Sexy Sadie R.I.P.

LOS ANGELES – Susan Atkins, a member of the Charles Manson "family" who admitted ruthlessly stabbing pregnant actress Sharon Tate to death in the cult's 1969 murder spree, has died in prison less than a month after a parole board turned down a bid for compassionate release. She was 61 and had brain cancer.
Atkins, who eventually came to call the crimes a sin, died late Thursday, according to the California Department of Corrections.
Corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said that at the time of Atkins' death she had been in prison longer than any woman currently incarcerated in California.
Atkins' final chance at freedom was denied on Sept. 2. Terminally ill, she was brought to a parole board hearing on a gurney and slept through most of it, but managed to recite religious verse with the help of her husband, attorney James Whitehouse.
Atkins was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008, had a leg amputated and was given only a few months to live. She underwent brain surgery, and in her last months was paralyzed and had difficulty speaking.
She had been transferred to a skilled nursing facility at the California Central Women's Facility at Chowchilla exactly one year before she died.
Tate, the 26-year-old actress who appeared in the movie "Valley of the Dolls" and was the wife of famed director Roman Polanski, was one of seven people murdered in two Los Angeles homes during the Manson cult's bloody rampage in August 1969.
Atkins was the first of the convicted killers to die. Manson and three others involved in the murders — Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Charles "Tex" Watson — remain imprisoned under life sentences.
Atkins, who confessed from the witness stand during her trial, had apologized for her acts numerous times over the years. But 40 years after the murders, she learned that few had forgotten or forgiven what she and other members of the cult had done.
Debra Tate, the slain actress' younger sister, told the parole commissioners Sept. 2 that she "will pray for (Atkins') soul when she draws her last breath, but until then I think she should remain in this controlled situation." Debra Tate noted that she would have a 40-year-old nephew if her sister had lived.
Atkins' prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, had spoken out earlier in favor of release, saying the mercy requested was "minuscule" because Atkins was on her deathbed.
Atkins and her co-defendants were originally sentenced to death but their sentences were reduced to life in prison when capital punishment was briefly outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s.
During the sensational 10-month trial, Atkins, Manson and co-defendants Krenwinkel and Van Houten maintained their innocence. But once they were convicted, the so-called "Manson girls" confessed in graphic detail.
They tried to absolve Manson, the ex-convict who had gathered a "family" of dropouts and runaways to a ranch outside Los Angeles, where he cast himself as the Messiah and led them in an aberrant lifestyle fueled by drugs and communal sex.
Watson had a separate trial and was convicted.
One night in August 1969, Manson dispatched Atkins and others to a wealthy residential section of Los Angeles, telling them, as they recalled, to "do something witchy."
They went to the home of Tate and her husband. He was not home, but Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, and four others were killed. "Pigs" was scrawled on a door in blood.
The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife were found stabbed to death in their home across town. "Helter Skelter" was written in blood on the refrigerator.
"I was stoned, man, stoned on acid," Atkins testified during the trial's penalty phase.
"I don't know how many times I stabbed (Tate) and I don't know why I stabbed her," she said. "She kept begging and pleading and begging and pleading and I got sick of listening to it, so I stabbed her."
She said she felt "no guilt for what I've done. It was right then and I still believe it was right." Asked how it could be right to kill, she replied in a dreamy voice, "How can it not be right when it's done with love?"
The matronly, gray-haired Atkins who appeared before a parole board in 2000 cut a far different figure than that of the cocky young defendant some 30 years earlier.
"I don't have to just make amends to the victims and families," she said softly. "I have to make amends to society. I sinned against God and everything this country stands for." She said she had found redemption in Christianity.
The last words she spoke in public at the September hearing were to say in unison with her husband: "My God is an amazing God."
She spent 37 years in the California Institution for Women at Frontera. When she fell ill, she was moved to a medical unit at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. She died there.
Susan Denise Atkins was born May 7, 1948, in the Los Angeles suburb of San Gabriel. Her mother was stricken with cancer and died when she was 15. Her father, reportedly an alcoholic, sent her and her brother to live with relatives.
While still in her teens, she ran away to San Francisco where she wound up dancing in a topless bar and using drugs. She moved into a commune in the Haight Ashbury district and it was there that she met Manson.
He gave her a cult name, Sadie Mae Glutz, and, when she became pregnant by a "family" member, he helped deliver the baby boy, naming it Zezozoze Zadfrack. His whereabouts are unknown.
The Manson slayings remained unsolved for three months, until Atkins confessed to a cellmate following her arrest on an unrelated charge. Police found Manson and other cult members living in a ranch commune in Death Valley, outside Los Angeles.
Besides Tate, their other victims were celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, filmmaker Voityck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of Tate's caretaker; and grocery owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Atkins also was convicted with Manson of still another murder, of musician Gary Hinman, in July 1969.
Atkins married twice while in prison. Her first husband, Donald Lee Laisure, purported to be an eccentric Texas millionaire. They quickly divorced. Whitehouse, her second husband, is a Harvard Law School graduate and had recently served as one of her attorneys.

