Croatoan
“Sooner or later,” my wife said, “people will have to face up to the fact that the Internet will allow perversions and twisted ideas which are statistically rare to find each other and gather force. It will become a public safety issue in our lifetimes. Count on it.”
I thought a second before answering, “Well it is a matter of degree is it not? It began with the rise of the cities. Evil which could find no kindred spirit in homesteads found them at last in cities. Alone a perversion might find no resonance and die out. But in the cities the individual sparks could merge into a blaze: the bigger was the city, the bigger the blaze.”
That conversation came to mind when the Miami Herald reported a naked man had been found atop another naked man eating his face on the MacArthur causeway in Florida. A motorcyclist pulled up and yelled at the man to stop. He simply raised his head to display a grisly mouthful. The motorcyclist called the police. A responding officer fired a warning shot which had no deterrent effect on the man feasting on the victims face. Finally the policeman shot the assailant multiple times.
The question is what the heck was going on? The naked man whose face was being eaten is missing parts of his eyes and face and is therefore unavailable for questioning. So the Miami police are seeking witnesses, hoping to find an explanation for the incident. But what sort of answer do they expect? They may find a reason here and there; they may even find a full blown new sexual preference with a demand for full domestic and civil rights. Whether it will make sense is another matter. We are entitled to answers, but we are not always entitled to sense.
Harlan Ellison wrote a story titled Croatoan about where all the dark things go.
The story’s narrator, Gabe, is forced by a hysterical girlfriend to descend into New York City’s sewers, into which he has just flushed her aborted baby. Arriving there, he finds that fetuses populate the sewers, astride similarly disposed-of crocodiles, and the word “Croatoan”, crudely lettered on a wall near the entrance to the sewer. The story ends with the narrator’s hysterical realization: “I am the one they have been looking for all along….They call me father.”…
Although abortion figures into the plot of “Croatoan”, the issues surrounding abortion are not central themes in the story. In the story’s introduction, Ellison states that the story is neither for nor against abortion, but rather a promotion of personal responsibility (he goes on to say that after writing the story he had a vasectomy).
Where some people have a vasectomy still others will walk as quickly as they can to the nearest open green and there, while listening to the wind and the flutter of birds they will summon reinforcements to ward off what they would not face. For the human mind has many dark rooms, whose owners in most cases turn the lock against what lies within. But there are some who let the lurkers out and through the magic of the Internet, hook up with others delighted with similar discoveries.
It may be no coincidence that pedophilia, all manner of perversion, even the beheading videos enjoyed by those professing a religious revival and — who knows maybe face eating videos — now ride the currents of the global network. Once released from their dark rooms these phantasms travel across the routers, caches, peer to peer networks and encrypted torrents of the Internet. Nor can they even be denounced without danger. Political correctness surrounds them with the protective mantle of tolerance and the injunction against bigotry.
If cities of a few hundred thousand persons have historically been able to create orchards of evil, what exquisite flowers can a Global City of a billions not produce? Of course the tendency also goes the other way: for if evil can muster, why not good?
Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, should be equally famous for his story the Suicide Club. In it, he expressed this very possibility. Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his sidekick Colonel Geraldine go seeking the most extraordinary evil in the city of London in order to oppose it. Nowhere but in the largest city of the world could the greatest evil be found; and nowhere else but there should it finds it match. Jack the Ripper, meet Florizel or was it Sherlock Holmes that did him in? Perhaps that is not the hero’s name. All we know is that the Ripper eventually stopped. Maybe we will find out why when we discover why the Florida man was eating faces.
Interestingly the Steven’s Suicide Club stories led directly to the establishment of the Suicide Club of San Francisco.
The Suicide Club was probably best known at the time for its bridge climbing exploits. The Club, though secretive during its lifespan, influenced many future cultural and artistic endeavors. The Billboard Liberation Front began as a Suicide Club event hosted by Gary Warne in 1977. Author Don Herron’s Dashiell Hammett Walking Tour, the longest lived literary tour in America began in the Suicide Club in 1977. The Chinese New Years Treasure Hunt was created by Gary Warne in 1977 and continues (albeit in a different form) to this day. John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was a Suicide Club member. The Cacophony Society was founded by ex Suicide Clubbers in 1986. Gary Warne organized San Francisco’s first SantaCon in connection with the Suicide Club, adopted later and spread throughout the world by the Cacophony Society. There are now Cacophony Societies throughout the world. The Burning Man Festival was influenced by Cacophony and many former Suicide Club members were crucial organizers in the early days of the desert event. The “leave no trace” mantra of Burning Man was borrowed from the Suicide Club and the philosophy of Warne.
It is now said to be disbanded, but who knows? And as for Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine, I hope they find their way to the Belmont Club, wherever they may be. Perhaps the fate of our reality ultimately depends on the battle of fictions. How strange it has been in the 21st century to discover that ideas, memes and narratives are not insubstantial airy things, but the entities upon which our lives turn.
