Pheasants

Popular music has its ups and downs, there are more nuances of quality and poor quality than in the best catalog of industrial paints, shameful and glorious moments, but only on extremely rare occasions are there those timeless products that once in a few years will grace the stage with their existence, will step out of the framework of the popular and the banal and will enter the head to stay there forever. One of those songs that time (as well as the Pyramids in Giza) can do nothing to, on the contrary, it seems fresher with each passing decade is the unforgettable song ``When the Pheasants Fly.'' If Oscar Wilde were alive, he would certainly be proud of Branimir ``Johnny'' Štulić who managed to create a musical equivalent of the literary phenomenon of Dorian Gray who remained eternally young due to the reflection of his sins on the canvas with his portrait that ``absorbed'' the effects of aging.

`Pheasants` remain young due to the reflection of social sins on the canvas called `Human Life` on which generations of psychopaths and sociopaths known as `rulers` `paint`, and the effects of suffering absorb the `masses` in all their unconscious stupidity - thus protecting the poem from aging and ensuring its eternal relevance.

The song originates from the Yugoslav `new wave` band Azra, from the time when new waves were splashing the shores of sound producers from Germany to Ireland and from Yugoslavia to Japan. Although it appeared as an unplanned offspring of the Tsunami of Punk Rock, New Wave music left behind fanatical songs, perhaps precisely because it came as a result of musicians who took their first steps in Punk, with somewhat clearer minds than their Punk colleagues - getting their act together - managed to create something like this:

Why are you looking for charisma in yourself you stuffed bird?

possibility of enlightenment

it separates you from the desire for a mission

scent of the dirt

concentric circles of stupidity and ignorance like rings 

I don't understand it anymore

it seems to me that it is dead guards

and it is not necessary

to not be a sinkhole until the end

what is happening when dead pheasants fly above our heads

When dead pheasants fly above our heads

And what happens when?

desperation grabs people

when despair inevitably turns into regret

looking at the contours of the scene from a distance

water colors come to mind

dirty hands wash off quickly...

Even if this was Azra's only song (and of course it isn't), even if they were a typical one hit wonder (and they weren't) and if by any chance they stopped making music right after the release of ``Pheasants'' - that would be enough to beat the time and send the message. And who did they send that message to? One interpretation could be the following...

Why are you looking for charisma in yourself, you stuffed bird?

The possibility of enlightenment?

It separates you endlessly from the desire for a mission?

The smell of the earth?

Concentric circles of stupidity and ignorance like rings?

I don't understand any further. 

It seems to me that it is a dead guard.

Most often, the unsightly, physical and moral freaks at the top of the system are in a panicked search for instant charisma with which to hypnotize the electorate, stuffed birds, stuffed drones of Evil and destruction, self-proclaimed Messiahs and saviors of the 'people', conveyor belts for throwing out empty phrases and platitudes. And behind all that, in all its splendor, concentric circles of stupidity and ignorance blare like rings, the naked and ugly reality, sometimes difficult to understand behind the false shine of cathode rays and liquid crystals and the dead guard of legions of fools ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of other people's interests.

I said to myself ``my God'' 

so much demagoguery systematically arranged in artillery salvos

so many stolen thoughts behind which there is nothing but hatred, vanity, power

and how much corruption needs to be poured out at our feet

and how the essence of deception has been rendered unrecognizable!

The artillery barrage is a lovely phenomenon, it is the so-called ``artillery preparation'' of the terrain that is later to be attacked by infantry. Hundreds and even thousands of cannons, howitzers and mortars continuously fire on a certain territory for hours and days in order to destroy everything that could be a threat to the infantry. And if instead of grenades, demagogy is fired, the result is no less devastating. Of course, expecting originality from the elite is ridiculous, with rare exceptions - it is a rehearsal of millennial tricks, recycled who knows how many times. What is sad is the fact that nothing can dislodge the slave from his obsession with slavery. A politician can rape his child, he can kill him, rob him, destroy him - nothing will move the believer from his faith in the system. And that system, despite everything, should be worshiped as the Golden Calf and Big Brother were never worshiped, because it is based on the propagated moral argument for its own goodness and righteousness as well as the pseudo-historical assessment of inevitability.

and the river was not a river at the beginning

and it is not necessary

to not be a sinkhole until the end

what happens

when dead pheasants fly above our heads

when dead pheasants fly and not a single one falls!

And the ``general public`` has not always been a collection of Zombies and does not have to be like that until the end of the world despite the constant flying of dead, lifeless and meaningless ``greatnesses`` above their heads. ``Greatnesses`` who despite having no pulse and a total absence of content still fly like Eagles and have no intention of falling to the ground, simply float on the clouds of stupidity in paradise. Lucifer, although known as the essence of evil, was still an exceptionally fair entity who at least had the virtue to fall headlong to the ground after his wings were clipped. Or did gravity do its thing?!

And what happens when?

desperation grabs people

when despair inevitably turns into regret

looking at the contours of the scene from a distance

water colors come to mind

dirty hands wash off quickly...

The finger of blame must point to oneself, never to the perpetrator.

Self consume your woes, as the mad country poet John Clare would say. Hands are always washed, a procedure popularized by Pontius Pilate, the pragmatic governor of Judea. Today, hand washing is expressed through the fatuous myth of the `Social Contract` and the no less idiotic one of the `will of the voters`.

And perhaps all this was in vain and no one will hear the message? A completely possible and realistic assumption. And completely wrong because the messages that emanate from the depths of history are rarely created for an existing audience. Or for an audience at all. They just were.

In fact i cannot shake off the feeling that people creating all them amazing stuff did not give a fuck if anybody was nodding their heads understandingly...or not. For if everyone was born out of the same stock, people would perish from sheer boredom in the midst of whatever class they belong to.

Meaning in life never comes cheap.

(Roger Mortis, 086)

Time enough

It seems that every culture or civilization has had a habit of singing its own `Swan Song`, justified or not, since the time of the Sumerians when the reflection of Enlil in a mirror known as Enki decided to end the `Golden Age` in the land of Mesopotamia. And our civilization, if we may honor with such a name the current dominant paradigm in the world, which appeared on the scene thanks to a fierce fixation with fossil fuels - has reached a level of psychological threshold where `end of the world` scenarios are openly discussed. Not only that, but literature, film and television are also experiencing an unprecedented infestation of apocalyptic themes and dilemmas.

In several countries, starting from 1936 until today, there are projects for time capsules. These are isolated chambers and more recently satellites that contain all kinds of information about our civilization, from the most ordinary everyday objects, through seeds of various types - to information about today's world and society. According to the International Time Capsule Society (lol) - there are about 15,000 of them worldwide. A typical example is the capsule at Oglethorpe University in the USA where they calculated that our civilization began counting time in 4241 BC (the earliest recorded date ever discovered) which is 6181 years to 1940 when the capsule was sealed. The mechanism for opening the capsule is set to open in the same number of years from when the capsule was closed, assuming that people at that time would be at a sufficient technological level to see what it was about...in the year 8113.

This project is not based on optimism because it assumes some kind of cataclysm after which humanity would begin to recover in the distant future.

The KEO satellite supported by the United Nations and launched in 2012, contains a real wealth of information about our civilization. Part of the project was that there was enough built-in memory for every inhabitant of the planet to write a maximum of four pages of a personal message or anything else that came to mind and send it via email, directly to the site or by mail to the agency working on this project. It is not known how much response this approach received, but that is not important. In addition to personal opinions of random people, the satellite also carries data on DNA/Human genome, samples of human blood, seawater, soil and air, digital records of everything and anything, encyclopedias, photographs...

Re-entry into orbit is planned for 52,000 years from now... which is certain, it is certain. Unless the people of that time are too advanced to understand the message. Or if they return to an animal stage of development in which the message will not mean much to them. Or if there are no more people by then... the possibilities are endless. KEO was not the first satellite with this purpose, but it is the largest project to date. There are others that should be realized in the immediate future.

What is the purpose of these capsules in our time?

