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 George Zimmerman. Remember him? George, who shot Trevon Martin and was acquitted in July.

We did several posts on George and Florida’s stand your ground gun law.  At  the time of his acquittal, we felt fairy certain that Zimmerman would screw up somewhere up the line, just as O.J. Simpson did after his acquittal, and would end up in the news again. And he has – 5 times since his acquittal.

The most recent event occurred today, November 18, 2013, when Zimmerman apparently came to his girlfriend’s home, smashed a glass table, threatened her with a gun, then pushed her out of her own home and locked her out. He barricaded himself inside and called 911, just as she had done moments earlier, and gave his version of events.

On MSNBC this evening, Lawrence O’Donnell played the full tape of the 911 calls. The tape is chilling. Zimmerman sounds strangely calm as he spells out his version of the events. It’s the voice of a man who knows how to play the system, who knows that his version of reality must be recorded somewhere, for his own defense. It’s the voice of a man who knows that the best defense is an effective offense.

What’s really interesting to me about the Zimmerman case is the girlfriend – not his wife, who is divorcing him – but his new girlfriend. What woman in her right mind would get involved with this guy?

When I worked as a librarian and Spanish teacher in the Florida prison system, I discovered a rather strange and perverted phenomenon that I called The Inmate Groupie Weirdness. You take a high profile case involving a young man and, invariably, female groupies converged. They sent letters (in the days before e-mail), dropped by for visits on weekends, and sometimes the inmate actually married the most faithful groupie while still in prison or as soon as he got out.

I don’t know what it’s like in Florida prisons since I left in 1979, but many of the prisons are now privatized (more profitable!) and it’s likely that conjugal visits can be arranged, for the right price. Even back in the days when the state had fairly stringent oversight on prisons, almost anything could be had for the right price – cigarettes, drugs, sex. And if you were a high profile inmate, someone whose case got a lot of media attention, you could get even more privileges. Unless you molested kids. Then you usually died in prison, killed by other inmates.

If George Zimmerman ever does time, there will be some woman in the wings who declares her undying love for him. And when he’s released, she’ll be outside the gates, waiting for him, eager to draw him fully into her life.  And it’s likely that she, too, will end up calling 911 because sociopaths like Zimmerman just can’t help themselves. And women who are drawn to men like this can’t help themselves, either. Something essential is missing from their psyches. It’s why Charles Manson had such a faithful female following.

I don’t know if the missing ingredient was breast milk or a loving parent, or even something simpler. Maybe all the players involved agreed to these roles before they were born in this life. But Zimmerman, regardless of what happens to him, won’t ever lack for female support and adoration.

Go figure.

 When we were on Open Minds radio last spring, the host, Alejandro Rojas, asked if aliens can control synchronicity. The question is a good one and came up again today, when we had lunch with a woman who has had encounters for the last twenty years.

Sandy and her second husband, George, live on Florida’s West coast, we live on the East coast, so today we met them for lunch halfway across the state in the town of Clewiston. We’ve been corresponding with Sandy ever since she got in touch with us in late September,  after having read  Aliens in the Backyard. During the years of her encounters, she has kept meticulous notes and journals about what transpires and had sent us some of her journal entries.

We planned to meet at the Clewiston Inn but it turned out the inn doesn’t serve lunch until the tourist season begins in a few weeks. So we ended up at the Tiki Bar, an open air place on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. On Sundays, it’s  also a biker bar. Dozens of Harleys roared in just as we arrived, but we got a waterside table and talked for the next three hours.

Sandy is a retired veterinarian whose specialty was animal neuroscience. Her encounters have never involved the classical abduction scenario, medical experimentation, or being taken into a craft. Some of her experiences of these beings – whom she refers to as energies – sound utterly terrifying to me, but over the years she has learned to control her fear and now works consciously with these entities.  She has names for them – Watcher, Marshal, John –  which makes it easier for her to distinguish them in her journals.

During the course of our conversation, we also talked about synchronicity. She feels that ever since these encounters started, the entities “arrange” major events through synchronicities, that they actually generate the synchros. Her move from Maryland to Florida and her meeting George 17 years ago are two such events. This part of the conversation led into a discussion about free will. She says that even when these synchros were occurring, she had the free will to make different decisions, to go in another direction.

Interestingly, this is echoed by Bernard Beitman, a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia, who just finished a book on meaningful coincidence.  “A synchronicity presents you with an option but it doesn’t mean you should make the choice that seems to be suggested.”

But Sandy chose to heed the synchronicities and not only moved to Florida, but ended her first marriage to Jay, a physician. Jay’s encounters included abductions that were sometimes so horrible  she had to throw herself over him to calm him down.   The entities “scolded” him for being coldly objective and subsequently taught him to meditate and to open his mind and heart. He and Sandy remain friends and although he no longer has encounters, his life has completely changed – for the better.