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Wretchard, I see your wife is as wise as you. Her prediction has come true. And it is a public safety issue. Flash mobs, kidnappings, murders. There are some dark doors to the human psyche that should be left closed. We are not ever made better by opening them.
I recently read an article on internet porn that left me very depressed. It is so prevalent, and so twisted, that I despair of my daughters ever finding a worthy man.
We must be very close to the end.
The human is forever self-conflicted, torn by the eternal psychic battle between part predator and part prey, the omnivore who harbors the instinct for destruction and self-destruction, between life-flourishing and life-extinguishing, Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, life’s anabolism and catabolism. We are two animals in one, and the mind just cannot find a long moment’s peace.
We are not any better as a rural animal than we are as an urban one. It’s just that urban concentrations provide so much more opportunities for the mind to lose its fragile tether on self-control, self-discipline, and self-mastery. The line between being human and being humane is the taut demarcation between being sane and insane, and no one actually knows where the divide is.
Quothing here from E.A.Poe of Baltimore…..
“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!’ I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!’
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.’
From the Wikipedia article at here
1963-1983
John Calhoun with mice experiment.
In the early 1960s, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) acquired property in a rural area outside Poolesville, Maryland. The facility that was built on this property housed several research projects, including those headed by Calhoun. It was here that his most famous experiment, the mouse universe, was created.[1] In July 1968 four pairs of mice were introduced into the Utopian universe. The universe was a 9-foot (2.7 m) square metal pen with 54-inch-high (1.4 m) sides. Each side had four groups of four vertical, wire mesh “tunnels”. The “tunnels” gave access to nesting boxes, food hoppers, and water dispensers. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting material. There were no predators. The only adversity was the limit on space.
John Calhoun meeting Pope Paul VI in a rare reverse of the traditional hand clasp.
Initially the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 days. The population reached 620 by day 315, after which the population growth dropped markedly. The last surviving birth was on day 600. This period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against. After day 600 the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed “the beautiful ones”.
The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.
Calhoun saw the fate of the population of mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of man. He characterized the social breakdown as a “second death”, with reference to the “second death” mentioned in the Biblical book of Revelation 2:11 [1] His study has been cited by Conservative Christian writers such as Bill Perkins as a warning of the dangers of the living in an “increasingly crowded and impersonal world”.[2]
On September 27, 1973 Calhoun met with Pope Paul VI at the Rome Special World Conference on Futures Research.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. There is no obligation to tolerate the intolerable. No one has the right to take from others. Those who profess a desire to engage in free speech and self expression may do so, until they seek to impose a cost on others.
If I can hear your sound on the subway then you are wrong. If you want to wear a shirt that is five colors not found in nature then that is your choice. If you choose to wear a shirt covered with rude sayings then that is not a private act but one designed to impose on others.
The courts have failed to make this distinction. They protect the right of the derelict to impose costs on others by allowing him to enter the library and afflict others with scents and sounds.
Man had a greater sense of the reality of evil in former times than he has today. I know some old people for whom the thought of the devil is terrifying. The devil can never be mentioned in their presence without inspiring a real unease.
He was once thought to exist. To some extent our traditional ritual is flame intended to ward off what we sensed to be waiting out there beyond the circle of light. The churches, the communities were alike mini-fortresses designed to defend against the Dark Ones. Even Homer, in his description of the Shield of Achilles puts culture, law, philosophy as the bulwark of society; within whose embrace commerce and family can flourish. Our last props are the walls of the city and armed men. When you get to that — the cop firing the bullets into the naked face-eating man — then other things have failed. The outer bulwarks have fallen long before.
We might want to call it mental health or something else. The name doesn’t much matter. What is important is to revive the notion that ideas are as dangerous as guns and we should explore them, like all else in the world, at our peril. We must venture aboard but in former times did so with a watchfulness now in disuse There are no safe trails outside the precincts of home. When we wander into the maze of caves then we had better be on our guard.
It has often been repeated that the greatest trick the devil has pulled is to convince every enlightened modern man that he doesn’t exist. Substitute what word you like for “devil” but that observation by CS Lewis contains an essential truth. Nothing is so fraught with peril as an idea and a suggestion. Temptation is man’s peculiar weakness because he is like unto angels — and therefore unto devils. The flip side of the great power of the human mind to dominate nature is that it contains the potential to destroy him as well.
The best defenses used to be the simple things — food, kindness, light, air, sacrifice, reflection and love. They somehow have the power to ward the Dark Ones from us. There used to be a phrase called Mental Hygiene once, back when we believed in germs and germs had names.
When Nieztsche wrote, “God is dead”, he did not mean that God was literally dead, but that his era marked the end of belief in the supernatural moral force and judgement of a Supreme Being, and Man was now left to his own intellect, abilities and judgement to survive, as a race.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/839/pg839.html
Culturally speaking, America is one big Love Canal. The culture is toxic. Filth is being pumped into our homes & our streets nonstop by the media. Young people whose parents do not take very strong proactive measures to limit the cultural deluge and inoculate the youth (by raising them to think critically, to discern the false from the true, the real from the fake), quickly get overwhelmed.
