Well, that's some kind of disturbing.

William Friedkin - Director of The Exorcist and an unbeliever - gets scared out of his wits by his experience of an exorcism and the fact that he does not get the reassurance that it is all hokum from  psychologists.


//LIEBERMAN: I’ve never believed in ghosts or that stuff, but I’ve had a couple of cases, one in particular that really just gave me pause. This was a young girl, in her 20s, from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and she was referred to me with schizophrenia, and she definitely had bizarre and psychotic-like behavior, disorganized thinking, disturbed attention, hallucinations, but it wasn’t classic schizophrenic phenomenology. And she responded to nothing,” he added with emphasis. “Usually you get some response. But there was no response. We started to do family therapy. All of a sudden, some strange things started happening, accidents, hearing things. I wasn’t thinking anything of it, but this unfolded over months. One night, I went to see her and then conferred with a colleague, and afterwards I went home, and there was a kind of a blue light in the house, and all of a sudden I had this piercing pain in my head, and I called my colleague, and she had the same thing, and this was really weird. The girl’s family was prone to superstition, and they may have mentioned demon possession or something like that, but I obviously didn’t believe it, but when this happened I just got completely freaked out. It wasn’t a psychiatric disorder—you want to call it a spiritual possession, but somehow, like in The Exorcist, we were the enemy. This was basically a battle between the doctors and whatever it was that afflicted the individual.

ME: Do you completely disregard the idea of possession?

LIEBERMAN: No. There was no way I could explain what happened. Intellectually, I might have said it’s possible, but this was an example that added credence.//

I suspect that a lot of people share my preference that the stuff of horror remain safely locked up in fiction.

On the one hand this speaks to a level of evil that beggars the imagination...

...on the other hand, if the atheists are right, we are all just animated clumps of meat, so what's the big deal?

Wife of alleged cannibal cop testifies in court:

 The trial of a New York police officer accused of conspiring to kill and eat women featured grisly testimony Tuesday as an FBI agent described the Internet correspondence between the officer and a man in Great Britain who spoke as if he were mentoring the officer on the art of cannibalism.

Agent Corey Walsh read passage after passage from emails and text messages between Officer Gilberto Valle and a man the government said used Moody Blues as a screen name and MeatMarketMan as an email address.

"I'm dying to taste some girl meat," the agent said Valle wrote.

Some of the passages went into sickening descriptions about cooking and eating women. Others sounded so absurd they bordered on cartoonish, feeding the defense argument that Valle and friends he met on extreme sexual fetish websites were merely engaging in fantasies.

In describing one potential victim, Moody Blues suggested "cutting off her feet and barbecuing them in front of her" while she was still alive.

Throughout, jurors remained stone-faced as they followed the words on screens before them while Walsh read them aloud in a federal courthouse in Manhattan, where the charges of conspiracy to kidnap and improper use of a federal database system could bring Valle, 28, a life sentence if he's convicted.

He was in the business of being likeable. The New Yorker has an interesting article on how pedophiles can play their audience. Of course, that's the way it is with anyone with an addiction or obsession that distorts their personality. The rest of us are just making our way through life, balancing our many interests and concerns. An addict obsesses on only one thing and can get very good at getting that thing. And since he knows the game he's playing, and the rest of us don't even know that there is a game, we can be made fools of, time and time again. Here's an excerpt from the New Yorker article:

The successful pedophile does not select his targets arbitrarily. He culls them from a larger pool, testing and probing until he finds the most vulnerable. Clay, for example, first put himself in a place with easy access to children—an elementary school. Then he worked his way through his class. He began by simply asking boys if they wanted to stay after school. “Those who could not do so without parental permission were screened out,” van Dam writes. Children with vigilant parents are too risky. Those who remained were then caressed on the back, first over the shirt and then, if there was no objection from the child, under the shirt. “The child’s response was evaluated by waiting to see what was reported to the parents,” she goes on. “Parents inquiring about this behavior were told by Mr. Clay that he had simply been checking their child for signs of chicken pox. Those children were not targeted further.” The rest were “selected for more contact,” gradually moving below the belt and then to the genitals. The child molester’s key strategy is one of escalation, desensitizing the target with an ever-expanding touch. In interviews and autobiographies, pedophiles describe their escalation techniques like fly fishermen comparing lures. Consider the child molester van Dam calls Cook:

Some of the little tricks that always work with younger boys are things like always sitting in a sofa, or a chair with big, soft arms if possible. I would sit with my legs well out and my feet flat on the floor. My arms would always be in an “open” position. The younger kids have not developed a “personal space” yet, and when talking with me, will move in very close. If they are showing me something, particularly on paper, it is easy to hold the object in such a way that the child will move in between my legs or even perch on my knee very early on. If the boy sat on my lap, or very close in, leaning against me, I would put my arm around him loosely. As this became a part of our relationship, I would advance to two arms around him, and hold him closer and tighter. . . . Goodbyes would progress from waves, to brief hugs, to kisses on the cheek, to kisses on the mouth in very short order.

Sandusky started with wrestling, to make physical touch seem normal. In the shower, the boy initially turned on a showerhead a few feet from Sandusky. Sandusky told him to use the shower next to him. This was a test. The boy complied. Then came the bear hug. The boy’s back was touching Sandusky’s chest and his feet touched Sandusky’s thigh. Sandusky wanted to see how the boy would react. Was this too much too soon? The boy felt “weird” and “uncomfortable.” Sandusky retreated. The following week, Sandusky showed up at the boy’s home, circling back to test the waters once again. How did the boy feel? Had he told his mother? Was he a promising lead, or too risky? As it turned out, the mother had alerted the University Police Department, and a detective, Ronald Schreffler, was hiding in the house.

Here's another excerpt:

One of the most remarkable and disturbing descriptions of the grooming process comes from a twenty-two-page autobiography (published as a chapter in a book about pedophilia) by a convicted pedophile named Donald Silva. After graduating from medical school, Silva met a family with a nine-year-old named Eric. He first sexually molested Eric on a ski trip that the two of them took together. But that came only a year after he befriended the family, patiently insinuating himself into the good graces of Eric’s parents. At one point, Eric’s mother ordered an end to the “friendship,” because she thought Silva’s friends had been smoking pot in her son’s presence. But Silva had so won over her husband that, he writes, “this beautiful man found it in his heart to forgive me after I assured him that such a thing would not happen again.” Silva describes an unforgettable night that he and Eric spent together after they were “reunited”:

I had recently broken up with Cathy [his girlfriend] when Evelyn, my future wife, arrived for a visit. In that month, Evelyn met Eric’s family, and she and his mother became good friends. Evelyn stayed with me at my parents’ house, and we enjoyed an active sex life. Eric slept over one night, and the three of us shared a bed for a while. He was going to pretend to be asleep while Evelyn and I made love, but Evelyn declined with him there and went to sleep elsewhere.

To recap: A man uses his new girlfriend to befriend the family of the ten-year-old boy he is molesting. He orchestrates a threesome in a bed in his parents’ house. He asks the girl to have sex with him with the ten-year-old lying beside them. She says no. She leaves him alone with his victim—and then he persuades her to marry him.

And, after the fact, everyone undoubtedly said, "how could I have been so stupid." And the answer is that they are only human and an admirable part of being human is giving other people the benefit of the doubt and not being judgmental. The article is really about putting the reader into the position of the community around Jerry Sandusky, who were hood-winked by him. On the surface, he seemed like an admirable guy, with foster kids and a charity, but below the surface he was corrupt, which raises the perhaps unanswerable question, what was he thinking? The answer is that he was thinking - reasoning - about the means to his end. His end was something that he chose out of "love," a disordered, inordinate love that ran counter to reason.

Thought experiment: Based on the idea that morality is simply a matter of consent, and assuming that the victim was over 18 and consented, where in this story do we draw a line and call the conduct "abnormal"?

