Aral Sea Disaster

Lake or Sea, that is the question!

In the field of nature conservation, there are undisputed champions of pollution, soil degradation and human misery. And who are they? Why, the Soviets of course. Why did all communist regimes on the planet  never give a fuck about environment? Is it something that Karl Marks wrote? Or was it Friedrich Engels? Or parhaps even Vladimir Ilic Ulyanov known as Lenin? The mystery goes on and on, and even today we have the Chinese communist party from the fraudulent "People`s Republic" (as opposed to the real China, simply Republic of, temporarily stationed in Formosa) as a Giga poluter on a global scope. Other commie regimes such as North Korea just ride the trend set up by the founding fathers of Bolshevism.

And no other disaster is more poignant ana representative as the case of now barely extant Aral Sea. Yes, the Soviets managed to destroy a whole sea! But what is Aral sea and how did it became one fifth of it`s former size, almost as large as total area of Serbia before?

The Aral Sea (sometimes referred as Aral Lake) is a large inland body of water located in Central Asia, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, it has been shrinking dramatically since the 1960`s due to extensive irrigation projects that diverted water from its tributary rivers, primarily for agriculture, especially cotton farming. This environmental disaster has led to a significant loss of the sea's surface area, turning parts of it into desert and causing severe ecological, economic, and health problems for local communities. The shrinking of the Aral Sea is considered one of the worst environmental tragedies of the 20th century. If not the worst, period.

The Aral Sea, once one of the world's largest inland bodies of water, was significantly affected by Soviet Union policies. During the Soviet era, large-scale irrigation projects aimed to boost cotton production in Central Asia, particularly in Uzbekistan took place. These projects diverted water from the rivers feeding the Aral Sea, leading to its dramatic shrinkage. Unfortunately (again), corruption and mismanagement played a huge role in these decisions, prioritizing economic gains over environmental sustainability. As a result, the shrinking of the Aral Sea has caused ecological and economic hardships for the region never experienced before!

This over-irrigation we mentioned led to a significant decline in the sea's water levels, causing environmental devastation, loss of fisheries, and health problems for local communities due to the exposed seabed's toxic dust. The level of irrigation was unsustainable but nobody wanted to bring up that fact to the general secretary of the Bolshevik party, be it Hruscov or Breznev. After the sea dried up, thousands of tons of lethal dioxins were left to be spread by winds along with salt causing salinization of nearby population areas.

Later on, Andropov, Cernenko and Gorbacov administrations did bugger all to alleviate the disaster.

The term "Soviet white elephant" typically refers to large, expensive, and often underused or abandoned projects or structures built during the Soviet era. These could include massive industrial facilities, sports complexes, or other infrastructure that, despite their size and cost, ended up being inefficient or impractical, sometimes becoming symbols of waste or misallocation of resources. The phrase draws a parallel to the "white elephant," which is a costly and burdensome possession. Stalin for example wanted to build the "Palace of the Soviets" ultra high and spectacularly wide object for the glory of working class who couldn`t afford to buy a flat there anyway. Being a creature of maniacal disposition it`s not that unthinkable that he planned to level up the whole of central Moscow only to rise that monstrosity to the skyes. 

Back to the Aral Sea, there`s not much left of it. Within a decade or so, there will be no water in the basin that once had a whole inland mega-lake, larger than half of countries of the world by area in kilometers square.

Just to add insult to injury, Soviets built a center for Biological warfare experiments. All kinds of disgusting agents from Botulism to Variola Vera and Anthrax were weaponized on the Vozrozdeniya peninsula. Today an islanddue to receding water, this ghastly and damned place is abandoned with facilities being closed since 1993. Several outbreaks amongst local wildlife were observed in the years after it`s closure. Nowadays it seems that all the patogens there are extinct although you never know. It`s not far from reality to consider another outbreak in years to come. Let`s hope not. And that`s what remains. Hope and not much more.