We asked her what she thought the beings’ agenda is. “Maybe it’s about helping humanity evolve.”

Sandy says that her intent is to work with these beings and record the experiences. She tries not to judge or dissect what happens, but because she’s such a left-brain person it can be challenging to simply remain open, without fear. “The beings are teaching me to manage the powerful energy that comes in when they’re present. I’m learning to work with matter and to move in and out of dimensions, even to strange worlds and different times. The space/time jumps are my favorites.”

Whitley Strieber has also written about these space/time jumps. I think he calls them time slips. For Sandy, they seem to happen suddenly, without warning, and she finds herself in some sort of parallel world/dimension with people whom she knows. In one experience, she found herself as a convention of scientists and asked the woman next to her what year it was. The woman whispered, “We’re not supposed to talk about dates.” But Sandy kept pressing her for the year and the woman finally said, “19…” And that was it.

Judith Orloff, an M.D. and author,  wrote about something similar in Second Sight. In between lives, she visits and lives with her soul family, people she knows only from the between state.

Sandy, like Strieber, believes there may be some connection between the entities and the dead. She also is convinced that since her encounters started in 1994, her intuitive abilities have deepened.

“I think paradigm shifts start as localized ripples like this that eventually spread and grow large enough to change how we think and function as a society,” she says.

 If so, then perhaps one day synchronicity will be understood as the unifying force that it certainly appears to be.

This video is inspiring!

I can’t get the video to show here, but copy, paste, and you won’t be sorry!

It seems that South Florida is a hotbed of psychic misadventures. Recently, we wrote here about a Fort Lauderdale-based Rom family and their methods of scamming unwitting clients, including a bestselling romance writer, who was duped out of millions.

Now comes a new story of a psychic taking advantage of a vulnerable woman, caught up in a series of negative events in her life, including the death of her mother and the breakup of a relationship. In her case, money was not an issue – at least not initially. She had inherited $100,000 from her mother, money that she would soon lose to a 23-year-old psychic, named Stephanie Thompson.

Probably the young psychic thought ‘easy come, easy go,’ regarding the inheritance. Once she knew about it, she told the unwitting woman, who remains unnamed, that the money was cursed and needed to be cleansed. Amazingly, the ‘victim’ got the cash out of the bank and turned it over to the psychic. I put victim in single-quotes because really there are no victims, only people playing roles.

In this case, the woman even admits that she knew better, that she was aware of fraudulent psychics operating in South Florida when she walked into the Psychic Boutique on U.S. 1 in Boca Raton. But she says she was so caught up in her travails that she thought maybe she was cursed.

Apparently, she initially thought she would pay $50 for a psychic reading, but was told she needed to pay $2,000 to determine the cause of the ‘negative energy’ around her. The price grew to more than $20,000 after the psychic said she meditated and discovered the woman was cursed. Thompson even told the woman that she might get cancer just like her mother if she didn’t get the inherited money cleansed. Supposedly, she would get it back after the ritual.

But that didn’t happen, as the woman should’ve known. Does the money ever get returned in these ‘money laundering’ schemes? The woman says: “In my logical mind, I probably would have said, ‘Get the heck out of here, you’re crazy. But I was distraught. I had gone through a string of very difficult things. And you think, maybe I am cursed. Maybe there is something going on here.”

Indeed there was. She was about to lose $100,000. Actually, when you think about it, it turns out that money was cursed and both women would pay the price. The so-called victim lost her inheritance and Stephanie Thompson lost all the money in a casino – so she says – and was arrested and is facing a prison sentence when it comes to trial. That would be a double-trickster synchronicity. You think that money is cursed…just watch what happens.

Another synchronicity occurred when the woman went to the police. She was reporting the misdeed to a detective when Thompson called her and said that she could get her about $75,000 back. So they agreed to meet outside a CVS in Boca and the cop came along. When questioned by the detective, Thompson admitted she had lost it all at a casino.

Years ago, I used to be annoyed when newspapers, such as the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel where this story appeared, featured these psychic scams on their front page. It seemed an attempt to show that all psychics were frauds, that there was no such things as psychic abilities. I no longer think that way. The reason people get caught up in these scams is that there are indeed people who can foresee events, who can read you as if they’ve known you all their lives, some who can even heal. But there are the scammers, and some of these people no doubt also have talents. It usually takes at least one good psychic hit to hook a potential victim.

We’ve encountered such psychics over the years. For us, it has been people who attempted to psychically manipulate us into writing their books or who wanted some control or influence over a part of our lives. That was the case in one instance a few years ago when a psychic told Trish that she was in contact with Trish’s deceased mother. A good ploy, but Trish didn’t buy it. She knew her mother too well. Nothing the psychic said provided any proof that she was in contact with her mother.

