“I am the bread of life...."

The dubious sculpture

You have to wonder what the sculptor of the statue pictured above was thinking.  Was it really just a case of not thinking things through, a tremendous case of oversight -- or was it a jab at the Catholic Church's pedophilia cover-ups?  Or merely a childish joke?

 

Covered up, eh?  As for reality being the metaphor, you can't get much better.  When the statue was installed, students at the school immediately  saw the humor in it, taking pics and posting them on Instagram.  The school wrote a note of apology explaining the situation (above) and then covered it up until a solution can be found.  I'm sure the Blackfriars Priory School is loving all the attention.

The cover up.

It's kind of a shame, really, because the Saint depicted, St. Martin de Porres (1579-1639), seems like a pretty decent fellow, known for a genuine commitment to the poor, having established both an orphanage and a children's hospital.

Born in Lima, Peru, he was the illegitimate child of a nobleman and a freed slave.  Though an unusually devout child, his mixed race prevented him from fully joining a religious order.  But when the Prior ignored the law due to Martin's unflagging dedication to healing the sick and caring for the poor, he was allowed to take vows as a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic.  Unfortunately, not all the monks were as open-minded as the prior, and he suffered insults and harassment from his new "brothers".

There are several anecdotes that attest to his humanity: bringing an old man covered with ulcers to his own bed, saying that "Compassion, my dear Brother, is preferable to cleanliness" when he was criticized by a dubious brother.  Another time he was reprimanded by the Prior for bringing a dying Indian to his room and he responded "Forgive my error, and please instruct me, for I did not know that the precept of obedience took precedence over that of charity."  Zing!  St. Martin had certainly learned the true meaning behind Jesus rebuking the Pharisees when they criticized him for healing on the Sabbath.  He was thereafter given liberty to do as as wanted when it came to merciful acts.

There are reports he cured the sick merely by giving someone a glass of water, and that during an epidemic he worked tirelessly, even walking through locked doors into quarantined areas.  His alms could feed up to 160 people a day.  Other miracles have him levitating in ecstasy, light filling rooms as he prayed, a remarkable rapport with animals (he was a vegetarian), miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures, and my favorite, bilocation.

Because of the miracles that occurred when he was invoked in prayer, his body was exhumed 25 years after his death.  His body was said to be incorrupt and to have given off a sweet fragrance.  Numerous pleas were sent to Rome for his beatification, and though his works were eventually recognized as heroic, he wasn't beatified until 1837.  He was made a saint in 1962.  He's often shown carrying a broom to symbolize his belief that all work was holy and he is also sometimes pictured with a dog, cat and mouse drinking from the same bowl, symbolizing peace.

He is the patron saint of mixed-race people, barbers, innkeepers, public health workers, and those seeking racial harmony.  His feast Day is November 3.  In Santeria he is venerated as Papa Candelo.

The Adelaide Blackfriars probably wanted to unveil something nice for Saint Martin's saint day, but unfortunately they, erm, blew it.

3 Portaits of Daurade by Tim Wilson

Daurade as Yasser Arafat

Daurade as Baron von Kunststoffwanne

Daurade as beekeeper

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.

No body home

First thing I heard on the radio today is that Osama Bin Laden has been killed in Pakistan by US forces.  Checking it out later I saw in the NYT that the "Body is Buried at Sea".

The CIA did this disappearing act with Che Guevara--hide the body so there would be no shrine potential....come to think of it, that's why the Russians burned Hitler's corspe, no?

In 1997 Guevera's remains were found, exhumed and transferred to Cuba where they lie in a mausoleum and monument.  Even his hands.  Hmm?  These had been hacked off and sent back to his native Argentina to be preserved in formaldehyde but were later sent to Cuba.  Odd, eh?  Ten years prior, 1987, Argentine leader Juan Peron's tomb was desecrated and his hands cut off with an electric saw.  An investigation into the matter was inconclusive and some involved in it died under "questionable circumstances".  Wikipedia states that "In their book Unveiling the Enigma, writers Damian Nabot and David Cox write that the P2, also known as the Propaganda Due, were involved in the theft, and that there was a ritual involved in the cutting of Peron's hands".

CIA National Security Archive, 1967.

Che has in fact become exactly the folk saint the authorities who hid his body feared: 

"It's like he is alive and with us, like a friend. He is kind of like a Virgin Mary for us. We say, 'Che, help us with our work or with this planting,' and it always goes well."

— Manuel Cortez, a campesino who resides next to the schoolhouse where Guevara was executed.

I find it significant his body was displayed in a laundry, as if to clean Che from collective memory before hiding him away.  But hey, there's nothing like a missing body or empty tomb to base a religion upon....

But I'm getting away from Bin Laden.  I must admit, so quickly disposing of his body raises alarms bells in my prone-to-be-skeptical brain.  I'm not saying there's something, er, fishy going on, but you can bet half the internet will.  Seems like a perfect psy-op to me.  Without any thorough independent examination of a body hastily disposed of, there will always be suspicions that this was like the second Oswald.  This was the biggest manhunt in US history, the capture ten years in coming and now there is no body.  Doesn't seem like standard police procedure to me.

.

http://www.sovereignindependent.com/?p=18055

I remember that Saddam Hussein employed body doubles to throw off would-be assassins.  Some have argued that it was in fact on of these hapless doppelgangers who was hanged in Baghdad....