(Roger Mortis, 094)

Nightmares on Discount

His wife had always wondered why Axel had such a hard time falling asleep.

He was used to falling asleep with a tight hug around his `better half` and that habit hadn't left him even after four years of living together. Maybe he was compensating for something from the past that he rarely talked about, maybe it was about (too) strongly expressed emotions, or maybe it was completely simple and most laconic, it was just a matter of character. That night, after a long time, a dream appeared, completely simple and devoid of drama, but still meeting all the conditions to be called a `Nightmare`.

The location of the dream was undefined, as often happens during trips through the kingdom of Morpheus. Three people were recognizable, one adult male and one adult female, and the third was a child in a worn-out child's jacket and obviously slightly too-large shoes. The child had a slightly surprised expression and his gaze fell on the local kiosk where newspapers, cigarettes and various trinkets were sold. In addition to the pictures of football players from some undefined championship...Looking at the pictures reminded him that he had recently seen albums in which some children stuck pictures, and a picture with a colorful crest on which there was a red lion on a yellow-blue background and under it the word Scotland appeared crystal clear in his mind, on another there was a strange stadium with beautiful green grass and on a third - a black player with funny hair, which if not the child, at least the dreamer would have remembered as a Dreadlocks hairstyle.

Since he had been conditioned from a young age to stop looking for toys, chocolates and small things in time, the child did not dare to cast a questioning glance at his parents. But the temptation was not destined to pass by itself, the father stopped in front of the kiosk and bought a pack of cigarettes, just a moment before a teenager said, "Give me ten packs of those stickers," followed by a vague comment from the seller that he would get a lot of "doubles." The child did not know what "doubles" were and that did not even intrigue him, what caught his attention were the packets, shiny and thin, which hid the ultimate childish desire, the secret of what stickers would come with various players, stadiums and colorful crests.

The child fell further and further behind, dragging himself and turning constantly towards the kiosk, just as his mother and father slowly moved away from it...`Dad, buy me a sticker` were the words he quietly uttered at that moment. The father first looked at the child with an expression of fear and then turned to the mother with whom he exchanged a look, understandable only to them. The mother started some `pedagogical` conversation with her son, something along the lines of `what are you going to do with the pictures, you're already big, you've turned seven, you should have sympathy for the school and not collect pictures like babies`...

The reality was that both parents at that moment had enough money at least for an album and maybe for a few packages, but that money had long ago been intended for something completely different, maybe half a kilo of mixed minced meat and two kilos of potatoes that would last them at least another day or two... Whatever the exact purpose of that money was, the child was not interested in any of that, he just knew that he wanted at least one package of pictures. No accountant in the world would have managed to balance the child's desire and current priorities, so the choice was expected...

The parents applied the tactic of `strategic withdrawal`, rapidly moving away from the traffic and at the same time the object of the naive child's temptation. The child tried in vain to pull his father's sleeve away, then tried the same with his mother...whose gazes met again, but this time with a different expression, a mixture of anger and sadness on the father's face, a confused look somewhere to the side at the mother's...The child lowered his head and somehow didn't have the strength to feel any more sad than he already was. He continued walking past his parents back to the house.

And then his gaze suddenly fixed on a package with pictures blowing in the wind down the street. He was overjoyed to find a package in the middle of the street. He headed towards it and picked it up from the ground, all the while maintaining a smile from ear to ear.

`Mom, Dad, look what I found' was his first reaction.

The parents turned to see what was happening and noticed the child's beaming face holding a package in his hands. What immediately became clear to the parents was that the package was probably empty, because there is no child who would throw such a thing on the ground before opening it. A little more slowly but surely, this also became clear to the child who started to cry when he noticed that the package was torn and that there was nothing inside. However, wiping the tears from his reddened cheeks, the child put the empty package in his pocket, calmed down and continued walking forward.

