America's Half-Blood Prince of Darkness

It doesn't take a particularly astute media observer to point out that Barack Obama has generated some extreme responses from the American public.  It's tempting to say Americans either love him or hate him, but the former option seems to be dwindling....you'd be hard-pressed these days to find people who still say they "love" him.  On the contrary, there's no shortage of hatred out there.

The kind of rhetoric in which we've been most interested here on LoS uses the language of religion.  In the giddy days following his election we began to hear of supporters speaking as if Obama were the Savior.  The Messiah in the form of a skinny lawyer from Chicago.  While this was partly conservative satire of liberal response to his election, there were grounds for the criticism.  For example, a 2008 cover story about Obama's popularity in the German magazine Der Spiegel was entitled Der Messias Faktor (The Messiah Factor).  Newsweek's January, 2013 cover on Obama's reelection was entitled The Second Coming. 

Perhaps even more widespread, however, has been the notion that Obama is a false Messiah, the Beast, the Antichrist.  Searching for "Obama is the Messiah" or "Obama is the Antichrist" in Google images will confirm that I'm not simply making this up.

It occurs to me that both identifications serve to arouse the ire of religious conservatives; on the one had there are the people who genuinely believe that Obama is the harbinger of the End Times.  On the other hand there are those who are offended that the media would make a comparison between Jesus and any secular figure, let alone one with whom they disagree politically.  And then there are those who doubt his nationality and religious allegiances or feel a vague if not explicit uneasiness about what a mixed race President means for the future of the country; it becomes easier to understand why intimations of saintliness provoke--at a minimum--a hostile response.  In an atmosphere as polarized as America today, where concession becomes a kind of treason, the rhetoric will become even more uncompromising; Obama not only isn't saintly, he's downright demonic.  This is also why people will overlook their doubts about a baffling health care plan full of flaws and unanswered questions and proclaim their unreserved support for something so obviously "good" and why others would prefer to shut the government down than accept something which is so obviously "evil".

In this context, which is not a historical abstraction but a reality of the here and now, the image above will generate a certain Internet buzz or at the very least a ripple of murmurs.

Drudge asks:  are those a devil's horns or the wings of an angel?  Are we are seeing Obama portrayed as a modern-day Hermes?  For some a welcome messenger and guide, for others a presumptuous conductor of souls trying to assume the role reserved for He of whom Obama is but a pale pretender?

Should we take note of the olive branch of peace or the sheaf of arrows?  13 leaves or 13 arrowheads.  Forget the symbolism of of the original 13 colonies, we all know what the number really means, right?  War and peace, black and white, give and take.  Not much of this last dynamic happening on the tiled floors of Congress.

This photo was shot by AFP photographer Saul Loeb as Obama spoke about hurricane preparedness in the context of the budget debate and, as the captions says, on the 7th day of the government shutdown.  Not so effective as an "Obama as God" portrait; to be accurate Obama would have to be resting....

But the wings or horns? photo gets at the heart of the social polarity in America today, which is not only being played out physically in Washington D.C., but in the mind of the country, where the war is being fought with symbols.  And if this is happening in the halls of Congress and in the American Mind, it would, at least for millions of Americans, indicate a spiritual war as well.  We can see the shadows on the wall engaged in furious struggle; it stands to reason there's something important going on outside the cave.

Somewhere out there, Jesus and Satan are locked hand in hand over the chessboard, tiled black and white, no give, no take.

 Angel or Demon?  Antichrist or Messiah?  Choose your own adventure!

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For further reading, here's a list of some other posts where we looked at odd photos of Obama, along with a few additional remarks in light of what I've mulled over today.  In some cases, I linked to online reactions to them and in others I've only now sought it out.  For the rest I don't know how people reacted....

Barack Obama: Hogwart's Alumnus 08/15/12

In this odd picture, an academically-robed Obama is shot in such a way that he appears to be holding a glowing ball of light while giving a speech about health care.  I think the photo was intentionally imitating a crystal ball, symbolizing that nobody knows exactly what the future would bring with regards to Obamacare.  At the time, the photo elicited mostly bemused reactions, but there were some half-serious comments out there to the effect that the liberal media were suggesting that Obama is some kind of magician.  Which of course has the additional capacity to offend as a celebration of the occult.

"Barack Obama is the Antichrist!" 03/23/12

In another health care-related image, the Huffington Post placed a photo of Obama holding his hands in the air, hand in hand with his colleagues, next to one of a Byzantine mosaic of Jesus in a similar pose.  The image was used to illustrate an article about Notre Dame (the university) suing the Obama administration because his plan mandated that birth control be covered.  Is HuffPo taking a swipe at Notre Dame, comparing Obama and Jesus as two men who would advocate taking care of the poor?  Or does is symbolize a face-off between secular and religious belief?  I didn't read any comments on this photo, but I can only imagine that for many people there would be nothing innocuous about its rhetorical or symbolic intentions.

The Royal Obamas: personally blessed by Christ the Redeemer 03/21/11

In this shot the Obama family is seen from below, Rio's Christ the Redeemer glowing in the background.  This photo generated significant online commentary by many who saw it as crude propaganda that associates the Obama family with holiness;  the nimbus of white light, the protecting arms of Christ looming in the background, the angle of the shot which is as if the viewer gazes up at the family....

An intellectual regarded disparagingly, as being impractical, officious, pedantic, etc. 08/04/10

In this shot Obama has a weird haughty look to him, his up-tilted head framed in such a way at to form a kind of circle within a black triangle  I didn't see any comments about this one, but I wondered then if Drudge used it to a) suggest the Eye of Providence to recall the Illuminati, a kind of guilt-by-association tactic or b) suggest a black KKK hood, evoking the reverse racism the man is accused of harboring not so deeply within.  (A quick search of the image does reveal that in a few instances people associated with the NWO, the Eye in the Pyramid or a pyramid with detached capstone.)

Political Saviors 03/18/10

This is a series of shots where both Democrats and Republicans are framed so that they appear to have halos or appear at the center of the cross.  I think these are certainly intentional and probably satirical comments on how politicians frame their political discourse in moral terms.  This set does not include Obama.

Obama as Jesus, or Hippocrates? 03/17/10

This was also a controversial shot, which generated a firestorm, or a least a fire-shower, of online comments.  Obama appears to have both halo and nimbus and a white cross hovers in the background.  Like the Rio pic, it is shot from below so we are looking up at him on high.  In this case, the cross was not part of the shot but was photoshopped into the image.  Conservative commentators saw an example of liberal bias, the deification of Obama.  This shot was used to illustrate an article about health care, which is why, according to some, a cross was an appropriate backdrop.

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I first saw this current AFP photo with the question about "wings or horns" on Drudge at about 12 PM in France on 8 October but by 3 PM it was no longer there.  Fortunate The Blaze includes a brief quip about Drudge's editorial choice, including a screen shot.  Quick work!  The Blaze wrote about it yesterday, so the image was apparently online for a while.  Odd is that Drudge called it a "shock" image, and asked the "horns or wings?" question, but he wasn't linking to an article; he linked to Yahoo news which merely carried the photo and named the photographer, date and event.  Apparently, Drudge is unaware of the long history of religiously-charged photos of Obama, or merely looking for another small way, like I think he did with the "eye in the triangle" photo, to feed anti-Obama resentment.  Which is his right, of course.  He's hardly secretive about his political orientation nor subtle with the articles he chooses and the titles he gives his links.