An obvious and rational purpose - there is none, however, it is a matter of fear of the curse of oblivion, of the temporality and short lifespan of all human products - even if they were global civilizations, the need to say ``I was here too,'' as best witnessed by the phenomenon of Roman ``graffiti'' that have survived volcanic eruptions and two difficult millennia and have no other message than the one already mentioned. Maybe this civilization is nearing its end and maybe it is not, of course unlike other civilizations it does not depend only on an `external factor` for a cataclysm - but is itself capable of ending it, with Atomic Winter or a mutated laboratory virus, no matter, but the human need to leave a mark recognizable in the distant future has been present since the time of the Sumerians and even long before that, if we can judge by the drawings of the still uncivilized man in various caves dating back 35,000 years.

And who knows, it is possible that looking into the future is just a counterpoint to nostalgia, a phenomenon born of dissatisfaction with the present but with a preference for the unknown future as opposed to the glorification of the past that never happened...

(Roger Mortis, 085)

Sunday, Gloomy Sunday

The line between mass hysteria, emotional hypersensitivity, urban legends and paranoia is sometimes foggy and unclear, that line can fade to the extent that it skips logic and enters speculative waters. That is why sometimes all that mixture can bring to the surface a phenomenal story...like the one about music that leads to taking one's own life...All attempts to find a correct transcription of the name of the main character of the story remain unsuccessful in the absence of people who speak Hungarian. And there are not many of them in the area and therefore instead of Rező Seress, Rező Seress (?), Rező Seress and other unlikely combinations, it is best to have his name in the original.

Rezső Seress, a Hungarian composer who lived in Paris, composed the song Gloomy Sunday in 1932, a piece of music that allegedly took thousands of lives. The composer at that time was trying to build a career in music, taking great risks, without making compromises and without looking for additional work to support himself. His fiancée could not bear the constant poverty and waiting and left him. Rezső Seress was left alone, without money, without the girl he adored and who made his lonely life in emigration easier, without friends and without a future...in one word he became Forever Alone. All this was followed by the December Parisian days with rain and fog...the final result of his mental state was the greatest success of the composer who in a single day turned his difficult `suffering` into notes. The myth was born.

A record company accepted the music and printed the composition, and it was released to the public via radio and gramophone records performed by then and future pop stars such as Pál Kalmar, Paul Robertson, Damia, Hall Camp and superstar Billie Holiday.

The first victim falls in Berlin, where the song becomes an instant hit.

A young man asks to have the song played for him in a bar, goes home, tells his friends that the song has "beaten him up" and that he can't go on any longer, locks himself in a room and kills himself with a revolver. A week later, again in Berlin, a young girl hangs herself. A copy of a Gloomy Sunday record is found in her room. Two days later in New York, another young girl commits suicide with gas, and the note says that she wants Gloomy Sunday to be played at her funeral. The next victim, an old woman, also in New York, jumps from the seventh floor after listening to the song. That same day, a teenager in Rome jumps off a bridge. The last song he listened to was Gloomy Sunday...

The media has already begun to treat the song. Especially after the case in London when the neighbors of a girl, irritated by her gramophone that plays that song for several hours because of the scratched record, decide to take action. No one answers the calls and knocks on her door. The police are called and break in... the girl is found dead. Suicide by overdose of barbiturates. Months pass and news reports of suicides become more and more frequent, especially among depressed people who have had the misfortune of listening to Gloomy Sunday. The BBC board decides to play it safe and bans the song from being broadcast on national radio.

In Paris, Rezső Seress has collected a good amount of money in royalties during this time. Finally financially stable, he writes his girlfriend a letter in which he begs her to come back to him. Instead of her answer, he receives a letter from her parents informing him that the girl has taken her own life by poisoning. The police find, in addition to the poison, a copy of the record with Gloomy Sunday next to her body...With the beginning of World War II, the song fell into oblivion, the wave of reports of hundreds of suicides was overshadowed by the horrors of war and the suffering of millions of people. And as people say, suicides tend to be a bit redundant in wartime. However, the song once again found itself on the front pages many years after the war, and that day after the suicide of Rezső Seress, the composer of the most melancholic song of all time.

"Gloomy Sunday with a hundred white flowers

I was waiting for you my dearest with a prayer

A Sunday morning, chasing after my dreams

The carriage of my sorrow returned to me without you

It is since then that my Sundays have been forever sad

Tears my only drink, the sorrow my bread..."

(Roger Mortis, 084)

Paedo Paradise

There was a Bavarian village at the foot of the Andes...and in that village, the face and appearance of a rural idyll - blond children in classic Dirndl costumes were running around...Wait, what? You must mean the Alps, there must have been a mistake in the spelling... There is no mistake, at the foot of the Andes there still exists a German village, founded in the fifties, which hid one of the most terrible secrets that humanity had the opportunity to learn after the fall of the regime of General Pinochet, a standard image of a corrupt Latin dictator with a multitude of epaulettes and orders on his uniform and a face that simply reminds one of an aged pedophile.

The nightmare that would later act as an unfortunate meeting between Dachau and Jonestown, began with the escape of Nazi pedophile Paul Schaefer from Germany, where the investigative authorities began an investigation into his pedophile activities. South America was a refuge for a huge number of deranged members of the Wehrmacht, SS and Abwehr - so where all the Nazis were there and Paul, but with the important difference that Paul, in addition to worshipping children's genitals - also founded his own sect!

The sect was Risyan, a faction of Catholicism modified in order to create a new Aryan race on an egalitarian basis, where the individual would not exist and where the ``higher goal'' would be alpha and omega. Children were taken from their parents after birth and left to the ``care'' of the community. It remains unclear where Schaefer got the money to buy dozens of hectares of land in central Chile, about 400 km from Santiago. Not only land but also building materials and machinery and all the other things needed for such an undertaking. The traces pointed to the numerous German emigration there and to the old ``comrades'' from the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

And so after some time, Schaefer, in addition to local Germans, was joined by residents of Germany who came in search of a better life and meaning of existence in Colonia Dignidad, as the village was called. Several hundred people began to work day and night for Schaefer, not only building the infrastructure of the place but also engaged in agriculture, farming, and the production of food and beverages that they then sold in Santiago. They did not receive a salary for their work, the money went into the pocket of the sect leader who used that money to buy surrounding land so that at one point his property reached 13,700 hectares or 137 km2!

The property was surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire, underground tunnels and hideouts and guard towers were built because Schaefer assumed that many would want to leave the place and that was not to be allowed. Expanding his businesses, Schaefer `brothered` local politicians and police officers who came on his payroll. In this way, he secured unhindered power and sick enterprises. The children in the `colony` were exposed to pedophile experiences by Schaefer and his friends. Later, when Pinochet came to power, renowned Chilean pedophiles from the world of politics and business began to come to the village who could enjoy raping children in peace, far from the public eye. Schaefer became absolutely untouchable, a diminutive deity in the escapist world he had created.

In addition to children for sex, Schaefer also offered the government a place where arrested opponents of the regime could be taken to be tortured. For this purpose, and with state money, facilities equipped with the most modern torture devices were built, which would be used to torture thousands of people during the years of the dictatorship. Many of them were also liquidated, as was later learned with the excavation of mass graves.

The birth rate of the Aryans proved unsatisfactory, so they resorted to buying and ``adopting`` children from the local population. Paul Schaefer stands out as the doyen of pedophilia, with figures of abused children only achievable by the ``pedo legend`` Jimmy Savile. And so one day the ``Angel of Death`` himself appeared on the scene in the colony, who was none other than Josef Mengele, who came to supervise medical experiments performed on political opponents in the well-equipped hospital that had been built there. In the underground sealed chambers, the effects of war poisons on the victims were tested, under the leadership of the veteran of Evil - Josef, in coordination with representatives of the Chilean army and the secret police DINA.

The presence of Mengele and Walter Rauf, the `inventor` of the mobile gas chambers - attracted the attention of the famous `hunter` of Nazis Simon Wiesenthal, and probably also of the Mossad. Namely, in the eighties - an alleged agent named Boris Weissfeller was sent to the site to gather information about the sect.

Weissfeller was discovered and captured and later severely tortured and liquidated by the maniacs in the colony.

It seemed that the sect would continue to supply new generations of pedophiles with children until Judgment Day. But in 1990, the Pinochet regime fell, and with it a large part of the finances that kept the Pedophile Paradise alive dried up. Journalists, various activists from human rights associations and Nazi hunters appear daily around the colony, the pressure to open the village's doors is growing...and in 1997, Schaefer abandons his slaves, his henchmen and his Nazi colleagues and, using the runway in the colony, escapes by plane to Argentina.