At that moment, Axel woke up, reluctantly freed himself from their mutual embrace and sat up on the bed. It was too late to try to fall asleep again, but for consolation there was more than enough time left for the regular morning ritual with caffeine and nicotine, poor substitutes in terms of fulfilling instant happiness compared to a package of stickers in some other time or in some other, completely distorted dimension...

(Roger Mortis, 093)

Ambivalence

These days it is almost impossible to avoid the news about the mass migration of Syrian citizens across the Balkans. The media reports on the situation at length and extensively, and all this is followed by a bunch of ``analysts`` who will inform the public from an ``professional`` angle about the seriousness of the situation...And the situation is serious. Tragic and senseless, but also completely unsuitable for empathy, at least not beyond the extent to which it is evolutionarily built into humans. The image of a child screaming in the arms of its parents while waiting for transit is disturbing (except for sociopaths, patriots and psychopaths) but all of this gains full context only if one scratches a little below the surface.

The situation in Syria (and Iraq), as places with the oldest continuous state apparatuses on the planet (in various forms) dating back 6,000 and perhaps 6,500 years - is yet another in an endless string of unequivocal evidence of the tragedy of statism, a reminder of the evil that the state symbolizes and of the total irony in the existence of statists as individuals and as groups, blind fanatical believers in the righteousness of the state that in one way or another has been destroying them for thousands of years, so that it will continue in the summer of 2015, when those same statists set off on a 5,000 km journey to escape from 'their' state and reach other states that are a lesser evil than theirs, although for the sake of truth with a much younger statist tradition - where no one wants them and whose politicians are up to their necks in the shit that is happening in the Levant.

Allegedly, Damascus was the city with the longest continuous urban `experience` on the planet, and Uruk the oldest city in general, although with a long-term interrupted continuity. And there, in the places with the oldest state tradition on the planet - there is no indication that time is an ally of the myth of the state as the `savior` of man. On the contrary, there, as everywhere, regardless of whether statism has existed for 500, 1000 or 6,500 years - the raw reality is quite clear, the state steals, kills, demolishes and rapes.

When one looks from this perspective, suddenly any humanistic urge towards millions of blind believers in statism subsides (faith in Allah is just a sad addition, a value-added tax on millennial idiocy). And the Balkan people, who are currently watching the migration live - don't worry at all, if any problem arises - the state will protect you, all you have to do is love it, invest strong and sincere emotions, pay taxes and respect your `social contract` that you probably have framed at home, on the wall, between the icon and the portrait of a random `national hero`.Really, who is to blame for the Syrians for making such a bad `social contract`, similar to the one made by the inhabitants of Yugoslavia since the beginning of the nineties? Why are they fleeing the territory of their state that persistently defends them, which they have loved since birth and perhaps even before that, in their mother's womb, the state that took care of them as if they were their own children?

Or all those billions over the centuries, killed by this or that state, all because of the fine print on the last page of the `social contract`, a major consequence of a small misunderstanding?

They will never learn...

Or they`ll need glasses.

Or contact lenses.

Or more death and destruction...

(Roger Mortis, 092)

Cruising Rats

No one is surprised by flyers that include photos of a random dog or cat that has disappeared alongside a contact number. It happens. But for a ship to disappear completely in this day and age is certainly something extraordinary. And not just any ship, a humble fishing trawler or a small sailboat, but a passenger cruise liner... that disappeared on its own.

That's exactly what happened to the ``Lyubov Orlova``, a Russian cruise ship back in 2013.

Built in Yugoslavia in 1976 as one of eight identical ``Mariya Yermolova`` class passenger ships built for the USSR under an alleged agreement between Tito and Brezhnev to help the South Slavic shipbuilding industry, this ship specialized in cruises around Antarctica, the least anthropophilic continent of all. The ``Lyubov Orlova`` was not named as it was due to some post-Soviet shipping company's erotomaniac obsession with eagles. Not even with falcons or hawks. It was simply about Stalin's favorite film diva, Lyubov Petrovna Orlova, the Bolshevik counterpart to Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr.

