Studies in Misanthropology:
Exploiting & Questioning Ignorance, Stupidity, Mediocrity & Human Folly. Encouraging Aesthetics & Great Works Throughout the World's History to Enlighten the Self.
A 10-ton fishing boat has been sunk by gigantic jellyfish off eastern Japan.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo
Published: 7:00AM GMT 02 Nov 2009
The trawler, the Diasan Shinsho-maru, capsized off Chiba`as its three-man crew was trying to haul in a net containing dozens of huge Nomura's jellyfish.
Each of the jellyfish can weigh up to 200 kg and waters around Japan have been inundated with the creatures this year. Experts believe weather and water conditions in the breeding grounds, off the coast of China, have been ideal for the jellyfish in recent months.
The crew of the fishing boat was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler, according to the Mainichi newspaper. The local Coast Guard office reported that the weather was clear and the sea was calm at the time of the accident.
One of the largest jellyfish in the world, the species can grow up to 2 meters in diameter. The last time Japan was invaded on a similar scale, in the summer of 2005, the jellyfish damaged nets, rendered fish inedible with their toxic stings and even caused injuries to fishermen.
Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures.
Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.
“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.
His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”
From left, a Caduveo woman from Brazil and a Maori chief's self-portrait, from “Tristes Tropiques”; Caduveo women, from “Structural Anthropology”; Caduveo body designs, from “Tristes Tropiques.”
In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.
But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”
With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.
In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”
Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.
From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”
In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York."
After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.
By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.
The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.
An 11-year-old girl who gave birth on her wedding day while still dressed in a white gown and a tiara says she is excited to "have a new toy".
Kordeza Zhelyazkova from Bulgaria gave birth to 2.4kg baby girl Violeta last week but left the hospital with her newborn after only an overnight stay to finish the wedding ceremony, the News of the World reports.
The schoolgirl said she and 19-year-old husband Jeliazko Dimitrov met in the playground of her school in the industrial town of Sliven after he saved her from bullies.
Kordeza said the pair began a sexual relationship even though she did not know what a condom was and fell pregnant within a week of them meeting.
"I'm not going to play with toys anymore — I have a new toy now," she was quoted by the paper as saying.
"She is so beautiful, I love her ... Violeta is the child and I must grow up.
"I am not going back to school — I am a mother now."
Kordeza said she did not realise she was pregnant until her grandmother pointed out her weight gain.
"I just thought I'd eaten too many burgers," she said.
But Mr Dimitrov could be jailed for up to six years for having sex with a girl under 14.
"I'm scared ... I want to look after my wife and child ... instead I may be going to prison," he said.
"I made a mistake but I am not going to apologise for that because now I have beautiful Violeta."
Kordez said she was not planning on having any more children.
60 Minutes' Lara Logan Reports On The Yakuza, Whose Criminal Influence Is Worldwide
CBS) The Yakuza is one of the most powerful organized crime syndicates in the world. It is Japan's not-so-secret version of the Mafia, with 85,000 members who trace their roots back to 17th century Samurai warriors.
Deeply embedded in Japanese business and culture, the Yakuza also have their tentacles into this country and American law enforcement knows it.
One man they keep a close eye on is Tadamasa Goto, a ruthless "Godfather."
Ordinarily such a notorious mobster wouldn't even be allowed into the United States, but Tadamasa Goto not only got into the country, he jumped to the top of a long waiting list for a life-saving liver transplant at UCLA Medical Center.
"What does it mean in Japan to be a Yakuza?" correspondent Lara Logan asked a Yakuza boss - a rival of Goto's who agreed to be interviewed if 60 Minutes masked his identity and did not use his name.
"To be a Yakuza in Japan is to live an unalterable way of life. It's not an occupation. It's to follow and explore the lives of the Samurai, the code of the Samurai," the man told Logan.
Asked how a person can tell if someone is a Yakuza, the man told Logan, "It's the smell….The smell of another beast."
"When you join the Yakuza, they become your family," Jake Adelstein told Logan.
No American knows more about the inner workings of the Yakuza than Adelstein. He has spent the last 15 years in Tokyo investigating and writing about the mob.
"Generally speaking, Yakuza get rid of bodies by dumping them in the foundations of buildings. They own a lot of construction companies. So, you know, you're pouring a new building. You throw the body in, like, the cement. And nobody ever finds it. The buildings go all up, all the time in Tokyo," Adelstein explained.
It's impossible to miss the mark of a Yakuza: severed fingers. Tradition demands when a mistake is made, they chop off their own finger to atone and present the severed part to their boss. Many have ornate tattoos that often cover their entire body, marking them for life.
But unlike the Mafia in America, Yakuza don't hide their membership in the mob, because it's not illegal in Japan to be a member of organized crime. And they are so much a part of Japanese culture, they parade openly.
"Right now, we don't hide the fact that we're Yakuza," the anonymous Yakuza boss told Logan.
He was introduced to "60 Minutes" by Jake Adelstein in downtown Tokyo. Beneath his expensive suit, his body is a canvas, like many Yakuza, covered with intricate tattoos.
"Physically, the tattoos take their toll on your body," Logan remarked.
"The tattoos are so dense that it's very hard to sweat, which means when you can't get rid of the toxins in your body, that's also very hard on the liver," Adelstein explained.
What's also hard on the liver is the hedonistic lifestyle of the Yakuza.
As she walked down the main street of Tokyo's entertainment and "red light" district, Logan explained, "This is traditional Yakuza turf. They run everything from the girls to the sex, to the drugs. But the modern Yakuza is a different animal, adding corporate takeovers, financial fraud and insider trading to their criminal portfolio."
That's how Tadamasa Goto made most of his money. According to Japanese police files, he amassed an estimated billion dollar fortune through nearly 100 front companies.
He is one of the richest and most violent godfathers in Japan. That's why he's known to U.S. law enforcement as the "John Gotti of Japan."
But there was one thing Goto's power and money couldn't buy him in his homeland. He had liver disease and desperately needed a transplant.
Culturally, the Japanese don't believe in organ donation, so to get a new liver, he needed to come to the U.S. For a Yakuza, that should have been a problem, said Mike Cox, the chief of immigration and customs at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
"We want to be a welcoming country, the United States. But certainly we don't want the Yakuza coming to the United States," Cox told Logan. "They have extensive criminal histories here in Japan. They are members of criminal organizations. For both of those reasons they would be ineligible to enter the United States."
How did he get around that? According to Jake Adelstein's reporting, which "60 Minutes" confirmed, Tadamasa Goto made a deal with the FBI.
He offered to become a "rat" and inform on his Yakuza brothers.
"Goto said, 'Here's the deal. I need to get in the United States to get my liver transplant or I'm gonna die. I will give you the names of all our front companies in the United States,'" Adelstein explained. "So in terms of not only criminal intelligence, but sort of covert intelligence, Goto represented a real find for the FBI."
"So the FBI made this deal?" Logan asked.
"And they gave him a special visa to come into the United States," Adelstein replied.
Getting into the U.S. was one thing, but getting a liver transplant at a leading American medical center like UCLA was something else altogether.
"What's the average waiting time for someone in California waiting for a liver transplant?" Logan asked California attorney Larry Eisenberg.
"It's probably realistically three years. And it could be much longer," he replied.
Not for Tadamasa Goto, who got a liver in just six weeks. Eisenberg finds that surprising, especially since Goto was number 80 on the waiting list.