He was discovered in 2005 and extradited to Chile where he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for pedophile activities, finally dying in prison in 2010, in his later years. The surviving victims partly returned to Germany, partly remained in Chile and most of them are trying to get compensation from the Chilean state through the judicial labyrinths that subjected them to sexual abuse and torture.

The state as a state, immediately seized the documents that were in the colony and to this day remain under lock and key because they would obviously implicate many local and international politicians in their insatiable hunger for child flesh. Aside from the experiments with chemical weapons and the huge quantities of weapons that were found there, the responsibility for financing the colony and a number of other situations that would have hatched from the egg called Disclosure. Today, the village has been renovated, most of the compromising objects have been removed, and it serves as a tourist attraction (!?) that provides a source of income for the few residents who remained to live there. The colony was de facto extraterritorial, outside all legal and tax laws that applied to the rest of Chile, yet another in a series of evidences of the extreme psychopathy of the political and business elites whose very existence only causes suffering and unprecedented misery for countless millions of stupid, zombified people who love their country... whatever it may be.

Even though it financed the rape of children.

(Roger Mortis, 083)

Oscar Romero

After several centuries, positive news has finally emerged from the Vatican, one of the largest centers of organized mysticism. Finally, something different from pedophilia, papal encyclicals with furious demagoguery against abortion and condoms and support for various genocidal regimes that have `enriched` the already rich history of the Disaster on planet Earth with their actions.

The late Pope Francis, who succeeded the ex-Hitler Youth soldier Ratzinger after his sensational resignation - one can even say that he seems completely human. A member of the Jesuit order (wrongly labeled in the alternative media as a hotbed of conspiracy) and heir to the traditions of `liberal theology`, a few days ago announced the Beatification of the long-dead Oscar Romero, a character who is unusually reminiscent of the Bishop from `The Iron Heel`, the book by Jack London that inspired George Orwell for his `1984`.

Archbishop of El Salvador in the seventies, a priest under whose leadership there were many Jesuits inclined to `liberal theology`, a theology that interprets the character and work of Jesus as a way to fight against unjust and inhuman social and economic conditions. All this was especially popular among some of the clergy in Latin America at that time. Romero started out as an extremely conservative priest but over time, seeing the suffering in paradise and the injustices he began to change and surely in his head echoed the words of Jesus from the `Sermon on the Mount`, without a doubt the most socially conscious part of the Holy Scripture.

After a series of dictators, maniacs and psychopaths in power in El Salvador, the country was again on the verge of civil war (which happened after Romero's death), the country was the property of a semi-feudal oligarchy under the protection of the army, the police and paramilitary ultra-right-wing units.

The standard of living, especially in the villages, was at a medieval level, without electricity, water, medicine... in a word, the dictatorship contained all those elements that existed in the countries of that region (with the exception of Costa Rica) where the presidents-dictators were appointed by the CIA, in accordance with the doctrine of the Cold War and corporate interests.

Death, disease and the suffering of the military formations on the rural population were everyday life. The church, unlike in most cases, in this case under the influence of the Jesuit priests with their "liberal theology", took a position in favor of those who were suffering. Romero, as the chief priest in the country, began to publicly speak out against the government and the army, and against US policy. He even wrote a letter to US President Carter asking the Americans to stop funding and training the army, which was only using that training for massacres of civilians and defense of the oligarchy.

His speeches began to become radical, more and more people refused to obey the authorities, people began to gain some hope that better days were possible. Romero reached the point where he demanded that cooperation with the system be canceled, because it was in complete contradiction to the teachings of Jesus...Several of Romero's collaborators (Jesuit priests) were massacred, their body parts were cut off and displayed around the villages, some were killed in ambush...Many ``nuns'' who provided aid to the hungry also suffered, were raped by the paramilitary and then liquidated and buried.

The climax occurred on 24.3.1980. After the murders of his ``colleagues'' and ``colleagues'' did not bear fruit in bringing him to a ``state-friendly path,'' the authorities decided to kill him too. He was eliminated by army special forces with a sniper, in a church - during a sermon. The decision of the military junta to eliminate him was in accordance with the interests of the CIA but also of the Vatican, where Romero sought support for his efforts from Pope John Paul II but of course without success... he was suggested that secular power was given by God, i.e. not to raise too much dust, because in this way he supported the "godless" guerrillas from the FMLN who fought against the dictatorship.

Tens of thousands of citizens gathered at his funeral to send him off for the last time. But he was not destined to go alone on his last journey... the police and the army opened fire during the funeral and killed over 50 people and wounded hundreds, many were arrested, some were tortured using medieval methods, some "disappeared" and to this day their graves are unknown...The CIA, the authorities in El Salvador and the Vatican could breathe a sigh of relief, the black sheep was eliminated along with the other "rotten apples". 35 years later, the Jesuit Pope acknowledges the mistakes of his predecessors and gives recognition to the Martyr, a move that is to be welcomed.

Oscar Romero remains one of the rare positive examples in the ranks of religion in the last half century, if not more.

(Roger Mortis, 082)

Krishna Venta

Once upon a time there was a cult that carried out suicide bombings long before it was cool. At the same time, they were steeped in Eastern mysticism long before the Hippie era, again quite ahead of the global trends. What was this sect that, if it existed today, would surely have explosive hipsters as members?

They called themselves the Fountain of the World and were led by a certain Francis Penzovich, the son of Jewish immigrants in California. As is customary, Francis changed his name to Krishna Venta, rejected Judaism, and after a rich career filled with petty fraud, crime, and frequent prison stints - decided to become enlightened, become a Guru, and gather followers who would lead them to a bright future and salvation. The beginning of the sect was in the early forties, during the period when Venta sent threatening letters to the then President Franklin Roosevelt (!?) for some reasons known only to him, which is why he was imprisoned in an insane asylum.

And is there a better place for enlightenment than an insane asylum?

After being released, Venta declared himself a Guru after claiming that the spirit of Jesus had downloaded into his body and he had become just a tool for channeling a higher consciousness, preaching a difficult-to-digest mixture of Christian/Mormon, Jewish and Hindu mysticism. The spirit of Jesus has supposedly been present on earth for a long time because it arrived on this planet 100,000 years ago in an alien ship and was distributed into various individuals who thus conveyed the message of heaven. Among them were the first man Adam, Krishna, Jesus, Joseph Smith (founder of the mega-sect Mormons) and Abraham Lincoln (!?) and the last one was, of course, Venta...

An apocalyptic cultists would not be apocalyptic if he did not predict the end of the world, and Venta said that there would be a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR and that he had to gather 144,000 followers in the shortest possible time who would continue humanity to a new, higher level of consciousness. Something was not going well for him because he gathered at most a few hundred members, bought a property about 45 km from Los Angeles, a place where the sectists could peacefully sect. To be honest, the sect was engaged in charity work, they saved some people during a major fire in California and several survivors of a plane crash, and they also took in homeless people and various sufferers on their property.

Venta later went to Europe to meet the Pope in Rome, to open his eyes and tell him how things were, but the Pope was not in the mood to give him an Audience. Occasionally, quasi-crucifixions were performed in order for Venta to experience the `feeling` of Jesus on Golgotha. Other spiritual activities included gambling in Las Vegas, swindling the sect's funds, and active messianism. In order to obtain funds to strengthen the sect, Venta often went to Las Vegas after once winning a good sum of money gambling...but luck increasingly deserted him and he had to take money from the sect's fund and gamble with it, which brought the sect to the brink of financial collapse.

And then (1958) two fanatical sectarians had enough, the end of the world and the atomic mushrooms were nowhere to be found, and the common money magically disappeared. The two decided to change the mind of the gambler-messiah-immortal-ascended-master through personal self-sacrifice, a martyr's path to a better world. They were probably afraid to openly confront the leader and therefore decided to sacrifice themselves without much talk because the deeds speak for themselves. They purchased dynamite which they tied around their belts and with an electric lighter in their hands they went to the sect's ``base'' in California and found Krishna Venta preaching to a large group of people.