You see, the seed already has tentative roots.  Won't be so hard for some clever dick to make it blossom.  From the comments on my Facebook homepage, that process is already well underway.  All I can say is, if you want to start a folk legend, kill the outlaw.  If you want to canonize him, hide the body....

SS in Uruguay Egypt, sous un chapeau de paille eucalypt--us....

He was a Nazi doctor. He hid out in Egypt for almost 50 years. He died of rectal cancer in 1992. The fascinating tale is here. A book should be written about this. Any takers?

P.S. 13 Feb.

The title of this meager post comes from from a song on Serge Gainsborough's poppy Nazi-themed album Rock Around the Bunker (1975). The album leads off with a kitschy little number called "Nazi Rock" and finishes with "S.S in Uruguay." But not without first covering Harbach and Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"....

Swedish police say human foot on beach identified

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — A human foot that washed up on a beach near a Swedish tourist resort belonged to a 59-year-old man who went missing on the southwestern coast last year, police said Wednesday.

Full article here

Another foot washes ashore....this time in Washington

Just follow the link above until someone more clever comes along to shed light on this baffling mystery. LoS has posted on this a few times before. When we first wrote about it in May there were only four feet. Now there are six, not including one hoax one one foot found on the Swedish coast. There is also apparently a footless body in Washington state.

Two of the Canadian feet come from the same body and another has been identified as that of a "depressed" man who disappeared some time ago. All but one of the feet are from men. All were found in athletic shoes. None are said to have been "severed" and bodies coming apart in water is said to be quite normal.

If it's normal that feet come apart from their bodies then why are so many being found now, in more or less the same place, all them in athletic shoes? Doesn't anyone die near the water wearing espadrilles or fisherman's Wellingtons? Doesn't anyone die in the water in Florida?

Interesting fact from the article:

"Her [Simon Fraser University forensic scientist Gail Anderson] experiments last year showed that it takes scavenging crabs, seals, sharks and fish about 28 days to fully devour a decomposing pig carcass, which is similar to a human carcass in its bacteria and rates of decomposition."

Also, from the Peninsula Daily News:

"One early theory that Canadian authorities broached early in the investigation of the five severed feet has been debunked.

The RCMP in British Columbia said that none of the feet belongs to the five men who died in a plane crash in the Strait of Georgia in February 2005."

Post Script Aug. 6: This article has some good observations, including:

"Although the similar footwear may seem like a strange coincidence, it actually explains why these feet have been found.

"Most body parts would sink," Shields said. "Because the feet have running shoes on them and running shoes consist of a spongy sole that contains air, it makes the foot float."

The other parts of the body, and other feet wearing different kinds of shoes, would sink and never be found, he added."

Strange things are afoot

Had enough of mysterious disembodied human feet? Too bad; another human foot has washed ashore, this time in Tylösand, a tourist destination in south-western Sweden.

Swedish police spokesman Christer Harplinger says a shoe was found "containing a sock, with a foot inside it." An odd way of putting it.

Although no crime is suspected at this time, the foot has been sent to a laboratory and the police are combing through lists of missing persons.

According another spokesman,it's "far too early" to make any connections with the Vancouver 5. On the Canadian side, intrepid media relations mountie Annie Linteau told the press: "We have not been in contact with the authorities over there and vice versa, they have not contacted us either. We are just continuing our own investigation."

Stay tuned.

The Telectroscope

"Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope has been installed at both ends which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York
and vice versa."

Smiley Face Killers

Some nine months back, the LoS reported on the Mississippi River's apparent appetite for death.

And now we learn with fear and sadness that Christopher Jenkins, supposedly a victim of accidental drowning in the Mississippi near downtown Minneapolis on Halloween of 2002, was perhaps a victim of the Smiley Face Killers:




From CNN.com:

In all, the investigators say they've connected the bizarre drowning deaths of at least 40 college-age men across the country ... connected by a creepy symbol left near the water's edge: a smiley face painted on trees and other surfaces ... The most sinister was found in Iowa ... drawn in red with a devil's horns. Next to the smiley face was a note that read, "Evil Happy Smiley Face Man." ... The detectives say the string of deaths could be the work of more than one killer because some of them took place on the same day in different states. "It's so widespread. We have so many different victims in so many different areas," Duarte said. "It would, in my view, be impossible to be one person."

Let's repeat that last statement from Detective Duarte: "It would, in my view, be impossible to be one person."

Now let's jump west to British Columbia, where four sneaker-wearing severed right feet have washed to shore in British Columbia in less than one year.







What the?!? Four severed *right* feet washed to shore!?! Four?!?

Let's repeat, again, that last statement from Detective Duarte: "It would, in my view, be impossible to be one person."

An astute blog-reader recently noted this pair of quotes from Charles Manson and David Berkowitz (Son of Sam):

What about your children? You say there are just a few? There are many, many more, coming in the same direction. They are running in the streets -- and they are coming right at you! -- CM

There are other 'Sons' out there -- God help the world. --DB

With that in mind, consider the gruesome case of the Happy Face Killer, currently incarcerated for eight murders, a string of crimes committed while the killer taunted the police with notes inscribed with a smiley face.

Again, Detective Duarte: "It would, in my view, be impossible to be one person." Say it three times and it's true.

Thank you, Detective. I will sleep soundly as I dream of the Happy Face Killer bilocated, roaming and killing while quietly incarcerated.

The face of the LORD is against them that do evil -- Psalm 34:16

God help us.