"It should not be possible that an unsavory character from out of the country, with ties to organized crime, comes into the United States and gets a priority and obtains a transplant," Eisenberg said.
Two families, Eisenberg's clients, both lost loved ones waiting for livers at another transplant center in the same area: Salvador Ceja was number two on the waiting list; John Rader was number five.
"Do you think, for one second, that this was legitimate? That they stood in line and waited just like your husband did?" Logan asked Rader's widow Cheryl.
"Absolutely not," she replied. "No. Because nobody gets a liver that quickly."
"I think they were playing God," Yolanda Carballo, Ceja's stepdaughter, added. "Now, I think they were picking and choosing who they wanted to give a liver to."
"So, in your minds, what was this about?" Logan asked.
"Money," Rader said. "Spoke loud and clear. And they listened."
"That's what it was all about. Money," Carballo agreed.
Three of Goto's Yakuza cronies also got liver transplants at UCLA. For them, money was no object. UCLA says each of their transplants cost about $400,000 dollars; the Yakuza all paid cash.
The hospital also acknowledged Goto and another Yakuza each made $100,000 donations to the transplant center.
Adelstein says Goto paid even more. "According to police documents and sources, a million dollars for Goto. A million dollars," he told Logan.
"A million dollars for one liver?" she asked.
"A million dollars for one liver," Adelstein said.
Asked if UCLA knew who these people were, Adelstein said, "When you see guys with lots of tattoos, missing fingers, wouldn't it occur to you, like, 'Oh, this guy is a gangster.' I can't believe they didn't know."
Attorney Eisenberg says transplant rules require extensive background checks on every patient. Yet, UCLA insisted to federal investigators they had "no knowledge" that Goto or his cronies had ties to Japanese organized crime.
UCLA declined all of 60 Minutes' requests for interviews. The only thing the medical center will say on the record is that their program has been reviewed and found to be in "total compliance" with liver transplant rules.
The hospital told us, "state and federal patient confidentiality laws prohibit UCLA from responding to the…issues raised by 60 Minutes."
"In my opinion, the medical center has a moral and ethical obligation to determine the source of those funds," Eisenberg said.
"A moral and ethical obligation, but apparently no legal obligation?" Logan asked.
"Well, it's not addressed in the rules specifically," Eisenberg said.
Because the quality of livers and the eligibility of patients vary widely, any wrongdoing in the cases of the Yakuza would be very difficult to prove.
The FBI also declined our requests to talk about the Tadamasa Goto case, which for them, Adelstein says, did not turn out as planned.
"As soon as he got his liver and was better, he's back to Japan. And he only gave the FBI a fraction of what he promised, maybe a 10th, maybe a 20th. Not a complete failure, but certainly not what the FBI wanted," he told Logan.
Tadamasa Goto returned to his life of crime as a Yakuza godfather and it all stayed hidden until Adelstein was tipped off. It took him years to piece together the details for a newspaper story. Then, when word got out that Adelstein knew, the Yakuza tried to buy his silence, offering him half a million dollars.
Asked if he was tempted by the cash offer, Adelstein said, "Of course I'm tempted. You know? When someone offers you half a million dollars not to write something, but then again, you know I don't want to be owned by organized crime the rest of my life."
Adelstein wrote the story for "The Washington Post" and it eventually made its way back to Japan. The news infuriated the Yakuza bosses. For Goto, it was a humiliating blow from which he would never recover.
"I heard from someone very close to him that as he was leaving and getting in his car he said, 'That goddamn American Jew reporter, I wanna kill him,'" Adelstein said.
Japanese and U.S. law enforcement agents took Goto's threat seriously.
Adelstein now lives alone, under Tokyo police protection; his wife and children are in hiding.
"Are you concerned that there is an American citizen here whose life is at risk?" Logan asked the U.S. Embassy's Mike Cox.
"Very much so. I mean, we think the Japanese police are doing what they can to make sure that no harm comes to Mr. Adelstein. I mean, we certainly don't want to see anything happen to him," Cox said.
"What do you have to do in your daily life to stay alive?" Logan asked Adelstein.
"You have to keep your rooms shuttered, because you don't want a sniper to pick you off across from somebody’s house," he said.
Asked if he lives in darkness, Adelstein said, "When I'm up in my room typing, yes. All the rooms are shuttered. You gotta be very careful on rainy days. Because when Yakuza take people out, they like to do it on rainy days, because fewer people are on the streets and the rain washes away trace evidence."
Even in disgrace, Tadamasa Goto still has a small army of loyal soldiers and a hit out on Jake Adelstein. The Yakuza say he will never be safe.
"When someone does something that causes them (Yakuza) to lose face, they will use any means possible, legal or illegal, to crush the person who has gotten in their way, who has humiliated them," the disguised Yakuza boss told Logan.
Asked if he thinks that's wrong, the boss told Logan, "That's not wrong. If you're a Yakuza, that's simply how you're going to behave."
"So if Jake had done that to you, you would get rid of him?" Logan asked.
"Absolutely," the boss replied without a moment's hesitation.
By Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, Times Staff Writers
Posted: Oct 31, 2009 04:30 AM
For years, the Church of Scientology chased down and brought back staff members who tried to leave.
Ex-staffers describe being pursued by their church and detained, cut off from family and friends and subjected to months of interrogation, humiliation and manual labor.
One said he was locked in a room and guarded around the clock.
Some who did leave said the church spied on them for years.
Others said that, as a condition for leaving, the church cowed them into signing embellished affidavits that could be used to discredit them if they ever spoke out.
The St. Petersburg Times has interviewed former high-ranking Scientology officials who coordinated the intelligence gathering and supervised the retrieval of staff who left, or "blew."
They say the church, led by David Miscavige, wanted to contain the threat that those who left might reveal secrets of life inside Scientology.
Marty Rathbun, a former church official and confidant of Miscavige, said the leader especially targeted those he had edged aside during his rise to the top or anyone he feared might threaten his position or the church if left alone on the outside.
When the church founder L. Ron Hubbard was in charge, "there were no fences," Rathbun said. "If somebody blew, they blew. It wasn't until these purges started with Miscavige — where he was creating enemies and people … became a threat to him — that we went into this overdrive scenario."
Church spokesman Tommy Davis "categorically denied'' Miscavige knew about or was involved in the pursuit of runaways or spying on former members. He said Rathbun and other former staff are liars, taking their own misdeeds and blaming them on Miscavige and the religion they have forsaken. He said they are trying to undermine Miscavige's leadership even as he presides over unprecedented church growth.
Miscavige "redefines the term 'religious leader,' " Davis said, while some of the Times sources are on the "lunatic fringe'' of anti-Scientology. He said they are the real villains, who Miscavige dismissed for "suborning perjury, obstruction of justice and wasting millions of dollars of parishioner funds.''
He accused the Times of "naked bias" and engaging in tabloid journalism.
"You have a few petty allegations,'' Davis said.
"In fact, all you have is a few people who left a religion after committing destructive acts and are now complaining about what they did while in the church.''
The story of how the church commands and controls its staff is told by the pursuers and the pursued, by those who sent spies and those spied upon, by those who interrogated and those who rode the hot seat. In addition to Rathbun, they include:
• Mike Rinder, who for 25 years oversaw the church's Office of Special Affairs, which handled intelligence, legal and public affairs matters. Rinder and Rathbun said they had private investigators spy on perceived or potential enemies.