At that moment they activated the explosives, which blew up the suicide bombers along with the leader Venta and eight other sect members, killing a total of 11 people and seriously injuring over 70 others. And so the messiah departed to a higher plane of existence, literally disintegrated, and the sect never recovered from the shock and loss of its leader, existing for some time with fewer and fewer members, only to die out completely in the mid-nineties.

The Cult was just too early...

(Roger Mortis, 081)

On Villages and Cities

It is difficult to overestimate the insignificance of the settlements in the ancestral homeland of the Hunzas. If the insignificance is joined by the other characteristics that `decorate` the cities (futility, isolation, deadness and ugliness) - then a complete picture would be obtained for which no suitable word can be found in the any dictionary. An interesting thing is myths. One of those myths that has been constantly dragged like a hose through the years is that the city of Skopje is a metropolis, a center, an important place. Maybe... although unfortunately only within a certain territory that covers 25,713 km2 according to the latest measurements and in which there are supposedly 1,784,000 holders of a corporate declaration of ownership (passport, ID card, birth certificate) according to long-outdated counts.

Outside that small and sad territory, the significance of Skopje is equal to that of Nis, Tirana, Pristina, Plovdiv, Banja Luka... a comparison with Thessaloniki, Sofia, Belgrade (although Belgrade is `inevitably` on its way to becoming Pripizdina despite mitigating circumstances such as bombings and stuff) and even Sarajevo or Split is to the great detriment of Skopje from any aspect. Regionally, continentally and globally, the significance of Skopje is more than modest. If at the regional level, it can still be caught on the radar with great difficulty, at the continental level - any significance of Skopje is non-existent. Non-existent to the extent that Debar, Prilep, Ohrid, Bitola, Kriva Palanka `do not exist` continentally...

The undeniable conclusion follows that on a global scale, Skopje is equal to Kocani.

Ohrid and Bitola, for example, are heavy fuckers. The difference with Skopje is that they are small shite holes and Skopje is a relatively large and dystopian shite hole. Relatively, because in India there are cities with five million inhabitants that no one has heard of. Purely a difference in the number of inhabitants and the cumulative influence that this brings. Something like the difference between Ohrid and Kosel or Bitola and Novaci. The mentality is a petty-bourgeois-retrocommunist amalgam, seasoned with the distinct charm of a dilapidated Ottoman town and the kleptocratic Styrofoam aesthetics.

There is probably no populated place in which there is no `whining` for the `good old days` when good old citizens and good old citizens flourished, guilds of raja, honesty and respect. Of course, this is a universal phenomenon and is not limited to these regions. The difference again is only in the number of raja and the intensity of the whining. Apart from the number of people, there is almost no difference between the mentioned places. From Kosel to Skopje, there is almost no qualitative difference. If Novaci is multiplied 30 times, you will get Bitola. And if Bitola is multiplied 10 times, you will get Skopje.

(Roger Mortis, 080)

Beware a Cult !

In the neighborhood, serious efforts are being made to make children and young people aware of the lurking cults in a timely manner. As a result of these efforts and as a consequence of scientific works of epic proportions, publications are appearing that will oblige generations of people through their saving mission.

As is generally known, cults lurk most around the still unformed minds of children. "Hook`em while they`re young" is the motto under which cults try to recruit new members. In order to inform the young public about this danger, the book ``Watch Out for the Cult`` by a certain Biljana Đurđević-Stojković has been published, who has already published several phenomenal works on this topic, such as ``Soul Hunters``, ``Confessions of a Cult Victim`` and ``Lexicon of Cults``.

This significant and above all instructive masterpiece, which with its paper pages stands on the bulwark of orthodoxy, was published in 2004 by the Serbian publishing house `Anturijum` on 150 pages, and could still be purchased for about three euros, a completely reasonable price for saving the soul of a young person.

The following is an excerpt from the book with a partial list of dangerous sects that lurk in the shadows of weak children:

White Witches, Lords of the Rings, Rosenkreuzers, Golden Dawn, Anthroposophis, Lucis Trust, Creationists, Kabbalists, Satanists, Domneh, Subud, Spiritualism, Bekteši, O.T.O, Hare Krishna, Montanists, Sanatan, Scientology, Black Rose, Red Solar Temple, Tarot, Black Scorpio & others...

The author was obviously comprehensive in her research on sectarianism, including The Lord of the Rings, which, as we learn, was a sect founded by a certain J.R.R. Tolkien.

There are also vegetarians, about whom the book includes a touching confession from a parent ``Help my child is a vegetarian,'' and of course Yoga, which, through physical exercises, becomes competitive in the sect market.

This monumental work claims to rescue the youngest from the clutches of sectarianism in a sympathetic, unobtrusive way, with the help of dry facts and verified arguments that are adapted to the age of the readers, and there is also a convenient cover on which we see Lisa and Bart Simpson being afraid of occult symbols.

(Roger Mortis, 079)

The Waco Massacre

The activities of cults are a fascinating topic that penetrates the deepest abysses of the human psyche, into the dynamics of conscious action, into the dark corners of the subconscious - sects are a kind of microcosm, a system within a system where on a small sample of paradise one can diagnose very large problems that plague a society.

If Aum Shinrikyo is the most runaway cult in the history of sectarianism, then the Davidians are certainly the bravest. The Davidian Branch was a faction of some faction of the Adventist sect faction, which unlike mainstream Adventism, preached millenarianism, i.e. the end of the world. And what is the end of the world without the second coming of Jesus? It's like a bean without ribs, an engine without oil, Yin without Yang, such a thing cannot exist and therefore, very naturally, the sect leader David Koresh himself declared himself not exactly the second coming of Jesus but the `Last Prophet`, the next best thing to a Messiah.

A classic image of a charismatic sect leader (a spitting image of Dennis Hopper) with a Bible in one hand and an AK-47 in the other. Perhaps not so classic and perhaps a little `slandered` by the media that later went after David, an unsuccessful Heavy Metal bassist and an even less successful producer, who changed his disreputable real name Vernon Howell to David Koresh for marketing reasons.

The cults headquarters were near the city of Waco, Texas, USA, where a series of facilities had been built to accommodate the sect members since the 1920s. At the end of the eighties, an internal struggle for supremacy began within the sect. Two of the three candidates for the vacant position of `Prophet`, David and George Roden, decided on a fair competition in Necromancy, the winner of which would prove that he was on a divine mission. However, David, as a particularly cunning person, took advantage of George's digging up the corpse of a woman from the local cemetery to arrange for the competitor's arrest for desecration of a corpse.

After George was released from prison after a few months, the first thing he did was to eliminate the third competitor, a certain Wayman Ader, with an axe blow to the head after a fierce theological argument, an act for which he was imprisoned in an insane asylum that paved the way for David to become the head of the sect.

David was a hardworking man, he immediately rolled up his sleeves and threw himself into work, his interpretations of the Holy Scriptures spoke of the start of the `last days`, a time in which the world would face doom and only the `chosen ones` would survive. The popular theme of the Russian mythology known as the `Seven Seals` was also at play, passages from `Revelation` (the most popular part of the Bible for generations and generations of sectarians) that say that the End of the World will come after the opening of the last, seventh seal. As David claimed, the seals were almost over, there was still the last one left, which meant that Judgment Day was almost at the door. That's why David was in a hurry to have as many children as possible with the female members of the cult, to bring into the world a new generation of sectarians. Or maybe he was just constantly horny...

To save themselves from the apocalypse, the sectarians decided that prayer was not enough, and God forbid, neither was a hoe. Cash was needed. That's why they started trading weapons in bulk, semi-automatic rifles that they converted into full automatics, heavy machine guns, hand grenades and even the occasional stray hand-held rocket launcher were on offer. Such purchases could not remain anonymous, and the US Bureau of Firearms, Tobacco and Alcohol (!?) began an investigation into the sectarian activities. The investigation resulted in a search warrant for the sectarian facilities and 76 armed members of this federal service rushed to conduct a search. The long column of law enforcement officers aroused interest among local television, which set up cameras for a ``live broadcast`` of the arrest of the sectarians, the agents ``posed`` like peacocks in front of the cameras, and the sectarians, who numbered at least 150 in the facilities, could see on TV that a raid was being prepared...