The toxic culture has already swallowed up a twenty-something co-worker of mine. This person can’t see that their sexual behavior is wayyyyyyy more extreme than just one generation before. Doesn’t bother them in.the.least that they are unmoored from everything that came before them. Doesn’t bother them in.the.least that the generation that comes after them will be them-times-10. All the twenty-something knows is, they have it ALLLLL figured out. Above all, they are non-judgmental. And that makes them cool, a friend to everyone, and certainly way more evolved than the shrivel-minded old folks (i.e. everyone over 40) who go on about how there are just some things one does not do if one does not want to be thought of as trash. “If people can’t accept me as I am, f*** ‘em,” says the twenty-something.
I swear it all started with the sound FX of Archie Bunker’s toilet flushing. But I would have a hard time proving that in court.
Am I the only one who keeps reading this and asking, “Face???”
Also, I recall this seems to be a chimpanzee standard attack, in one or more chimp attacks on humans biting off the face appears to be a major goal. But swallowing it? No doubt there were some heavy drugs involved.
Croatoan? How about Chorizo?
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/340224
If cities of a few hundred thousand persons have historically been able to create orchards of evil, what exquisite flowers can a Global City of a billions not produce? Of course the tendency also goes the other way: for if evil can muster, why not good?
Standard comic book narrative, have to match your super-heroes and super-villains. Heck, Satan has a much greater role in the public mind than he does in Jewish or Christian liturgies, though perhaps these have been expurgated over the centuries, some orthodox Jewish services spend more time chasing the devil away, as perhaps more old-style fundamentalist Protestants did, or do.
–
bw @ 10: Culturally speaking, America is one big Love Canal.
Oh now, it includes thee and me, can’t we give it a break on that account?
The final words of The Golden Bough
Sir James George Fraser
“Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped her weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to Nemi. It is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to the Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset, its golden glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint over Rome and touching with a crest of fire the dome of St. Peter’s. The sight once seen can never be forgotten, but we turn from it and pursue our way darkling along the mountain side, till we come to Nemi and look down on the lake in its deep hollow, now fast disappearing in the evening shadows.
“The place has changed but little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi’s woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind, the sound of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. Le roi est mort; vive le roi! Ave Maria!“
The Miami matter is just another consequence of the prevalence of–
The Culture of Death.
It has always lived in the shadows of Christian Civilization–the snake–St George slaying the dragon-etc
In the post Christian world Satan is now a celebrity and center stage
Hey maybe the cannibals where “consenting adults”
Maybe we are guilty of cannibilo-phobia
IMHO perversion has been around forever. As long as humans.
We notice it more today because there are more humans and therefore more to notice and a fairly large industry devoted to bringing it to our attention.
50 years ago the face eater would have been in a magazine next to the check out counter. Today it’s on the WWW and tomorrow it will be picked up by a network.
And this — “The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. . . .”
DOVER BEACH
By Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
1867
[I fear they don't teach Arnold any more.]
I knew Gary Warne tangentially and was in the neighborhood when the Suicide Club was formed. They were generally beta males and their female sidekicks conjuring up Dada-esque stunts that were actually quite creative and amusing from a certain point of view. “Pie-of-the-month club” wherein you were stalked by a friend with a cream pie, etc. Those kids had nothing in common with the primal evil headlining today’s “Drudge” or indeed most days’ “Drudge”.
Those kids had nothing in common with the primal evil headlining today’s “Drudge” or indeed most days’ “Drudge”.
My apologies if I gave the impression they were. The key idea of this post is that bad ideas can disseminate and reassemble in ways that we can’t predict.
Harlan Ellison wrote a story titled Croatoan about where all the dark things go.
Ellison was likely referencing the account of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, settled on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina in 1587. When a second expedition returned in 1590, the crew found no trace of the 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children who had formed the original colony. There was no sign of a struggle or attack. The only clue was the word “Croatoan,” carved into one of the posts of the colony’s fort.
Theories about the fate of the colonists range from the commonplace (they intermarried with and were absorbed by the local Indian tribes, whence they produced the ancestors of Elizabeth Warren) to the dark and grisly (they were slaughtered by Spanish conquistadors moving northward from Florida; they tried to return to England on their own and were lost at sea; they died of starvation and/or disease; or they were eaten by a tribe of Native American cannibals).
In any case, the word “Croatoan” conjures up a sense of something grim and evil as well as mysterious, and so fits well with Ellison’s story.
stoi/14:
I have to disagree. I know what you mean but the way you express your point skirts a little too close to the “it has ever been thus” argument, which as you know is the rhetorical cover under which cultural Marxism has been foisted on us.