They say they had an operative infiltrate a group of five former Scientology staffers that included the Gillham sisters, Terri and Janis, two of the original four "messengers" who delivered Hubbard's communications. They and other disaffected Scientologists said they were spied on for almost a decade.
• Gary Morehead, the security chief for seven years at the church's international base in the desert east of Los Angeles. He said he helped develop the procedure the church followed to chase and return those who ran, and he brought back at least 75 of them. "I lost count there for awhile.''
Staffers signed a waiver when they came to work at the base that allowed their mail to be opened, Morehead said. His department opened all of it, including credit card statements and other information that was used to help track runaways.
• Don Jason, for seven years the second-ranking officer at Scientology's spiritual mecca in Clearwater, supervised a staff of 350. He said that after he ran, he turned himself in and ended up locked in his cabin on the church cruise ship, the Freewinds. He said he was held against his will.
And then there's the story of the cook, his wife and the movie stars.
WINTER IN THE ROCKIES
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were to be married on Christmas Eve 1990. The setting: a large rented cabin outside Telluride, Colo., a resort town at the floor of a Rocky Mountain valley.
The couple starred together that summer in Days of Thunder. He was the megastar, she the up-and-coming Australian.
In the desert east of Los Angeles, a small contingent from the Church of Scientology's international base took Cruise's plane to Colorado.
Miscavige would be the actor's best man. Ray Mithoff, a long-time Scientologist who worked closely with Hubbard, would officiate. The church's pastry chef, Pinucio Tisi, would bake the cake. Its five-star chef, Sinar Parman, would prepare the feast.
Parman had been with Scientology's dedicated work force, the Sea Org, for 12 years. He started in 1978, fresh from an apprenticeship at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. He worked as Hubbard's personal chef for two years. (The founder was a meat-and-potatoes man who also enjoyed fish.)
Parman later cooked for celebrity parishioners who visited the church's base camp.
He made chicken noodle soup the way Kirstie Alley's grandmother did, and the actor sent him flowers. John Travolta gave him a carton of Camels for his birthday. Cruise brought him a jacket from the set of Days of Thunder and would hand him Cuban cigars.
For Telluride, Cruise insisted the minister, the baker and the chef bring their wives for the holiday.
Christmas in the Rockies with Tom Cruise? Parman's wife, Jackie Wolff, was beyond excited.
When they married four years earlier, Wolff worked as a personal assistant to Miscavige and his wife, Shelly. She ironed his shirts, prepared the couple's breakfast, lunch and snacks, and woke them each morning.
Now she worked in personnel, recruiting Sea Org members.
Before flying to the wedding, everybody drew names for a gift exchange. Wolff drew Cruise and got him a Hubbard novelette. It cost $50, a week's pay.
Cruise put up the Scientology contingent in a hotel in Telluride, but they spent much of their time at his rented estate. Parman cooked; Wolff hung decorations, tidied rooms and helped in the kitchen.
The Miscaviges let it be known not to give church-related gifts, a nod to the non-Scientologists at the wedding. Wolff went into town and picked a substitute gift, a black ski mask.
At sunset on Christmas Eve, Cruise and Kidman took their vows. The guests sipped Cristal champagne and Parman prepared a holiday spread that included saddle of lamb.
The next afternoon, Wolff and Parman saw police officers standing at the driveway to keep back the paparazzi. Cruise made sure the officers were fed.
The newlyweds took their guests skiing that day. Wolff will always remember seeing Cruise on the slopes, wearing his new black ski mask.
BACK TO WORK
The glow of Telluride faded as Parman and Wolff returned to life at the Scientology base.
Parman says the church reneged on a promise to pay him extra for cooking at the wedding. Parman had been counting on the money. His credit card balance jumped when he bought proper clothes for Telluride, and he charged his own meals. He worried how on a Sea Org salary he would pay down the new debt.
It wasn't the first time he felt he had done a good job, only to be somehow punished. "I was stewing in my own juices, so to speak."
His wife's job in personnel was no better. Supervisors interfered and gave conflicting orders. Many times Wolff worked into the night and slept under her desk.
Parman and Wolff each thought about leaving the church but couldn't tell the other. Such thoughts were taboo, and spouses were to file a "Knowledge Report'' if their partner violated the code. If a spouse didn't file a report and it came out during a confessional, he or she got in trouble, too.
Wolff sensed her husband was as frustrated as she.
"I kind of took a chance at bringing it up. And when he was agreeable I was like, 'Okay!' "
Hubbard recognized that the Sea Org wasn't for everyone. On Dec. 7, 1976, he issued a policy titled "Leaving and Leaves," on how departing staffers should be handled. It doesn't help to hold onto staff who don't want to be there, he said. But Hubbard also said everyone who leaves is to undergo a "security check,'' or "sec check,'' to protect the staff and to protect Scientology.
The church had been security conscious from its earliest days as Hubbard, and later Miscavige, battled over government investigations and lawsuits.
Church staffers used pay phones and elaborate mail drops to keep information from falling into the wrong hands. Sea Org members used fake first names. Rathbun's real first name isn't Marty, it's Mark. Morehead, the security chief, also was known as Jackson.
"Everything was done CIA fashion," Parman said. "That was the way of life in those days."
After Hubbard died in 1986, his policies became the church's guiding compass. But "Leaving and Leaves" presented a contradiction. If you let people leave when they wanted, as the policy dictated, it could compromise security. But if you held onto people until certain they posed no security risk, they might feel like they were being held against their will.
Under Miscavige, former Sea Org members say, the church put more emphasis on security. Getting out became more difficult.
If staffers like Parman and Wolff insisted on leaving, they were supposed to "route out" of the Sea Org, protocol that could take months. It included a daily regimen of manual labor and "sec checks'' — confessionals that surfaced a person's every thought and questioned his reasons for wanting to leave.
Or they could "blow.'' It was faster to secretly escape, but it triggered the church's "disconnection" practice. If the runaway didn't "route out'' properly, he would be labeled "suppressive" and lose his Scientology family and friends.
Parman and Wolff had a decision to make.
THE CHIEF OF SECURITY
Their living arrangement presented an extra obstacle. They shared a small, church-owned home with Gary Morehead and his wife. The base's security chief from 1990 to 1997, Morehead directed the team that would chase them.
Morehead said he worked with Rathbun to develop a "blow drill,'' a plan the church followed when someone left without permission, which he said happened maybe once a month.
The drill helped predict where runaways were headed, and find and return them before they spilled secrets to opposing attorneys or the media.
"I had the order and the pressure to find them," Morehead said, referring to people in charge of security above him. "And God forbid I did not find them."
Staff deployed to airports and bus stations. They called all hotels along likely escape routes. They called airlines and pretended to be the runaway checking a reservation. They phoned relatives.
The intensity of the chase mostly depended on what a runaway knew, said Rathbun, who was one of Miscavige's top lieutenants. Rathbun oversaw and participated in staff recovery missions.
"It all had to do with the hierarchy of how close you were to Miscavige, how much you knew about him and how damaging what you knew might be,'' Rathbun said.
He said the leader began each day asking if any problems had arisen overnight, and if anyone had left.
"I had to report it and take the brunt of it," Rathbun said.
Morehead, who reported to Rathbun, described runaways as "loose cannons of knowledge.'' You wanted them back, under control, before they did damage.