The ship ended its career in 2012 and was towed to the Dominican Republic where it was to be cut into pieces. Arnaud, however, broke away from the tugboat that was towing it to its final port and gained a mind of its own. Since it did not like to end up recycled, it fled across the Atlantic and since there was no active GPS device on it and it was not difficult for it to disappear...It was last seen in January 2014 not far from Ireland.

Speculations spoke of rats on the ship who suddenly found themselves on a luxury cruise and who, after eating everything that could be eaten even by a rat - faced with hunger, turned on themselves and a rodent cannibalistic ball began. The source of this information, which appeared in the British tabloids, is unknown, as is the source of the distress signals received from the ship, from a radio device designed exclusively for that purpose - and this long after the disappearance. Rats are adaptable creatures, but it is too much to expect them to evolve into radio operators in such a short time. Another possibility is that (because the ship was hanging around Ireland), the `Lyubov Orlova` was kidnapped by Leprechauns who took the ship to Tir-na-Nog, the `paradise` according to Celtic pagan mythology.

Leprechauns aside, it remains unclear what combination of incompetence, stupidity and mystical circumstances allowed a 5,000-ton ship to disappear sailing across the Atlantic, without propulsion, without fuel, without navigation and without people on board, in full view of the local navies and coastguards. Sea currents are powerful, but not so powerful as to hide an entire steel monster from view.

Apparently the sea remains the final frontier and `Lyubov Orlova` a post-modernist variant of `Marie Celeste`.

(Roger Mortis, 091)

Island of Pain

Islands, due to their specific location and natural isolation from the mainland, have always had a special place in the agendas of those in power. Devil's Island near French Guiana, a notorious prison for the most hardened criminals from the `metropolitan city` and opponents of the state, immortalized in the books of two former convicts and a phenomenal film starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen.

Goli Otok and St. Gregory, the traumatic symbols of Yugoslav political persecution, Robben Island, west of Cape Town, the apartheid response to Goli Otok which served as a warehouse for disobedient blacks, Alcatraz - perhaps the most famous prison of all time and of course Vozroždenija, the former island which due to a series of `genius` decisions of Soviet politicians and the tragedy of the Aral Sea experienced transformation into a peninsula, a former secret center for testing chemical and biological weapons, host to explosions of bombs with Anthrax, Bubonic Plague and Variola Vera. None of these centers of evil can be compared to the continuous, centuries-long existence of misery, death and misfortune on the islet of Poveglia, located in an attractive position in the Venetian lagoon that is a magnet for millions of tourists every year.

Although politics played a secondary role in the history of Poveglia, the bizarreness of its history is difficult to digest. Due to the frequent visits of the bacteria `Yersinia Pestis` which, through bloodthirsty fleas and the mediation of rats - was on the verge of exterminating humanity in the `old world` several times - the authorities of the Venetian Republic decided that the nearby island was an ideal place for Quarantine, a 40-day isolation of potential plague sufferers. Later, the island was promoted to a mass grave for the victims of that disease and an isolation center for those who were already sick. Poveglia quickly gained such a reputation that even the Benedictine Order rejected it as a gift from the `Venetian Doge`.

After the fall of Venice, the other `owners` of this piece of land tried to make it look good and to persecute the superstitions that surrounded it. Fortifications, a lighthouse, customs terminals were built, but all of that was doomed in advance, whether due to superstition or a real curse that followed the island is difficult to say, depending on how much one believes in the supernatural. Since the plague was not in fashion at that time, patients with other serious infectious diseases were brought to the island to die in isolation...