Makes me think of another photo someone sent me and which I put onto my website long ago, not too long after 9-11.  I don't recall where it came from, and I've never seen it elsewhere, except where someone has either hotlinked it or downloaded it and uploaded to their own site.  I guess we can add the horned President genre to world leaders giving dubious "Masonic" handshakes or flashing the famous "sign of the horns" collections so plentiful on the Web.  Just for kicks I did a Google images search on the following image it has been reproduced by quite a few sites around the world.  You can see that all its current online uses ultimately derive from that single source, because they all have the telltale signs of having been scanned from newsprint.  That means a proper digital original hasn't been made public.  So it's kind of cool that I let this thing out into the world years ago and it's still alive.  It'd be interesting to know who took it first and how it spread after that.  But viral standards these days, it's still pretty limited, but I still have that tattered bit of newsprint somewhere.

So, here it is, SHOCK photo of George W. Bush.  Definitely horns.

Don't have a cow, man

The Inspector, Karen Liebowitz

And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, This is the ordinance of the law which the LORD hath commanded, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke — Numbers 19:1-2 (KJV)

Robert Guffey's Cryptoscatology turned me on to the bizarre and frightening story of Clyde Lott, cattle breeder and fundamentalist Christian, who is seeking to breed an unblemished Red Heifer in order to bring about the construction of the Third Temple which will then bring about the Second Coming of Christ, along with the end of the world as we know it.

Why the Red Heifer?

The red heifer or red cow (Hebrew: פרה אדומה; parah adumah) was a sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible the ashes of which are used for the ritual purification of an ancient Israelite who had come into contact with a corpse.

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In Daniel 12:10, God tells Daniel that in the last days, "many shall be purified and made white"; a reference to the purification ritual of the Red Heifer, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isa 1:18, Num 19:6). The analogy appears to relate to a partner of the returning End Time messiah.

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The absolute rarity of the animal, combined with the detailed ritual in which it is used, have given the Red Heifer special status in Jewish tradition. It is cited as the prime example of a khok, or biblical law for which there is no apparent logic, and is therefore deemed of absolute Divine origin. Because the state of ritual purity obtained through the ashes of a Red Heifer is a necessary prerequisite for participating in Temple service, efforts have been made in modern times by Jews wishing for biblical ritual purity and in anticipation of the building of The Third Temple to locate a red heifer and recreate the ritual.

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The Temple Institute, an organization dedicated to preparing the reconstruction of a Third Temple in Jerusalem, has been attempting to identify Red Heifer candidates consistent with the requirements of Numbers 19:1–22 and Mishnah Tractate Parah.

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During a March 2010 radio interview a Temple Institute representative claimed that there is now "definitely a kosher red heifer here in Israel."

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The non-canonical Epistle of Barnabas (8:1) explicitly equates the Red Heifer with Jesus.

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Some Fundamentalist Christians believe that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ cannot occur until the Third Temple is constructed in Jerusalem, which requires the appearance of a red heifer born in Israel. Clyde Lott, a cattle breeder in O'Neill, Nebraska, United States, is attempting to systematically breed red heifers and export them to Israel to establish a breeding line of red heifers in Israel in the hope that this will bring about the construction of the Third Temple and ultimately the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Not forgetting that for fundamentalist Christians such as Lott, the Second Coming will be preceded by the reign of the Antichrist.  The Second Coming will result in the Last Judgement, the end times thought by some to be described in the Book of Revelation.

His is what would be generally described as a "futurist" interpretation of Revelation:

Futurist interpretations generally predict a resurrection of the dead and a rapture of the living, wherein all true Christians and those who have not reached an age of accountability are gathered to Christ at the time God's kingdom comes on earth. They also believe a tribulation will occur - a seven-year period of time when believers will experience worldwide persecution and martyrdom, and be purified and strengthened by it. 

Those not included in the rapture will be condemned to hell on earth, forever.  Which is actually probably pretty accurate, for the reconstruction of the Third Temple must be on the Temple Mount where we currently find the Dome of the Rock, the second holiest site in Islam.  Destruction of this mosque would lead to such a violent Holy War that it could easily finish in nuclear holocaust.  Even after the Israelis trounced their Muslim adversaries in the Six Day War, they left the Temple Mount in the hands of their enemies.  Even in victory, they couldn't risk the all-out Jihad of the entire Muslim world should they have chosen to occupy it.

So breeding the Red Heifer is just one way to bring about the Apocalypse.

La vache qui rit

 

One happy heifer

Being the goofball I am, the words "red heifer" made me think of the only red heifer I know about: La vache qui rit, aka The Laughing Cow. (Red Bull energy drinks don't count, a heifer is a female, a bull, a male!)

This brand of cheese dates to 1921, when brothers Leon and Jules Bel founded the company and created the first spreadable cheese found in individual, foil-wrapped portions.

The cow itself was trademarked in 1921 by Leon, becoming France's first brand-name cheese.  In 1924, friend Benjamin Rabier created the caricature of the cow which is pretty much the same version we see today.

Obviously, this jovial bovine is not the Red Heifer of the Book of Daniel.  For starters, her nose and hooves have white hair; according to the stringent standards of the rabbis, this disqualifies the Laughing Cow as a sacrificial candidate.  Furthermore, it's a cartoon character.

Funny thing though, is the name of the founders:  Bel.  Bel and the Dragon is an apocryphal book of the Bible, chapter 14 of the extended Book of Daniel, the very book in which the Red Heifer makes an important appearance in an end of days context.

In Bel and the Dragon, there are, curiously, two incidents related to food.  In the first, Daniel challenges the Persian King Cyrus's belief that his idol is a living God.  Cyrus says his proof is that the God consumes a ritual meal overnight.  By scattering ashes on the floor, Daniel is able to prove that the meal is in fact consumed by the priests who hide inside the statue and come out at night to gobble up the ritual offerings; their footprints give them away.  Cyrus then has the priests, their wives and their children killed on the spot and allows Daniel to destroy the idol.  Yahweh is a jealous god and when affronted, thinks nothing of allowing the murder of women, children, etc.  Remember the Apocalypse!

In the brief but autonomous companion narrative of the dragon (14:23-30), "there was a great Dragon, which they of Babylon worshiped."....  Daniel slays the dragon by baking pitch, fat, and hair (trichas) to make cakes (mazas, barley-cakes, but translated "lumps") that cause the dragon to burst open upon consumption.

So, given the family name and the centrality of food in these two stories, is it not possible the Bel brothers chose the Red Heifer as a sly nod to the Book of Daniel?

Also interesting is that Bêl is not a name but a title meaning "Lord" or "Master".  Feminized, it's Bêlit, meaning "Lady" or "Mistress".  As in....the Scarlet Lady?  More on that later.

I iz not the Red Heifer you iz looking for

L'Homme qui rit

The Man Who Laughs in French, L'Homme qui rit (1869) is one of Victor Hugo's more obscure novels, written after he had embraced Spiritist and Deist religious views.