"I could command as many staff as I wanted,'' Rathbun said. "I could get 10 guys on the road at once. It was pretty amazing that we could always generally get to these guys before they'd get to their destination."
When they didn't, he said, they kept at it, "for weeks, if necessary."
Morehead remembered the night in 1990 that Sea Org member Julie Caetano jumped in an irrigation contractor's Ford pickup and sped off, with Morehead and two other vehicles in pursuit.
For three hours, at speeds up to 100 mph, Morehead said they chased the truck around Riverside and San Bernardino counties until the pickup got away across a rutted field. The next day the team tracked down Caetano, and she agreed to return.
The church did not respond to questions about this incident.
Mike Rinder, the church's former intelligence chief, said his department sometimes tracked runaways by getting into their credit card or bank accounts.
The account numbers came from Morehead, whose guards opened every piece of mail at the base, logging staff financial information as they went. Morehead said Sea Org members were told their personal correspondence was examined for security reasons. He said they were not told this included financial information.
"Except for the upper, upper executives, there wasn't a base staff member who I didn't have a bank account number on, a credit card number, social security number and date of birth, phone numbers, you name it, I had it all,'' Morehead said.
Church recovery efforts also drew on records from the runaways' Scientology counseling sessions, which often identified sore points in their lives the trackers could press to talk them into coming back, he said.
They also used "ethics files'' that included the staffer's transgressions and confessions, as well as the "life history" Sea Org members filled out when they came to the base that included every job held, every friend, every sexual encounter.
When a runaway was found, the recovery team sometimes used someone of influence in the person's life to get them to come back.
Those who were found were told they could be "disconnected" from family and friends.
They were told that the outside world, with its drugs, crime and insanity, was no place to be.
And the clincher: They were forsaking their eternity.
Scientology teaches that people are spiritual beings that transcend human lifetimes and inhabit an endless succession of bodies. Only the church can make a Scientologist aware of this passage and help him navigate it successfully.
That was part of the closing argument when a church recovery team located a target: Run and risk losing everything you worked for — your eternity.
"How do you control someone? You threaten what is most valuable to them," Rinder said. "And the threat is, that's going away. And that's the mental prison that people are put in.''
The church said Morehead and his team were acting "out of concern for the welfare of the blown staff member."
In "Blow Offs,'' a bulletin Hubbard issued Dec. 31, 1959, the founder said someone who wants to leave has done something to hurt the church, is withholding it and is upset about it. The only responsible thing to do is to help the person come clean.
Morehead said he believed that as he went to bring people back.
"Security in my mind-set was secondary," he said. "But as time went on you found out the (primary) effort was the security concern. We didn't give a s--- about the person."
STARTING A NEW LIFE
Parman and Wolff, in their mid-30s, wanted to reach for a new life right away, not wait until the church said they were ready to leave.
A month after the Cruise-Kidman wedding, they took a week to plan their "blow" and picked a Sunday morning, when staff got its weekly personal time. It would be hours before the day's first head count.
They knew the church would come after them because of the jobs they had held. Both had worked for Miscavige, and Parman had spent a lot of time with Hubbard and church celebrities.
They waited until Morehead and his wife fell asleep in their room, gathered a few belongings and drove off.
After about an hour, they pulled into a truck stop to eat and decompress. They stopped at Parman's parents' home in Los Angeles, borrowed $2,000 and took the coast route north.
In Lake Tahoe a day or two later, Parman won a few hundred dollars at craps and lost it back. Wolff shopped. She figured she would need new clothes to find a job in the non-Scientology world.
"You go to the hotel room and it's like, 'Oh, a TV. We can watch TV now,' " she said. "It was just kind of like an adventure."
They phoned their parents and learned that the church had called, looking for them. Wolff's sisters also had been called, but no one betrayed their location.
They went to Carson City and moved into the home of Wolff's stepfather's cousin. The cousin owned a furniture store and gave them jobs. Wolff trained as a salesperson. Her husband, the chef, moved furniture and loaded trucks.
"It was cool," Parman said. "There was some kind of hope for a life there."
They thought they were safely "off the grid," Wolff said. "We figured they'd never find us at my stepfather's cousin's house."
ON THE HUNT
The church got private investigators to tail the couple's relatives, Morehead said.
"They would just sit there and sit there and sit there and follow the family members around. They had no idea they had church-assigned private investigators sitting on them, watching them."
The surveillance paid off after several days. The couple were spotted at their temporary home and at the furniture store.
Back at the base, Morehead and his team didn't wait. The longer runaways stayed gone, the chances of talking them back diminished. Families had a way of convincing them to come home, he said.
They booked seats on the next plane out of Ontario International Airport and had only 30 minutes to get there.
"That is the fastest I've ever been driven in a car my entire life," said Morehead, who had $3,000 in expense money set aside for security. "We just had to get there, just had to f------ get there — just that deeply ingrained compulsion."
It was on to Carson City.
FOUND
The knock came first thing in the morning. Parman peeked out the window.
"We looked at each other and we just went, 'Oh my God! Oh my God! What do we do now?' " Wolff said. "I was shaking. I was nervous. I was like … 'What do we say?' "
There was no thought to refusing to open the door or telling the group to go away. Parman and Wolff were so unnerved that they reacted with compliance. They invited the group into the family room.
The Scientology entourage included Morehead, two other base security officers and two private investigators.
The team delivered messages, called "reality factors," from supervisors at the base who had examined Parman and Wolff's counseling files. The team wanted the couple to come to their hotel, undergo security checks and consider routing out properly.
They said they had "auditors" waiting at a nearby hotel, one for each of them. They wanted to help them.
The couple said they would go. Parman was swayed by the argument that leaving might cost him his eternity.
"That is their main hook," he said. "It's your future for the next millennia … They push that."
For more than an hour the security team searched their boxes, bags and clothes. They said they were looking for pictures the couple might have taken at the Cruise-Kidman wedding. They found nothing.
RUNAWAYS WHO COME BACK
The Church of Scientology describes "auditing'' as a form of spiritual counseling.
The auditor running the session asks prescribed questions intended to locate painful mental images from the person's past that may be limiting his potential. The subject holds two metal cylinders attached by wires to an "e-meter," a device said to pick up electrical currents or "charge" associated with the troubling episodes.
There's also "sec checking,'' a type of auditing designed to find out if the person has done something to harm the group.
Runaway staffers like Parman and Wolff were referred to as "security particles'' and were segregated from others, to keep their inclination to leave from spreading.
At the California base, they often were assigned to the Old Gilman House, beyond a swamp. In Clearwater, it was at the Hacienda Gardens staff housing complex on N Saturn Avenue, sometimes in rundown units known as "pig's berthing.''
Many runaways were assigned to a work detail called the Rehabilitation Project Force. They were not to speak unless spoken to, isolated from family and often "sec checked'' for hours every day.
The church says the RPF is a voluntary program that affords a staffer an isolated environment that encourages self-assessment. By mixing physical labor with periods of religious study, security checks and counseling, wayward staffers can reform.
Bruce Hines said the RPF is about mind control. Now 58, Hines teaches physics at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is six years removed from three decades in Scientology.
He figures he audited staff and parishioners for 15,000 hours, with about one-third of the hours conducting "sec checks.''
"Sec checking'' a runaway was "an interrogation,'' Hines said. Wrongdoing uncovered during sec checks was recorded by the auditor and often posted on bulletin boards or announced at the daily muster.