Normally, if a tiny island-slash-mass grave of more than 100,000 plague victims had its reputation justifiably tarnished - it was completed in the twentieth century when a prison was built for perpetrators of the most serious crimes, the criminally insane, so that after the First World War, the influx of mentally ill young people, a consequence of the ``war that was supposed to end all wars,'' was resolved by building an insane asylum to house the mentally ill. The resident psychiatrist in the asylum (whose name, unfortunately, has not been recorded by history, and therefore from now on we will call him Giuseppe) was a creative doctor who fought against madness in his own way. Since Lobotomy had not yet crystallized as a procedure (that would happen some ten years later), Giuseppe, on his own, amateurishly engaged in lobotomies of `difficult` patients, using adapted kitchen utensils and other unsuitable devices as if they had come from a script for a cheap horror film.

In his years of hard struggle with madness, Giuseppe fell victim to the altar of mental health, and went crazy himself and one night butchered several patients with a knife. The next morning, complaining that the spirits of the murdered began to haunt him, Giuseppe climbed the lighthouse and threw himself from there, as another in a series of suicides that had become a custom in Poveglia.

The asylum existed until 1968 when it was finally closed, the lunatics were redistributed to various asylums on the mainland, and with the closure of the institution - the island was completely abandoned and remains abandoned to this day, an uninhabited neglected tragic pearl a few hundred meters from one of the most famous tourist centers on the planet. The locals were not eager to visit the island, and foreigners...it seems they are not thrilled about visiting a rat infested mass grave either, and therefore the island remains aloof from the events. Only the occasional foolish `ghost hunter` heads there to `record` the alleged wailing voices of the suffering souls who have not found peace in the afterlife and have remained in `no man's land`, between the two worlds, trapped in eternal waiting.

(Roger Mortis, 090)

Just Do It !

It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which the entities Web Design, Comet and Castration would merge at some common point, I do not believe that there is a writer who could in a `coherent` way combine all of that and create a convincing narrative. But where imagination is powerless, there is reality with its sometimes unlikely but completely real dynamics. And that reality for hundreds of people in the United States, from 1975 to 1997 was known under the name `Heaven's Gate`.

The start of the trend of religiously motivated suicides does not belong to a sectarian but to the mainstream religion of Judaism and about 960 members of it (a plagiarism of an obscure desert cult and the aborted religion of the psycho Akhenaten) who in 74 AD chose to take their own lives faced with the alternative - surrender into the hands of pagan Roman legionaries...This trend experienced its `revival` in the nineties when extreme sectarians from all over the world united in their madness and triumph of irrationality, faced with the appearance of three zeros in the number of the year that was the last in the second Millennium.

In the already mentioned year 1997, the comet Hale-Bopp was clearly visible in the heavens with the naked eye, perhaps some random virtual traveler on this blog reading these lines will recall the spectacular sight from 28 years ago when the celestial body was clearly visible for several months with its long tail in the sky, faintly illuminating the night and attracting all eyes pointed upwards. Precisely that phenomenon that in ordinary people caused nothing more than mild discomfort mixed with respect and the occasional random thought about the significance or lack there of of the good old planet Earth - for a small group of sectarians meant final salvation, deliverance from earthly suffering, ascension to a new level of existence and of course - returning home, as it was written on their logo - Heaven's Gate - Away team!

Home was an alien planet from some galaxy unknown to the public, an idea that simmered within the walls of the brains of leader Marshall Applewhite and his pseudo-wife Bonnie Nettles who did not live to see judgment day in physical form but appeared as a spiritual concept of her quasi-husband after death...The world, faced with a constant avalanche of shit, at least for the last 6,500 years - was a foreign place for the sect members who were convinced that they were nothing more than physical containers of alien consciousness.

Hardcore from start to finish, the sect was innovative, in step with the times and sometimes a little ahead, the Internet, apart from being a source of income (some of the sect members were web designers and developers), also served for self-promotion and for recruiting new members. And all this in the mid-nineties when net penetration was at its very beginning. How many corpses instead of 39 would there have been in the rented `palace` near San Diego, California if they had Facebook, YouTube or Twitter at their disposal is a question, I would bet at least ten times more. Applewhite, an enigmatic charismatic, former university music professor and ex-Christian - experienced a severe identity crisis, primarily due to his misunderstood bisexuality and the general (counter)culture of the 1960s, which resulted in a new religion in which there was a place for aliens, Jesus, the Beatles (also worshipped by his sectarian predecessor Charles Manson), asceticism and all sorts of New Age situations from which Marshall, together with his wife, created a rather simple and seductive concept.