Butterfly Nebula

2009 September 10

The Butterfly Nebula from Upgraded Hubble
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Explanation: The bright clusters and nebulae of planet Earth's night sky are often named for flowers or insects, and NGC 6302 is no exception. With an estimated surface temperature of about 250,000 degrees C, the central star of this particular planetary nebula is exceptionally hot though -- shining brightly in ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by a dense torus of dust. This dramatically detailed close-up of the dying star's nebula was recorded by the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope. Cutting across a bright cavity of ionized gas, the dust torus surrounding the central star is near the center of this view, almost edge-on to the line-of-sight. Molecular hydrogen has been detected in the hot star's dusty cosmic shroud. NGC 6302 lies about 4,000 light-years away in the arachnologically correct constellation Scorpius.

Simo Hayha

Who Was He?

Simo Hayha had a fairly boring life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military, and then became a farmer. But when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland in 1939, he decided he wanted to help his country.

Since the majority of fighting took place in the forest, he figured the best way to stop the invasion was to grab his trusty rifle, a couple of cans of food and hide in a tree all day shooting Russians. In six feet of snow. And 20-40 degrees below zero.

Can you spot Hayha? Neither could the Russians.

Of course when the Russians heard that dozens of their men were going down and that it was all one dude with a rifle, they got fucking scared. He became known as "The White Death" because of his white camouflage outfit, and they actually mounted whole missions just to kill that one guy.

They started by sending out a task force to find Hayha and take him out. He killed them all.

Then they tried getting together a team of counter-snipers (which are basically snipers that kill snipers) and sent them in to eliminate Hayha. He killed all of them, too.

Over the course of 100 days, Hayha killed 542 people with his rifle. He took out another 150 or so with his SMG, sending his credited kill-count up to 705.

Since everyone they had was either too dead or too scared to go anywhere near him, the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, they had the location right, and he actually got hit by a cloud of shrapnel that tore his coat up, but didn't actually hurt him, because he's the fucking White Death, damn it.

Finally on March 6th, 1940, some lucky bastard shot Hayha in the head with an exploding bullet. When some other soldiers found him and brought him back to base, he "had half his head missing." The White Death had finally been stopped...

...for about a week. In spite of having come down with a nasty case of shot-in-the-face syndrome, he was still very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.

Apparently, this fat guy is upset.....

23 tips for media control

’till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!“
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

The opinions and behaviors of people and societies are easily swayed. Every decade, every year, every week, those who control mass media change the climates of human thought. New pop stars, fashions, and fads are paraded center stage and then exit stage left followed by floods of expendable cash, leaving the path of sordid garbage known as “popular culture” in its wake.

Now the power to rule the world and wag the cultural dog is at your fingertips. What follows are simple instructions, a manual, a playbook of sorts, some simple behavioral tools to influence and take advantage of the nervous systems of all your peers.

The 23 Tools:

1. The key to truly effective brainwashing is to work at people’s most fundamental awareness. Shape them at the neurological level so they develop the faculties to take your input and call it “thinking for myself.” Enable them to stop thinking.

2. Limit any and all faculties for self-awareness and self-sensing. Destroy instinct and intuition. Actively and endlessly encourage external awareness. Make people dependent on your external input for as many decisions as possible.

3. Speed up messages so that the pace and rhythm of information is disorienting and visually biased.

4. Condition people to being bombarded with hundreds of thousands of signals a day. Teach them to attend to this stream of information and to call it Reality. Never let them ask what “reality” is.

5. Framing is everything. Decide what you want people to believe and make sure that any choices you give them are within a framework which assures you of your result. This is called the Illusion of Choice. “Do you want to sweep the floor before or after dinner?” Repeat this formula for economic systems, politicians, news stories, competing product brands and entertainment.