"Whatever you've done gets broadcast. And the worse and the juicier, the better. That shows I'm doing my job as a security checker,'' Hines said.
"If the person has blown, they hopefully would go from a frame of mind of, 'I don't want to be here. Let me go. You people are holding me against my will' … to… 'I've harmed the organization. I need to make up for it. Please let me stay.' "
To get off the RPF, Hines said, the staffer must identify why he's destructive.
"You're not looking for the bad things you've done, but the evil in you that prompted you to do those things. It's predicated on the assumption you're there because of the evil in you. And you have to root out that evil.''
Church spokesman Davis said it's "offensive in the extreme'' to describe Scientology confessionals in such terms. "Giving an individual the opportunity to unburden himself of transgressions is as old as religion itself,'' he said.
Late in 1994, a VIP's auditing session was mishandled. Hines says Miscavige blamed him, and he spent six of his last eight years on the RPF, on the other side of the auditing table and on a labor crew that cleared land, painted old mobile homes and built sheds.
To get off the RPF, the "security particle'' had to demonstrate that his evil intentions were erased. He had to show a new willingness, a deeper sense of responsibility. Sea Org members called it a "self-generating resource.''
Hines called it: "Totally in step.''
DECISION TIME
At the hotel in Carson City, Parman and Wolff were audited and "sec checked'' day after day for more than a week.
During down time they watched TV or played cards. After more than a week, the recovery team told them it was time to decide. Come back to the base. Preserve your eternity, your family relationships. If you want to leave, fine, just "route out'' properly.
"Sinar and I talked about it and then agreed to go back to the base," Wolff said. "And as soon as we agreed, it's like we were on a plane within probably an hour or two."
To that point, the church had paid for airfare, four hotel rooms, food for nine people, around-the-clock shifts by private investigators and other expenses.
"Lots of money and effort was spent on those two," Morehead said. "Lots of money."
A SOFTENING PROCESS
Before the flight back to Southern California, Wolff called her mother to assure her she was still intent on leaving. But she was equally intent on doing it by church rules. She might want to be active in Scientology again some day and wanted to keep her good standing.
A friend got Wolff into the church 11 years earlier, at age 25. She still remembered the realization she had as a little girl in Southern California, standing in her driveway, staring at the rose bushes.
"I knew I'd lived before and I knew I would live again, but I didn't know how it worked. That's what kind of started me on this quest. What are we doing here on this planet?''
Her Scientology auditing surfaced a distinct memory of how she died in her previous lifetime: a woman jerked the wheel to avoid oncoming traffic, the car landed on a power generator and she was electrocuted. "It was me," Wolff said.
It resonated with Wolff when Morehead and his team said it would be a mistake to give up on her spiritual eternity.
Once they returned to the base, the couple spent their days around the Old Gilman House. They studied Scientology books and rehabilitated an old greenhouse.
If they broke a rule, if they shared frustrations, it eventually would come out in daily sec checks. In a world of constant confessing, no thought was safe inside their heads.
After six months, Wolff softened. "You kind of start feeling better about yourself and you start feeling remorse for what you did. It's like you've deserted your group, and how could you do that?"
Paul Kellerhaus, of base security, sat with her at a card table and pushed Wolff for a decision, she said. He suggested Parman wanted to stay in the church. Did she really want a divorce?
"Probably up until the 11th hour I wanted to leave," Wolff said. "I was determined. I was not going to change my mind. And then, I don't know, (I had) those feelings of 'Oh this could happen and it just could be bad if I leave.' ''
She cried. Then: "Okay. I'll stay."
She said Kellerhaus took her decision and used it to sway Parman. He decided he would stay, too.
THEIR FINAL LEAVES
In July 1991, they started new jobs at the base, Wolff a gardener and Parman an electrician. Ten months later, for a second time, they reached for a new life. They didn't even bother to cover their tracks.
They loaded the car in the wee hours and drove to Los Angeles, to Parman's parents' house.
He took his wife to Disneyland for her birthday, and he got a job as a valet at a boutique hotel in Hollywood. Wolff helped her in-laws paint and take care of other home improvement projects.
Soon a church "case supervisor" came to the house and said two auditors were standing by. The couple agreed to "route out'' but said this time they would not return to the base. The church arranged for them to come to its complex in Hollywood for more auditing, more security checks and some Scientology courses.
At night, they went home to Parman's parents house.
The routine lasted all day, every day, for about eight months, May 1992 to January 1993.
"I want to leave," Wolff recalled thinking. "I'm not going to change my mind."
Until she got a job she liked in the church treasury department. "I kind of ended up changing my mind."
At the church's urging, she talked Parman into staying.
He was back in good graces and back as a chef.
Wolff moved to a job doing research for videos shown at the church's frequent events. She got to attend some — showy affairs with upbeat speeches and word of Scientology's bright future. Parishioners cheered. It renewed her faith in the church.
At the same time, she and Parman were growing apart. They divorced in 1998.
Wolff ran a third time, in 1999. They found her at her sister's house, and she came back, again intending to "route out.''
At the base she was assigned to live in a trailer at the Old Gilman House, joining a woman who had been there a year. They cooked on a hot plate in what Wolff described as a converted garage. She lived there more than six months.
Wolff remembers the small group outside on the night of Dec. 31, 1999, ringing in the new millenium at midnight as they looked out over the swamp. "We were like, 'Woo hoo,' " she said.
Parman, meantime, worked as Miscavige's personal chef, often traveling with the leader, who was keen on staying trim.
"I would feed him something like five different meals (a day) and they all had to be precise in percent of calories, like so many calories of protein, so many calories of carbohydrates and so many calories of fat. And they all had to taste good."
In 2001, during the fallout from the unexplained death of Scientologist Lisa McPherson, Parman was with Miscavige for an extended stay in Clearwater.
It was there, during an auditing session, Parman decided the church's promise of spiritual freedom did not add up. A top officer from the Religious Technology Center, the arm of the church that knows Scientology inside and out, put him on an e-meter to find out how he felt about his Scientology counseling regimen.
Inside, Parman was furious, which the meter should have picked up. It didn't, and the officer determined that all was well.
Parman wondered: How could that be? The next day, between cooking lunch and dinner for Miscavige, Parman went to an auto dealer on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard. He paid $1,800 for a used Honda Civic and drove off. Several weeks later, at his parents' home in Los Angeles, he saw what he took to be a private investigator staking him out.
Soon after, church representatives approached him, urging him to come back. They said an auditor standing by. Parman told them he wanted to be left alone.
In 2001, he signed papers that required he remain silent about his time with the church. He was officially out.
That year, his ex-wife went to work on the line that assembled and repaired e-meters, and soon became the supervisor. Wolff's staff shrunk by half, but she was expected to maintain the same production. She said she often worked from 8:30 a.m. to 2, 3 or 4 a.m.
In October 2003, she was called to the base mess hall, which had been set up for a group confessional. Wolff was made to stand at a microphone facing a few hundred staffers. Egged on by supervisors, the staff jeered and berated her for not meeting production targets.
For the fourth time in her 24-year Scientology career, Wolff asked to "route out.''
The church sent her to an isolated ranch called Happy Valley, where the sec checking process took almost four months.
"Had I had the guts, I would have just gotten up and gotten out of there," Wolff said. "But you're scared."
She confessed everything she could think of, but the e-meter kept indicating she was holding something back. "This was a nightmare for me."