The law enforcement officers, underestimating the hard-core armed cultists, tried to enter the facilities, whereupon the sectarians opened fire, a real battle ensued in which the Federal Bureau of Firearms was completely defeated and forced to retreat with several dead and about twenty wounded members. The sectarians even showed mercy because when the agents withdrew, they could have completely wiped them out, something David did not allow. After it became clear that the service and the local police would not be able to deal with the sect, the FBI got involved in the story, sending special forces, surrounding the sect and starting a siege that would last 51 days and in which tanks, armored personnel carriers, psychological weapons and helicopters would be used.

They expected that in a few days the sectarians would run out of food and water and would surrender whimpering, but that was a naive expectation, the sectarians had huge supplies of food, water and ammunition that they had prepared in anticipation of the apocalypse. And it somehow arrived...

After several failed attempts to break in (in which the sect leader was wounded), the FBI decided to negotiate. In the meantime, FBI agents killed a sect member who tried to break into the building from the outside. The FBI constantly played unpleasant sounds from huge speakers around the buildings in order to keep the sect members from sleeping, including retro hits by Nancy Sinatra. Bright lights were also used to constantly blind the Davidians.

The negotiations were unsuccessful and on the 51st day, a mysterious fire began to spread through the sect buildings. To this day, it is not known who started the fire, the surviving sect members claim that it was the FBI's oil (the pun is strong here) and the FBI claims that the sect members themselves decided to sacrifice themselves in a fit of apocalyptic madness. In the chaos and fire, at least 80 sectarians died, including the leader and his assistants, and the siege was ended. To make the tragedy even greater, many children who were hiding in an underground shelter whose exit was `accidentally` blocked by a parked tank were also burned. The controversies surrounding this event never subsided, the state services were seriously embarrassed, first the special forces being defeated by a group of sectarians, then the FBI who, with teams of psychologists, negotiators and a total siege using all available means, failed to force the sectarians to surrender, the media fiasco and unnecessary victims.

Most likely, the state armed services decided to show ``who's who'' through a bloody feast that would send a ``message'' to the then wave of sects and various secessionist militias and to liquidate the sect with the help of fire, trampling children with tanks and shooting people trying to get out of the hellish fires. Despite their relative remoteness, the members of the cult did nothing to deserve such an end and such torment. Their incredible courage in the almost two-month armed resistance against an incomparably stronger and better equipped opponent must be recognized.

It is only a pity that they did not manage to drag more members of the state services with them to the other world.

(Roger Mortis, 078)

Drama at the Brewery

Sincere faith and sincere idealism rarely bring anything good to the person who believes in them and adheres strictly to their principles. The best indicator of this is a case from Skopje that has long since succumbed to the ravages of time to the extent that even Google remains deaf and mute when searching for it.

Tome Stojanovski, a 34-year-old electrician from the village of Gorno Konjari, was a poster-boy for Yugoslav socialism and workers' self-government. After finishing primary school, he went to Skopje to learn a trade at the Kuzman Josifovski factory, from where he went to serve in the Yugoslav National Army to return and get a job at the Ministry of Labor. From there, he found his way to the Skopje Brewery in early 1965. Hardworking, hardworking and honest to the point of naivety, Tome was a member of all possible youth and `senior` communist organizations, a member of the workers` council of the enterprises in which he worked and in the Brewery he quickly became the president of the union branch. Maybe he was on a sure path to becoming the Macedonian Alija Sirotanović, who knows?

And everything would have been phenomenal and the road to Marx`s paradise open if Tome, due to his character, had not come into conflict with the reality in which the factory management was prone to malfeasance. Although ridiculous from today`s point of view, the irregularities in the work of the directors expressed in the protection of `suitable` employees, the employment of relatives and their placement in less demanding jobs as well as the promotion of the position that logically belonged to Tome - led to an unexpected climax...

Tome, as a union member, often criticized and called to account the managers of the Brewery who were city powerhouses at that time. Tome was probably a true supporter of self-management, but what did that matter to him when he was fired from his job in January 1966? Tome believed in the system and raised the issue of his dismissal before the municipal party committee...a move that not only did not help him but also led to his expulsion from the party!

Tome had planned to go to court to prove that he was right - when rumors spread by several factory snitches reached his ears that he had allegedly slept on the job, peeked into the women's toilets, was mentally ill, and many other similar stories that deeply offended the honest Tome. The bottom was reached in the last days of his employment, when he did not find support from his colleagues who privately supported him but kept quiet in public so as not to resent the management.

And what should Tome do now?

All he had left was a lot of anger and a Zbrojevka pistol in the popular 7.65mm caliber. And so, on February 10, 1966, Tome returned to the brewery for the last time under the pretext of having to pay off a debt about the tools. In the tool room, he expected to find the two informants he had learned had slandered him, engineer Vlado Hristovski, whom he killed immediately with a single shot to the head, and technician Božo Dapcevski, who was killed in an identical manner. From there, Tome continued his march to the administrative building, where he found director Kiro Vaninski, who had come out to see what was happening - and received three bullets from point blank range. The fourth victim was secretary Ljubo Dodevski, into whom he fired the remaining three bullets in the office.

Tome went outside, left his gun on the ground and said something like ``I finished my job, I did what had to be done. Call the police.'' He waited for the police and went into custody without any resistance.

The liquidation of four people was something unheard of at that time, poor in serious crimes and serial killers, phenomena that would appear much later, with the transition. Even more shocking was that Tome was not a delinquent or in any way connected to crime and violence - on the contrary, he was a hardworking and respected member of society. At the trial, he said that he wanted to fight with weapons against the bureaucracy and officials who made the life of every honest person miserable, claims that did not help him at all.

He was sentenced to death by shooting, later, after many appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court of Yugoslavia, which unexpectedly replaced his death sentence with life imprisonment. With the closed door of the cell in Idrizovo, the story of Tome Stojanovski, who was a Vigilante slightly before Harry Roberts was cool, also closed. The further fate of Tome is unknown; if he was 34 then, he would be 93 today, so it is not inconceivable that he would still be alive. How long he spent in prison, whether he was pardoned, whether he experienced the collapse of the system and what happened remains a mystery.

Some would say that this type of justice is suspicious and morally `dubious`, but from the current perspective there is no reason to condemn Tome... one can only regret that there are no more such characters nowadays.

(Roger Mortis, 077)

Eureca moment

It has been said that a paranoid person (unlike a customer who is supposedly always right) only needs to be right once, and in the case of unemployed German citizen Günter Stoll - the paranoid person was right and right.

A man in his mid-thirties, a completely ordinary, regular Joe who was no different from the rest except that in the last few years of his life he began to be interested in alternative views of reality. He did not share the information he collected from newspapers and books with anyone. From time to time, his relatives and his wife noticed him mentioning something to the effect that `they` were to blame for this or that or that `they` were making plans to destroy him.

When asked who `they` were...he answered confusedly with something like `you know...they`. In the last months of his life, he mentioned `them` more and more often, and on the fateful 25.10.1984, Günther was visibly nervous, as if he felt a threat to his safety. In the evening, he was more pensive and withdrawn than usual when he suddenly exclaimed ``Now I understand!`` after which he vaguely stated that an unknown group of people wanted to liquidate him or something similar. The eureka moment was followed by a code that popped into his head from somewhere and Günther wrote it down on paper, these were six capital letters (Y, O, G, T, Z, E) which he later crossed out (or underlined, it was not quite clear)...

Uneasy, Günther went to a bar in the town of Heigerselbach where he lived at around 11:00 PM and ordered a drink. After taking the first sip, he suddenly fainted and hit his head on a chair. After some time, he regained consciousness and left without drinking anything more. After about four hours, two truck drivers noticed a crashed Golf by the highway and a figure wearing a white jacket standing near the Golf. The police soon arrived and found Gunther sitting naked and badly beaten in the seat of the Golf. Although seriously injured, he managed to regain consciousness while the police pulled him out of the car. When asked what happened, he told them that "they" had beaten him and that it was four attackers whom he had seen for the first time in his life.

On the way to the hospital, Gunther succumbed to his injuries...