According to them, the Earth was on the verge of `recycling` due to the long reign of Satan in it, and the aliens, with their spaceship that traveled skillfully camouflaged behind the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet, headed to Earth to accept the souls of those who would deserve evacuation through ascension in the ship. And ascension was possible only with long seances, fasting, denial of sexuality (at least nine members cut off their own testicles) and of course - suicide! Between March 19 and 21, 1997, equipped with new clothes and new sneakers (Nike) - the sect members prepared a hellish cocktail of large quantities of Phenobarbitol, Vodka and juice. And to make the dream complete, there were plastic bags around their heads. A slow fall into sleep accompanied by suffocation...

In order to protect their corpses from defilement with feces and vomit (a natural reaction of the body after drinking the cocktail and after suffocation), Applewhite and his best follower stayed after the initial suicide of 37 members to clean up the shit and vomit and leave the corpses in a respectable position, on beds covered with purple blankets. Then the leader and his `adjutant` took their own lives, as they should, because the `captain` is the last to leave the damned dimension...The anthology footage, made by a castrated sect member who, by chance, was the only one to miss the event the next day - shows covered dead sect members in an unreal peaceful atmosphere, gently disturbed by the juddering of 78 legs, all wearing black Nikes with the recognizable logo...They Just Did It!

Two ex-sect members, after seeing the case on TV, disturbed by the possible loss of the alien ship that was ``towed'' behind the comet, poisoned themselves two months later, bringing the final tally of sect members who went to meet the aliens to the final figure of 41. A little creepy but true, the sect's website still exists and you can visit it at the following link: http://heavensgate.com/ although for understandable reasons it has not been updated since March 1997...It is unknown who pays for the hosting of this site because the number of surviving active members was 1 (one) but the number of ex-sect members, many of whom remained with great respect for the sect and its leader, is several hundred, so it is entirely possible that some of them pay for this site.

The only sect that is more hardcore in terms of beliefs than this one are the Nuwabians, for whom it is impossible to determine what they did not mix into the pot of their theology, various mythologies and religions that found a place in the head of its founder Dwight Yorke, a former Manch player...lol, no, it is still another Dwight Yorke, the namesake of the famous footballer and at least a few hundred light years older than him. One of the fundamental beliefs of the Nuwabians is the following:

Everyone is originally conceived as twins, but usually only one of the twins survives to be born. Another one is usually aborted. Some of the aborted fetuses survive their abortion to live in the sewers, where they are being gathered and organized to take over the world!

Fetuses.

Ex-twin fetuses.

Who survive abortion.

And retreat into the sewers.

Where they grow and gather.

In order to organize themselves.

To conquer...the world...

I will briefly return to the initial statement that fantasy is powerless against reality. Because no one in the world is so (un)creative that they can invent people who believe in the above. Only reality can create such people...

(Roger Mortis, 089)

Great Wall of India

It is assumed that in the Mariovo villages there was a man who had not heard of the Great Wall of China. Some claim that it was a farmer from a certain Polog village, and others point to a history teacher from Radoviš. Regardless of all this, the Great Wall of China is widely known in all its fantasticness, grandeur and visual attractiveness that attracts millions of tourists every year.

The ancient idea of ​​building long walls that, by their defensive nature, would be an obstacle to external aggressors - has two faces, one is the defensive one, and the other is the less known, unpleasant one, which is controlling the population that is inside, in the territory that is limited by the wall. The belt around Berlin, for example, the dramatic symbol of the Cold War, had an exclusively offensive task - to prevent people from leaving the bizarre creation known as the `German Democratic Republic`. These days, the self-proclaimed successors of the former Huns (Hungarians) are building a wall to protect themselves from an alleged invasion of Syrian refugees. A nice irony, if you know that the Huns were known as the two-legged Plague, prevented in their unannounced visits to various territories that had that misfortune - precisely by various defensive walls...

