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>Repetition III

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LEVITICUS 15

1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying,
2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When any man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.
3 And this shall be his uncleanness in his issue: whether his flesh run with his issue, or his flesh be stopped from his issue, it is his uncleanness.
4 Every bed, whereon he lieth that hath the issue, is unclean: and every thing, whereon he sitteth, shall be unclean.
5 And whosoever toucheth his bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
6 And he that sitteth on any thing whereon he sat that hath the issue shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
7 And he that toucheth the flesh of him that hath the issue shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
8 And if he that hath the issue spit upon him that is clean; then he shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
9 And what saddle soever he rideth upon that hath the issue shall be unclean.
10 And whosoever toucheth any thing that was under him shall be unclean until the even: and he that beareth any of those things shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
11 And whomsoever he toucheth that hath the issue, and hath not rinsed his hands in water, he shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
12 And the vessel of earth, that he toucheth which hath the issue, shall be broken: and every vessel of wood shall be rinsed in water.
13 And when he that hath an issue is cleansed of his issue; then he shall number to himself seven days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean.
14 And on the eighth day he shall take to him two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, and come before the LORD unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and give them unto the priest:
15 And the priest shall offer them, the one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him before the LORD for his issue.
16 And if any man’s seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even.
17 And every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the even.
18 The woman also with whom man shall lie with seed of copulation, they shall both bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the even.
19 And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even.
20 And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean.
21 And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
22 And whosoever toucheth any thing that she sat upon shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
23 And if it be on her bed, or on any thing whereon she sitteth, when he toucheth it, he shall be unclean until the even.
24 And if any man lie with her at all, and her flowers be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days; and all the bed whereon he lieth shall be unclean.
25 And if a woman have an issue of her blood many days out of the time of her separation, or if it run beyond the time of her separation; all the days of the issue of her uncleanness shall be as the days of her separation: she shall be unclean.
26 Every bed whereon she lieth all the days of her issue shall be unto her as the bed of her separation: and whatsoever she sitteth upon shall be unclean, as the uncleanness of her separation.
27 And whosoever toucheth those things shall be unclean, and shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
28 But if she be cleansed of her issue, then she shall number to herself seven days, and after that she shall be clean.
29 And on the eighth day she shall take unto her two turtles, or two young pigeons, and bring them unto the priest, to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.
30 And the priest shall offer the one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for her before the LORD for the issue of her uncleanness.
31 Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile my tabernacle that is among them.
32 This is the law of him that hath an issue, and of him whose seed goeth from him, and is defiled therewith;
33 And of her that is sick of her flowers, and of him that hath an issue, of the man, and of the woman, and of him that lieth with her that is unclean.


philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Eleven

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Harvard University canteen

The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of Nazi concentration camp doctors following World War II were like a joke. Because of that, after the trial, the judges, concerned that there had been no clear guidelines available to them on which to base their condemnation of these defendants, made up rules of their own to be used in future similar trials. These rules were to be hailed pretty much globally as the golden rules regarding experimentation on human subjects, and this set of ethic principles were collectively named The Nuremberg Code.
”The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential, and the person involved should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any elements of force, fraud, deceit, duress…”
This says pretty much why The Nuremberg Trial was a joke.
However, the Code was ignored by many. One of those who violated the Code was Henry Murray.


”Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?”.
This was the invitation to a group of Harvard students who had enrolled in a popular psychology course in the fall of 1959. Around seventy students volunteered and twenty-two were picked by the researchers. What the invitation failed to say was that the experiments would last not one, but three academic years. It did not reveal that the students would be decieved. Nor did it provide information about the purpose or possible effects.

