Across Difficult Country

“When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.” - The Testament of Dr. Mabuse . More strange news from Whitby : A MYSTERIOUS oil spill has covered the roads around Whitby and has brought chaos to the town. Police were forced to hold up traffic at locations around the town while sand was put down. One witness described seeing pedestrians fall in the street and cars skidding as they struggled for grip in the wet conditions. Sgt Paul Delaney described the source of the spill as a "mystery". Notice the mysterious oil spill is both more elaborate (it’s no simple task to not only spread that much oil, but do it undetected) yet less physically destructive than ordinary vandalism. Why would someone do this? Because it brought chaos to the town . This is what links the bizarre and seemingly disconnected events of Whitby - the senseless crimes , th...

In Malaysia, lesbian Orangutans are tearing off women’s pants (probably because they know they can’t be sued for sexual harassment). Cambodian police have placed bounties on the heads of a group of macaque “ gangster monkeys ”. The macaques’ crime spree includes acts of theft, burglaries, assaults, and sabotage of internet lines. According to deputy district governor Pich Socheata, “Authorities tried several times to get the unruly monkeys to eat eggs laced with sleeping pills, but had always been outsmarted.” Are monkeys getting smarter? These types of incidents suggest that’s the case, leading me to conclude the Flynn effect has been occurring not only in humans, but in monkeys and apes as well. Humans, as I’m reminded by my family every year at Thanksgiving, are primates too, little different from the hairier primates. In human crime news, Things Move Around has been doing some looting. Or has he?

PIERO DI COSIMO. Perseus Frees Andromeda . 1515. The Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462 – 1522) hardly ate anything other than eggs. He would boil 50 at a time (who counted?) and nibble on an egg held in one hand while painting with the other. The time saved allowed him to get a lot of work done, though some claim he wouldn’t cook other foods because he suffered from pyrophobia, or fear of fire (how did he heat the boiling water?), but I think he just loved eggs. ___ First published in 1886, Phantasms of the Living is a two volume, 2,000 page compendium of the research of the Cambridge educated psychologist Edmund Gurney, the poet Frederic William Henry Myers (he coined the term ‘methetherial’), and the postal worker Frank Podmore (who, when not delivering letters, did things like suggesting the name for the Fabian society) of ghosts, precognitive dreams, precognitive visions, and telepathical hallucinations. In the pages of this pioneering work of parapsychology we encounter th...

Cartoon by John Leech .

Across Difficult Country's legal counsel Judge Florentino Floro Jr. is in the news again, this time on the front page of the Wall Street Journal . As readers surely remember, Judge Floro was declared psychotic and removed from the bench for being in psychic contact with three invisible “mystic dwarves” 1 named Armand, Luis and Angel. Angel, Judge Floro tells the Wall Street Journal , "is the neutral force", Armand "is a benign influence", and Luis,"whom Mr. Floro describes as the "king of kings," is an avenger." Now the Supreme Court which fired him is persecuting him again, issuing an “en banc resolution asking Mr. Floro to desist in his threats of 'ungodly reprisal.'” While not stating explicitly, the Court appears to be blaming Judge Floro for a series of unfortunate events, including a “mysterious” fire which “destroyed the Supreme Court's crest in its session hall”, and a string of accidents and illnesses numerous members o...

It's obvious to anyone with eyeballs that the liberal brain, by its very nature, is more susceptible to fads and fashionable nonsense than the conservative mind. Now, if a new study is correct, there may be scientific proof : Frank Sulloway of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study, said results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity." Based on the results, Sulloway said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas. The compulsive acceptance of new social, scientific or religious ideas is, of course, a major reason why liberalism is so corrosive and destructive. For most new ideas are wrong , if not harmful. As David Stove wrote, in his brilliant essay "The Columbus Argument": “No doubt it is true that, for any change for the bette...

Apparently I’m not the only admirer of the retarded brilliance of Fletcher Hanks: "There is a man in a blue suit and a green and red skullcap piloting a red plane across a yellow sky. Crossing a lush jungle valley, he spots thousands of “gigantic royal panthers” and instantly declares: “I CAN USE THEM IN MY PLAN TO WRECK CIVILIZATION!” Though the colorful and crudely drawn adventure comics gathered in I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets ! read like the fevered imaginings of Henry Darger’s bully older brother, they are, in fact, the garish and terrifying work of Fletcher Hanks." [ More ]

The anti-Swiss slander campaign continues. Writing for Foreign Policy , deep thinker Preeti Aroon claims the proposal by the Swiss People's Party (SVP) to deport immigrant families if their children are criminals is part of “a larger general trend of racism and anti-Semitism brewing in the region.” And once it’s fully fermented, the toxic Swiss brew will spill over, and hordes of Swiss will sweep across Europe, stabbing every minority in sight with the corkscrew attachment of their army knives, as they’ve done so many times in the past. This charge would be stupid even if we weren’t talking about Switzerland. Aroon concedes “not all Germans, Swiss, and Austrians are cold-hearted extremists” (how generous) but threatens “history is replete with examples of populations that have been radicalized quite fast. This German-speaking part of the world should be kept on our radar screens.” Step 1: Lock target on radar. Step 2: Commence bombing. The Independent takes up the issue by askin...

Korean scientist Dr Mi-Jeong Jeong has discovered certain genes in plants which can be activated by sound. When researchers directed sounds toward the plants at specific frequencies : Two genes, called rbcS and Ald, became more active at 125 and 250 Hertz, and less active at 50 Hertz. Both genes are known to respond to light, so Jeong's team checked out what happened when the test was repeated in the dark -- and found that the two genes still responded to the sound. This breakthrough has far reaching implications, As any student of palaeontology knows, in the distant past of long ago (what specialists call “dino-time”) nearly every inch of the landscape was overrun with stupid looking plants, and among this dense growth roamed gigantic, preposterous animals. Obviously, with a few exceptions, that’s no longer the case. There have been many explanations for why things changed, all unsatisfactory. But Dr. Mi-Jeong Jeong’s work provides a crucial clue, one that leads to a new hypothesi...

A Swiss political party’s proposal to deport immigrant families “if their children are convicted of a violent crime, drug offenses or benefits fraud” has provoked hyperbolic reaction , within Switzerland and without. The Swiss Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism dishonestly equated the policy to “the Nazi practice of "Sippenhaft" — or kin liability — whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for his or her crimes and punished equally”. AP reporter Frank Jordans even invoked Stalin and Mao, claiming, “Similar practices occurred during Stalin's purges in the early days of the Soviet Union and the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in China, when millions were persecuted for their alleged ideological failings.” Mr. Jordans seems to have a novel notion of what reporting is, and and a novel notion of what the word “similar” means. The UN has also condemned the proposal , suggesting it may violate European law, an odd complaint considering Switzerland is not a memb...