Yes, *some* degree of perversion has always been around. But not THIS degree of perversion that is here, now, America 2012. As just one example: The degree to which TV has ramped up the depiction of perversity over just the course of my lifetime (I’m 41) is un-freaking-believable. Starsky & Hutch was the “raunchy” show (relegated to the 10 PM hinterlands) when I was a kid. I can only imagine how it would make the hair curl of someone who arrived here in a time machine from the 1950s. Their gritty crime shows were Bob Stack playing Elliot Ness and Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday. Now we have Boardwalk Empire.
And for all the “artistic excellence” of a show like the Sopranos (which was in certain ways an outstanding show), has the experience of watching it ennobled us, as a culture, as a society, as viewers? Influenced anyone for the better, to become more thoughtful, more responsible, more committed to their family, more _______ (fill in the blank with anything positive)? Did it reflect the classical aims of art, to depict the true, the good, and the beautiful? If it did little or none of the above, how “good” was the show, really? What *was* the show, really? Tasty rat poison?
Hollywood made a bargain with the devil at some point, and it definitely feels like the worm turned during my lifetime. The prevailing current of the output did not used to be nihilistic, and now it is. (Gunsmoke > Deadwood … just to sample the change in the TV Western)
I don’t know how a culture goes back to non-nihilism. Or forward to post-nihilism, if that’s a more proper expression of the idea. What does post-nihilism look like? Anyone?
Wretchard #7
Even Homer, in his description of the Shield of Achilles puts culture, law, philosophy as the bulwark of society; within whose embrace commerce and family can flourish. Our last props are the walls of the city and armed men. When you get to that — the cop firing the bullets into the naked face-eating man — then other things have failed. The outer bulwarks have fallen long before.
W.H. Auden published a bitter poem on that theme sixty years ago, in 1952:
“The Shield of Achilles”
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
12. beverly
A long voyage indeed in The Golden Bough.
Before the final passage that you quote, Frazier wrote some lines relevant to the Miami cannibal.
“The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that for ever recedes. We need not murmur at the endless pursuit:
You were not made to live like brutes
But to follow virtue and knowledge”
Someone in Miami did not get the memo.
Most of the people making entertainment today have become too cynical to make anything ennobling. The concept of nobility escapes them. Further, since Utopia is impossible, they think only Dystopia is left. They see no middle ground, no land of the Good Enough.
We need better artists.
One of my readings during the 1990′s that turned me to Christianity during the 1990′s was an account by Hernando Cortez’s oldest Lieutenant Bernal Diaz of Cortez’s conquests. The title of the book is the “DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST
OF MEXICO AND NEW SPAIN”
The book mentioned that the Aztec priests were not just cannibals. They also practiced homosexuality. Their practices were so abominable that Cortez reaction was often the same as that of Joshua.
The book can now now be read on line for free at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32474/32474-h/32474-h.htm
Expecting the next thing that will happen is for scam artists to descend on Miami and tell people they can be safe forever by giving them all of their money. Never mind that the public already paid for some level of safety, which did its job today as best anyone could expect of the fellows. One poor gentleman will have to endure some surgeries of course, which ultimately may lead to a better life than the one he was leading previous to the attack.
If successful, the con-men will hopefully send ‘Drudge Report’ its share of the earnings, or at least a thank-you card in the mail, which Matt will surely remit to avoid a perception of double-dipping on tragedy.
To know what this story really means in a broad sense, try googling “Miami” for News. The results now 12 hours after the “cannibal” incident (which was not true cannibalism by any stretch) return 4 stories in lead: all of them sports headlines.
Yet ‘Drudge Report’ chose this story…… Why??
““it has ever been thus” argument, which as you know is the rhetorical cover under which cultural Marxism has been foisted on us.”
No, I don’t know that. First time I ever heard it. It sounds like a hypothesis to me and not a very good one. I can’t imagine it ever upgrading to theory. Not even in today’s junk science world.
The intersection of all these various sets is money. If it bleeds, it leads. Drudge, like Cortez, is looking for gold. The Suicide Club was the Wal-Mart version of the Merry Pranksters. Publicity is gold.
John Calhoun with mice experiment. Junk science, pure and simple. Nothing more then a grant magnet for Mr. Calhoun. The basic premise of his experiment is that Rats and Humans have the same thought processes. Mr. Calhoun might but I don’t. Besides, the observation that the population density in several Asian cities is higher then John’s rat farm invalidates his hypothesis.
Not that anything factual will ever stop junk science from producing grant money.
“But what sort of answer do they expect? They may find a reason here and there; they may even find a full blown new sexual preference with a demand for full domestic and civil rights.”
I just assume the Evil is around us all. Always has been always will be. My worry is that these people practicing them will demand full domestic and civil rights from the goverment. An I as a tax paying citizen will have to support their behavior with my tax dollars.
Stoi @ 25:
“Not that anything factual will ever stop junk science from producing grant money.”