Finally, someone said, "You're done."
Wolff signed a declaration, dated Jan. 12, 2004, in which she blamed herself for everything and the church for nothing. "I know that what I have done violated Church policy and caused harm,'' the declaration stated. "I do not blame anyone else but myself."
She collected $500 severance and drove to her sister's home in Orange County, Calif.
Wolff's mother, Detta Groff, says the family held its breath, afraid she would go back again. She said her daughter put up with a lot.
"But she was searching for something," Groff said. "It was just a relief to have her back."
When asked for comment on the couple's departure from Scientology, the church said Wolff and Parman kept returning to the Sea Org because they wanted to. The church said Wolff messed up on her job and was dismissed. Parman is inflating his own importance by talking about famous people he cooked for.
Parman and Wolff said they signed documents confessing their faults so the church would leave them alone. They said they would not have returned to the Sea Org each time if not for the church's repeated, unsolicited intervention.
"They make it seem like there was no pressure," Wolff said. "They just gloss over the reality of what was going on."
Parman pointed to the first time they left. He and Wolff were thrilled to be starting a different life, he said. They had found new jobs.
"To say we came back willingly ... Why did we go to another state? Why did we go to different places to disappear?"
Joe Childs is Managing editor/Tampa Bay. He has supervised the Times' coverage of Scientology since 1993. He can be reached at childs@sptimes.com.
Thomas C. Tobin is a Times staff writer who has covered the Church of Scientology off and on since 1996. He can be reached at tobin@sptimes.com.
01. Angel Of Death 02. Piece By Piece 03. Necrophobic 04. Altar Of Sacrifice 05. Jesus Saves 06. Criminally Insane 07. Reborn 08. Epidemic 09. Postmortem 10. Raining Blood 11. War Ensemble 12. Hallowed Point 13. Necrophiliac 14. Mandatory Suicide 15. Spill The Blood 16. South Of Heaven
Shakespeare, David Bowie, Dr. Who, the Saxons, Druids and Romans are all claimed to have all made their mark on these massive man made tunnels
If someone were to try and tie together every piece of English History and from the Saxons to Dr. Who, Bowie to the Druids, Air Raids to Shakespeare, to one space they could do so in two words: Chislehurst Caves. How much of it would be true, is another question all together.
Despite being called caves, these 22 miles (35 km) of tunnels are something much stranger then that, a series of entirely man-made tunnels, rooms and caverns under the south eastern suburbs of Greater London, UK. Though, there is debate over how old the caverns are, it is believed by some that they go back to the time of the Saxons -- the 400s and 500s A.D. -- some suggest they may go back 8000 years, to 6000 B.C. just after the time when the landmass of Britain was separated from the rest of Europe in 6500 B.C.
The caves information (as well as a archeologist of 1905, now generally debunked) split the tunnels into three sections. The oldest area is thought to be 6000-4000 year old and is created to the "druids," though by this it is actually meant Neolithic Britons. (The druids were never more then a small priestly caste of mystics in Britain dating to at the earliest 100 B.C., and had nothing to do with the Neolithic monuments, such as Stonehenge, they are often associated with.)
Following British history like a textbook, the next tunnels are said to be 2,000 years old and undertaken by the Romans after their arrival in Britain in 43 A.D. Other tunnels are dated from the 500s with the arrival of the Germanic Saxons.
Despite all this, the earliest known mention of the tunnels dates to the much more recent 1250 A.D., and most archeologists and historians point out that no archeological evidence exists to prove these ancient claims. Spurious claims about the tunnels continue through the 1700s placing Christopher Wren, Napoleon III and Shakespeare all in the cave at one point or another. (Once again, while plausible, no evidence exists to confirm these claims.)
Regardless, the caves were definitely an active lime mine through the middle ages and were last worked in the 1830's. As intersting as the history of the 22 miles of man made tunnels is, the modern historical record of the tunnels are even more intriguing and unquestionably true.
During WWI the caves served as a munitions storage house, but took on an even more important role in WWII, as a complete underground city. Housing some 15,000 inhabitants the caves were outfitted with lights, a hospital and a chapel. A baby, Rose Cavena Wakeman, was even born within the caves. In the 1960s the caves became associated with a very different period of English culture, rock and roll. David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd all played concerts in the Chislehurst Caves.
Another type of British hero can be found in these caves as well, the fictional kind. Merlin, Dr. Who. and a number of other British fantasy and science fiction shows have been filmed in the caves. It would seem, regardless of whether the Chislehurst Caves are 8000 or 800 years old, whether they had druids, or just people playing druids for TV in them, they remain, quintessentially British.
The only remaining collection of flayed figures made by French "madman" Honoré Fragonard
Founded in 1766, the Fragonard Museum is one of the oldest museums in France. Honoré Fragonard was one of the first medical masters of France, and his extensive collection contains rooms devoted to anatomy and terratology, articulated animal skeletons, and to disease and pathology. The highlight of this extraordinary museum is by far, however, the écorchés, or "flayed figures" of Honoré Fragonard.
Fragonard was appointed by Louis XV to be a professor at the first veterinary school in Lyon, and it was there where he began working on his "flayed figures." These écorchés were carefully dissected animals which were posed and mounted using a secret process. While many of his contemporaries were creating artificial anatomy models of wax, ceramic and plaster, Fragonard spent years preparing hundreds of these écorchés through a very difficult and, to this day, secret process similar to that of plastinisation. Though most of the items were intended to be used as educational tools, some his work is purely artistic.
Fragonard worked in Lyon for six years before his flayed figures began frightening the townspeople. Fragonard was declared a madman and fired. This did not deter him, and he continued to make hundreds of his magnificent écorchés to sell privately. While Fragonard created over seven hundred écorchés in his life, the collection at the Fragonard Museum contains only twenty one écorchés: the last of the remaining haunting and whimsical flayed figures of Honoré Fragonard.
Be sure not to miss (it would be hard to) the écorché of the Horseman of the Apocalypse. Inspired by painter Albrecht Dürer's famous picture of a man riding his horse, Fragonard made Dürer's vision a disturbing, skinless, three dimensional reality.
Female short-nosed fruit bats have been observed performing fellatio on their partners during copulation. Mating pairs spent more time copulating if the female did so.
Cynopterus sphinx live in south-east Asia. The males often roost with small groups of females.
Min Tan of the Guangdong Entomological Institute in Guangzhou, China, and colleagues captured 30 male and 30 female short-nosed fruit bats in Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou City and observed their mating behaviour in enclosures.
The bats copulate dorso-ventrally, with the male mounting the female from behind. During mating, the females reached over to lick the base of the male's penis in 14 of the 20 pairs that copulated.
The tip of the penis had already penetrated the female's vagina, and the males did not withdraw when the female licked the base of the penis.
Both the duration of an individual copulation, and the overall time a mating pair spent copulating, were increased if the female performed fellatio.
Several employees say they have seen, heard things they can't explain
By Ruth Fuller
Special to the Tribune
October 30, 2009
Eerie things have startled people in the Lake County coroner's office ever since the body of a woman was inadvertently left in the cooler for several months before anyone got around to identifying her.
Workers say they hear strange knocking sounds, see sudden movements and sometimes catch glimpses of people walking about in the autopsy room when it should be empty of anyone still able to walk. They attribute it all to a spirit angry at being forgotten.
"Some things that have happened here have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up," said Robert Barrett, senior deputy coroner.