6. Appeal to the lowest common denominator. Make sure that all shows model conflict resolution of people with an emotional and intellectual maturity no greater than that of a six year old. Make it funny so no one notices.

7. Keep people passive. Encourage the Couch Potato Alpha Wave Escape Plan as the healing elixir for all that ails.

8. Don’t make people think. Their days are hard enough as is. Bypass the need for opinion making by giving people ready-made opinions. Do it as though you don’t have a conscience – they are probably too stupid to make their own decisions anyway.

9. Ensure that there are no ongoing storylines with meaning or purpose beyond immediate sensory stimulation. Avoid universal themes as much as possible. Make absolutely certain there is no cultural, societal or global story or mythology present that conflicts with the myths of comfort and consumption.

10. Never encourage responsibility, or so much as suggest that humans could be involved in co-creating their future and the realities in which they reside.

11. Encourage group-sanctioned individuality only. By making ‘individuality” the new conformity you are generating a powerful illusion of free choice.

12. Sensationalize the superficial.

13. Keep information bytes infinitesimally small. Promote Attention Deficit Disorder. Several decades of television have already set this in motion.

14. Repetition is key. Repeat important messages as often as possible.

15. Repetition is key.

16. Repetition is key.

17. Bypass rationality by any means possible. People don’t need logic to accept information. Belief is emotional. Always remember: WAR=PEACE.

18. Remember –- two half-truths make up a whole truth.

19. Demonize self-knowledge technology of all kinds. Throw around words like “cult” and “brainwashing.” Marginalize anyone involved in such pursuits.

20. Keep old models of consciousness alive and well. If you can get away with referring to people’s states as being phlegmatic or sanguine instead of programmable and intentional, do it.

21. Keep people’s attention on what really matters. Emphasize what’s wrong as much as possible.

22. Always give the impression that Everything Is Under Control – but just barely so – hammer into the populace the idea that their greatest fear could strike at any moment.

23. Teach people that they are their thoughts and emotions. Reinforce this by teaching them to feel bad about their ideas, and to feel bad about feeling bad. Remember: Identify, identify, identify –- this will widen the empty void inside of them that only shopping can cure.

Judas and Red Hair

The invidious linking of Judas Iscariot with the Jews has had a long and continuous development. An intimate bond between the hated "betrayer of Christ" and the despised Jews has been boldly and repeatedly sketched–the tie reinforced by endless variations on the theme. Foul epithets, invented stories, and villainous attributes have been added to both Judas and the Jews to emphasize their wickedness, as evidenced in folklore and legends, in drama and in art.

Fig. 1 Betrayal and Arrest of Christ (detail), Gaspart Isenmann (mid-15th cent., Germany), Musee d'Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany

There is nothing in the Christian Bible that indicates anything distinctive about the physical appearance of Judas. Yet at least as early as the ninth century, artists developed devices and motifs for pointing out the traitor. A repertoire of attributes developed in subsequent centuries so that in the visual arts Judas was distinguished from the other apostles in various ways. To mention only a few: sometimes he was portrayed in strict profile or without a nimbus, or with a dark-colored nimbus; sometimes he was depicted beardless among the bearded, or hiding a stolen fish; later a yellow robe and a money purse for Judas became popular attributes.

And notably in the art of northern Europe in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, artists frequently used hideous, deformed features to render Judas as hateful as possible, sometimes transforming those features into Jewish caricatures. Red hair, red beard, ruddy skin (or all three), though less frequently employed, were also used to make Judas stand out from the crowd. It should be emphasized, however, that the attributes used to characterize Judas such as yellow robe, money bag, caricatured Jewish features and red hair or ruddiness, among others, entered the visual arts as separate traditions. Not unexpectedly, different attribute-traditions sometimes met, combined, or overlapped. This is what happened along the way with Judas' red hair and the Jews.

That red hair or beard would be thought fitting for Judas is borne out by the ancient and continuous aversion to red hair and ruddy skin. The age-old dislike of red hair is testified to as early as ancient Egypt, associated with the evil god Seth, known to the Greeks as Typhon. A disdain for red hair in the Greco-Roman world is displayed in the red-headedness and red wigs designated for the figure of the slave in the comedies.