Wintery Knight relays this truly grotesque news article about truly grotesque evil:

The hunt for Luka Rocco Magnotta has gone worldwide, with INTERPOL issuing an international warrant for the arrest of the Canadian man accused in a Montreal murder that saw a torso left in a suitcase and a hand and foot mailed to the Ottawa offices of the Liberal and Conservative parties.

The global bulletin follows a Canada-wide warrant issued by Montreal police hours after officers first entered the 29-year-old suspect’s apartment — the scene of one of the most gruesome killings in Montreal in recent memory.


The police had finished their work inside and Apartment 208 was pretty much stripped bare, but the stomach-turning stench and darkened red stain on the mattress left little doubt that something terrible had happened there.

“The smell of death is not funny,” Eric Schorer, the building’s superintendent, said as he opened the door Wednesday afternoon. “If you look at the bed, that’s where it happened.”

Not only was the unidentified victim dismembered, not only were two body parts apparently mailed to political parties in Ottawa, but it has emerged that the killer filmed his crime and posted it on the Internet. The snuff film titled 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, depicting the dismemberment of an Asian male body and various indignities to the remains, has provoked online debate about its veracity since it was posted last week. Police have confirmed the video depicts the actual crime.

[...]Mr. Magnotta, who has also been known as Eric Clinton Newman and Vladimir Romanov, has left abundant traces on the Internet. A Toronto native, he had worked in gay porn and as a model, but more recently he attracted attention after being linked to a 2010 online video showing kittens being suffocated with the aid of a vacuum cleaner.

A blog attributed to him and titled “Necrophilia Serial Killer Luka Magnotta” included this March 2012 post:

“It’s not cool to the world being a necrophiliac. It’s bloody lonely. But I dont (sic) really care, I have never cared what people thought of me, most people are judgemental idiots. I’m unable to talk to anybody about it and there’s always the knowledge that 99% of people would be repulsed by me if they found out about my feelings. Some people would even want to harm me.”

[...]The online video shows a naked male, tied to a bed frame, being attacked with both an ice pick and a kitchen knife, according to the description on a website called Best Gore. The victim is stabbed, has his throat slashed and is later decapitated and dismembered. The video was posted on Best Gore on May 25, but it is unclear when, or where, it was filmed.

Original story here.

It sounds like a cliche "straight-to-video" serial killer thriller. The comparison has been noted by those very close to the scene:

Residents described Magnotta as a very quiet man who kept to himself. The building’s superintendent joked about it.

“It’s like you see in the movies. It’s always the good neighbour. It’s the cliche,” he said.

Evil like this is hard to fathom.

This is just so unimaginable - particularly when you read that it happened with the mother's cooperation:

A former California State University, East Bay professor pleaded guilty in federal court in San Francisco Thursday to aggravated sexual abuse of a child after federal investigators discovered he was molesting an infant in Missouri, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Kenneth Martin Kyle, 47, of San Francisco, was an assistant professor of justice studies when undercover FBI agents discovered he was sharing child pornography over a peer-to-peer network, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag’s office said.

The ensuing investigation revealed Kyle had been visiting an infant in St. Louis over a six-month period and molesting the child with the mother’s cooperation, prosecutors said. Kyle was arrested in March 2010 and indicted by a federal grand jury on April 1 of that year. He pleaded guilty Thursday to traveling across state lines to engage in sex acts with a child younger than 12. After the FBI first made contact with Kyle, the agency contacted San Francisco police, who obtained a search warrant for Kyle’s apartment and found computers with thousands of child pornography images and videos, Haag’s office said.

And:

Kyle will be sentenced Aug. 11 in San Francisco and faces at least 30 years to life in prison, a $250,000 fine, restitution to the victim, and registration as a sex offender.

In the federal system, 30 years pretty much means 30 years.

As for the mother, there is no hole deep enough to drop her into.

Evil.