The police determined that the Golf had not been damaged at all by running off the road but had been pushed into a ditch, the autopsy and tests determined that there was no alcohol or drugs or medication in Gunther's blood. The investigation indicated that Gunther was stopped on the road, taken out of the Golf and beaten, then put back inside and the car was pushed aside. It was never determined who killed Gunther Stoll, nor was the reason for the murder known, and to this day it is not known who the killers were or who the figure in the white jacket was who was seen at the scene of the crime.

No less mysterious was the six-letter message (code?) he wrote and left for his wife. The organization of the killers and the lack of leaving traces indicated professionalism, which further indicated the fact that Gunther was on the trail of something. Whatever that something was, we will never know, although it is clear that no one would have organized the whole event just to kill some insignificant character from German werewolf society who supposedly suffered from occasional paranoid outbursts... and who predicted that something dramatic would happen on the day that turned out to be the last of his life...It remains unclear why he did not run away somewhere far away (and perhaps that is exactly what he was trying to do since he was found on the highway) and whether someone had put 'drugs in his juice' in the bar. It is also unclear what information he came across that would have put him in mortal danger due to its content.

What is quite clear is that he was not quite paranoid enough...

(Roger Mortis, 076)

Victim of Fate

There are many stories of buried treasure that tickle the imagination of modern treasure hunters. The forgotten legend of the gold of Ukrainian Hetman Pavlo Polubotok disappeared into the labyrinths of British banks, the mainstream legends of buried pirate treasures like that of Captain Kidd, the always annoying Nazis and their fabulous hiding places in the Alps, the mythical gold of the ``White'' counter revolutionary General Kolchak - they all kept company with the legend of General Yamashita's gold.

Due to an unexpected development of events, Tomoyuki Yamashita's gold has left the realm of legends and become a completely real fact and now stands lonely and sad, without its former friends who kept it company in the imaginary world. The slightly pathetic introduction aside, it was about the wealth that the maniacal Japanese hordes during the Second World War, and even before that - in the capacity of Termites - stole from all over Asia, according to the plan developed by the brother of Emperor Hirohito (something.....Hito) which practically meant that everything of value should be collected from the occupied territories and for the practical realization was appointed General Yamashita, a veteran of the genocidal actions of the Japanese `Kwantung` Army in China.

Like their equivalents from the insect world - the Japanese armies also fed the `Queen` with the plundered wealth. The myths about the Japanese honest warriors, heirs of the Bushido standards of behavior and warfare appeared later, in California. The Chinese, Korean and Filipino people had known this for a long time...

They stole what they stole and took it all to the Philippines, where they sorted and packaged it, melting down the gold and silver bars to erase the seals of the various original owners. They took the cargo to the port, loaded it onto ships and submarines and headed for Nippon. Probably deluded in their confidence due to their initial successes, they did not expect that the Americans would break through the Philippine Islands so quickly, with part of the massive wealth remaining untransported to Japan. Therefore, Yamashita ordered 175 underground storage facilities to be dug where all this would be buried, in anticipation of a counteroffensive, defeat of the Americans, God's wind... better times in any case.

Naturally, the workers who worked as slaves on the tunnels in which the treasure was buried were liquidated after the work was completed, a pragmatic procedure to prevent information from leaking out, although Sadism also played a role in all of this, as in the best Bushido custom. The locations were written down in code on paper and taken to Japan. Yamashita was captured by the Yankees, convicted as a war criminal and hanged, having taken the secret of the treasure to his grave. Or at least that's what was believed...About 20 years later, some poor guy from the Philippines named Rogelio Rojas, obsessed with the talk of the supposed treasure buried by the Japanese in his area, after much suffering, saving, and strenuous searches - came across one of the coded maps, apparently not all of them were transferred to Japan or someone made copies, in case patriotism wasn't hot enough after the war.

Rojas also found a relative who knew Japanese, they translated the map, deciphered it, and the poor guy gathered everything he had and everything he didn't have, and hired a few souls to dig together in the tunnel he found. After several months of digging and hard work... it turned out that the treasure was not supposed to be, but completely real! It was one of 175 secret caches. About 240 gold bars, silver, works of art, a golden Buddha stolen from Burma, jewelry...Rojas clearly had no respect for the religious relic because he turned the head of the Buddha... and for that unexpected effort he was rewarded with two handfuls of uncut diamonds that were hidden inside the pseudo-divine statue.

The poor guy becomes a billionaire...

And then a nasty, disgusting, worthless, ugly, insidious, whoreish plot twist comes into play. Disgusting, worthless, ugly, faggot, nasty, horrible, evil...did I mention nasty?!

Namely, the dictator of the Philippines at that time, a kleptocratic jackass who went by the name of Marcos - was also searching for the treasure, he had hired teams of archaeologists but all of it - in vain. Did one of the diggers brag drunk somewhere, did someone see the golden Buddha and the seven ingots they were carrying to sell or something else - Marcos found out about the event and sent the secret police to find poor Rogelio, they found him and arrested him, beat him, burned him with cigarettes, connected electrodes to his genitals...he saw it or not, Rojas told them where the treasure was and signed that he donated it to...the state. And the state was Marcos.

Later, various traumas followed, he was put in prison where he stayed for several years, he escaped but was caught and returned to prison, he was later released but he was not sure that he would survive until the fall of Marcos and the regime in 1986. His wife left him with the children, he couldn't see a thing from the beating, his hands were shaking, the poor guy didn't have a penny, even though he had everything for a short time. He managed to find a lawyer who agreed to file a lawsuit in Hawaii (where the fugitive dictator lived comfortably), the process dragged on and only in 1996 was a verdict issued to return his wealth along with the largest damages in the world's judicial history of 40 billion dollars, but in vain, the wealth had long since been transferred to accounts in Swiss and Cayman oases...

In vain and because Rojas did not wait for the court's decision, he died of a stroke in 1993, no doubt due to the consequences of the tragic events that happened to him. A terribly depressing story about a poor man, who would have been befitting a portrait by a new Theodore Gericault, the only one who could capture the tragedy of a dark fate. A tragedy resulting from so much pain and effort, saving, cutting back on daily bread, success in finding a treasure that few even believed existed, without deceiving or hurting anyone... so that in the end, instead of enjoying the fruits of his labor and fanatical perseverance - Rojas ends up a ruin, abandoned by everyone, sitting alone in front of his house, probably unable to understand and unwilling to surrender to the disgusting twists of fate.

If there was ever a need to invent a concept opposite to a happy ending, then it was in this case. There are still 174 tunnels, 174 lures for adventurers from all over the world, 174 potential tragedies...

(Roger Mortis, 075)

The White Rose

The seas and oceans do not have an exclusive contract with the universe for mysterious events, but rivers and lakes also hide their secrets. Okay, some lakes like Lake Michigan are the size of an ocean, so shipwrecks are not a rare occurrence.

But some shipwrecks are still unique for many reasons. In 1875, the schooner Rosa Belle with 10 people on board capsized for unknown reasons. After some time, the capsized ship, retaining some buoyancy, was thrown by the winds and currents right into the harbor of Grand Haven, a grotesque situation when the ship appeared on its own at the dock (!?). But there was no trace of the ten passengers and crew members and their fate was never clarified.

And all of that would have been just another tragic mysterious episode, a footnote in local history if the ship hadn't been preserved long enough to make it worth repairing and renovating. And if a cult hadn't gotten involved...After they renovated it, the ship had been in service for almost half a century. In 1921, it was chartered by the House of David sect, a Russian cult known for its progressive views, orgy affairs, founding a godly baseball club, building its own town, and requiring all men to wear beards.

And when a Russian cult boards a ship with the word Rose in its name, even White, nothing good can come of it.

In the fall of 1921, the ship again appeared on its own in a harbor, this time Ann Arbor, again capsized and again without any of the people on board, in this case without the 11 sectarians who had chartered the schooner. The sectarians suffered the same fate as the unfortunate ones of 1875, disappearing without a trace for all time and eternal memory. The reasons for the capsizing were not known. The weather and conditions were quite good, although the ship after its appearance was slightly damaged, the cabin with the steering wheel was almost destroyed and there was a hole in the hull above the waterline. This led to the conclusion that it was a collision, but no ship reported such a thing and no witnesses ever appeared to witness such an event, nor was there any word about repairing the damaged ship that could have possibly participated in the collision.