Is it also possible that the vache qui rit is a comical nod to Hugo's novel?  The first major character in the novel is a snake-oil salesman who "dresses in bearskins and calls himself Ursus (Latin for "bear"). His only companion is a large domesticated wolf, whom Ursus has named Homo (Latin for “man”). 

I was only attracted to the novel because the title was an echo (or vice versa) of our lovable cow, but I was surprised that this animal/human transvestism is a feature of the novel, because what is the Laughing Cow but an anthropomorphized animal?

The second major character is a starving boy lost in the snow.  He encounters a hanged criminal, and takes the dead man's shoes.  He then walks some more and encounters another corpse, a women in rags, frozen to death.  He discovers an infant child clutching at the woman's breast, from which hangs a single drop of frozen milk. (OK, not to take things too far, but milk?  And cows?)   He realizes the girl is blind. He eventually stumbles upon the caravan of Ursus, the animal man.

A flashback later in the novel reveals that in this first encounter, Ursus thinks the boy is laughing as he holds the nearly dead blind girl; upon closer look, he sees the boy's face has been mutilated into a clown's mask, carved into a smile.  He is l'homme qui rit, Gwynplaine.

The girl is eventually named Dea (Latin = "goddess").  Due to her blindness, she can't see Gwynplaine's deformity and the pair fall in love.

As it turns out, Gwynplaine was the victim of court scheming, sent off to a group of kid traffickers who disfigured him in order to sell him as a freak to a travelling carnival or circus.  After intrigue involving an arranged marriage and investiture as the rightful Lord Fermain Clancharlie, Marquis of Corleone, he is ordered to take his seat in the House of Lords. "But, when the deformed Gwynplaine addresses his peers with a fiery speech against the gross inequality of the age, the other lords are provoked to laughter by Gwynplaine's clownish features."

Gwynplaine/Lord Fermain (fer = "iron" / main = "hand") renounces his peerage and returns to search for Ursus and Dea, who he eventually finds.

Dea is delighted that Gwynplaine has returned to her. She reveals her passion to Gwynplaine, and then she abruptly dies. Gwynplaine then walks, as though in a trance to the edge of the ship, speaking to Dea, and with the reflection of a distant light in his eyes, though the sky is starless. He throws himself into the water, and is thus reunited with Dea in death. When Ursus, who has fainted in Dea's last moments, comes to his senses, Gwynplaine has vanished, and Homo is staring mournfully over the ship's rail, howling into the sea from which Gwynplaine will not return.

So, the deformed clown is united with the goddess by throwing himself in the water, and the wolf/man mourns their death.  This paring of a laughing man and a goddess, whom Christians would automatically label a false deity, may have some importance in our unfolding poetic discourse.

Gwynplaine incarnated by Conrad Veigt

Don't forget the Joker

Hugo's novel and it's various filmed versions have inspired several Batman comics over the years:

• 1940. Jerry Robinson borrows the physique and grotesque grin of Gwynplaine as his inspiration for the Joker, something revealed by Bob Kane in later interviews.
• 1998. Artist Brian Bolland is inspired by The Man Who Laughs film for Batman: The Killing Joke.
• 2003. In the "Wild Cards" episode of the Justice League animated series, the Joker uses "Gwynplaine Entertainment" as an alias.
• 2005. Batman: The Man Who Laughs.
• 2008. The Dark Knight. The Joker's permanent grin appears to be caused by a mutilation to his face.
• 2011. Batman and Robin, writer David Hine introduced a deformed French supervillain named the Man Who Laughs. His backstory states that his father, a fan of classic art and literature, carved a smile onto his face as an intentional homage to Hugo's novel.

The only reason these Batman references jumped out at me is because of the Aurora shootings, to which a host of Batman references have been associated by various Internet synchromystics, conspiracy theorists and people who pay attention.  Holmes himself said:  "I am the Joker" before opening fire on the apostolic dozen of victims.  This feeds back to our Red Heifer because I've recently run across a lot of references to a woman in red, but more specifically, with regard to Aurora shooter Robert Holmes:

Loren Coleman has been writing about the symbolism of a "lady in red" (Holmes' Harlots, July 30, 2012).  He links several appearances of the red woman to the Aurora shootings in Colorado, itself one in a series of shootings with patterns pointing to what Coleman calls "Red Dawn" scenarios.  This follows a post of July 22, Blood Red Movie Massacres.  Back on May 3, The Sink Hole's Will Morgan devoted a post to the topic, unrelated to shootings, entitled....Lady in Red.  Morgan links the red lady to the Sacred Whore of Babylon.  Coleman links her to prostitution.  Old acquaintance Tate Bunker, who I haven't actually spoken to in 20 years or so, premiered his first feature film, Little Red at the Milwaukee Film Festival (September 30).

If you will, the Whore of Babylon is also known as the Scarlet Woman. Interesting that the red women in Coleman's post are harlots, or whores. Echoing Hugo's "Dea" and the stories of Daniel, the word translated here as "whore" can also be translated as "idolatress." Is the Scarlet Woman the "partner of the returning End Time messiah" referred to in Daniel 12:10? Hard to say. "Apocalypse" initially meant revelation, prophetic literature. Like most prophecy, it's pretty garbled stuff, encoded, cryptic. Fun stuff, but this tends to lead to as many interpretations as there are interpreters. So really who knows what the fuck Daniel or St. John were on about. Different Christians traditions have different interpretations. Funny thing is, we've got synchromystics going on about the current ubiquity of a Scarlet Woman, many appearances pointing back to the Batman mythos. So, from the Scarlet Heifer of Daniel to the Laughing Cow, thenceforth to the Laughing Man and finally to....the Joker and the Scarlet Lady. But where is the Antichrist?

Heath Ledger as the Joker

Enter Obama

A short time ago we posted Barack Obama is the Antichrist. We don't think he is, of course, but a lot of people do. www.beastobama.com may just be the best domain name, evah. We also looked at how Obama was depicted as the Joker in a post about the Batman links to Aurora (20 rosy fingers). This was all in the context of mass shootings, which for many on the conspiratorial right, are merely false flags to scare the sheeple into accepting gun control laws they might not otherwise push for or accept (see Cold, dead fingers). In fact, Obama has begun the process of issuing executive orders to regulate the access to firearms, a fact not lost on the right, to be sure. This is all a prelude, according to the BA is the AC crowd, for the pacification of the people, one more step towards One World Government/Religion and the New World Order of the Antichrist.

Batrack Obama as the Joker

If I don't get into whole Whore of Babylon thing, it's because no one knows for sure who exactly she is....each sect takes its prejudice and runs with it. Likewise the New World Order. Suffice it to say that for true believers, everything these days is a step towards that nefarious goal.

I have no conclusion here, but it was an interesting trip down the path of association. From the Red Heifer to Barak Obama, via cheese, Victor Hugo and the Joker. Not too shabby!

Moon!

Recently Gid and I have been making comments on an old post (A tessellation of the plane. And beer.)  Confirmation bias kicked into high gear, so much so that I wanted to re-post those comments here.  Today's news was the clincher.  Reading the original post will make these comments a bit more clear.