There can be a fine line between a good psychic reading and one intent on manipulating and altering a person’s actions. Then there are the Stephenie Thompsons who step way over the line into the world of fortunetelling fraud and make front-page headlines for their criminal behavior.

Daughter Megan was home for a visit over the weekend and pulled us away from our computers for a couple of hours to watch a movie – one that we would never have picked out ourselves. She likes to do that, previously exposing us to strange, raunchy satires, such as Super Bad and Pineapple Express. And now This is the End. The latter involves several actors from the earlier two movies  –  Seth Rogan, James Franco, Jonah Hill, among others – playing themselves as they getting together for a party at Franco’s new house when an unexpected event occurs—the apocalypse. Hence, the title.

Turning the apocalypse into a comedy, including a reading from Revelations, might seem chancy. In fact, the studio that produced the movie was wary and cut the budget. So the actors agreed to take smaller pay than expected. We found the movie pretty hilarious, in a gross sort of way, and noted that it even maintained a moral about personal behavior – self-serving vs. self-sacrifice. The self-serving tended to fall into a sinkhole to hell in James Franco’s front yard, while those willing to sacrifice themselves were ‘rapturized’ in a blue beam of light accompanied by Whitney Houston’s, “I’ll Always Love You.” Ultimately, only two of the actors playing themselves made the trip up the beam, the others succumbed to the whims of a well-hung, red-eyed, horned beast.

After This is the End ended, I turned to Trish and smiled. “Now why don’t you write a post about that.” Little did I know that events the following day would lead me to writing the post.

When the snail-mail arrived, I found a small envelope with my name on it, written in a shaky scrawl. There was no return address, but it had been mailed from West Palm Beach, a few miles away. Inside was a photocopy of a newspaper or magazine clipping. It was a Q&A column and the question of the day was: What is the Rapture of the Church?

Of course, I immediately saw the synchronicity. Silly movie was soon followed by serious  column, which I also found silly. Maybe it was the way that the question was phrased that bothered me  – Rapture of the Church. I had the feeling that it wasn’t put that way to avoid confusion with say, rapture of the deep. No, the implication, of course, was that you best be a member of the Church if you’re going to make it out of this world alive.

The answer to the question was stated this way. “The Rapture of the Church is the time when Jesus Christ returns in the air to bring the Church home before the beginning of the Great Tribulation.”

The column went on to include a quote from scripture, which in part read: “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven and with a shout, and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the cloud to meet the Lord in the air, and thus shall we ever be with the Lord.”

The author of the column, said to be Hal Lindsey, author of The Rapture and The Late Great Planet Earth, concluded: “I believe that the Rapture could occur any moment. The signs of the times indicate it will certainly come in the lifetime of those who are reading these words.”

According to Wikipedia, Lindsey earlier had predicted the Rapture would take place by 2000. Well, timing has always been a problem with prophecies about the end times. Although maybe the Great Tribulation is already underway – ahead of the Rapture – and it’s taking place in the U.S. Congress. Certainly, there are members of Congress who deserve to be rapturized out of Washington ASAP.

The third book in my Hungry Ghosts trilogy was published today! Before I knew the pub date, I was worried that it would be published during Mercury retrograde, which ended on 11/10. It turns out that astrologically, today is one of the luckiest this year, with the transiting sun and transiting Jupiter forming a perfect beneficial angle to each other.

An excerpt is here.

The cover is scary… I think it’s supposed to be Ricardo, one of the brujos – hungry ghosts – but he never looks like this in my descriptions of him. He doesn’t wear face paint. When we first see him, his host is a Q’ero Indian. By the end of the book, his host is a black man, whom I imagine as Denzel Washington!  I didn’t have any input on the cover!

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On another note: every disaster and mass event not only has synchros, but also has miracles. In the midst of utter devastation that may have killed more than 10,000 people, a baby was born. She was named after her grandmother, who is among the missing.

Some storms you can write about with a kind of detachment, as an exercise in synchronicity. But the typhoon that slammed into the Philippines is in a league apart.

This storm had gusts up to 170 miles an hour, which puts it in the Category 5 niche for hurricanes. In a country where 96 million people live in what is basically abject poverty, there’s little hope that devastation will be minimal. When the first casualty reports came through as 1,000, it seemed incomprehensible to me. I figure it would be in the tens of thousands. Then this evening, November 9, the reports were putting deaths at around 10,000.  But when your rescue teams are finding bodies in the roads, in standing water, in buildings, you can bet the death toll will exceed 10,000. And as of today, November 10, it does.

I suspect there’s a synchro rolled up somewhere in this castastrophe. I tried to find out what the word Haiyan – the name of the typhoon – means. I found a number of different meanings and among them was that yan is Chinese for angry or annoyed if uttered in one tone of voice and means respect if spoken in another tone.  Hai in Chinese supposedly means angry ocean. Respect the angry ocean?

