice are blank, faceless soldiers of servitude.

These are not characters; they’re appliances with limbs. That they’re white is no accident. White is a cultural signal: clean, clinical, neutral, safe. White is the colour of hospitals and laboratories and the myth of objectivity. A white humanoid says: don’t worry, there’s no ideology here. This is just engineering.

There is more going on here, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. In a recent interview, Subhadra Das, historian of science and author of Uncivilized: Ten Lies That Made the West, revealed a hidden dark agenda. Speaking to Myriam François on The Tea YouTube channel, she outlined some of the motives behind the forthcoming robot revolution.

She says that it’s a myth that science and technology are automatically neutral, “truth with a capital T,” floating above politics. As was the case with eugenics, this aura of neutrality has historically been used to give harmful social ideas a clean bill of health, because if something is labelled “science”, it becomes harder to argue with and easier to obey.

That matters, because the robot revolution is going to force society to answer a very old, very ugly question: what is a person for?

When machines can do more and more of what people currently do for wages, there will be more and more humans who are “unnecessary” to the labour market. In a sane world, that would be the start of leisure. In a less sane world, it becomes the start of sorting.

She talks about how eugenic thinking worked, not as cartoon villainy but as something disturbingly mainstream: decide that society has a “problem”, identify a group you can blame for it, then present control over that group as rational, scientific, and even compassionate. What gave me a chill was the way she described how this thinking can return in softer packaging: not “inferior race”, but “burden”, “low productivity”, “won’t contribute”, “won’t pay taxes”. Those aren’t just insults. They’re the vocabulary of a future in which citizenship is conditional on usefulness.

If that sounds dramatic, consider the mood music coming from the billionaire futurists themselves. The same people who sell “abundance” also flirt with demographic panic: talk of “Western civilisation” in peril, fear of replacement, the sense that the wrong people are multiplying. My earlier point about robot colour isn’t separate from that. If you’re anxious about who counts as the rightful inheritors of the future, then a white, “neutral”, “default” robot starts to look less like a product and more like a flag.

There’s another strand in her reasoning that helps explain why this ideology arrives with such confidence: the belief that the future is inevitable. In the transhumanist/AI-accelerationist framing she describes, AI isn’t treated as one possible path. It’s treated as destiny, almost a secular end-times story: history has a direction, the merger with machines is coming, and anyone who slows it down is cast as ignorant or even immoral.

Once you accept that framing, debate becomes blasphemy. Regulation becomes “standing in the way of progress”. And political questions, like “who owns the robots?” or “what happens to the displaced?” get pushed aside by a louder question: “how fast can we build?”

Which brings us back to those white bodies and black faceplates.

I’m not saying a designer sat down and said: “Make it look colonial.” I’m saying something more mundane and therefore more plausible: the industry is building the visual language of a future in which robots are framed as neutral, rightful, unquestionable. The whiteness is laundered as safety. The black “face” is blankness: no ethnicity, no history, no individuality, nothing that might prompt you to empathise or to ask who is being served. A humanoid, stripped of the human.

In the fiction of my childhood, robots were angels or demons depending on what the story needed. In the marketing of today, robots are neither angel nor demon. They are presented as inevitable infrastructure. And when infrastructure is inevitable, the people who control it quietly become inevitable too.

So the question I want to ask, before the robot revolution is declared “AMAZING” and the press releases start writing the future in permanent ink, is this:

When the billionaire futurists say “abundance for all”… who exactly is included in “all”? My fear is that it will be “all who remain” after the dust has settled on what may turn out to be the most turbulent period in human history.

 

There's a war going on right now for the control of money. Its significance cannot be overstated. It will shape the future of everything to such an immense degree that I believe its impact will dwarf all the wars of the 20th century combined. Billions will die - untold billions will cease to exist, all because of a handful of laws that are being passed today, with hardly anyone batting an eyelid. I'm woefully inadequate as a writer to convey the magnitude of this change, especially in a short form such as this blog post. I just hope I can bring you a flavour of what is going on so that you can start thinking about it and doing your own research.