It was never determined which mysterious ship hit the Rosa Belle. Or maybe it was the Ascension, a long-awaited religious event by the better-informed Russians when the righteous souls would be taken directly to heaven while the wicked would remain on earth...Regardless of the capsizing, as the crowning of the bizarre, the ship in both cases remained above water and in both cases no one was saved and not only that but everyone completely disappeared without a trace.

After this incident, rumors began to circulate that the ship was taking victims at a certain time, as if it had a mind of its own and one of the theories later was that the passengers from 1875 entered a time hole, appeared in 1921, rented an old dilapidated ship, waited for the Rosa Belle to sail to the same place where they disappeared (and indeed the capsizings occurred almost in the identical place) - and at full speed crashed into their former-present enemy ship. Or was it a future one?

Time paradoxes have always given me headaches, so I'm not sure the latter theory makes any sense. After the second incident, it was decided not to risk the Beautiful Rose again, the ship was dismantled just in case and ended up as a source of firewood, sending the final symbolism of the hellish fires where it may have sent the sectarians for their heresy, orgies, and sectarianism.

(Roger Mortis, 074)

Elderly Dynamics

In the miserable misfortunes known as Balkan societies, the cult of respect for the elderly is omnipresent. Perhaps less so today than ever, at least judging by the chatter of elderly people who complain that there is no more respect for the elderly, the young are described as more furious, uncultured, evil and unfamiliar with the default value of old age.

I believe that every generation from the time of  Biblical Noah and even earlier from the Anunnaki to the present has complained that the younger generations are ``stupid`` and that in ``their time`` there was order, respect and discipline. The classic generation gap, the malice of elderly characters who are jealous of someone else's youth or just good old whining? There is a whole arsenal of proverbs and sayings about the supposed wisdom of the elderly, it is sung in folk songs and stories, myths and legends are full of ``aging`` qualities. Adolescence and childhood as concepts are relatively recent, given the shift in age boundaries compared to the past as a result of increased life expectancy. Childhood was invented by Charles Dickens in 1844.

Just as `old age` no longer begins at 40 as it once did (and somewhat earlier for women) but much later, perceptions are changing as well. Truth be told, there is a counterweight to this cult, and that is the cult of youth/children, but that is another topic...

What are the qualities that are worthy of respect in senior citizens?

Why should the elderly be privileged over others?

Are the elderly perhaps considered `keepers` of tradition?

First of all, the question should be asked whether there are any 'young' people in these parts because the young have an old-fashioned way of thinking, they inherited cowardice from the old who still nurse the new generations with fear and humility, every power is sacred to them, every authority is absolute. The exterior expressed in a 25-year-old body only conceals the 96-year-old perception of the creature that is hidden inside that garment. His or her fingers may be fast on a keyboard or a touch-screen, they may have sex incomparably more than their pitiful predecessors and they may be extremely liberal in terms of soft drugs, gambling and alcohol. They watch different movies and listen to different music than their parents, grandparents and other animals - but these are those insignificant, skin deep differences because the clothes and the hairstyle and the music and Twitter - come from the outside world into the empty head of the young person. What they emanate from themselves around them is the same morbid stupidity and total lack of social awareness about any matter that will be crucial in their lives and in the lives of their future offspring...Therefore, do not scratch below the surface if you do not want to see rot.

The generation gap is not something big in the Balkans, it never has been, except for the technology that separates them - the other aspects are very similar or completely identical, so if we take the life fundamentals of a 19-year-old and an 80-year-old, it will be determined that they think according to identical patterns and have a noticeable absence of social awareness. If we go into the more distant past and notice what folk proverbs and wisdom have been preserved through the centuries, we will reach the glorification of stupidity, fear, obedience, spinelessness and sycophancy. The deception is that each generation probably prolongs the myth of old wisdom in order to give itself a false value and in time to poison the well from which the younger ones will drink tomorrow.

The `wise` generations sold the future of today's generation for 150 euros per month. Today's generation sells the future of the next one for 200 euros. And a sandwich at a rally, of course. And that cycle seems never to end. The only hope is the catastrophic birth rate, emigration and growing mortality. Here, a few Kilotons or a suitable biological agent, strategically dispersed over the peninsula, would help...Although generalization is a sword with at least two edges, sometimes it imposes itself with regard to current situations. It is not an attack on specific individuals or their grandparents to whom they are attached and do not like such a generalization. The conversation is about the values ​​that are passed down generationally and whether/how much they are worth.

And they are worth almost nothing.

What`s more, if you go back centuries - the peninsula was a miserable place to live, a perpetuation of shit, never an inch away from a bare struggle for existence and survival. A bowed head flies and is not eaten. An interesting coincidence, at the height of the period with the highest standard of living of the population in the history of these regions, during the so-called ``Ante Marković period``, the people apparently found themselves in an unrecognizable situation of being outside the struggle for bare life and completely shocked and confused, instead of following the consolidation of that beginning - a bloody orgy of evil followed spread over a decade of wars, hunger, diseases, unprecedented theft and corruption.

In the past, there was no class in these regions that was outside the struggle for bare survival, and today there is such a small insignificant group of political-criminal origin whose survival requires the suffering of the majority of the population. And that is the worst possible option...The centuries-old struggle for survival without the ability to raise one's head even slightly above the threshold of the shit that threatens to enter the mouth of the individual at any moment, to take a breath in order to do something more significant than survival - is at the root of the curse of many meridians, including the poor peninsula, condemned to thrive on a diet of delusions and slavery.

The answers to the questions posed are self-evident. There are almost no qualities that are worthy of respect in senior citizens. Elderly people should not have any privileges in relation to others. The traditions that are ``preserved`` by the elderly are a cheap mythomania worse than a random invention of a five-year-old child. The semblance of a possible decent life here depends proportionally on how much one will part ways with those ``values`` once and for all. It is probably already too late for that and one is just waiting for the curtain to fall, an act that is never pleasant to watch but is the logical result of centuries and centuries of morbid stupidity.

(Roger Mortis, 073)

Trodmore

One fine day in August 1898 (it is not known whether the day was fine, but in any case it is a nice way to start a text) an elegantly dressed guy with perfect manners entered the editorial office of the then most famous British sports newspaper `The Sportsman` and introduced himself as Mr. Martin and his purpose was to report the holding of a new horse race in Trodmore, a small town in Cornwall. He had with him a flawlessly printed race program, cards with the characteristics of the jockeys and horses and a confirmation from the municipality of Trodmore for the upcoming event, so everything is in order. He duly paid for advertising the race and left.

Since the times were Victorian and no one doubted the word of rich gentlemen, the newspaper announced the race and so far there was nothing strange. Bookmakers at that time were informed by newspapers and by telegraph in an attempt to compile betting odds, and so this time they compiled a `bulletin` that also included the race at Trodmore. The best odds were a horse with a ratio of 1/5, which means that if that horse won, for every pound invested, five were returned. And so one fine day, just before the start of the race, another fine, gallant gentleman appeared who placed some 2,000 pounds on the favorite horse.

The day of the race came and later Mr. Martin appeared in the newspaper's editorial office again, to bring the results, the winner was the horse that we have already mentioned. The other fine gentleman, the one who had paid at the bookmakers (the bookmaker's office of...), went to the bookmaker's office with a copy of the newspaper (as proof of the results), naturally withdrew 10,000 pounds and left. Later, other characters appeared with smaller amounts, but the bookmaker's window stated that the odds were 2/5, i.e. two pounds equals five, probably an unintentional mistake. This caused confusion and the bookmakers called the Sportsman's editorial office to check the odds. They were told it was 1/5, but just in case, they decided to call Trodmore and check on the spot.

The problem was that Trodmore did not exist, much less was there a horse race in the non-existent town...

One can only imagine the expressions on the editor's and the bookmaker's faces when they found out. A sportsman was hit by a scandal for publishing fictitious races and the bookmaker was left short by 10,000 pounds, I am very much out of luck at that time if you know that a worker earned about 50 pounds a year. Mr. `Martin` and the character who paid and collected the payment...needless to say, were never seen again, they left relatively rich and were never caught, not only that but no one got a clue about their identity. No weapons, no violence, no hatred - they just used the style over substance situation that reigned in the psyche of the then paradise.