But no wall can compare to the completely unknown Great Wall of India, the creation of the giant corporation ``East India Company'' created for the colonial exploitation of the Indian subcontinent. What is so special about yet another wall, this time on the other side of the Himalayas?

Nothing, except that it was 4,000 km long. And that, unlike other walls, this one was - alive! In their relentless pursuit of more and more revenue, the company's leaders decided to increase taxes on salt, the most important product of the subcontinent on which the entire economy depended, along with the health of the subjects. Due to the climatic features, the population of those areas loses salt from the body through loss of body fluids and sweating and it needs to be replaced. Salt as a strategic product in those areas was the subject of attempts to monopolize by the company, a private entity with state prerogatives in collecting taxes, customs and excise. Having a private police and a private army, the company had long tried to increase the collection of duties and reduce evasion and smuggling.

The exact originator of the idea for the wall is unknown, although it has sometimes been attributed to the head of the Agra customs service - a certain George Sanders. Horticulture and the cultivation of hedges, walls and labyrinths in Britain has been brought to the level of an art. The tradition stretches back hundreds of years of experience and this experience was more than welcome in the cultivation of the Great Wall of India.

Around 1840, after a trial selection of many local plants - a few were chosen to be planted in stages from the foothills of the Himalayas in the northwest - to the Bay of Bengal in the southeast over a length of 4,000 km. Common features of the selected plants were thorns, density and speed of growth. The wall was 3 to 5 meters high and 2 to 4 meters wide, quite enough to discourage potential smugglers of salt and other commodities. One would expect that fire would be a logical solution for the destruction of this wall by smugglers, but one of the specifics of the plants that made up the wall was that they emitted huge amounts of white, far-visible smoke when burning. And that smoke would bring some of the 15 thousand soldiers, mercenaries of the East India Company and customs guards deployed along the wall - to the exact location of the place where someone would try to set fire to the wall.

This venture quickly bore fruit, the population was forced to travel through the `bottlenecks` along the wall, richly ornamented with customs facilities, measuring posts and armed guards. Soon, the revenue from taxes doubled, and later tripled. However, all this did not go without incidents, in various clashes between the guards and smugglers, 115 officials were killed and over 1000 were injured during the almost 30-year construction of the wall. And it grew and grew, maintained with the help of part of the tax money allocated for that purpose, the burned parts were replaced with newly planted thorns, hundreds of wells and rainwater tanks were dug in order to keep the monster alive.

As we know, a taxed man is a living devil, and so the then inhabitants of Hindustan became increasingly creative in avoiding the barrier, the memories of the great Mutiny of 1857 were still fresh and the famine and disease that hit Bengal culminated in 1876-78 when at least six million people died, partly as a result of the existence of the wall due to the unavailability of salt for millions of people. The figure is recognizable because it is equal to that of the Holocaust with the difference that in Hindustan such events were the rule that repeated itself every two to three decades, not the exception.

After the company's contract with the Crown expired in 1858, the management of the wall and its construction was taken over by the British colonial administration, the bloody British Raj headed by the Indian Viceroy. Faced with the described crisis situations, growing anger, mass desertion of the guards and the reduction of tax revenues, the Raj decided to abandon the wall in April 1879. Without maintenance, the wall thinned out over the next twenty years and then disappeared completely, remaining on the margins of memory, without the deserved historical notoriety that its ``colleague`` around East Berlin later had.

If the Great Wall of China is the largest structure built by human hands in history, then the Great Wall of India is certainly the longest ever erected, unique in its originality, tragedy and rapid oblivion...