The people are friends or colleagues. They gather at a bar  for a couple of drinks, then don aprons and approach their assigned easels, paint brush in hand. It’s paint night at the bar in Orlando and the young blond master artist smiles and begins her instructions.

Over the next two and a half hours, the artists – most who have never painted a picture in their lives – will re-produce a selected painting using 5 acrylic paints. They’ll go home with their art, hopefully happy painters. The motto for Paint Nite is: Drink Creatively – No Experience Required.

Paint Nite is a new thing in Orlando. It began in Boston and has been catching on across the country as an ‘alcohol ad-on.’ Our daughter Megan happened to see an ad on Craig’s List for artists and applied. The timing was perfect. Her galley show was underway and the same day she was contacted about her application, she was interviewed by FOX-35 about her art work. Needless to say, she was hired and became Orlando’s first Paint Nite master artists.  Eventually, she could be working five nights a week as the company expands.

The synchronicity here is that days before finding this job that fits so well with her background and downtown Orlando lifestyle, she had undergone an extensive interview and swim test to get a job at Sea World. She thought she had it. After all, they had hired her a year earlier, but because of speeding tickets she was dismissed before she even began. The job would’ve entailed driving a golf cart on rare occasions. While corporate policy prevailed, they told her to apply again. This time she was only one of two applicants who completed the swim test successfully. She thought she was in, and was very disappointed when she didn’t get the job.

But if she had been hired for the part-time minimum wage job at Sea World, she wouldn’t have seen  the ad for Paint Nite master artist. Now she is earning approximately four times the salary paid by Sea World and is her own boss. Meanwhile, she continues with her downtown dog-walking business, which is expanding.

So it’s an example of a big disappointment turning into something very special and rewarding. Good going, Megan!

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Here’s the painting Megan will be teaching others to paint:

To practice teaching people how to paint the painting below, we held a practice session this weekend. Here’re some photos from that. Two of Megan’s friend, Bill and Stephanie, were there and so was Maddie, our 10-year-old neighbor, and me. What fun it was!

This video is amazing.

 I’ve often wondered about places and people that disappear under mysterious circumstances.  Take the Roanoke colony, founded in 1587 on the coast of what was then Virginia and is now North Carolina.

The colony was settled by a hundred men and women, who intended to farm and to pay for supplies from home by selling wild sassafras, then used in England for medicinal purposes. The governor of the colony, John White, sailed back to England for supplies that would help the colonists live through the winter.

But he was detained in England by the war with Spain for more than three years. He was able to gain passage back to Roanoke on a private expedition that agreed to stop at the colony on the way back from the Caribbean. White landed on August 18, 1590, his granddaughter’s third birthday, but the settlement was deserted. Evenm his daughter and granddaughter were gone.

All the house and structures had been dismantled, there was no sign of a struggle, and no trace of the 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children. The only clue found in the deserted settlement was a word carved into a post of the fence around it: Croatan, the name of a local Indian tribe. White supposedly had instructed the colonist that if anything happened to them before he returned, a Maltese cross should be carved onto a nearby tree  and it would indicate that their disappearance had been forced. Since there wasn’t any cross, so White assumed they had moved to Croatoan Island – now known as Hatteras Island.

Inclement weather prevented him for searching Hatteras for the missing colonists and he returned to England.

 What actually happened to the lost colonists remains a mystery. One theory is that they assimilated into some friendly North American tribe. Another theory is that they were slaughter by the Spanish, who were colonizing Florida.  

 This kind of strange disappearance is a great what if premise for fiction. In fact, Dean Koontz, in his novel Phantoms, delves into it and Roanoke is mentioned. But what about people who suddenly vanish?

 On September 23, 1880, David Lang, a farmer living near Gallatin, Tennessee, supposedly set off across a field and vanished in full sight of his wife. His disappearance was allegedly witnessed by two arriving visitors, who had waved to him as they passed him in their buggy.  After Fate magazine wrote about the case in 1953,  a search was conducted of the 1880 census records for Sumner County where the Langs had supposedly lived, but the name Lang wasn’t found.

 In 1873, an English shoemaker named James Worson accepted a friend’s bet that he couldn’t run from their town of Leamington Spa to Coventry and back, a distance of  about 16 miles.  Worson set out with three friends following him in a cart. After a couple of miles, he stumbled, pitched forward – and vanished.

His three buddies knew what they’d seen and frantically searched the area. They couldn’t find him and eventually went to the police, but stuck to their version of the story – their friend had simply disappeared.

There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands of stories like these. Some may be explicable, but how many may be attributable to something else? To something science doesn’t understand yet?