So dig this. Blue Moon gets lots of play on this half-serious synchromystic post--and the comments.

August 31 was a rare blue moon, which is nature's way of smiling on....Neil Armstrong's funeral, same day.

September 1. Obama, who got the cop a Blue Moon, releases his beer recipe.

Coincidence? Cosmic joke? Or weird ploy by Obama to slip "beer" into the national discourse, associating it with rare natural phenomena and the celebration of a national hero? Homer Simpson diplomacy?

And oddly, one hero named Armstrong dies just after another is taken down for doping, his heroism undercut, his 7 titles at risk....

This second hero named Lance. French verb lancer means...."to launch"....

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OK, stop f*cking with us: Sept 3: Sun Myung Moon dies in Korea (Sept. 2 on the US east coast)

Barack Obama: Hogwart's Alumnus

AP photograph

This apparently undoctored photo will probably raise some hackles.  I'm going to give it a few days, make some web searches and see if anybody seriously suggests this is proof of Satanism and or Illuminism in the White House.  I'd be willing to wager a large sum there are forums where this is already being discussed.

My take is that the photographer is playing on the fact the election is a few months away and that Obama and his strategists would love to have a crystal ball to tell them what lays in store for the future, but then again, I'm only a sheeple.

If this is Twilight Language (as opposed to good old-fashioned symbolism, metaphor and artistic intent), what do you suppose the message is supposed to be?

Previously:

• Obama as Jesus, or Hippocrates?
• An intellectual regarded disparagingly, as being impractical, officious, pedantic, etc.
• The Royal Obamas: personally blessed by Christ the Redeemer
• "Barack Obama is the Antichrist!"

Cold, dead fingers

This is a follow-up to 20 rosy fingers, which included a brief, less-than-half-serious post-script about the famous "Obama as Joker/Socialist" poster, riffing a bit loosely, just tossing some ideas about....

I thought of the gun control debate immediately upon hearing about the Aurora shooting, as I do with any mass killing, and wondered if this event is in some way a kind of political "bonus" for people who might not go out of their way to exploit this tragedy, but who wouldn't feel too concerned if at some level, even if subconsciously, people made the connection between Obama/Joker and Holmes/Joker.

Well, someone has made the connection, explicitly....albeit without the whiteface.

The text says:  "Kills 12 in a movie theater with assault rifle, everyone freaks out" next to a photo of Obama with the words "Kills thousands with foreign policy, wins Nobel Peace Prize."  It appeared in Caldwell (cold well) Idaho, a state with its fair share of firearms enthusiasts.

The CCTV camera is a nice Orwellian touch which in it's own way adds fuel to the fire heating up libertarian rhetoric these days.  I wonder if this electronic sign was chosen precisely for that reason; the Smeed Foundation, the billboard sponsor, is a libertarian think tank.  Are they implying that as you watch Obama pilloried, Big Sis is watching you? (Big Sis being Drudge's nickname for United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.)  Or maybe not.  I've just read they actually own the sign

Of course, the Smeed Foundation has a point and a right to express it as they wish.  Maurice Clements, president of the board, is quoted as saying:  “We don’t want to offend people....We’re trying to gain friends for our message.”  Apparently the sign has been almost universally panned in Caldwell.

The billboard has angered many, but Smeed is certain to get some positive feedback from the large and vocal anti-Obama crowd. Be that as it may, the Smeed people seem to have had a change of heart, or perhaps realized the sign is a bit too much; either way, the sign is coming down  Not to wag fingers, as with some liberal responses I've read; plenty of people who detest Obama don't approve, and the left certainly doesn't shy away from shock-value tactics and cries of "fascist" and the like.  Being offensive in politics is not the exclusive domain of one political stripe or another.

I also realize full well that LoS could be seen as exploiting the events in Aurora, another reason I won't point my finger and cry "poor taste"....not too loudly anyway.  I don't have to.  Seems pretty evident that the billboard is a bit over-the-top.  Not the sentiment necessarily, but the context.  A private dialogue or even a speech allows one to  elaborate, nuance, contextualize, set an argument up correctly.  A billboard just knocks your eyeballs for a loop with an offensive bit of jingo.  I actually agree with the sentiment expressed here.  Why isn't there more universal anger at the ongoing death and dismemberment in Afghanistan, for instance?  Why is that 12 American lives are a tragic and senseless murder, but literally thousands of Iraqi civilians are acceptable collateral damage?  Yeah, I know, out of sight out of mind and all that.  But hell, I don't think it takes a bleeding heart to decry the death in great numbers of people halfway around the world, especially when your tax dollars are at work.

I'm not surprised by this billboard at all and said as much in my original post about Aurora; here though, someone has actually gone and explicitly made the connections media outlets such as Drudge and the Examiner were making implicitly (much as other right-of-center media indirectly linked Obama to the recent spate of cannibal attacks!)  Usually they do in such a way as to have plausible denial, to make the very accusation seem absurd.  Kind of like the way Drudge headlines stories about crime and corruption in Chicago.  They can reasonably deny they're targeting Obama....they're merely reporting on outrageous evidence of US decline.  But they're most certainly doing it to tarnish Obama.  Guilt by association. 

This time, there is nothing subtle about the tactic at all.  And although I'm obviously not a rabid anti-Obama fan, I would add that for me, his Nobel Peace prize is as an absurd and offensive bit of propaganda as this billboard; the Nobel had very little to do with peace and everything to do with something else entirely.  I disapprove of Obama in a lot of important ways, I just don't share the ad hominem vitriol.

Despite mentioning the war, I believe this sign actually revolves around the politics of guns.  The Smeed Foundation didn't even bother use the NRA's preferred use of the word "firearm".  Here it's "Assault Rifle," a term which to me is so loaded (no pun intended), so evocative of the gun control debate that it's hard for me not to think the billboard is as much about gun control as it is about Obama's foreign policy--which is after all essentially a re-hash and prolongation of Bush's, just with happier allies (hence the Nobel).  But the Tea Party and the libertarians, the Republicans and other assorted political partisans lined up against Obama probably don't care too much about that.  They're more concerned with guns, taxes, immigration and creeping socialism.  The wackier ones wonder whether or not Obama is a secret Muslim or foreigner bent on destroying America from within, guns of course being the necessary defense against the coming dictatorial state, perhaps led by the minions of the Antichrist.  Not to unfairly imply everyone against Obama is an extremist or a lunatic, though they're out there too.

Bottom line is that we're in an irreconcilably polarized political culture, and the tone will certainly only get worse as November draws nearer.  This billboard is just another questionable bit of propaganda in a recent string of violent rhetoric and images.

Meanwhile, the bullets are actually flying and everyone keeps wringing their hands and asking, "why"?

Addendum, appx. 13:00 Paris time.