This story about the mother driving herself and her children off a bridge into the Hudson river because she was suicidal after an argument with her husband about his cheating on her describes something that seems to be literally diabolical.  The mother and three of her children drowned; her 10 year old son survived by escaping through one of the car's windows.

Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord,

the soul of Thy servants,
from every bond of sin,
that being raised in the glory of the resurrection,
they may be refreshed among the Saints and Elect.
Through Christ our Lord.

It slowly dawns on one writer that Stalin may have been worse than Hitler.

Writing a review of "Bloodlands" for Slate, author Ron rosenbaum observes:

How much should the cannibalism count? How should we factor it into the growing historical-moral-political argument over how to compare Hitler's and Stalin's genocides, and the death tolls of communism and fascism in general. I know I had not considered it. I had really not been aware of the extent of the cannibalism that took place during the Stalinist-enforced famine in the Ukraine in 1933 until I read Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder's shocking, unflinching depiction of it in Bloodlands, his groundbreaking new book about Hitler's and Stalin's near-simultaneous genocides.

And:

But I suppose that, without looking deeply into it, I had considered Stalin's state-created famine a kind of "soft genocide" compared with the industrialized mass murder of Hitler's death camps or even with the millions of victims of Stalin's own purges of the late '30s and the gulags they gave birth to.

Snyder's book, while controversial in some respects, forces us to face the facts about the famine, and the cannibalism helps place the Ukraine famine in the forefront of debate, not as some mere agricultural misfortune, but as one of the 20th century's deliberate mass murders.

And:

Students of comparative evil often point out that Stalin caused a higher death toll than Hitler, even without taking the famine deaths into account; those losses were not treated the same way as his other crimes or as Hitler's killing and gassing in death camps. Shooting or gassing is more direct and immediate than starving a whole nation.


But Snyder's account of the Ukraine famine persuasively makes the case that Stalin in effect turned the entire Ukraine into a death camp and, rather than gassing its people, decreed death by famine.

Should this be considered a lesser crime because it's less "hands-on"? Here's where the accounts of cannibalism caused me to rethink this question—and to examine the related question of whether one can distinguish degrees of evil in genocides by their methodology.

And:

find it hard to understand anyone who wants to argue that the murder of 20 million is "preferable" to anything, but our culture still hasn't assimilated the genocidal equivalence between Stalin and Hitler, because, as Applebaum points out, we used the former to defeat the latter.*

Consider the fact that downtown New York is home to a genuinely likable literary bar ironically named "KGB." The KGB, of course, was merely the renamed version of Stalin's NKVD, itself the renamed version of the OGPU, the secret police spearhead of his genocidal policies. And under its own name the KGB was responsible for the continued murder and torture of dissidents and Jews until the Soviet Union fell in 1991 (although of course an ex-KGB man named Putin is basically running the place now).

You could argue that naming a bar "KGB" is just a kind of Cold War kitsch (though millions of victims might take issue with taking it so lightly). But the fact that you can even make the kitsch argument is a kind of proof of the differential way Soviet and Nazi genocides and their institutions are still treated. Would people seek to hold literary readings at a downtown bar ironically named "Gestapo"?

The full evil of Stalin still hasn't sunk in. I know it to be true intellectually, but our culture has not assimilated the magnitude of his crimes. Which is perhaps why the cannibalism jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler

That this is an epiphany for Rosenbaum suggests the wool of euphemism that people from his social structure have been wrapped.  Rosenbaum is the author of
"Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil ."  One would think that someone interested in "evil" would have had more than an intellctual understanding that the evils of Communism were at least as bad as those of Nazi Germany.

Saul on the road to Damascus in Liberia.

This is one weirdly horrific story about a former Liberian warlord who after years of practicing cannibalism and child sacrifice and exploiting "boy soldiers" had a vision of Christ and, apparently, repented.

One wonders about how true the stories of how normal cannibalism and child sacrifice are, and how true is the story about conversion. 

But such things do happen.

If only there was no fault divorce, then wives wouldn't have to hire fake hit men



The marriage probably wouldn't have lasted anyway.