The red hair and red beard theme is scattered profusely through the literature of many periods and places. Though the examples are too numerous to summarize here, one outstanding example may suggest the richness of the theme. Recall the loud-mouthed, uncouth miller of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, who had a red beard, Chaucer says, "like any sow or fox," and on whose nose was a wart with a tuft of hair, "red as the bristles in an old sow's ear." Chaucer joined his powers of keen observation with a knowledge of the physiognomics of his day. The theme remained a fixed feature of physiognomical tracts, was incorporated into handbooks on manners, and though not licensed by the Church, red hair, red beard, and ruddy skin appeared in the visual arts in extraordinary ways.

Before moving to the visual arts, we mention several other references to Judas' red hair or beard in literature, starting from the sixteenth century: in Shakespeare's As You Like It, in Dryden's nasty verses about his publisher, in Tennyson's nineteenth-century play Queen Mary; in Frank Norris's novel McTeague (1899), in William Golding's The Spire (1964) and John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy (1980).

Fig. 2 Last Supper (detail), unknown Burgundian painter, c. 1515 Musee Rolin, Autun, Germany

In the visual arts, it is German art from the fourteenth into the sixteenth century that provides the most abundant evidence of a traditional belief that Judas had red hair. Bertram of Minden produced two stunning portrayals of Judas with brilliant, orange-red hair and beard in his Last Supper and Betrayal of Christ (ca. 1304) – both part of an altarpiece now in the Hanover Landesmuseum. Gaspard Isenmann (1462-1465) created a particularly hideous Judas for his Betrayal and Arrest of Christ. Red stringy hair, gigantic hooked nose, hugely bleary eye, and an unsightly open mouth, loudly trumpet the artist's intention: red hair and caricatured Jewish features join again to vilify Judas and the Jews (see Fig. 1).

The gossip that Judas had red hair spread, so that at least by the sixteenth century, examples of Judas with red hair and ruddy skin – one or all three – can be spotted in places such as England, France, Flanders, and Spain, through they are not always linked to Judas as a caricatured Jew. An unknown Burgundian painter, however, created a Judas for a Last Supper (ca. 1515), that rivals those of German provenance. With disheveled red hair, tremendous hooked nose and distorted mouth, and again partly costumed in yellow with a money bag at his waist, a forbidding Judas awaits the moment of Christ's disclosure (see Fig. 2).

Juan de Juanes, a late-sixteenth century Spanish painter, costumed Judas in yellow, gave him carrot red hair, but through Judas' nose suggests Jewish caricature, this portrayal lacks the grotesque distortion and evil expression of some of the others we have seen (see Fig.3).

The many portrayals in the visual arts of Judas with red hair (both with and without Jewish caricatures), just a few of which are discussed in this article, are in fact scanty evidence that the red hair (or skin) theme is specifically Jewish. Judas was, in fact, depicted with caricatured Jewish features and dark hair perhaps more often than with red hair. As mentioned earlier, red hair was simply used, as one of a repertoire of negatively-viewed attributes, to distinguish Judas from the other apostles and to render him more hateful.

Fig. 3 Last Supper (detail), Juan de Jaunes, late 16th century Madrid, Prado Museum

Many theories have been advanced to explain the dislike of red hair, or to promote that dislike:
1) Red hair was disliked because of its association with the color of foxes;
2) Red hair was disliked because of its connections with the red beard of the pagan god Thor whose attributes were transferred to the Christian devil;
3) Red hair was disliked by the English and Irish because it was attributed to the conquering Danes;
4) Red hair was disliked in non-Germanic places simply because it was less common;
5) Red hair has been disliked because it is a mutation or arrested development or degenerative characteristic.[*]

None of these theories is correct. Hair that is distinctly red exists in all societies, even to a small extent in non-white racial groups; red hair is a minority feature within all societies and ethnic groups (including the Irish). Red hair has been, and still is, looked down on, and treated with suspicion in all societies (though perhaps less so in the melting-pot of the United States) simply because it is a minority feature. And minority features, like minorities, are suspect. Antipathy to red hair is as simple, yet as complicated as that.

"You'll like it...."

"You'll like it...."
Current mood:Intolerant -WYRM-
Category: Life

"Oh, you'd really like it!"

No. No, I wouldn't.

"How do you know you wouldn't like it?"

What's that Carlin line? "I saw it in a dream...."

"You need to be more open-minded."

No, you need to learn to be more fucking selective.


Good day.