The day after writing this, I learned of  the Sikh temple shooting in Milwaukee.  Six victims, three wounded.  The killer is described as an Army veteran, heavyset, white, with lots of tattoos, including perhaps, a "9-11" themed tat.  I remember the hue and cry when a Homeland Security report listed disgruntled vets as part of a restive potential demographic from which domestic terrorism could arise.  Vets and conservatives had a field day denouncing Janet Napolitano, but I think against the background of Timothy McVeigh (Gulf War, bronze star), John Muhammad (Gulf War), even Oswald (US Marine), there's some interest in researching whether or not there's some merit to this analysis, which was at the time characteristically distorted and simplified by the conservative press as an accusation against all veterans and the entire military establishment.

Given my recent exchange with Loren Coleman about what it means to be a Fortean synchromystic, that the suspect lived on Holmes Avenue is very startling indeed.  One thing which has struck me about this case is the local police position--Oak Creek police chief John Edwards has said the FBI will lead the case because it's being treated as "domestic terrorism".  This is why, exactly?  Because the alleged shooter was a vet or because the victims, Sikhs, are often confused with Muslims?  I don't recall the phrase "domestic terrorism" used for John Holmes.  Odd that terrorism is evoked here and not in other contexts....although I do seem to recall that when Jared Loughner shot Rep. Giffords, there was some discussion of whether or not it was "terrorism".  As in the Oak Creek shooting, there is some talk of a "hate crime".  How the media gels around a label is an interesting process and we'll soon see what the consensus opinion regarding Oak Creek will be.

A little later, 20:30 Paris time.

Wade....is the English name for a common Germanic mythological [personage]...His heritage is uncertain - he is referred to as giant, dwarf, demi-god....or king - but he is always associated with water.    [As in a Creek?]

These references [from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde] show that the tale of Wade and his boat were well-known at Chaucer's time and it has been suggested that Wade and his boat were synonymous with trickery.

Wade (folklore)

In medieval times, a page was an attendant to a knight; an apprentice squire. A young boy served as a page for about seven years, running messages, serving, cleaning, and even learning the basics of combat, and the lord he was working for would usually treat him fairly but they went through intensive training. The lord sometimes gave the page private combat training from the age of seven until he was fourteen. At age fourteen, he could graduate to become a squire, and by age 21, perhaps a knight himself. 

Page (servant)

Synonymous with trickery?  A knight's attendant?  As in a Dark Knight?  Note the 7 and its multiples, numbering three.  Both significant numbers, with a multitude of Biblical association.  Including Pages, there were seven deaths as a result of the Milwaukee shooting, and three wounded.  There were 12 victims of Holmes' attack, yet another Biblically significant number.  I'll repeat that Page lived on Holmes Avenue.  Add to that a name of a trickster, or Joker, and the name of a servant to a Knight....synchronicity galore.

Page was a singer in a Neo-Nazi band called End Apathy.  Source:   He served part [of his military service] in "psychological operations," [!] but left the military with a Less Than Honourable Discharge, shortly after having been mysteriously demoted from sergeant to specialist. 

Source:  At a news conference at 10 a.m., authorities said they were attempting to identify another person, a white male, who they described as "a person of interest."

A man matching the photo officials showed was seen by Journal Sentinel reporters at the scene of the temple Sunday, possibly video taping what was going on. 
...
Heidi Beirich, director of the [Southern Poverty Law Center's] intelligence project, said her group had been tracking Page since 2000, when he tried to purchase goods from the National Alliance, a well-known hate group.

The National Alliance was led by William Pierce, who was the author of "The Turner Diaries." The book depicts a violent revolution in the United States leading to an overthrow of the federal government and, ultimately, a race war. Parts of the book were found in Timothy McVeigh's getaway car after the bombing of the federal building Oklahoma City in 1995.

A lot to digest.  I'd had a lot of doubts about the validity of this post, which up to the adendum was written before I learned of this event, but sadly, these revelations only add weight to my speculations and musings.  The circumstances will certainly add grist to the conspiracy theorist's mill, but with facts such as these, who can blame them?

20 rosy fingers

The Aurora shooting on July 20th has excited a number of conspiratorial musings, which is par for the course, of course.  What has caught my eye in these speculations is the recurrence of two themes which seem to have become almost requisite elements for any high-profile assassination, killing or mass murder.

The first theme is that of the body double, known in the trade as a political decoy; that is to say the alleged perp paraded before us on TV is not the real thing. 

The second theme is the idea that the killer is a product of mind control. 

These two themes are often brought together, as I've seen in the Aurora case, to construct the figure of the mind-controlled patsy.

The idea of the political decoy doesn't originate with the Kennedy assassination, but I think that as the über-myth of 20th century conspiracy literature, the assassination of JFK has become the source for the idea's subsequent application to various mass murders and killings.  In what I've read about Aurora so far, an explicit connection is made to the JFK assassination--the body double is a typical tactic of a nebulous cryptocracy orchestrating events in order to further their own agenda.  In this case the timing coincides with an important UN vote on an arms control resolution.  Drudge actually plays into this; for several days running his page had links to articles about how in the wake of this tragedy, gun sales are actually increasing, contrary to the expectations of....(insert bugbear here).  Conservative friends on Facebook have posted about how if everyone in the theater had been armed, the death toll would have been lower, also explicitly alluding to the UN vote.  The conservative press, typified by the Examiner article linked to above, has been making the link unuambiguously.

The Gid, my fellow writer on this blog, provided his own take on this topic:

....it strikes me that neither Obama nor Romney nor any other big political figure in the US seems to making a gun control issue of the event (unless I've missed something). In that light, it's almost a bizzare twist on twilight language--it's totally in your face that politicians ought to be all over this in terms of gun control, but they aren't, as if it has noting to do with the topic ... The politicians have evoked The Law of Silence on the topic. It is, however, totally possible that I'm wrong since I haven't paid a lot of attention to the news over the last couple of weeks.

I first heard about the "second Oswald" in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in relation to countercultural mystery man Kerry Thornley.  Thornley knew Oswald and had written about him before the assassination.  Because of this he actually testified before the Warren commission.  The first book on the topic was by one Richard Popkins appropriately titled The Second Oswald (1964) (review).  There is also an alleged memo from Hoover stating "there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate."

In 2004, conspiracy theorist John Armstrong published a book entitled Harvey and Lee, which claimed to have identified a Lee Harvey Oswald double who had impersonated Oswald as part of an intelligence operation. Armstrong bases his claims on photographs which appear to show discrepancies in Oswald's physique and facial features. Armstrong cites contradictory eyewitness testimony from the Warren Report, placing Oswald in two different locations at the same time. (Wikipedia:  Political Decoy)

Which is exactly how I first heard of the James Holmes patsy theory--a photo comparison.  The only inexplicable difference I can make out in this photo is the shape of the nose, which is much more flared in the first picture.  This could in fact be due to the angle of the head and the lighting.  The general contours of the face, the eyebrows, the ears, the slope of the shoulders....all look pretty much to same to me.  The mouth and eyes can be explained by the different expression.  I concur though that the overall impression is that we are looking at photos of two different men, albeit very similar in appearance.  I'm not going pass judgement, but the idea is out there whether I pass judgement or not!

My co-blogger, the Gid, looking at the same photos, was more judgemental:

I have to say that they look like different people to me. I find myself trying to convince myself that, yeah, sure those might be the same eyes, laughing then afraid, even though they look so different; that might be the same mouth, the same beard pattern, the same cheekbones, etc. Quite frankly, it's a lot easier for me to see these as two different people than as the same person. 