Back in 2022, I penned a somewhat gloomy blog about the future of freedom, power and money (Bitcoin Is Doomed And So Are We). It now turns out that not only was I on the right track, but the rate at which our freedom is coming to an end is massively accelerating. I'm late publishing this blog because every day since writing the initial draft, new relevant stories kept coming to light which I've had to research and include.

Anyway, getting back to the main story, the nature of freedom, power and money is intertwined. If you've acquainted yourself with the history of money, perhaps by reading The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson or Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, you can't help but see the analogy to a game of Monopoly. Every game ends the same way. One player buys all the houses and hotels, wins all the cash, then the other players get frustrated and throw the board up in the air. Then a new game starts with the wealth redistributed evenly again. The pendulum swing, where wealth moves from rich to poor and then back to rich, is essentially the history of economics, money, credit and debt, and ultimately power. This may be why the same redistribution myth appears across cultures, from Prometheus giving man the fire of the Gods, to Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor. [Others include Zorro, Koschei the Russian folk hero, Song Jiang from the Chinese 'Water Margin' and to some extent Jesse James!]

There isn't room to fully summarise the story here, but I've always been impressed by the theme tune to the Big Bang Theory which somehow manages to compress the entire history of the universe into a song lyric. With the help of AI, I've had a go at doing a similar thing for economics:

A History of Debt (karaoke cut, Mont Pelerin edition to the tune of the Big Bang Theory theme)

Ten thousand years ago we started farming land,
And temples used their scribes to track the IOU demand.
The pharaohs taxed the people, while kings declared a slate,
Religions banned the usurers - they tore apart the state.
The Medici got clever, winked at God and made it pay,
The Brits built banks and empires, flags and debts along the way.
The French cut heads, the markets bled
Wars, New Deal, Bretton Woods, the dollar ruled instead.
The anti-red Chicago boys said freedom is the key
Thatcher, Reagan hatched a plan, cried "Markets wild and free!"
Math, cash, history, unravelling the mystery,
It all comes down to big debt (Debt)!

And so here we are today, with the Neoliberalism of the Chicago School economists, embraced by left and right wing governments in the US, UK and EU - collectively known as the West. In universities it is taught as political orthodoxy - as though there is no rational alternative, yet it's only working out well for the 1% of people. The widening gap between rich and poor at the heart of this theory is there for all to see.

At this point, given our Monopoly analogy, we would reasonably expect the millions of people who are saddled with debt, living from pay packet to pay packet, may soon reach that point again where they have had enough and the board gets thrown up in the air.

Here's the thing though: the 1% know this, and are making subtle yet fundamental changes to the law to make sure that doesn't happen again.

So pay close attention to the next bit because it really matters. Cash - the simple handing of value from one person to another, without permission, without oversight, has been the bedrock of human liberty. Take that away, and everything else, every right, privilege, every choice falls with it. If money ceases to be ours, our life ceases to be ours. Total financial control is not just tyranny - it is an apocalypse. It is the weapon that makes famine deliberate, war automated, pestilence engineered and death selective. Billions will never live because they will be smothered before birth by resource control systems that decide who may eat, who may travel and ultimately who may exist. The end of our personal financial sovereignty is worse than the Four Horsemen - it is the master that rides them all. Once it comes, there will be no going back.

The war of which I speak then - the laws being changed are designed to move us away from cash towards a future of digital money. There is nothing wrong with digital money itself. We could have a form of digital money that can be exchanged between individuals with no other parties involved - in fact it exists already - it's called Bitcoin. However, that's not the form of digital money that we will be forced to use. They want us to use digital money that is centrally controlled - the CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currencies. The difference between these is huge. With money that transacts from person to person, we retain personal financial sovereignty - we are the masters of our own funds. It's this very Personal Financial Sovereignty that 'they' are planning to take away from us.

Of course, they're saying they're not. The US, UK and the most recent EU digital currency announcements don't claim to be doing away with cash altogether. In fact, the EU said they're considering a system of 'peer to peer' digital transactions with the digital Euro which won't require third party banking intervention, but I'm old enough and ugly enough not to believe a word of that nonsense. The stakes are too high, the power too great for them to allow that to happen.

