Opus Diaboli

Regular readers will know that in recent years I have written reviews of medical museums in both the Netherlands and Pennsylvania…

At the risk of appearing obsessed… I have just seen another, and recommend anyone who has a spare hour in London tomorrow to go and view it on  its final day.

Exquisite Bodies, at the Welcomme Trust in Euston Street, is a fascinating exploration of phenomenon of medical models, usually made out of wax, that existed from 16th century Florence until the Victorian Period.

Designed to get around the practicality and often the legality of dissecting real bodies for medical study. These figures are frequently highly artistic and have uncanny resonances with religious icons.

While this exhibition does not feature any real specimens (except a two-headed cow), they represent real medical conditions in a real and graphic way.

Highly recommended and FREE… catch it if you can, the final day is Sunday October 18.

The Stuff of Thought: Human Ideas and Where They Come from

The Stuff of Thought: Human Ideas and Where They Come from

by Steven Pinker

More at the Opus Diaboli bookshelf:

“Everybody knows I’m Christian, or they know I wasn’t and now I am. If you listen to my radio show or read anything about Alice, they would know I don’t drink, smoke or do drugs. I’ve been married to the same woman for 33 years, I’ve never cheated and I teach Bible study on Wednesday mornings. But there’s nothing wrong with Alice being a rock villain. The point of Alice is bringing up the absurdity of American life. Alice is America’s Frankenstein. He’s totally warped and insane, but there’s no bad language, nudity or anything that any normal person couldn’t take their 10-year-old to. The cutting off of the heads, the hanging — it’s all the same stuff that David Copperfield does. But because it’s rock ‘n’ roll, it’s seen as ‘Oh, that’s the Devil.’

… All my lyrics are talking about great stuff. Don’t invite this Satan guy into your life! That’s the one thing I have going through the whole show, this anti-satanic thing. If anybody should protest me, it’s the Satanists, not the Christians. Does anybody get this?

…But what they don’t realize is that these kids come home and they say, ‘Dad, Alice is totally anti-Satan. He’s against drugs and alcohol!’ And if that doesn’t work, ‘Dad, he can beat you in 18 holes. ”

An excert from an interview with Alice Cooper for the Sun Herald http://www.sunherald.com/living/story/1661729.html

Alice… Alice… don’t you realise that you’re playing the devil’s music, you’re borrowing his clothes, his imagery, his schtick… but not having the honesty to give Satan credit for all the positive things we get from him… like rock and roll.

Shame on you Alice, and if you came to my town I would ‘protest (against) you’.

Satan's Manifest III

Issue three of Satan’s Manifest is available to download free, now at Satanism-Today.com:
http://www.satanism-today.com/SM.htm

Bram Stoker’s, 1897 novel Dracula came towards the end of the Gothic novel’s popularity, but for many, it is the finest example of that genre.

Perhaps what makes it stand out, is that unlike many Gothic novels which feature what we might today call the ‘Scooby Doo’ ending – the  ghost in reality is the old caretaker in a sheet and the supernatural horror is defused –  Dracula is infused with the sense of  a real supernatural threat invading the ‘modern’ world of science and reason. There is no explanation at the end, only a last minute and costly victory over a palpable force of evil.

Those who travel to  Romania (the modern country which encompasses Transylvania) will find that Vlad Tsepes (the historical figure Dracula is based on) is regarded as a national hero and his picture adorns school walls etc.

While there is plenty of fabricated Dracula entertainment for the tourists (there is at least one ‘Dracula’s Castle’ – but the strongest claim that any can make is ‘Vlad Tsepes slept here’), the strongest link to Stoker’s novel is the harsh beauty of the Carpathian mountains.

Although it is almost certain that Stoker never went to Transylvania, he did visit Whitby in North Yorkshire on a number of occasions, and the locations he used in Dracula can still be seen today.

Whitby remains a working fishing port as it is was in Stoker’s day, with the town split by the harbour and a swivelling bridge allowing the passage of cars and pedestrians from one side to the other.

Climbing the 200 steps from the bottom of the town to the Steep hill on the Southern side of the harbour, one can command an imposing view across the bay.

From here one can see the beach upon which the hapless ship, The  Demeter founders with its dead crew and undead cargo.

At the top of the hill is St Mary’s Church, which features the cliff-top seat, facing out to sea, where Lucy is discovered at night with Dracula lowering over her.