A little later another group of betting enthusiasts flew into the prism of public interest. That event was the stand-off between the players and the management of Manchester United and Liverpool in 1915, when United had to win in the last round to avoid being relegated from the league and Liverpool was safe in the middle and so they agreed on a 2-0 victory for United. At that time, those clubs were not particularly hostile towards each other as they were later, which left room for such `cooperation`. The match was crap, Liverpool behaved as if it was their first time playing football, there was even a penalty for them but they missed it with a shot three meters above the goal and all that was enough to raise suspicions with the Football Association.

Perhaps all of this would have gone unpunished if certain nice gentlemen had not paid a heavy sum on the correct score 2-0 for United, with odds of 1/7 and walked away with a good sum - that was already a sign of alarm and in a short time the F.A. in cooperation with Scotland Yard, they uncovered the fraud, three Manchester United players and four Liverpool players were suspended for life from playing football and never played again, the remaining players, coaches and management received suspended sentences, the clubs escaped without points being deducted, they were `lucky` because it was the last match before the league was suspended due to the Great War, and thus they continued in the First League after the war, albeit with a larger double-red stain on the club's honor...

(Roger Mortis, 072)

The Good Citizen

The railway has always been a target of armed robberies, the names of famous criminals from the Wild West like Butch Cassidy and Jesse James or Bruce Reynolds and Ronnie Biggs from the `heist of the century` in Britain are almost household names and their fame seems not to fade but to be prolonged with each new film, documentary or book dedicated to them.

In all that colorful gallery of characters, one stands out who, with his self-awareness and anonymity, is like a black sheep in the robber community, primarily because of his double life and pronounced Robin Hood complex, and probably also because of his ideological motivation. In December 1946, an unforgettable robbery took place on the railway line between Troyes and Chaumont in France, in which a single masked man appeared with a gun in front of the shocked guards of the postal car of train no. 426 and addressed them with the words - ``Don't be afraid, just calm down, I need the money looted from the state and nothing more.'' He left with 2.5 million Francs, today's equivalent to some 7.5 million euros. And that would have been nothing special or significant if after a few weeks all over France about 500 people had not received a small parcel with 4,500 Francs (13,500 euros) - which came as a gift from heaven...

This event would be the first in a series of similar ones in the next seven years, behind which stood Barthélemy Varze, at first glance a pious and modest guy, a good and conscientious citizen and a family man who did not stand out in any way from the environment in which he lived. Except perhaps for his penchant for good food and good wine, with an emphasis on canned chicken, a specialty of a single factory in France...The only thing that, if I may say so, 'stood out' about Varze was the fact that he had never voted in elections, local, regional or national, and when asked why he did not vote, he would answer - 'I have never voted because I do not agree with the system. I do not want to know anything about a state that is wasting billions of francs while thousands of children are suffering in dire poverty.'

For some, this might have been a sign of alarm, but the good people of Montribourg were not particularly perceptive anyway...The next robbery took place on March 23, 1948 on the Périgueux-Brive line, where the train was transporting municipal money, 250,000 francs (or 750,000 today's euros). A copy of the first attack - this one also went off without a hitch. The third attack was on December 1 of the same year on the Rodez-Severac line and the loot was 100,000 francs.

The police began to suspect an organized group that was `serially` robbing trains, and the events began to become a topic of conversation among the local population. Barthélemy had come to terms with the double identity to such an extent that in conversations with his friends he complained about the police's inability to deal with such impudent robbers! The railways began to hire armed guards, a fact that did not prevent the next (fourth) attack - at the Longre railway station in February 1950. This time the situation turned out to be tense, the guard did not listen to Varze, who ordered him to hand over his weapon at gunpoint - but hit Varze with his fist and tried to take the revolver out of its holster. Varze did not hesitate, fired three bullets, one of which was fatal for the guard because it hit him in the head full of empty heroism at the expense of the state. The loot was 3,086,000 francs, which would remain a record single sum `expropriated` by Varze. The mystery of the money shipments arriving at addresses of the poor was enough for the police to suspect a large and well-organized group. Whether Barthelemy acted alone or had helpers, whether he had 'greased' employees at the post office and in general how the money reached the people has never become clear...The fifth action, in February 1951, a train on the Paris-Dijon line in which the guards were obedient and the bags were full of 1,120,000 francs - was a turning point in the investigation because the efforts of the police through their informants and informants in the underground to find out anything - were in vain - leading to the conclusion that it was a Lone Wolf or a small group, a renegade Robin Hood character who probably had no record or any problems with the 'law' before. Plainclothes cops began to nap at various train stations and travel by train, armed and ready in case the unknown benefactor appeared from somewhere.

However, the public expected results and the promotions were superior and therefore without any special evidence - two petty criminals were arrested and charged with the robberies and murder of the station guard in Longre. Varze, in accordance with his convictions, did not want to let innocent people suffer because of him and therefore sent a letter to the court in which he listed the serial numbers of the bags of cash as proof that the anonymous letter was indeed from the real perpetrator. The judicial authorities were slow in their reaction and after several months the wrongly suspected were still in custody, which prompted Barthélemy to send another letter - this time with two bullets inside addressed to Judge Le Pen, which stated that in case the suspects were not released - the same bullets would end up in the judge's head...

After the release of the two ``scapegoats'', Varze went into hiding for some time. An anecdote from that period best describes the character of Varze, namely, in winter time, he got stuck in the snow with his car, when a peasant came across him with a horse-drawn cart. When asked to be pulled out, the peasant hired the horses that pulled Varze's car out of the snow. In addition to the verbal gratitude, 1,500 francs that he had with him (4,500 euros) were added as a reward for the shocked peasant...

On September 12, 1952, Varze set off on another 'hike', this time on the Saint-Étienne-Clermont-Ferrand line. He returned home with 585,000 francs and the idea of ​​writing a book about his life, actions and views on life, since he was aware that the undertaking would not last forever...April 10, 1953, attack on the Le Mans-Tours line with 270,000 francs taken from the state. On October 23 of the same year, Barthélemy Varze's last attack, the station in Gisées, targeted 350,000 francs, but this time the money was protected by several armed guards joined by several plainclothes police officers. Varze arrived at the station as an ordinary passenger, with a paid ticket and a bag, and planned to escape in a seized vehicle. The situation escalated quickly, a shootout began in which two guards were wounded, which allowed Varze to escape despite the hail of bullets with the help of a seized car - but this time he left behind a bag containing one of his favorite cans that were produced in only one factory...

This clue was enough for the not-so-bright investigators who were working on the case. On November 21, 1953, the police surrounded Varze's house in Montribourg. Varze had enough weapons to try to break in, but the fact that his wife and several relatives were in the house and would be in mortal danger if shooting began - he decided to surrender peacefully. A few days later, the police, guided by their innate genius - arrested Varze's wife because they believed that it was impossible for her to have known nothing about her husband's actions. She was later sentenced to five years in prison, although the fact remained that she was not familiar with her husband's secret life - like no one else in the world...

Inspector Tagan, who was assigned to interrogate Varze, described the subject surprisingly accurately...`People want to believe that he is crazy. Personally, I am firmly convinced that he is not crazy at all, on the contrary, he is an exceptionally smart and impudent man. A man who lived a double life in all areas, a contradictory and conflicted personality, uneducated yet writing books, serving double military service yet being a fierce anti-militarist, seemingly a fanatical Catholic - but in fact a fanatical Anarchist, a man who cared for everyone, who distributed money to poor widows and sick children, a man who left crumbs every day for the birds that landed in his yard - and who did not hesitate to shoot a human being when he was in trouble. I cannot agree with the claims of some who say that Varze is just an ordinary criminal because he is more like a literary character who escaped from the pages of a book.

Barthélémy Varze, the guy who robbed and gave away over 8 million francs (24+ million euros) - was found dead in his cell in January 1954. The man who changed thousands of destinies for the better (or at least tried to) and who never stole private property, only `state` money - voluntarily went into the abyss of anonymity as an anomaly that must not exist in such a world, a ray of light that revealed too much in the field of view of a paradise accustomed to narrow band vision...

(Roger Mortis, 071)