Maybe it should read:
” Not that anything factual will ever stop grant money from producing junk science.”
Somehow I don’t think the Penn State and East Anglia crews would have been so successful in peddling their story if there had not been a pot of grant money at the end of the rainbow enabling their ‘science’. Their ‘peers’ who review their ‘science’ so credibly also have the taint of ‘grant money’ bending the rules so a dozen or so trees’ growth ring history can outweigh 100′s or 1,000′s of others whose growth does not coincide with the grantee’s desired outcome.
The only thing grant money created was “Tang”, or so goes the story…
tom
IIRC, The Suicide Club of San Francisco was made of a pranksters and nobody died.
The web is a good thing as it makes the world more transparent not less so. Jerry Sandusky, and the pedophiles who achieved positions of trust in the BSA and Catholic Church were all active pre-internet.
Commander John J. Adams: [to himself] Monsters from the Id…
Dr. Edward Morbius: Huh?
Commander John J. Adams: Monsters from the subconscious. Of course. That’s what Doc meant. Morbius. The big machine, 8,000 miles of klystron relays, enough power for a whole population of creative geniuses, operated by remote control. Morbius, operated by the electromagnetic impulses of individual Krell brains.
Dr. Edward Morbius: To what purpose?
Commander John J. Adams: In return, that ultimate machine would instantaneously project solid matter to any point on the planet, In any shape or color they might imagine. For *any* purpose, Morbius! Creation by mere thought.
Dr. Edward Morbius: Why haven’t I seen this all along?
Commander John J. Adams: But like you, the Krell forgot one deadly danger – their own subconscious hate and lust for destruction.
Dr. Edward Morbius: The beast. The mindless primitive! Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning.
Commander John J. Adams: And so those mindless beasts of the subconscious had access to a machine that could never be shut down. The secret devil of every soul on the planet all set free at once to loot and maim. And take revenge, Morbius, and kill!
Dr. Edward Morbius: My poor Krell. After a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.
I thought Croatoan was the demon virus from “Supernatural.”
“There is no other subject on which the average mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance and intolerance. Tolerance applies only to persons but never to principles. Intolerance applies only to principles but never to persons.” — Fulton J. Sheen, ‘The Curse of Broadmindedness,’ 1931
Man is a mimetic animal; monkey see, monkey do. When public displays of behavior ‘push the envelope’ of what is acceptable and is not immediately confronted and condemned it does two things simultaneously. It gives aberrant behavior tacit permission to continue; by extension it gives permission for others to copy it, it acts as social proof of normative behavior. This is called ‘license.’ To a certain extent this is a normal process of social change. What we have in our times is a conscious and deliberate use of this mechanism to erode Western civilization in general and American civilization in particular, its culture and its values.
The guardians of public morality have been increasingly undermined, delegitimized and rendered powerless, often by their own desire for acceptance by presenting themselves as ‘relevant’ or the deisre to participate in the fun themselves. Interestingly, the very institutions that so consistently and self-consciously set about ‘revolutionizing’ mainstream culture are themselves losing their efficacy as the public becomes aware of their perversity and mendacity. I think it possible that another Great Awakening is in the offing, I hope so, but it will not come without struggle, and not in time for many.
Bogie Wheel @ 19: “What does post-nihilism look like? Anyone?”
It looks like a swing of the pendulum.
With our short lifespans, we simply can’t appreciate slow-moving trends that happen over generations; but they happen all the same. There is an argument that the Israelites ’40 years in the wilderness’ was strictly to let the generation that failed die off and be replaced with a new generation raised in more stringent circumstances.
Today’s cultural nihilism is an accurate reflection of the unsustainability of today’s political/economic societies. The Best & Brightest today are not very smart; they shut down factories, sending work overseas and creating unemployment at home along with unsupportable trade deficits; they subsidize anti-social behavior and unproductive activities; they pay for it all with freshly-printed money; they are sawing off the branches even they are sitting on.
The good news is that all of this is unsustainable, and will not be sustained. Today, we cannot stop the inevitability of this tide coming in, but we can save some seeds to replant after the tides in due course inevitably go back out again.
tomw, #27:
“Stoi @ 25:
‘Not that anything factual will ever stop junk science from producing grant money.’
Maybe it should read:
‘ Not that anything factual will ever stop grant money from producing junk science.’”
You’re getting into chicken-and-egg there. Shaky science when it becomes trendy enough can pull in those sweet, sweet grant dollars to begin with.
The cannibal sounded like one of Nancy Pelosi’s base supporters. Seriously.
The monkey thing crossed my mind, too. Makes sense that a culture that is foolish enough to think that man “descended” (kind of a theological Freudian slip, isn’t it?) from monkeys would, in fact, eventually descend to that level.
This is less about the internet or even the presence of darkness and evil than it is about the absence of light and love, which are gifted to us unless we reject them. In which case we end up seeking fulfillment in a bottomless pit of stimulation.