At the time when Kaczynski decided to participate in the experiments, Murray was a giant figure in the world of psychology. His Explorations in Personality (1938) is considered a classic by many, and the Thematic Apperception Test, TAT, developed by Murray and colleague Christiana Morgan, became widely used by psychologists all over the world. Also, during World War II, while working for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA), Murray helped develop a system for testing the capacity of recruits for clandestine warfare, which is widely used by government and business today. He was of course a great influence on his students.
However, he was very intolerant to criticism. Many claim that’s why he feared to publish his work. He took everything personally, and couldn’t keep his feelings and science apart. This was the essence of these experiments: Murray’s research lacked the objective controls that the scientific method demanded.

Also, Murray was a complex character. For instance, he led a double life, which might shed some light on his experiments that I’ll discuss further on. He constantly masked a life bordering on the bizarre, probably as a result of his childhood (classic stuff: he felt rejected by his hypercritical mother and tormented by his dominant older sister) and was angry, narcissistic, sexually ambivalent, repressed… Ina May Greer, Murray’s longtime assistant said he was full of “anger, frustration, aggression, hostility, need to punish, need to explode, need to let go of all the controls of society and live out whatever mood was there, whatever instinct or impulse was there… This was stronger in him than in most people.”

In the summer he spent six weeks with Josephine Rantoul, his wife, and then six weeks with Christiana Morgan, his colleague and mistress. When together, the lovers explored the limits of their sexuality. They gave themselves pet names, where he was ”Mansol” and she was ”Wona”. Morgan wrote in her diary that ”our life was in the whip – the black whip that hurt”. In other words, they submitted themselves to extreme sadomasochism and role play which they called ”Walpurgis evenings” (Chase discusses this in more detail in his book, check here for the use of Walpurgis Night in popular culture).
According to Ina, Murray was a man who needed to be in total control, but also to be capable of exploding – and he exploded in violence when making love to Christiana. Their affair lasted over forty years.


Long addicted to amphetamines, Murray was introduced to LSD in 1959 by Timothy Leary, then a young professor in his department, who would soon become infamous as the advocate of psychedelic drug research (”Turn on, tune in, drop out” was his most famous catch phrase). One former colleague said that Murray ”took amphetamines and got himself whipped up to the point where he could work, and then he worked feverishly for as long as he could at a stretch and knocked himself out, and then he had to take sedatives to sleep”. Both Murray and Morgan were on a weird combination of sedative and pepper-up pills.
For more on LSD in (extremely vague) connection to the Unabomber, check out the (not so good) movie The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet.


And Murray was the guy that Kaczinsky was up against.
Kaczynski, a man with clearly defined goals and focus, somewhat of a genius, who was worried about the future of civilization, who had absolute faith in reason and who had great intellectual interests, where to meet Henry Murray, one of the world’s most prominent psychologists, whose science was an extension of his private turbulent life.
Darkness descends.

philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Ten

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Why are the most advanced civilizations also the most barbaric? It seems like the more human beings advance, the greater their crimes. In my mind, clearly inspired by Oswald Spengler as I am, the level of advancement in civilizations today is of no good. We have reached the peak and the further we advance, the more we destroy. This is definitely the age of decline, and technology is what increases our capacity for mayhem. In the 20th century we were even forced to invent new words to be able to deal with the madness: ”concentration camps”, ”genocide”, ”gulag”, ”ethnic cleansing”, ”collateral damage”, ”carpet bombing”… In the modern age progress equals destruction.
Spengler wrote: ”This machine-technics will end with the Faustian civilization and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten – our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon”.

Social philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford writes in The Conduct of Life (1951) that ”we have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where the feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end”.
Theodore Kaczynski, who arrived at Harvard in September 1958 (at the age of 16), read this, and a whole lot of other books that were part of the courses he took in expository writing, German literature, deductive and inductive logic, Western literature and philosophy, and the history of science. Harvard’s social environment at the time was clearly dominated by the ideas of the relativity of morals and the irrationality of religion. Here, at Harvard, is where the Unabomber got most of his ideas from.