When I speak to people about this they often fail to see the danger, and are seduced by the ease of use of apparently frictionless card purchases. I get it - it's easy. They want you to be comfortable with it. That's why the UK's Financial Conduct Authority announced on 10 September 2025 their intention to raise the limit on cashless card transactions. But this is to ignore what is going on behind the scenes. For all its flaws, Bitcoin has demonstrated that no banking intermediary is needed for value to be exchanged from one person to another. Despite what you may have read, Bitcoin has never been 'hacked'. The horror stories the press love to dwell on all refer to Bitcoin exchanges - essentially the interface between Bitcoin, which is perfect money, and the banking system, which is bent as the proverbial nine bob note. That 'they' are trying to ban anonymous crypto wallets and force everyone to use crypto via recognised exchanges says all you need to know about 'them', the folk who bought you the Wall Street and 2008 financial crashes - what could possibly go wrong?

Who, you may ask, is 'them', or the 'powers that be' as I referred to them in the previous blog? This question was eloquently answered by Critical Theory lecturer Louisa Toxværd Munch on TikTok recently. Conspiracy theorists love to apportion blame, even naming people like George Soros, Charles Schwab or Bill Gates as the arch villains in charge of it all. In reality the system is protecting itself. Rich people work to protect their own interests in all sorts of ways, and this leads to the creation of organisations that serve to protect those interests. There is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. There are just structures, many of which are unconnected and uncoordinated that appear to conspire against the interests of the less well off. 

There is no single figure to point at, just a blob, as I discovered myself a few years ago while trying to play low-stakes poker.

One day, the online gambling site 'Pokerstars' decided I wasn't allowed to play €1 sit-and-go tournaments unless I sent them shots of my passport, my face from multiple angles, my tax ID and my inside leg measurement. I failed the test (Spanish bureaucracy - enough said), so I tried other poker sites. Malta, Gibraltar, the other side of the world - didn't matter. They all demanded the same. Why? Because the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an unelected global body, had decided it should be so. They forced every online poker site in the world to introduce 'KYC' - know your customer. The G7 created the FATF back in 1989, and now, if FATF says jump, every government on Earth asks "how high?" No elections. No accountability. It seems on the face of it to be a one world government in all but name, but it's actually less well coordinated than that.

The reason I felt compelled to write this blog now is that 2025 is the year in which the 'powers that be' want to beef up online security, in the name of children's safety, by forcing people to provide KYC to access certain types of content (The Poker experiment clearly went well). While the UK government is most vocal about access to pornography, access to other sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia are similarly affected. Australia and Canada are following suit with similar legislation in the pipeline. Even America has The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill with bipartisan support which is currently grinding its way through congress.

The important point here is the direction of travel. We've had web access for 30 years, but all of a sudden we're supposed to believe it's right now we're taking action to protect children from porn? The UK government has seen that people are circumventing the identification process by using a VPN, so now they're talking about banning them too.

The relevance to child protection of these sorts of digital legislation has been shown elsewhere to be spurious at best. The real reason is to increase the control that governments have over the Internet. As I explained in the previous blog, I believe there to be a movement to restrict the software we are allowed to run on our devices. As if to confirm my suspicions, Google announced last week that from 2026 it will restrict the sideloading of apps to those of 'authorised' developers. (Sideloading basically means loading an app that comes from outside the Android appstore). I predict that moving forward, terrorism will increasingly be used as an excuse to introduce further restrictions on the software we're allowed to run. To ban software that could be useful to fight our subjugation: encrypted messaging, peer to peer file exchange, off-grid messaging apps like bitchat and many other tools will all have to become 'authorised'. Most of the open source software repositories for these sorts of apps are hosted on a source control website called Github. Github was bought by Microsoft in 2018, to gasps of horror in the open source community. Years later, Microsoft has been lauded for largely maintaining the site's independence and encouraging its continued growth. However, the cynical voice in my head says they would do that if there was a long term plan to capture and control the world's open source software.

My belief is that none of this is really about poker sites or porn filters. The endgame is cash. Cash, or as I explained earlier, Personal Financial Sovereignty, is the overarching goal.