As to Charles’ point, above, it’s worth noting that after the miracle of Guadalupe, Mexico was converted more or less completely over the next 10 years – that’s 5,000 people a day for ten years – and the Aztec culture of death was essentially eradicated.
It could happen again. On the other hand, maybe this is what the Apocalypse looks and feels like from within it.
We will be all right. There is an awakening of sorts happening at a personal level, and I think that the absolutism of tolerance is not going to survive much longer.
Since I was very young, I have been brainwashed that people are all the same under the skin. Over the last forty years (maybe longer, but that’s all the time that I’ve experienced firsthand), this somehow morphed into the absurd notion that people all share common yearnings regardless of what they say or do. Judge not lest ye be judged.
“Science” even gives us convenient scapegoats in the three-in-a-hundred psychopaths/sociopaths among us. The awakening is the realization that the correct number is closer to three-in-ten.
After Lynne Stewart was convicted of being the communications conduit between Abdel-Rahman and his terrorist army, a couple dozen lawyers stood on some steps in their lawyer duds, posing for a solidarity photograph in support of Stewart. They are not like I am under the skin. In fact, they are different enough from what I am that it is a stretch to think we are the same species.
There are several other examples. There are radical chic types who elevated Ayers and Dohrn to academia’s upper crust. The POTUS’s closest advisor was a despicable slumlord who unabashedly stole public monies from the underclass she was supposedly helping. The POTUS himself spoke in the Illinois legislature in support of leaving infant survivors of botched abortions to die of neglect.
The amount of pretending needed to tolerate this puts a strain on the “polite” part of polite society. The line between tolerance and condoning evil is not a thin line. It is a chasm a million miles wide, at least twice as deep, and brightly illuminated with the fires of hell. We have been spending entirely too much time on the wrong side of this chasm, and people are starting to wonder how and why that is. Forgetting the “why” for a moment, the “how” is obvious. People supposedly just-like-you-or-I agitate and vote to make this happen.
If civilization does not walk it back in an orderly fashion, it will hit a breaking point. I am perfectly fine with either scenario.
Lets see here we have a couple of guys nakedly frolicking in public and one wanted a snack. Heck, it might have been consensual. If they had been at the Folsom Street festival in San Francisco they might have starred in a Zombie photo essay.
What’s the answer? Let them marry. They wouldn’t need to hire a caterer for the reception.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhEwpRcPozE&feature=related
You don’t know the half of it, Barry.
K @ 32 – Well done. Historical data are abundant, a rich canvas recording the travails of mankind, as far back as recorded history allows one to reckon. Even farther, if one believes the scriptural accounts.
The scroll of time reveals one and only one story, but who can discern it, concealed as it is amongst the mound of ashes. One needs the cipher, the Rosetta Stone, to unravel the prize hidden within.
We often used fault trees to map the terrain of interest in failure and anomaly investigations at a certain government agency involved in human space flight. One could note that these are bell-shaped diagrams of the unfolding sequence of events that could credibly cause the top event, the particular failure or anomaly being analyzed.
The metaphor holds true. When the root cause was uncovered, the true answer caused the tree to ‘ring like a bell’. It provided answers to all of the troublesome unanswered questions, lurking facts. and unusual observations uncovered during the investigation.
We often overlook scripture as a fundamental source for understanding the history of mankind. After all, the omniscient hand of God is steering the course of history to a predetermined conclusion, in a manner that does not invalidate the volition of man.
We have the mind of Christ, the operator’s manual for the human soul, the Word from the one who created man. Yet, we make so little use of it, determined, as we are, that we can understand everything without help.
Understanding the nature of man, provided by the one who created man, is the key to unlocking the history of man.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
(Alexander Pope)
“This world is in the grip of a terrible evil”, I said to a person I had only just met at the dog park yesterday.
“Yes, it is”, she replied, The stranger, my wife and I watched in silence as our little boy and his dog ran laughing across the grass.
If I can recognize it, and a perfect stranger can recognize it, anyone can recognize it. Friends, we should thank God that we still have the capacity to recognize evil. Once you’ve lost that, you are a demon.
There is no political solution to the current situation. Our only hope is, as always, to crawl to the foot of the Cross and beg Him for mercy.
Fortify yourselves, friends. Make each family a miniature monastery. Fight the evil inside yourselves at every turn. Strengthen yourselves and your homes to ride out the Big Crash. If we can survive to emerge from the ruins, we can rebuild Christendom, and by doing so renew the world.
I’ve always found much to contemplate in this:
While most of the world spent the period of 1870 to 1939 creating secret societies and “cells” of various flavors of Marxism or Facism, somehow the United States managed to create the Rotary, Kiwanas, Lions, and of course the wonderfully named Optimists among many others.