Sure, it's Halloween. Barrett and others in the office know it's the time of year when scary stories are traded in half-whispers, and with smiling oaths that it really happened. But he considers himself a man of science, and said he wouldn't tell ghost stories just for the sake of the season. And he's not the only one in the office who has felt that tingling over something unexplainable.
The body was of a woman named Anna, the story goes. She died in a nursing home sometime in the late 1990s, and a deputy coroner retrieved her body. But he got swamped with other cases and Anna was untended among the dead. Once she was finally identified, Barrett said, the weird stuff began. When a deputy transported Anna's body to a funeral home, controls in the vehicle went haywire.
"All of the doors started locking and unlocking and the windows started going up and down by themselves," he said. "When he got out of the car to get her out, the car doors all locked and the car was (turned) off."
Barrett, 40, worked as a respiratory therapist before joining the coroner's office eight years ago. He's skeptical of the supernatural.
"It's difficult for me to believe anything if I don't see it for myself," he said. "I've been around the dead and dying for most of my career and I never had any weird experiences."
Until he began working in Lake County.
Sometimes at night, sitting at a computer a few feet from the cooler where bodies are kept, he swears he hears knocks coming from inside.
"The first time I heard the knocking on the inside of the cooler, I was here at night by myself," Barrett said. "I didn't get up for at least an hour or two, so if anyone did come out I was at a safe distance."
On several still and quiet nights, Barrett has been busy working at the computer with a body on the table behind him when he is startled by the person's hand falling. Other times, he has seen out of the corner of his eye a person walking in the autopsy room -- even though there's no one alive except him. "When that happens, I go and close the door to the autopsy room," he said. "Then I just turn up the music and keep on working."
Barrett is not the only one who will tell you about creepy experiences. Everyone who works at the office seems to have a story.
"I wouldn't say I don't believe in ghosts, but I am cynical enough to say that I need to experience something before I will believe it," said Mike Reid, 40, a deputy coroner for more than six years. He has heard the loud whistle reported by many in the office, which sounds like a woman screaming. He chalks it up to the wind.
But the memory that sticks with him is of the late night when he was alone in the locker room, where the doors are supposed to swing closed after you push through them.
"I pushed the door open and it stayed open," he said. "The only way it would have stayed open is if it was pushed open again. No one was there, so that is something I can't explain."
Reid also gets chills thinking about the time he was at the scene of a crash that killed a 15-year-old girl.
"No one realized the girl was deceased at the scene because more than one person said they saw her get up and walk away down the sidewalk," he said. "They actually attempted to locate her away from the scene. She was later located (dead) in the vehicle, so there is no way she could've walked anywhere at that point."
Even Lake County Coroner Richard Keller, a doctor who has practiced emergency medicine for 17 years, has had his share of odd experiences.
"Shortly after I took office I went to check for a pulse on a woman and when I touched her I received some sort of electric shock and was knocked back into a sitting position," he said. "It was quite a surprise. I looked around to see if there were any wires down or something to explain it, but there was none of that."
Though Keller hears the sounds that the others say they've heard, experience has taught him simply to not pay attention. "I used to live in a house that was probably haunted," he said. "It used to be a funeral home. There was a strong feeling of the presence of others there."
Spooky? Sure. Scary enough to feel danger? Not really, the coroners said.
"I've never felt threatened because I try to chalk these things up to something that can be explained through science, or something I don't have knowledge of," Barrett said. "Otherwise, it is something I don't want to know about right now."
Owner, 53, hospitalized after bulldog tears at his face and severs an ear
By Bob Shaw
Updated: 10/29/2009 11:32:41 PM CDT
A dog rescued by a retired police officer attacked him Sunday — inflicting hideous wounds on his face.
"The doctors and nurses have never seen anything like this," said John Wess, a friend of the victim.
Jim Stewart, 53, of Woodbury, reportedly suffered a severed ear and had the skin torn away from most of his face in the attack. He was listed Thursday evening in good condition at Regions Hospital in St. Paul.
"He has not seen himself in a mirror, and we are pretty worried about that," said Wess, a retired St. Paul police officer and longtime friend. "He was Mr. Hollywood, a good-looking guy who wouldn't talk to you without looking at his reflection in a window."
The attacker was a bulldog named Igor, which Stewart had obtained from an animal rescue group in Texas.
Ironically, someone representing the Texas group inspected the place where Igor would be living — to ensure "Jim was good enough to own the dog," said Amy Klinefelter, who owns the town home she shares with Stewart.
Stewart retired from the police department in Hudson, Wis., in 1998, Wess said. After an American bulldog he had owned for eight years died in May, Stewart began looking for a replacement.
Wess said Stewart searched the Internet and found a group in Texas trying to find a home for a dog named Igor. Wess didn't know the name of the group or anything about the dog's background.
For five months, Igor lived in harmony with Stewart, Klinefelter and her dog and two cats. "There was no sign of trouble. He was a very sweet dog," Klinefelter said.
About 9:30 p.m. Sunday, Stewart was watching TV in the basement with the dog when Klinefelter heard a noise. "It was like a thumping sound, like someone hitting a ball," she said — no growling or shouting.
She went downstairs to see a nightmarish scene — the dog standing over a barely conscious Stewart. Blood was spattered about, the skin of the lower half of Stewart's face was hanging loose, and one of his ears was on the floor.
The dog made no sound and wasn't moving around. Klinefelter grabbed it.
"He was not barking," she said. "He just looked at me."
Klinefelter shoved the dog into the garage and called for help.
The 911 operator told her to put a towel on Stewart's face. "She said, 'I can't — his face is gone!' " said Wess. "(Igor) ripped one of his eyelids but not the eye, thank God."
Doctors at Regions worked on Stewart for seven hours. He has been in and out of consciousness all week.
"I asked what happened, and he said he couldn't remember," Wess said.
And is there hope for Stewart's ear? "One ear, no. The other ear is looking better," Klinefelter said.
Igor is being quarantined for another six days to make sure it doesn't have rabies, said Wess, then will be euthanized.
The attack raises questions about why dogs attack — and what types of dogs do.
Animal welfare groups have long advocated that dog lovers avoid pet shops and puppy mills and instead adopt a previously owned dog.
That is still good advice, as long as people adopt from the right places, said Laurie Brickley, spokeswoman for the Animal Humane Society, which has facilities in Golden Valley and Woodbury.
She said the society puts dogs through an extensive test to screen them for viciousness.
"They are vetted," said Brickley. "We want to place good citizens in the community."
But no one can assume that animal rescue groups — especially smaller ones — go through the same rigorous tests.
"Before you get a dog, you have to ask: What evaluations are they doing? Are they doing due diligence?" said Brickley. "I can say at the AHS, we are."
But Mike Fry, director of the Animal Ark No-Kill Shelter in Hastings, said such tests are unreliable.
"It's a very complex topic," Fry said.
He said there is no reason to think that an adopted dog is any more attack-prone than a dog purchased as a puppy, because so many puppies are mistreated in so-called "puppy mills."
"The notion that you can test any dog — or even a person — and get an accurate picture of them at any moment in time is false," said Fry. "You can't take a prefect snapshot and predict behavior in unpredictable situations."
Usually, he said, the factors in dog attacks include the past treatment of the animal and the behavior of the victim.