When reading about the Unabomber at Harvard everybody seems to focus on his outsider attitude, that he kept to himself and never spoke to people he met in the hallway. What people seem to forget is that this is pretty normal behaviour, especially at Harvard at the time, where being labelled a ”loner” was like having a badge of honor. Dealing with highly complex mathematics there was little time for socializing. Kaczynski did not stand out.
Everybody who’s been studying at a university (or just left the house, for that matter) knows you don’t just stop for a chat when meeting people. You do that with people you know, otherwise you just keep walking. The same thing goes for the ideas of the Unabomber. Any sane person would think like him, only any sane person wouldn’t execute those ideas to that extent, in such a brutal way. And again, Ted did not stand out. Alston Chase writes in his book Harvard and the Unabomber:
”Another one of my classmates was expelled for dropping a bomb off the Anderson Bridge into the Charles River, setting off an explosion that shook windows throughout Cambridge. After leaving college, he was recruited by the CIA, which employed his incendiary talents during the succesful, agency-sponsored 1954 putsch in Guatemala…”.

So, again we come to the conclusion that Theodore Kaczynski was pretty much like everybody else. What made him snap, then? As Alston Chase writes, and what seems highly probable: it was The Experiment that took Ted over the edge.
More about that in Part Eleven.

philosophy, politics

>Manufactured Landscapes

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Our planet is slowly moving towards global disaster. Mankind’s devastating waste will put an end to human existence, there’s no doubt about that. The only question is when. There definitely will be a point where the air will be impossible to breathe and the water impossible to drink, and every day is another nail in the coffin. There are 6.76 billion people trying to reach for the same materialistic lifestyle, and there’s just not enough for the world to go around.


Jennifer Baichwal, director of the scary yet beautiful Manufactured Landscapes movie (based on the astonishing photos by Edward Burtynsky – check them out!), has documented the toll that “progress” is taking on the planet by visiting dumping grounds, dams, recycling yards, factories, mines and other manmade facilities that follow in the hollow trails of the industrial revolution. For the most part the documentary takes place in China, the land which strives so hard to Westernize, not realizing that this means total decline of the soul, spirit, and ultimately – life. China is the manufacturer of the world (you most probably have “Made in China”-products all over the place at home), and its’ work force is so concentrated that whole towns are dedicated to one type of product.
But there’s a steep price to be paid for runaway consumption. As Mother Earth slowly dies we tend to look away. Business as usual.
I’m like that myself, but then again, I lost hope a long time ago…


The opening shot of Manufactured Landscapes is truly surreal. The camera rolls through what seems like a never-ending Chinese factory and it blows my mind everytime I watch it. The whole movie is like that: deeply mindblowing. I’m amazed by the good shots, but repulsed by the sickness in man.
If you’ve seen the magnificent film Week End by Jean-Luc Godard you know what to expect, only this sequence is very much for real!


The Week End clip for comparison:

Unser Täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread) is another movie you definitely should watch. It’s pretty much in the same vein as Manufactured Landscapes (a documentary without the voice-over where you’re left to your own conclusions, where the photography speaks for itself), only it deals with the food industry. It sure as hell ought to awake the misanthrope in all of us.

Maybe it’s time to consider redefining the meaning of civilization?

literature, philosophy, religion

>The Selfish Gene

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>I know absolutely nothing when it comes to evolutionary biology and zoology or whatever it’s called. I know I love sex, but that’s about it. I believe sex is a part of evolution… ;)
Nevertheless, having read Richard Dawkins‘ amazing book The God Delusion (I wrote a bit about it here. Also check steve austin’s runthrough (in Swedish) here.), I decided to try his old masterpiece The Selfish Gene. I’ve come across the title several times when reading about religion, and especially when reading what the Young Earth creationists have to say. These comedians seriously believe that the universe is less than 10,000 years old. It is estimated that 47% of Americans hold this view, and almost 10% of Christian colleges teach it. No wonder the world is a fucked up place!