Well I hope Mr. Drudge is proud of the fear-stricken lemmings he makes, of the time wasted cleansing the body of implanted demons, of punishing their offspring with similar guilt, and generally reducing mankind to any of the three characters observed on the bridge.
Cop, victim, or cannibal- these are the options given to us that we may aspire to follow. Becoming a sane person or even worthy reporter is totally out of the question.
The evil that lurks amoung is the fiction so well propagated by the Marxists that man is the God not the servant of God. Until Christondom is renewed and the tenants of Christian civil society rebuilt this crazy crap will continue.
The big crash may of may not make believers of folks. I,for one, know that man neither collectively nor singley controls his destiny.
Doc– “Marxists”? WHO?? You are creating scapegoats for answers to crises that don’t even exist.
You want to talk about Big Crashes, fine: 10,228 people were killed in alcohol-related auto crashes in 2010. (Either last year’s figures haven’t been counted yet due to government sluggishness, or I’m no good at searching for them.) Drunk drivers are every bit the monsters as face-chewing coke addicts – greater in number, and equal in responsibility for their mayhem.
Those figures pale in comparison with the people killed from bad reporting of news, a most awful crime which (some say deliberately) has triggered decade-long wars and catastrophes of biblical scale. There is your evil right there- not found on any bridge in the world, but on every news stand in the western hemisphere.
Powerful “Flame” cyber weapon found in Iran
yahoo ^ | May, 28, 2012 | By Jim Finkle
BOSTON (Reuters) – Security experts discovered a highly complex computer virus in Iran and the Middle East that they believe was deployed at least five years ago to engage in state-sponsored espionage. Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that claimed responsibility for discovering the virus.
Iran’s National Computer Emergency Response Team also said Flame might be linked to recent cyber attacks that officials in Tehran have said were responsible for massive data losses on some Iranian computer systems.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/powerful-flame-cyber-weapon-found-135931201.html
…………
If the data losses were related to Iranian nuclear testing then this might be the reason that some israeli defense officials have softened their tone on Iran in recent months.
Wretchard @17
Guess I didn’t see the connection. Seems to me these sorts of people will be found wherever there is an art school. “Suicide Club” was a joke/attention-getting name at all events.
Always a surprise to see a post which includes items about which I know something personally. It was long ago.
BTW I find your posts, reflections, and analyses among the most thoughtful and thought-provoking on the blogesphere, or indeed anywhere.
I hope nobody is spying on my posts here.
“What’s the answer? Let them marry. They wouldn’t need to hire a caterer for the reception.”
Good one, Trang.
44. Baobo
“Drunk drivers are every bit the monsters as face-chewing coke addicts – greater in number, and equal in responsibility for their mayhem.”
You are conflating stupidity with evil. Not the same thing at all. To be evil one must have the intent. To be stupid, one only has to exist.
As Einstein supposedly said:”The difference between stupidity and genius is that there is a limit to genius.”
This being Memorial Day, I would like to thank trangbang68, Subotai Bahadur, and all the other veterans, LEOs, firefighters, EMTs, and other search-and-rescue folks at BC for their service in protecting us from harm and helping us pick up the pieces when it does strike. Whether the harm comes from evil or stupidity, I am truly grateful to all of you. And thanks as always to Wretchard for providing some of the brightest intellectual fireworks anywhere on the Net.
Now how to tell
Prince Florizel
And Colonel Geraldine
That they should read
This daily screed
This online magazine
Read in disguise
Or otherwise
It matters not how’s done
Now here’s the rub
The Belmont Club
Is erudite but fun
‘There is nothing new in all this.’ It’s the human condition. Evil haunted the corridors of the sacred from the beginning. From a certain point of view, all history is the history of religious war, even when these have described themselves as secular faiths, as the 20th century showed.
Watching the Wannsee video turned my interests to Central and Eastern Europe and it is remarkable how many of the ancient capitals of the region, which once were centers of Jewish life, only have the “last synagogue” type sites left. A whole civilization was exterminated — and not just the Jewish one, we are belatedly finding out. And yet it did not happen of a sudden, springing from a vacuum. This was the culmination of a madness long in the making.
Who started it, you might ask? The answer is complex. Christianity itself has been riven by many schisms, few of which we remember now, going all the way back to Nicae, but nearly all of whose ideas and their quarrels persist to this day, which often inform our views of freedom, will and destiny in unconscious ways.
Islam too was always present as an influence in Europe, especially in the East. And certainly socialism and Marxism and perhaps even the remnants of Nazism are currents which are not only felt today, but are in cases even more vibrant than before. We have rebranded some of these trends as “environmentalism” or have ushered them all into a Big Tent. But beneath the name is the beast.
The public space is under the masque, a Monster’s Ball. “It has always been thus”. That is true. There is nothing new. The difference was that in former times we knew it.