(Roger Mortis, 088)

The Ripper Crew

Madness in humans can take on various forms, some benign and some horrific to the point of causing blood to freeze and guts to turn. As we have already mentioned on this Blog, the non-existent Black Rose is synonymous with sectarian activity in these parts, although no one knows its members directly - many swear that they have heard third-hand that someone somewhere has committed atrocities in the name of the devil...

Although the memory of Satanic sects that commit devilish acts today most often causes ridicule - the reality is that such sects not only exist, but if we take an average between the number of members in a religious group and the crimes committed by its members - the worshipers of the Evil One would be at the top without serious competition. Unlike other sects where the `herd` directs their madness towards themselves - some of those with a preference for Satan manifest their madness exclusively on their surroundings. There are many such examples and the bloody trail stretches from Scandinavia to Mexico, from Siberia to Chicago, there are creatures who try to give meaning to their psychopathy with the help of rituals and appropriate murders - in the name of the devil...

One of the `most famous` satanic episodes is the sect known as `The Ripper Crew` that operated in the USA, specifically Chicago and the surrounding area in the early eighties. It was not about deluded intellectuals or people who were `looking for themselves` and thus took refuge in exotic sects. This group consisted exclusively of poorly educated working class people, characters who earned an honest living, construction workers and craftsmen who instead of class consciousness developed a taste for the occult, necrophilia and cannibalism. Sort of an `equal opportunity` psycho club. Officially, their campaign in honor of the Fallen Angel began somewhere in May 1981. in a suburb of Chicago where a strangled prostitute (a favorite prey of maniacs) was found. The murders of the "ladies of the night" are a common occurrence, but this time there was something more, the breasts of the murdered woman were missing and there were also stab wounds in the vagina. The police would have passed over that if in the next year and a half 17 more corpses of women of various profiles and ages had not appeared, all with their trademark - severed breasts and butchered vaginas...

Coincidence played the biggest role in the discovery of this sect, which numbered at least five people. The nineteenth victim - miraculously survived and gave an accurate description of one of the sect members as well as the vehicle that was used to kidnap her. The police soon noticed exactly such a vehicle (a red van) again by chance and during the search they found piles of clothes and "souvenirs" of stuffed female breasts...

The arrested person quickly confessed and "sniffed out" his Satanic friends. The number of 18 victims is the most conservative estimate, i.e. those for whom the justice system had sufficient evidence. But that did not mean much because the number of missing women whose fate was never known during that period was much higher, some estimate that there are at least fifty victims of this sect. Naturally, not all the missing were the result of the orgy of fear and psychopathy that ended in October 1982, but the indications of other victims besides those already prosecuted did not lead to further investigation.

The trial also revealed other characteristics that set this sect apart from the rest: the strong leadership skills of the leader Robin Gecht, who "infected" the other members with Satanism, their rituals with sexual penetration into the severed parts of the bodies of fresh corpses, the mixture of blood and sperm that they prepared in the severed breasts and then drank, the singing of ritual songs, the tattoos and drawings on the floors in Gecht's attic, where they mainly performed their rituals, the collective trances... Gecht also had a mini-library where he educated himself with books on topics such as "Medieval Methods of Torture" and "Rituals in Honor of Evil"...Two sect members received the death penalty, but the leader's sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, which was also given to two other lunatics. The fifth was not convicted in the absence of evidence and whether there were other members of the `Team` remained only a matter of conjecture.

The dominance of one madman over several others? That was the official explanation - but it does not hold water because the chance of finding several serial killers who would commit acts like the above - simultaneously, in such a small geographical area - is impossible. There are examples where two maniacs worked together, but they are extremely rare in the annals of crime.

Legitimate service to the imaginary Prince of Darkness? Unlikely since there is no such thing. But there are those who believe in his existence and believe that there is a way to `get close` to him, to serve him with various outbursts of depravity and malice and to earn a place `next to him` in the imaginary dimension where they believe he will take them.

No different from other religiously motivated criminals and murderers, from the beginning of time to the present day...

(Roger Mortis, 087)

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)