However, when reading The Selfish Gene I’m so fascinated by this whole thing called existence, I’m almost willing to submit to the idea of Intelligent Design and whatever the hell these crazies (EDIT: the creationists) are talking about. It’s really that amazing. There’s a lot more to evolution than many people realise. And I mean a lot more!
Dawkins, just as in The God Delusion, argues like the professional he is, but it’s never a dull read and even people who aren’t the slightest interested in the theory of evolution should enjoy this book if they only gave it a fair chance. It’s not hard going and Dawkins provides a lot of interesting examples that’ll make your brain flip because they’re pretty mindbending and thought-provoking.
I don’t know, maybe die hard biologists think Dawkins’ simplifying and dramatising ideas, often using sweeping statements, are laughable. I like it, though.
But what struck me, me being a Spenglerian (or at least having read a lot of Spengler stuff and liked it), is that Dawkins’ argumentation leaves little room for the influence of culture and individuality when it comes to human development. Even so, he apparently coins the term ”meme” in this book, meaning ”a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such “selfish” replication may also model human culture, in a different sense” – or ”a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena”.
I have the feeling I will return to this book when reading Spengler further on…

Anyway, this is probably the best popular science book I’ve ever read. If you decide to read it, make sure you get the 30th anniversary edition (yes, it was originally published in 1976!), since it includes a very large selection of notes which offer an additional perspective to many topics.
As for the title, The Selfish Gene: it’s kind of a metaphor describing the behaviour of genes, where altruism is an integral part of the so called ”selfishness”.

I read Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species some 15 years ago, and I think that kind of got me started on the anti-Christian (left hand) path, and I’m re-reading it right now.
Still, I feel I know nothing. Like Manuel.

philosophy, quotes

>Dead morality

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Let us consider the other case of so-called morality, the case of breeding, a particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of “the law of Manu.” Here the task set is to breed no less than four races at once: one priestly, one warlike, one for trade and agriculture, and finally a race of servants, the Sudras. Obviously, we are here no longer among animal tamers: a kind of man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the condition for even conceiving such a plan of breeding. One heaves a sigh of relief at leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier, higher, and wider world. How wretched is the New Testament compared to Manu, how foul it smells!
Yet this organization too found it necessary to be terrible–this time not in the struggle with beasts, but with their counter-concept, the unbred man, the mishmash man, the chandala. And again it had no other means for keeping him from being dangerous, for making him weak, than to make him sick–it was the fight with the “great number.” Perhaps there is nothing that contradicts our feeling more than these protective measures of Indian morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Sastra I), “on impure vegetables,” ordains that the only nourishment permitted to the chandala shall be garlic and onions, seeing that the holy scripture prohibits giving them grain or fruit with grains, or water or fire. The same edict orders that the water they need may not be taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but only from the approaches to swamps and from holes made by the footsteps of animals. They are also prohibited from washing their laundry and from washing themselves, since the water they are conceded as an act of grace may be used only to quench thirst. Finally, a prohibition that Sudra women may not assist chandala women in childbirth, and a prohibition that the latter may not assist each other in this condition.
The success of such sanitary police measures was inevitable: murderous epidemics, ghastly venereal diseases, and thereupon again “the law of the knife,” ordaining circumcision for male children and the removal of the internal labia for female children. Manu himself says: “The chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (these, the necessary consequences of the concept of breeding). For clothing they shall have only rags from corpses; for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron; for divine services, only evil spirits. They shall wander without rest from place to place. They are prohibited from writing from left to right, and from using the right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and of from-left-to-right is reserved for the virtuous, for the people of race.”

These regulations are instructive enough: here we encounter for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial–we learn that the concept of “pure blood” is the opposite of a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes clear in which people the hatred, the chandala hatred, against this “humaneness” has eternalized itself, where it has become religion, where it has become genius. Seen in this perspective, the Gospels represent a document of prime importance; even more, the Book of Enoch. Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity–the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against “race”: the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of the Idols (1889)