What a wonderful world Part 2

Bill Whittle and Steven Green at Pajamas Media describe how fame has now become the be-all and end-all of life. We live in a world where publicity — even notoriety — is the primary qualification for public office. It certainly helps to be strange if you’re going to make the news. After the Read More, we learn about brain-eating mental patients who have been released by the National Health Service. Also, we discover that the new Japanese First Lady was once abducted by aliens — and knew Tom Cruise in a previous lifetime: when Cruise was Japanese.

• Brain-eating convicted killer freed to murder two more after social worker bungles | Mail Online

  • A ‘systematic failure’ in the treatment of a schizophrenic allowed him to murder a friend and eat parts of his brain before he went on to kill a fellow patient in Broadmoor,two separate reports have revealed.

    Convicted killer Peter Bryan was given permission to live in a hostel in north London where he could come and go as he pleased.

    He had been admitted to a secure hospital after beating shop assistant Nisha Sheth to death with a hammer in 1993.

    But eight years later, mental health experts decided he could live in the community under supervision.

  • In a damning report into the case, authors found that while living in the community Bryan was looked after by an inexperienced social worker and a psychiatrist who had never worked with a convicted killer.
• I have been abducted by aliens, says Japan’s first lady – Asia, World – The Independent

  • Move over Michelle, watch your backs, Carla and Sarah. There’s a new kid on the first lady block, and she looks like upstaging the lot of you.

    Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan’s Prime Minister-elect, Yukio Hatoyama, is a lifestyle guru, a macrobiotics enthusiast, an author of cookery books, a retired actress, a divorcee, and a fearless clothes horse for garments of her own creation, including a skirt made from Hawaiian coffee sacks. But there is more, much more. She has travelled to the planet Venus. And she was once abducted by aliens.

GK Chesterton argued that men could not exist without belief. He said “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” A complete vacuum of belief is impossible to create. If you drive out Jesus or the Buddha it doesn’t leave an atheistic void. It simply leaves room for another belief: Chesterton’s “anything” rushes in to fill the space. People who are too cool and hip to go to church dress up in black clothes and makeup or wait for the Mothership. Maybe they go talk to their friend Tom Cruise via Japanese telepathy. It’s all very scientific and modern. Not. It is as primitive as a caveman baying at the moon. Man is built for belief. Perhaps all a person can do is adopt the least objectionable belief and follow the wisest of teachers rather than imagine that he can live in continuous disbelief, like some man upon a tightrope, with nothing before and nothing behind.

Nietzsche had a Madman announce the Death of God.  This famous story is suppose to herald the arrival of the age of post-belief. But maybe the joke is on us. When you think about it, the Madman had to announce himself first.

Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5