He said any dog can attack people. That is true whether a dog is adopted as an adult or purchased as a puppy, or whether a dog is one of the so-called "bully breeds." The American bulldog is not known to be among the bully breeds.
"Dogs are predators, and we have a responsibility about how we interact with them," said Fry. "Too often we take a simplistic view that it is all the dog's fault."
Klinefelter was asked if it were possible that Stewart did something to trigger the attack.
"Absolutely not. He loved that dog," she said.
What's ahead for Stewart? Several weeks in the hospital, then months or years of cosmetic surgeries.
"It will be years of ...," Klinefelter said, her voice trailing off. "Well, we just don't know."
From the briny depths of the South Pacific has come a massive ... something; which has parked itself on the stony shoreline of a Temuka beach.
Rose Fraser was walking along Browns Beach yesterday morning when she spotted the lump of stuff.
"I first saw it from a distance and I thought: 'That's a big white rock on the shore line ... that wasn't there four days ago'." As she got closer to the thing she thought it could be a piece of driftwood – a really big bit of driftwood – but upon reaching it, Miss Fraser's thoughts turned from sea to sky.
"I must admit, I thought: 'Heck, this is an alien'. It looks like it's got big ribs coming out of it, but it looks like they could be tentacles, so I don't know."
Cautiously, and ready to run should the thing suddenly leap into life, Miss Fraser lobbed a rock at it, then prodded it with a stick. Whatever it was, it sat there, not moving. All it did was emit a slight odour.
After Miss Fraser rang The Herald, a photo of the woolly, stringy object was sent to the Department of Conservation in Wellington, who sent it to Niwa and Te Papa. It was also sent to Otago University's whale experts.
After a flurry of emails a consensus was reached.
It was the top – essentially the stuffing – of a sperm whale's head.
As the blob was soft tissue, compartmentalised and big, it was likely to be the large spermaceti organ and "junk" of a sperm whale, probably male.
Those structures deal with sound beam focusing in sperm whales and related whales and dolphins and were also filled with a straw-coloured oily wax called spermaceti or case oil.
It is not yet known what will happen to the blob of whale.
Thinker, Doer, Misanthrope, Troubleshooter, Disciplinarian, The Satan, Atheist, Skeptic, Lovecraftian Outsider, Music/Movie Freak, Reader, Antichrist/politics/sports, Epicurean, Diabolically Indignated, Apocalypse Fiend. Verily! A Contained & Contented Man. THINK AND JUDGE FOR YOURSELF "I Have Never Wished to Cater to the Crowd; For What I Know They do not Approve, and What They Approve I do not Know." Epicurus +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
MISANTHROPIA is a (b)logbook which demonstrates a misanthropic view of humanity.
Nobody's perfect, but nobody seems to even try to better their condition as they keep following their herd mentality right off the cliff. (The proof of this are in these posts and are only a fragment of what goes on in the entire world.)
--THE WEAK ARE EMBRACED AT THE EXPENSE OF THE STRONG
--THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS JUSTICE
--THE END IS NOWHERE IN SIGHT
Fac Quid Vis
"With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend Everlasting, world without end."
"The Baphometic head is a beautiful alegory which attributes to thought alone the first and creative cause..."
ELIPHAS LEVI
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Frog Jesus
"I am not the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars."
"The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."
"Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!"
AYN RAND
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert Johnson - Me and the Devil Blues
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
"In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine."
"Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior."
"Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying."
"Martyrdom ... is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability."
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hymn to Lucifer
Ware, nor of good nor ill, what aim hath act?
Without its climax, death, what savour hath
Life? an impeccable machine, exact
He paces an inane and pointless path
To glut brute appetites, his sole content
How tedious were he fit to comprehend
Himself! More, this our noble element
Of fire in nature, love in spirit, unkenned
Life hath no spring, no axle, and no end.
His body a bloody-ruby radiant
With noble passion, sun-souled Lucifer
Swept through the dawn colossal, swift aslant
On Eden's imbecile perimeter.
He blessed nonentity with every curse
And spiced with sorrow the dull soul of sense,
Breathed life into the sterile universe,
With Love and Knowledge drove out innocence
The Key of Joy is disobedience.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Alone
From childhood's hour I have not been As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not take My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone; And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain, From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm, And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.
EDGAR ALLEN POE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Religion = Boredom
Equilibrium
"Being is substance and life; life manifests by movement; movement is perpetuated by equilibrium; equilibrium is therefore the law of immortality.
Conscience is the awareness of equilibrium, which is equity and justice. All excess when it is not mortal, is corrected by an opposite excess; It is the eternal law of reaction.
But if excess subverts all equilibrium, it is lost in the outer darkness and becomes Eternal Death."
ELIPHAS LEVI
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Every man is his own hell."
"Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself—by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true."
"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters."
"Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time."
"To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride."
H. L. MENCKEN
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Every night and every morn, Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night, Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.
WILLIAM BLAKE
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"The doctrine of equality!... But there exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.... "Equality for equals, inequality for unequals" that would be the true voice of justice: and, what follows from it, "Never make equal what is unequal."
"Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd."
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Litanies of Satan
Wisest of Angels, whom your fate betrays,
And, fairest of them all, deprives of praise,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
O Prince of exiles, who have suffered wrong,
Yet, vanquished, rise from every fall more strong,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
All-knowing lord of subterranean things,
Who remedy our human sufferings,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
To lepers and lost beggars full of lice,
You teach, through love, the taste of Paradise.
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You who on Death, your old and sturdy wife,
Engendered Hope — sweet folly of this life —
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You give to the doomed man that calm, unbaffled
Gaze that rebukes the mob around the scaffold,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You know in what closed corners of the earth
A jealous God has hidden gems of worth.
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You know the deepest arsenals, where slumber
The breeds of buried metals without number.
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You whose huge hand has hidden the abyss
From sleepwalkers that skirt the precipice,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You who give suppleness to drunkards' bones
When trampled down by horses on the stones,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You who, to make his sufferings the lighter,
Taught man to mix the sulphur with the nitre,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You fix your mask, accomplice full of guile,
On rich men's foreheads, pitiless and vile.
Satan have pity on my long despair!
You who fill the hearts and eyes of whores
With love of trifles and the cult of sores,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
The exile's staff, inventor's lamp, caresser
Of hanged men, and of plotters the confessor,
Satan have pity on my long despair!
Step-father of all those who, robbed of pardon,
God drove in anger out of Eden's garden
Satan have pity on my long despair!
Prayer
Praise to you, Satan! in the heights you lit,
And also in the deeps where now you sit,
Vanquished, in Hell, and dream in hushed defiance
O that my soul, beneath the Tree of Science
Might rest near you, while shadowing your brows,
It spreads a second Temple with its boughs.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower — the heart
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Quoth the Doctor...
"You can't erase millions of years of human response, simply by knowing why you do the things you do.
Not if they concern the rules of the chase.
Religions and ideologies will come and go and the games will begin and end, but man's basic nature will remain the same.
Yet only through understanding himself will he be able to embrace and cherish the demon within him.
Then he can revel in his nature and feeling glad, move on to the Final Solution."
By Altaf Hussain 
Posts
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
"Being is substance and life; life manifests by movement; movement is perpetuated by equilibrium; equilibrium is therefore the law of immortality.
"The doctrine of equality!... But there exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.... "Equality for equals, inequality for unequals" that would be the true voice of justice: and, what follows from it, "Never make equal what is unequal."