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/as-memorial-day-nears-a-single-image-that-continues-to-haunt/
Evil men have existed since Cain. They do not wish to submit to the way of the Lord, and often concoct elaborate and attractive excuses and cults to justify their immorality. Christianity has been dogged by such men almost from the beginning. The Gnostics Valentinus and Simon Magnus were early Christianity rip off artists, eager to grift off the wake of Christianity for their own purposes, and they did generate substantial followings.
The difference now is that it has become unfashionable among polite, cultured society to identify evil behavior for what it really is. It’s not so hard now to see how the Aztecs, or the Nazis became so hideously immoral.
Could there be a more perfect metaphor for our times?
Two naked men lie together, one atop the other in undeniable domination, since he is literally eating the other. Whatever else there is to the transaction, the eater has already made the other both blind and mute, and will not stop the destruction when ordered, so must be killed to end the attack.
Madness, we say, but it is merely a microcosmic mirror of the larger madness unfolding around the world, as the thugs and tyrants simultaneously rape and devour their own people.
maybe the south beach cannibal thought he was taking communion.
Programmr,
I imagine you and many other readers here know of Robert O’Brien’s novel “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,” which is a fictional account of rats that escaped from Calhoun’s experiment. Great stuff, one of my favorite books as a kid and one which I recently had occasion to re-read. It is wonderfully crafted, though puts too nice a face on some of the issues it raises (without giving anything away, the rats who dissent from the master plan wind up conveniently being killed offstage).
But an awfully good read in any case.
Solovyov –
That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the name of the institution.
Toadold –
Thank you, I’d never seen that photo before. Moving, indeed.
Wretchard –
“And as for Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine, I hope they find their way to the Belmont Club, wherever they may be.”
Am I the only one who read that sentence and then thought, sheepishly, W might want to turn his search to the man in the mirror? There’s a reason I’ve followed W since April of ’04, consistently. With his brilliance, artistry, and humility, and with the great commenters as well, I feel as though BC is indeed an exquisite flower, to borrow the phrase.
As for opposing evil where it is found, if it weren’t for BC I might not have found out about Leo’s CPA and ASG.
Of course, it’s easy for me to say, but I felt compelled to say it all the same.
programmr I thought of the same thing when I read this horific article.
I think we are entering a time where there are more bodies walking the world than souls
we are entering the age of the goblin wearing a nominally human skin suit.
The motorcyclist witnessed a most ghastly sort of “you talking to me?” body language.
Even though I have been tracking the increasing influence of the Death Cult for over 20 years, I’ve been avoiding this story because of its barbarity. It’s far more graphic than the news story out of Brazil last month where a trio was arrested for filling empanadas with the flesh of their victims and selling them to neighbors.
Mad Fiddler at 55 at least understands what I’ve been warning about. Thank God there was one cop who still had some decency to put an end to this attack, no doubt overcoming any CYA concerns he’d assuredly had drilled into him before having been granted his badge and his gun. Look for him to be investigated by all the usual suspects.
In short those at the top look at incidents such as this as a micro-event. They expect many more of us to succumb, if not to this level of savageness, to some other. The inducements are there in the media they have provided us. We have been and are being conditioned. Each of us is susceptible to some inducements that the others at our level of servitude (to them) are not. They figure it’s only a matter of time before we do in ourselves and a good number of our neighbors. And that will somehow save the planet (which also happened to be the excuse the empanadas bakers gave), with us sacrificing ourselves to their version of Moloch.
No, The Conditioners, as CS Lewis called them, are concerned about the macro-event. That’s the one where they are finally at the top, the post-humans ruling us sub-humans, essentially us being little more than hairless sheep who can supply a bevy of spare parts.
Those of us who still have chests (Lewis again) find it hard to speak of events such as this. I don’t think I’ll blog this one. The empanadas one was bad enough. In fact, I don’t know how you, Wretchard, found the stomach to write that sentence I’ve highlighted. Maybe it was out of empathy for the cop for the scene that confronted him and compelled him to act. I bet it is, and I commend your instinct.
I suspect the human condition is a constant. I wager this is visibility, not frequency. And visibility may actually suppress perversity v. encourage it (vicarious experience triggers some of the same emotional and hormonal responses of the act, it seems). What’s changed is ease of publication, the media’s need for viewers, clicks, and our own lack of vigilante response.
In the past some things beyond the pale were simply dealt with by neighbors. Seldom did it make it into the public record. Ages ago I had a home in a state with abstracts (rather than title insurance). Reading through the history of the property I saw one sale had been signed by a judge back in the 40s. I asked a town old-timer what happened. He said “That was farmer Sam who owned the land where you are, he had five daughters and had impregnated every single one of them by 1925. We beat him within an inch of his life more than once, and eventually locked him up and threw away the key.”
The town gossip is now google.
And the media tries to compete (while going bankrupt – they are discovering that opinion which costs nothing is worth nothing – and what customers will pay for – facts – takes hard work they no longer know how to do).
Ari Tai, you have once more ended your post with a line I want to steal; it’s worth reiterating here:
I will wait a decent interval…