The nearby ruins of Whitby Abbey loom over the entire town, adding to its romantic appeal.

When I first started visiting Whity by in the 1980s there was very little made of the town’s Dracula heritage, but now shops sell coffin-shaped candy, Dracula souvenirs and other tacky nic-nacs, there is even a multi-media Dracula experience on the seafront.  The Dracula association has also made it a magnet for Goths, and there are regular Goth festivals, horror movie weekends and the like.

However, the town still remains much of its  charm, and shops selling imported junk cannot subtract from the drama of the North Yorkshire landscape.

Opus Diaboli recommends:

The Dolphin Hotel.  Once a gastro-pub  now, sadly, under new management. If one can tolerate the incredible indifference of the staff (I checked in and out again without exchanging more than half-a-dozen words), even the modestly-priced rooms have a charming view over the harbour.

The Passage to India restaurant, excellent food, sensible prices and attractive decor.

For all things Goth, try Gothic Crafts, at Haggersgate, one of the few shops still selling quality items of a Gothic nature.

Whitby Jet:  Jet is a black mineral which is as light as wood.  Victorians loved it for mourning jewellery and Whitby is one of the few places in the world where it can be found.  Whitby has  a number of jewellers providing Jet jewellery both antique and modern, from the trashy to the exquisite.  However, while the best work is worth every penny, even the trashy end of the market isn’t cheap.

The UK’s National Health System (NHS) has been used as a political football this week, so I thought I’d make a few points addressed to friends in the US, to  counter some of the BS that’s been thrown around.

1)  Yes, the NHS is socialism in action. People pay taxes so that all can have healthcare.  ALL.  Yes, ALL.  Americans will have to accept that their taxes will go up.  They will have to accept that they are not just paying extra taxes for their own healthcare, they will  be paying for everyone’s healthcare. Illegal immigrants that fetch up at emergency rooms, people working on minimum wage below the tax threshold, the elderly and the children of the feckless, taxpayers will pay for all of it, and the burden will fall hardest on the middle classes.

2) Taxes will go up.  Everyone’s taxes will go up, including the pool boy, the maid and the people who make and bring you food in restaurants.  Higher taxes will push wages up and the US will have to either get used to not having as much cheap labour as it presently does, or paying more for it.

3) Expect the medical profession to get very moral and sanctimonious about how your money is spent.  Those doctors who today won’t give you a bandaid unless you have a credit card, once they are in the pay of the state will suddenly come out with “how dare you tell the medical profession who it can and can’t treat… we’ll treat illegal immigrants if we want… Hypocratic oath….”  The NHS has caused a phenomenon called ‘health tourism’ in the UK.  Because NHS staff refuse to do the work of  ‘immigration officials’.  They won’t check that people who present at hospitals are UK citizens and actually entitled to free treatment.  We have no idea how much this costs us… because the NHS will not measure it.

4)  When my father died of cancer, he received the best possible care imaginable. With all the money in the world, I could not have bought better treatment, and it did not cost me one cent.

5) If my father had had Alzheimer’s, I would have had to fight to get him the care he needed to die with dignity.  Cancer is an emotive disease and attracts a lot of political attention.  Alzheimer’s isn’t.  When the state pays for your health, it will become a political football.

6) Some medical treatment IS rationed in the UK.  There are long waiting lists for many routine treatments such as hip replacements.  Some people lose their sight because of waiting too long for routine treatment for Macular Degeneration.  If you have money you can jump the queue, but remember, you have already paid for your healthcare once through higher taxes, so you’re not going to have as much wealth and savings as you do now.

7) If you have a serious road accident in the UK, you will get extremely high quality treatment extremely fast.  Probably as good as anywhere.  If you tear up your hand with a power tool or have some other mid-ranking accident, you might spend half a day at the emergency room waiting to get it stitched.

8) The NHS  was introduced 60 years ago when antibiotics were still a novelty.  At that time if you got sick, you went to hospital.  You might have an operation… you might not… and you would either get better or you would die.  There simply wasn’t the range of expensive drugs and other interventions that are available now, but the NHS has not been able to change and reflect that because ‘free healthcare’ has become a political sacred cow.

There are other state healthcare systems in the world.  The choice is not between the iniquities of the current US healthcare system and the iniquities of the NHS.  You could have a system like the one in the Netherlands, Sweden, or even Canada.