When 'we the people' have our money fully digitally controlled, there are many upsides for the winner of the Monopoly game, but many downsides for us.

Once cash disappears, governments can literally program what you're allowed to spend money on. The classic example is "Fancy a sausage roll? Sorry citizen, your cholesterol's too high. Try a lettuce leaf." However, it goes much deeper than that. "Government deficit? We'll introduce negative interest rates - there won't be a bank run because you can't get cash out at the bank!" We're already seeing in America how Trump is using the threat of litigation to silence news media. Imagine how much easier that would be if the same man had the ability to control every penny everybody has to spend. The stranglehold an unscrupulous leader would have over our lives doesn't bear thinking about.

We tend to think of the end of civilisation as nuclear war, asteroid impact or a global pandemic, but this is far worse. I can see it happening in my head like a slow motion car crash. I feel like Nuñez in that H.G. Wells short story "The Country of The Blind". If I talk to people about what I think is going on they treat me like I'm mad.

And maybe I am mad - mad because I can see what most refuse to see. Once our money itself is captured, resistance dies with it. You can't organise, you can't fund a movement, you can't even buy bread without permission. Rebellions require resources, but all the resources will be controlled by them, so the fight will be over before it starts. That's why to me, this feels so apocalyptic: not because it ends in fire, but because it ends in absolute submission, forever.

There are some great definitions of the word lazy such is this one from Merriam-Webster:  disinclined to activity or exertion : not energetic or vigorous. Most of them reserve overtly negatively charged terms, but when you look at synonyms for the word 'lazy' it's a different story. Try these out for size: apathetic, careless, dull, inattentive, indifferent, lackadaisical, lethargic, passive, sleepy, tired, weary, comatose, dallying, dilatory, drowsy, flagging, idle, indolent, inert, laggard, lagging, languid, languorous, lifeless, loafing, neglectful, procrastinating, remiss, shiftless, slack, slothful, slow, slow-moving, snoozy, somnolent, supine, tardy, torpid, trifling, unconcerned, unenergetic, unindustrious, unpersevering and unready. Ouch!

By way of proving the point I'm about to make, I've already used my laziness to my advantage in preparing that list of words. These similes all appeared in the thesaurus.com website in a list which, when cut and pasted, turned into 43 words on separate lines. In order to turn them into a comma-separated list I wrote a 'macro' in my text editor by going to the end of the first line, hitting delete, adding a comma, then running the macro 42 more times. Easy! It maybe only saved me a couple of minutes but time is money right?

I was first alerted to the fact that I was lazy back in the 1980s by my boss when I was working as a small systems developer, so called because our job was to shrink down programs from mainframes onto desktop computers. After I was handed the third really stinky job in a row after having seen my colleagues given much easier jobs, I pulled him to one side and asked him why he put all the tough, awkward jobs my way. He said "Because your a lazy bugger! I know you'll be guaranteed to find the easiest way to solve problems with the least amount of time and effort." I don't know if this was already a management maxim in the IT industry but years later a similar comment appeared in a meme being attributed to none other than Bill Gates! Anyway I smiled because I knew he had a point. I do generally look for the easy way to do things.

Don't get me wrong, I have no trouble sticking to routines for arduous chores nor attending to tasks that need to be done in a timely manner such as emptying a cat litter tray. I'd sooner just avoid arduous tasks by looking at the big picture e.g. having a small house or not having a cat! Making life easy for oneself is a pursuit worthy of more attention than people give it!

Do you remember those maze puzzles from comics when you were a kid? You know the sort, there would be like a mouse hole and three mice on three independent paths all tangled together and your job was to find which mouse was on the right track to get home and eat the cheese? Well the first time I saw one of those I immediately saw the easy way to solve the puzzle was to trace the path in reverse from the cheese back to the mouse. Simples! I soon learned this applied to academia too. I had an amazing history teacher for GCE O-Level who had a 100% pass rate. Everyone who took his class passed! His secret was he started from the exam questions and worked backwards! Instead of making us read a book from one end to the other, my hero Mr Martin would take a subject, say the 'Bay of Pigs Invasion' and he would highlight as bullet points, each of the questions that he thought were most likely to be asked on the exam paper. Then he would give us the story as an outline that answered each of those questions. It was just like fiddling the mouse maze. Working back to front saved so much time! It worked for his students year after year. It was genius!