On LoS, the political decoy has come up in the context of the death of Saddam Hussein and the death of Bin Laden.  In the latter case, the internet was awash with forgeries rather quickly; total confusion and further conspiracy theories were spun off of the evidently faked photos of the dead Bin Laden.

While not exactly the same thing as a body double, the idea that Oswald acted alone is doubted by even the most non-conspiratorial of people.  Likewise, some doubt has been cast on Holmes' lone-nut profile.  According to one witness, some minutes before the shooting, a guy got a phone call inside the theater and went to the emergency exit, propping it open.  A few minutes later, Holmes burst in and opened fire.  This would suggest a partner.  The name Holmes is evocative in this regard, for where Holmes goes, his partner Watson goes.  Kind of like Batman and Robin.

(That said, the Police narrative is that the person who propped the door open was Holmes, who'd entered legally after buying a ticket.  One would imagine this was so he could prop open the door, retrieve his weapons and return to carry out the attacks.  The police believe he acted alone.  The cell phone story could easily have been a ruse used by Holmes--an excuse to get up and go to the door.  I think this is very plausible.)

John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy kind of bookend the period of major sixties' assassinations; both were noticably similar in appearance, both excited wild optimism.  In and of itself, the brothers reinforce the theme of the double.  Bobby was like a reincarnation of his older brother....and met the same grisly fate.  This leads us to the second theme:  mind control.  It's with RFK that I recall first hearing mind-control allegations against an assassin.  Sirhan Sirhan, his own name a double, is often seen as a kind of "Manchurian Candidate" a term taken from a 1959 novel by Richard Condon of the same name.  In his novel (first adapted to film in 1962), a man is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist plot.  Conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the "coincidence" that a book about a brainwashed assassin would appear in print a year before a real assassination so rife with suspicious inconsistencies that even the least paranoid among us smell something rotten in the official story.

In Holmes' case, people cite three things to build their case for mind control.  The first is that Holmes acted inconsistenly.  Why go on a murderous rampage and then meekly surrender to the police?  Why rig one's house with explosives then warn the police that they are there?  I've read it suggested that this indicates a kind of mental struggle in Holmes' mind, that his programmed mind was in conflict with the part of him that knew his actions to be wrong.  I'm no mental health expert, but let's use the razor here.  A man walks into a cinema and kills 12, injures dozens more, dressed like a character in the film about to play.  I think it's fair to say the man is mentally unbalanced.  So do we really need to ask why he was acting inconsistently to our rational minds?  I mean, really?  A crazy man acting odd?  You don't say!

Other "evidence" is that Holmes was a student of neuroscience and that Aurora is home to a large military community.  Although these are tantalizing facts, their presence in the story is indicative of nothing unless some concrete info can be found which makes it relevant.  I've heard that suicide is quite high among psychologists; this doesn't mean they've been mind-controlled.  To me it indicates that troubled people might actually want to go about investigating the way the mind works.  Could this also be true for neuroscience?  Was Holmes pushed in that direction by inner doubts about his own mental health?  Who knows at this point.

As long as we're hound-dogging untenable theories, let's pause to make some connections between the movie and real (or least our conspiratorially-imagined versionion of real) life. The second of these three Batman flicks included the bad guy Two Face. Half his face was normal; the other was twisted and evil. He flipped a coin to decide who would live and who would die. Note, too, the "Sons of Batman", vigilante killers in Miller's Dark Knight Returns comic--surely nightmarish dopplegangers.

Two Face also appears in the Dark Knight Returns storyline, his face repaired and to all outward appearances, normal; he does remain Two Face in his head though, and he continues to terrorize Gotham City in disguise.

But that's not all! Consider, too, that Batman was a doppleganger of Bruce Wayne, created by death, the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, who were murdered returning home from a movie, a Zorro film. Zorro is, of course, a doppelganger of Don Diego de la Vega. Bob Kane has described how Batman was influenced by Zorro in both look and mission.

As a last note along these lines connecting the films/stories with these conspiratorial musings, The Gid mentioned to me that he's always wondered if Bruce Wayne didn't kill his own parents. He seems to think that the whole mythology works much better that way. Of all the superhero franchises out there, Batman writers question the sanity of the hero the most. In the second installment of the Nolan trilogy, Batman comes across as crazy as the Joker, something alluded to in other stories as well I think. Batman is a man obsessed, leading a double life, one identity slipping into another. What is Two Face but a more grotesque version of the Batman? The Joker doesn't seem to have this inner dichotomy, however, being simply bat shit crazy.

Let's go back to the Manchurian Candidate and consider the question of why conspirators would go around announcing their intentions.  In the synchromystic strain of conspiracy theory, the cyptocracy uses cues (called twilight language) to activate certain ideas and feeling to create a sense of recognition; they're fucking with us, basically, in order to heighten the fear and increase a sense of powerlessness before them.  Another example cited is the Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel which greatly influenced film director Nolan's vision of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises.  In the comic, a red-haired guy goes into a theater and starts shooting people up, killing three.  Of course, reason would suggest that Holmes was life imitating art.  For others, the book was a blueprint, a kind of forewarning of what "they" had planned.

Aurora would actually be a good choice for "them" to execute their plan if this were (is) true.  Aurora is the Goddess of Dawn.  I, like many other Americans who were obliged to read it as kids, will no doubt think of Aurora in the Odyssey (recalling Odyssey Dawn, the name of the US operation in Libya), the rosy-fingered one who appears at transitional moments in the epic; symbolizing our hero's ongoing transformation.  What better way to evoke a sense of awe than to subliminally trigger thoughts of a story where human strength is often crushed under the weight of divine intervention?  In God(s) We Trust.  And just as the gods control peole in the Greek epics, so do people mind-control people in the conspriatorial-epics of today. Aurora is also the name of dozens of municipalities across the US and the anglophone world; what better way to bring a distant event a little closer to home?

The title of the film is evocative in a similar sense to the name of the town, evoking the transition between night and day.  The Dark Knight Rises could be read as a pun....dark night rises.  Yet it's day which usually rises, with Aurora Night usually falls.  These metaphors stem from what appears to the be the literal rise and fall of the sun each morning and evening--which coincide with humans rising and falling from sleep and from beds.  Of course this inversion within the title of the film could mean just about whatever someone wanted it to mean....the world tuned upside down, for example.  My co-blogger, The Gid, suggests that the title of the film is also meant to evoke the title of Miller's 4th book, The Dark Night Falls.

Dawn is of course a symbol we've looked at many times:  the rising sun is a new day, a new world order, Luciferian illumination.  Another god LoS has examined is Janus, in a post we called Blood and Fire.  Janus was a two-faced god, a god of doubles.  Like Lincoln's double visage in our last post, like the double-headed eagle we keep running across linked to black-ops by private mercenaries, it's an obssession of ours.  As we said in the last post, the body-double idea evokes Janus, who in addition to his doppelgänger role, also served as the god of gateways; what is dawn but a kind of gateway?