9)  No system is perfect, and there is no such thing as FREE healthcare.  Someone always pays for it somewhere.

The new edition of Satan’s Manifest is available to download free from here: http://www.satanism-today.com/II_I.pdf

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Julian Karswell

Create Your Badge

Christian Aid is currently spending an obscene amount of money on a multimedia campaign to tell us that world poverty can be ended.

Just one of the adverts they have put in the media  this weekend is a two-page advert in the Saturday August 1 Telegraph magazine (p19, 21) that cost around £67,000 (based on Telegraph rate card).

You can visualise this sum of money by imagining 6,700 people giving £10 to Christian Aid thinking it would be buying a water pump in the Sudan only to find that their money has been wasted on a facile campaign that even a sanctimonious adolescent hung up on Bob Geldof would find short on substance.

There is one good reason why we cannot ever eradicate poverty and I’ll give that last (so you can skip to the bottom if you want to save time), but here are Christian Aid’s ten reasons why poverty can be ended.

1) 500 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 25 years.
Yes, but that is only 20 million people a year. How many billions has that cost us each year in terms foreign aid projects? Would it not have been cheaper just to write these people a cheque?  And another thing, ‘lifted out of poverty’ sounds very much like a New Labour phrase.  Just how closely do you want to be linked to this corrupt and failing government?

2) Over 70% of us think that poverty eradication is important
More than 70% of us think that world peace is ‘important’ and just look at the shape of this place.

3) World leaders agree that financial structures that exacerbate poverty must change.
So what’s the problem then?  It sounds like our world leaders have things in hand.

4) Almost 190 countries have signed up to halve extreme poverty by 2015
See above

5)  It’s a big task, but no bigger than ending slavery and putting a man on the moon.
Slavery ended?  The good news has not trickled down to North Africa yet.  And we haven’t had a man walk on the moon in more than 35 years.

6) A fair deal at this year’s climate change summit could save 250 million people in Africa from poverty by 2020.
If you lent me £10 I could put it on a horse and I could pay you back double when I win.  Show me the figures.
Also, that’s less than 25 million people a year and at what is this ‘fair deal’ going to cost the people who have to actually pay for it?  Poverty isn’t going to be ended by any climate summit.

7) People created poverty and the systems that hold it in place, people can end it.
Yes.  The systems that create poverty are largely caused by inefficiency and corruption in developing countries.  Until the peoplewho live in those countries stop accepting that, no amount of foreign aid is going to make any lasting change.

8) If multinational companies paid a fair amount tax, developing countries would receive an extra $160bn a year.
Show me the figures.  If countries ensured that multinational companies paid a ‘fair’ amount of tax, would it be right and moral for those countries to give all of that revenue away to other sovereign nations?  Do they not have their own healthcare and education responsibilities to their citizens?  Do they not have moral duty to ensure that their citizens’ own tax burden be lightened if revenues increase?
And if $160bn was pumped into the developing world, would it end world poverty?  Or would it just cause a leap in sales of Rolexs, Mercs, Learjets and uniforms with a lot of gold braid on them?

9)  More than  $110bn of the world’s poorest nations’ debt has already been cancelled.
By cancelled, you mean that someone, somewhere else has paid for it. It has been absorbed by tax payers and by shareholders.  And has that done how much to end  poverty? If proper governance is not in place, cancelling debt just helps keep bad leaders in power.

10) The United Nations Secretary-General has categorically stated that this can happen.
Why didn’t you say before?  We need only sit back and wait for poverty to be ended… after all it’s not as if the UN is just a pointless talking shop that couldn’t organise a box of pencils.

And finally…

Some agencies define poverty as living on $2 a day.  In the UK, everyone in the lower 40% of the earning bracket is considered to be in poverty. Some of those in ‘poverty’ in the UK would qualify as in the comfortable middle classes in other countries.  And as societies develop, our ideas of what constitutes poverty change. Within living memory, children in the UK were defined as being in poverty because they did not have proper food, clothing or access to healthcare or education.  Now children are considered to be ‘deprived’ if they live in a household that can’t afford branded trainers for them (they’ll be vulnerable to bullying) and broadband (they will be socially excluded).
If we raised the quality of life of those on $2 a day to $5… guess what?  $5 a day would become the new baseline of poverty.

We can never end poverty because… the poor are always with us.