I soon learned this worked with other subjects too. You didn't have to read the works of Shakespeare, just read Lamb's tales and you glean all of the salient points of the Bard's important stories in a fraction of the time. Math? Learn how to derive equations from 'first principles' which takes all the rote donkey work out of learning formulae. Physics? Similar thing. Instead of anguishing over Maxwell's equations, breaking them down into physical phenomena makes them easy to remember, e.g. upside-down triangle with an arrow over the top (vector for divergence) times B with an arrow over the top (vector for magnetic field) = zero.  All this really means is the magnetic flux lines always balance out because a magnet always has only two poles. You can't break a North/South magnet in half to get separate North and South poles because there is no such thing in nature as a mono-pole magnet. This makes the math so much easier to remember when you know and understand the physical effect underlying the formula! An ingenious shortcut for recognising which artists did which works recently appeared online https://www.boredpanda.com/how-to-recognize-painters-by-their-work/ I'd kind of developed my own version of this over the years from watching the Open University picture round until they irritatingly started showing pictures of book titles in foreign languages instead!

In the world of commerce then I found this approach to work served me well as employers generally don't want time wasters, they want time disruptors, people who can produce quickly, ship products fast, develop services that are 90% there but good enough to release. In the Civil Service I also found many kindred spirits, who, once they had made their way into higher layers of management, had discovered they can use their skill for work-avoidance even more effectively by delegating, especially if those being delegated to are given the minimum information to do their job so they don't get ideas above their station. Mushroom management my boss used to call it. 'Keep you in the dark and throw shit at you!'

In fact this blog itself is testament to my propensity for laziness. I never write anything too technical, historical or factual that need hours of research. I generally choose a topic that is personally anecdotal, spew it out into the page and try to brighten it up with a few gags. Anything more would take way too much effort and that would never do!

Anyway I feel the giant dormouse in me stretching away, begging me for a snooze. I could go on making my case but I've near enough hit my 1000 word target now and I can't be bothered to write anymore!

verb [ I ]

uk/prəˈkræs.tɪ.neɪt/ us/proʊˈkræs.tə.neɪt/

to keep delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring

It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it's been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it's spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn't notice passing has passed away. 

Now I'm a logical sort of chap, a great believer in the scientific method, which basically stated is that "if a theory is disproved by experiment it isn't true". However there are a few wrinkles and crevasses in my belief system. These are what I want to share with you today.

Take divining for example. It's clearly rubbish as there is no verifiable force that can be detected by a human with a divining rod. However I recall as a kid we had a blocked drain. My father knew a lot about water. He had spent a decade as a plumber and worked for a time for the Water Board. I watched him fashion a couple of diving rods out of an old coat hanger. He than marched steadily back and forth across the garden. Each time he crossed a certain point the rods moved. He dug down a couple of feet, found the water pipe, disconnected it (it was the ceramic sort connected in sections) and found the blockage exactly where the diving rods had indicated. So I know first hand that diving works but I can't explain why. My best guess is my father knew subconsciously where the drain started, and where it exited the property, so he could have been making an educated guess with that information. How he guessed down to the nearest foot is still beyond me.

I know astrology is complete twaddle. But time and time again certain character traits do seem to reoccur in individuals according to their star sign. Leos are invariably extroverts. Cancerians are crabby and have mood swings. Virgos are organised and boringly safety-conscious, Scorpios are the undisputed masters of exacting revenge etc. It seems there are two possible explanations for this. Firstly we learn about our own sign in childhood and it is possible we either subconsciously (or possibly consciously in some cases) grow to fulfil our own prophesy. Another theory is that the seasons may play a role. The younger you are, the slower time passes. Imagine you are a newborn infant born say in September. Your first six months would seem like a life time, but much of it would be cold and grey, whereas if you were born in April those all important formative months would be bright and sunny. Many things other than the weather influence adult moods thorough-out the seasons, holidays and so forth, all of which would be absorbed by the infant. Is it then any wonder that people born at different times of year have a different outlook on life? The only snag with this theory is the character traits in the Southern hemisphere would be six months out of kilter with those in the northern hemisphere, though I still think it is a sufficiently interesting proposition that it warrants further investigation.