Indeed.  Aurora is called "The Gateway City".  The interview with the guy claiming to have seen someone prop open the door was interviewed at Gateway High.  Not so far from Columbine, as initial reports reminded us.  And Columbine is the mistress of Harlequin....a kind of clown.  And Harley Quinn, in some versions of the Batman story, is the female sweetheart of....the Joker.  This female villain incidentally, was once Harleen Quinzel, Arkham Asylum psychiatrist....

Michael Hoffman, whose essay with James Shelby Downard entitled King Kill 33, is a classic of the twilight language texts, proposes that the JFK assassination was part of an elaborate Masonic Killing of the King ritual which culminated in the moon shot a few years later,.  He's now written an article on the Aurora shooting entitled Predictive programming and ritual stagecraft:  Batman movie shooting synchronicity.  (The comments are intriguing as well).

In this essay he asks:  Where's Watson? 

Where indeed?  At least, the conspiratorial rumblings suggest that Holmes did not act alone.  The use of mind control and political decoys is a more fantastic proposition, the kind of stuff that in times past was grist for the fringe elements of the frings.  But with the internet, the fringe has lept into the center.  More correctly speaking, there is no more center, it's all fringe, arranged like knots in a vast net which is cast wide and harvests every detail, no matter how trivial, and hauls it into the boat.  Looking at the squirming mass before us, it doesn't make "sense" in the traditonal way; merely appearing together is a kind of proof of something.  History and journalism, the documented and demonstrable, are no longer part of the process.  We simply throw around ideas, half-elaborated "facts" and hearsay, then run with it.  There are so many narrative threads we can pull out of the tangle of facts, whatever suits our fancy.

The idea of twilight language is convenient because if nothing concrete ever comes of it, the ideas are still planted, the lack of follow-up is part of the process.  As the theory goes, the plotters show us just enough to remind us they are there, but not enough to do anything about it.  There will always be reasonable doubt.  But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, just as sometimes there are crazy people who go off the rails and commit horrendous, senseless crimes.  Sometimes our need to make it sensible leads us to believe strange things, to make us wonder why a crazy person would do crazy things.  We assume people are like most of us, who do things for a reason, try to escape punishment for our misdeeds, attempt to have some kind of consistency in our lives.  When we see someone acting otherwise, it's hard to process, we are, perhaps, bewildered and alarmed for our own security.  Or perhaps, for our own sanity. Could that, we ask, be me or my children in the theater, either victim or perpetrator?  And it's in this state that we are susceptible to believing in conspiracies, especially a theory suggesting that an innocent person has been highjacked by mind control or a doppelganger.

If the world's a stage, and we are but actors, it's no wonder we're often curious to know who the director is. Of course it helps that in this case, it all took place in a theater showing a film in a franchise which has already given us a dose of real-life death.  Even before the release of the last installment, Heath Ledger, Joker actor, was dead in an apparently accidentally overdoese of legal medications.

P.S.

I wanted to work the following image in somehow, but I'm not quite sure how it works in.  One "right-wing" theory is that this is a staged event by the cryptocracy to further a gun control agenda.  What if it were in fact a right-wing conspiracy to make it look like a gun-grabbing conspiracy?  Wouldn't it be nifty to suggest this was a staged event, then point out that it isn't working and then link the shooter as Joker to the gun-grabber in Chief?  I don't advocate this at all, but after I thought of the image below it crossed my mind that this was a pro-gun conspiracy disguised as a blatant anti-gun conspiracy....  This is how crazy this kind of stuff will start making you.  Oddly enough, for some that's proof enough of a successful....conspiracy.

Obama is evoked, perhaps in a long and roundabout way, but so is Romney.  The villain of this latest Batman film:  Bane.  What company, often seen as villainous, did  Romney once lead?  Bain & Co....

Thanks to The Gid for his suggestions and additions, as well as copy editing.  Some very great observations and clarifications are integrated into the text.  Also some rearrangement of ideas.  He had a lot to add about the Batman comics I'd forgotten.  Some of his ideas are introduced with phrases such as "The Gid suggests..." written by the man himself.  Hmmm.  Writing about yourself in the third person?  Talk about your double-mind....

Sorry Gid, that I nixed your PPS about Snoop Dogg.  That's gonna be a post of its own....

Cannibal Spring

Eschatology by Dummies

I'm a bit late off the mark, sure, but I have a few observations about the so-called "Zombie Apocalypse" which occurred last month as the sun was moving from the house of the fish into that of the twins.  Is this the beginning of The End, marked by the transit of Venus, an event as rare as the earth passing through the tail of a comet?  Are the Mayans in on this?

The Cooked....

April 13.  The seeds of this post were planted after reading the strange and amusing tale of "asexual" Japanese chef Mao Sugiyama who, post-op, seasoned and served up his own "meat and two veg" for five diners at 250 bucks a pop.  Make that four diners, one balked at the last minute.  Sugiyama is a true Iron Chef!  This story appeared in Huff Po on May 24.

April 16.  I'd forgotten about the Brazilian cannibals I read about back when that story first broke and have only just now remembered.  There's not much amusement here, only strangeness.  Two ladies and a fellow lured at least two young women into their home with an ad for a babysitting gig.  They then killed the women and dismembered the bodies, making meat pastries which they sold to the neighbors.  This "cannibal cult" called themselves the "Cartel", perhaps an homage to the cartels to the north in Mexico, where dismemberment and beheadings have become par for the course in the drug-related violence which has claimed lives on the scale of a full-on war.

Calling a cult a cartel isn't so strange.  There's a cartel in Oaxaca called Caballeros Templarios, that is, Knights Templar.  A cult, a cartel, a chivalric order....without pushing things too far, one could say they all share quite a bit of characteristics, including laws of silence....

Concerned with reducing the population, the "Cartel" apparently intended to kill three women a year.  Symbolically significant, perhaps, but not quite enough to reverse exponential population growth.  Another motive was "to purify their souls" according to a police spokesman.  This would not be without precedent.  I've read somewhere that both the Aztecs and some Kali cults practiced cannibalism in order to please or approach their respective gods.  This is my body, this is my blood....

...and the Raw

May 26.  Whatever amusement I got from the Japanese cook tale was completely absent from the events which went down in Miami.  Unless you've been living under a rock, you've almost certainly read about the "Miami Zombie," which began all this Zombie Apocalypse talk.  A naked Rudy Eugene was shot dead after being ordered to stop eating the face of a naked hobo by the name of Ronald Poppo.  We're told this attack lasted 18 + minutes and cost victim 70% + of his face:  nose, lips, one eye, forehead eaten to the bone.  The attacker is described by friends and family as a nice guy who smoked too much pot and read the Bible.  Obviously that book is a bad influence!  He was suspected of being on drugs, the current theory being "bath salts" after the newspapers suggested cocaine psychosis, then mutant LSD.  Even this is far from certain and apparently, some humanity remained in Eugene, for you see, no flesh was found in his stomach (it pays to wait before blogging).  In other words he spat, not swallowed.

In an interview with his girlfriend after the attack, the girlfriend said that Eugene was either "drugged or cursed."  She hadn't believed in Voodoo before this incident but after she saw the victim's face, she was a believer.  Eugene, incidentally, was of Haitian descent and of course, the Zombie is associated with Haitian Voudon.