What I'm getting at is that for most phenomena considered supernatural, there is usually a more mundane explanation.

And now for a good old ghost story. Clearly ghosts don't exist according to science. However strange things happen. This is one I experienced myself.

Back in Murcia a couple arrived from the UK with the intention of establishing a pub, which they did by converting an old residential property, and a very good job they made of it too. They named it the Yorkshire Rose. It was heaven. Just before it opened, they invited an elderly neighbour in to show her what they had done to the place. She was happily admiring the decor until she reached the far right-hand corner of the bar, at which point she burst into tears. It turned out that is where her friend, the previous occupant had gasped her last breath.

I didn't know this until the story was recounted to me some years later. However I recall dining in that corner of the room and thought it felt chilly. I mentioned it casually to the waitress who laughed and said she had lost count of the people who said that. Stories abound that cold spots like this are associated with hauntings, but perhaps I'm just putting two and two together and making five. Perhaps it was explanable by air-flow, fluid dynamics and the fact that air-conditioning unit was just above my head!

However this wasn't the only spooky thing that happened in the bar. One night, I and a bunch of pals had a late-night lock-in playing poker. It was a bright moonlight night and very still. There was not a breeze in the air we had no music playing, so it was just the flick of the cards and our banter that could be heard. At about 1:30 a.m. there was an enormous crash. My first thought was that someone had thrown a brick through the window. As I was nearest the door, I unlocked it and had a look outside but there was nobody there, and anyway the windows were protected by wooden shutters.

Meanwhile my fellow poker-buddies looked around inside. It turned out that a glass had smashed behind the bar. This was strange, as nobody had been behind the bar for a while as we were all involved in the game. Also the shelf on which the glasses were kept didn't have a direct path to the floor. There were freezer cabinets and cupboards on which the glass should first have bounced, but this isn't what any of us heard. We all heard one large crash, so loud that we all agreed it sounded though it had been thrown down deliberately by a human hand. We got back to the game scratching our heads. I considered things always sound louder at night when it was quiet and dismissed it as a freak accident.

I was in the bar again quite early the next morning as I was due to meet a client there. A different barman was on shift. Thinking the owner may have told him the tale already (but setting my self up to segway neatly into the tale if necessary) I jokingly asked him if anymore glasses had smashed this morning. He turned to look at me, eyes like saucers, the colour running from his cheeks.

"How do you know about that?"

"I was here last night", I replied.

"No, just now. After I opened I was standing here at the sink washing up a few glasses and all of a sudden a glass smashed on the floor behind me. It sounded like someone threw it at the floor - I jumped out of my skin!"

It turned out the owner was having a lie-in and the barman knew nothing of the night before. After I shared the story with him, we did the only sensible thing in that situation and had a couple of nerve-steadying brandies!

Coincidence? Maybe. There are a lot of earthquakes in Murcia. Sometimes these come in swarms and are all but imperceptible, but resonance at a particular frequency can cause individual objects to move while everything around them is still. However, there is a primitive part of me that cannot shake off the notion that not everything is mumbo jumbo. Some things do go bump it the night!

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly New Statesman, February 25, 1933

My favourite pastime is studying. I like learning about all sorts of things, music, science, politics, economics, history and current affairs. This led me towards MOOC - Massive Online Open courses. These are being run by universities all over the globe. They use them as a sort of sales vehicle in the hope that if you get hooked on them you will upscale to a paid course.

I've done dozens of these courses in recent years. One that I particularly enjoyed last year was run by Stanford University and was entitled Introduction to Mathematical Thinking and hosted by a well respected mathematician called Dr. Keith Devlin.

Much of the course was devoted to the application of the rigors of mathematical logic to the everyday language we humans use. All human languages have shortcomings that make it easy for meaning to be distorted and misconstrued (as do the users of them). By applying certain mathematical rules, we can overcome many of the errors of thinking people make everyday.

This concept was not entirely new to me. In fact the course reminded me that when I was a kid, maybe in the first or second year of secondary school, I was lucky enough to read a book by RH Thouless called Straight and Crooked Thinking. This book was quite famous back then but seems to have fallen out of fashion of late. You can however read it online: Straight and Crooked Thinking by RH Thouless.

The book was a revelation to me then. I was just becoming interested in politics and reading the newspaper at that time, so the book helped me avoid some of the pitfalls that one encounters in dealing with communications that have an agenda at heart.

Many concepts are covered in the book, certainly too many to explain here within the confines of the 1000 word target of this blog post. However I'll give you a few examples of the type of issues the book addresses and how they come in handy when listening/reading the daily news.

The first chapter introduces the concept of emotionally charged words. Often, especially where a newspaper is trying to trigger a prescribed response, a journalist will use similes of harmless words, replacing them with alternatives that may contain stigma, prejudice or some other emotional colour. The Daily Express is particularly good at this using it as a technique to elicit clicks in its online version every day. Here is a random title from today's edition "Sturgeon FUMING as she's savaged for IndyRef2 obsession amid SNP-led Scotland 'CRISIS". Can you see what they did here? FUMING, savaged, obsession and CRISIS are all emotionally charged words that could have been written with milder alternatives (annoyed, condemned, concentration and situation for example), but the author has deliberately used the most extreme alternative for each of these words with the deliberate intention of making the SNP leader look bad because the Express don't care much for the SNP.

I saw another good example in a tweet this week. The MP Zarah Sultana had made a speech in the house. She tweeted a video excerpt from her speech along with the message:

Just because they want to learn, young people are burdened with colossal student debt.

My debt is nearly £50,000 & last year alone it grew by more than £2,000 in interest.

Now someone who is obviously a supporter of the party on the opposite benches replied:

Just a thought Zara , is it fair that kids whom choose to become bricklayer, plumbers , electricians etc pay via their tax for their peers to drink and socialise throughout a 3 year course in media studies at some spurious polytechnic ?

The chap has used a series of emotionally charged words and concepts in his reply to belittle the MPs position. Let's deconstruct this because it is quite skillfully and mischeiviously done. Firstly he uses the word 'kids', suggesting that children are being taken advantage of. Yet he's actually talking about people of working age. Would have been less inaccurate perhaps to say 'young adults'. Then he names three trades, bricklayer, plumbers and electricians, as examples of these working age adult's jobs. Notice he chose to use types of work associated with the working class. He could have said 'banker, stock broker or civil servant' none of which necessarily require a degree to enter, but his choice again emotionally colours his argument. He then asks why these people's taxes should pay for their peers to 'drink and socialise' - notice that he didn't say 'study' which is what student loans are for. The vast majority of students don't borrow enough to pay to drink and socialise, many indeed have jobs to help pay for food, but again he's cleverly invoking a stereotype of student days of the past which were much easier than today. Then the last two stingers, 'three year course in media studies' and 'some spurious polytechnic' both of which are deliberately designed emotional triggers. Media Studies are often derided as vacuous and easy options by right-wing commentators, however ironically the people on media studies courses are the ones learning the very pitfalls and traps the author is laying. Again 'polytechnic' is a derogatory term for university, as they were tertiary educational institutions in the UK which, prior to 1992 were regarded differently to universities due to their specialization in STEM subjects, a distinction that was abandoned in 1992 by the further and higher education act.

So nearly every word and phrase in this tweet has been tweaked with emotionally charged language, designed to persuade the reader to believe a particular political viewpoint.

For what its worth I replied with:

Is it fair that many have no choice other than to become bricklayers, plumbers, electricians etc because they can't risk taking on student debt as they already come from a poor background?

Twitter's character limit makes it hard to address each of the authors' word choices individually!

Talking of limits, I've just reach mine for this blog post. In fact I'm over the 1000 word target already! But I hope I've introduced you to the gist of Straight and Crooked Thinking, a topic I may revisit in the future.