May 25.  Another cannibal murder. Kenya-born Alexander Kinyua eats a houseguest, 37-year old exchange student Bonsafo Agyeai-Kodie, a Ghanaian.  Police were alerted when the head and hands of the victim were found in a trash bin by Kinyua's brother.  The killer had disposed of the torso and legs near a local church after consuming the victim's brain and heart.

We've already looked into the significance of the severed head and severed hands, both symbols of power.  In a lighter post, we also discussed the Egyptian misunderstanding of the heart as the seat of intelligence.  Without this specifically Egyptian inspiration, I would propose the dismemberment was in fact a way to disempower the victim both literally and symbolically  (deep, huh?).  Eating the heart and brain might have been a way to ingest something of the victims intelligence and emotions, his character; in this the killing becomes the ritual accompaniment to an act of sympathetic magic.  As we will see, another recent cannibal killer took off the hands and head of his victim.

The Kinyua killing happened, by the way, in Joppa, Maryland.  Joppa is another name for Jaffa, a port city in current-day Israel with a rich Muslim history (a history the Israeli authorities have done their best to gloss over).  It was also the turf of the Tribe of Dan.  A fitting provenance during the talk of a zombie apocalypse, for it is from this tribe that some Millenialist groups have ascribed the origin of....the Antichrist.

Kinyua also ranted about death cults and mass human sacrifice and had been kicked out of the ROTC. His past violence and notoriety as a ticking bomb will do little to assuage people's suspicions that this kind of behavior was in fact programmed.

Waiting for the War

In some forums I've read, comments imply these cannibal attacks are somehow Barack Obama's fault!  Others don't beat around the bush.  According to one, these attacks are a sign America must cut all immigration (now!) according to a post I can no longer find.  [I swear it's true; I read these comments before I started the post and lost the articles I'd read them in among the welter that followed.  This makes what I've just written unreliable hearsay....]  Indeed the "race war" theme seemed to have gained steam in the wake of the Trevor Martin killing.  Drudge often has headlines about black on white crime, usually about gangs of black youths attacking a lone white or a couple, often with a quote "This is for Trevor".  Of course, these are real events, but it's also a none-too-subtle attempt to stir up fear; I propose Drudge is assembling these incidents on his perpetual front-page in order to create the impression of a pattern whose tempo is increasing, linking these events to the Obama presidency without directly saying it, so that swing voters might be persuaded that a black man in the White House is encouraging this kind of behavior.

The specter of black mobs and violent uprising is a potent and visceral image, which, as well will see, has already been evoked by at least one mainstream politician--a year ago Mike Huckabee made the connection between Obama and the Mau Mau, for instance.

Ooh Mau Mau

A few days after all this cannibal stuff broke I got a message on Facebook:  Happy Madaraka Day.  This was on June 1.  This Kenyan holiday commemorates the day Kenya achieved self-rule.  I thought here of the Mau Mau uprising which preceded independence, grokking at the same moment that Kinyua was himself a Kenyan.  Incidentally, the Mau Mau were primarily from Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu; the name Kinyua comes from their language and means "one who drinks".  Presumably, the reference is to water, but for our boy Alexander the thirst seems to have been for blood....

It is said that:

"The horrors they [the Mau Mau] practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women."

The Mau Mau uprising is another event evoked whenever someone wants to drop hints about the "upcoming" race war, and the Mau Mau have been linked to our Antichrist/President by more than Mike Huckabee.  There is some basis for this, in fact:


Sarah Obama, President Barack Obama's grandfather's wife told him that her husband was imprisoned for six months and tortured before being tried in a British court.

Thing is, this uprising was primarily "black-on-black" crime.  Only 32 white civilians were killed, the rest of the vicitms blacks and soldiers.  Many of these deaths were spectacularly barbaric.  But the English killed about 10,000 Kenyans supressing the uprising, which adds a little perspective.  The Mau Mau didn't hold a momopoly on savagery; English atrocities are well-documented:

"[E]lectric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men's rectums and women's vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence."

Cannibals All

But let get back to the present.  A man, Chinese exchange student Lin Lun, 33, is reported missing on May 24.  In this case one Luka Magnotta, born Eric Clinton Newman (New Man) films himself murdering the poor fellow.  He masturbates with a severed arm and commits another sex act with the corpse.  He also eats some the victim with a knife and fork, so it's not entirely uncivilized.  Unlike another Clinton, our "new man" Magnotta inhaled.

He mailed a foot and hand to the HQ's of Canada's major political parties.  The other hand and foot ended up in Vancouver, the nearest city to the series of discoveries of dismembered feet floating in local waterways.  Is Magnotta making a citation here?  Is he trying to plant the idea that he may have been responsible for these killings as well? 

Earlier on, some papers were reporting that Magnotta claimed to have dated notorious killer Karla Homolka.  Her tale involves the abduction, rape and torture and ultimate murder of three female victims.  Now papers suggest this was just another lie by Magnotta, whose very name is false.  (He played a rich porn star online, posing with fast cars and good clothes, but in fact was a bankrupt waiter).  Mythomania and narcissism among his lesser character flaws!

This initial report of a liaison with Homolka is chilling.  Homolka, you see, did not act alone, but with her husband.  The Canadian feet mystery was first brought to our attention through the theory of the Smiley Face Killings.  This flawed theory suggests that a series of gruesome killing across the nation were carried out by an organized band.  Could the Magnotta/Homolka link be evidence that this is true?  Hey, even if its false, the seed is planted.  A kind of terrorism along the liminal.  Like Kinyua, seekers of signs that something fishy is going on are easy to find...an internet trail of animal cruelty and accusations of necrophilia already had people out for this guy even before he turned his attention to human victims.  An encounter with England's news media alarmed journalists there so much that they called Scotland Yard.

Magnotta wrote:  “Once you kill and taste blood it’s impossible to stop.”  Another line: “I’ll be back — and this time the victims won’t be animals.”


Apocalypse Whenever

Magnotta's story has some parallels with Kinyau's:  both seemed to be mythomaniacs with violent pasts, known to the police.  Their victims were both foreign students.  They both  left a "large online footprint".  Like the Miami cannibal, the attack was captured on film.  Terrorism in the digital age.  Brings all the horror onto your laptop.  (The Brazilian cannibals may have also filmed their crimes).

As it turns out, Magnotta also frequented white nationalist message boards and penned rather harsh anti-immigrant screeds....and some are questioning whether this was a racially-motivated killing or if the screeds were more of Magnotta's seemingly pathological need to create himself anew online.

So, these killings are more than rife with weird conspiratorial details which lead us down a variety of rabbit holes.  Anyone looking to construct a conspiracy theory is well-equipped with tantalizing links.  The internet cesspool is a swirling miasma, where the murky waters turn round and round, bits of flotsam floating back into view again and again before going down the memory hole.

2012 is the new Y2K and we here at LoS marvel at the continued strength of the apocalyptic mindset, how one incoherent book of the Bible continues to exert such force upon the American mind.  Then again, with footage of people killing, dismembering and eating each other so readily available, maybe it's not so difficult to believe that indeed, these are the last of days.