Friday Foofaraw: April 29, 2017

I found something really cool on Wikipedia the other day.

A Kurdaitcha, among the Aranda group of indigenous Australians, is a kind of ritual hit-man. Their job is to carry out a curse on an enemy via a ‘bone-pointing’ ritual (a form of which is generally common to many different groups of Aboriginal people).

The ritual is carried out by first preparing the cursing bone, which is generally animal bone, though sometimes human bone or a sharpened stick is used. The preparation is often a complicated process which usually involves coating it in rotting meat or other foul substances. The Kurdaitcha then dons a pair of special shoes, made of feathers held together by human blood and fastened to the foot with human hair; these shoes are said to leave no tracks. Before putting them on, one would first hold a fire-heated stone to the ball of the pinkie toe to soften up the joint, and then sharply pull the toe toward the outside of the foot, dislocating it. The dislocated toe is then inserted through a special hole in the shoe. The shoes themselves and the rituals surrounding them are highly secretive and cannot be witnessed by women or children, but medical examinations have shown evidence of the dislocation in people who have claimed to be Kurdaitchas. You can see pictures of the shoes online if you search for them, but since it’s taboo to look at them, someone somewhere would presumably be pissed to know that these pictures are out there, so I’m not going to post them here. You can look them up yourself if you’re comfortable making that decision, you insensitive brute.

Once the shoes are donned, the Kurdaitcha hunts down the intended target, taking years to do so if necessary. Once the victim is found, the Kurdaitcha drops to one knee and points the cursing bone at the target, who witnesses the curse; death follows not long afterward. The cause of death may be, in modern parlance, ‘psychosomatic’, ie. with no apparent medical cause, the victim grows anxious and listless and simply wastes away and dies (it’s worth noting that this is basically what would happen if he was, you know, actually cursed.) Some variants on the ritual involve scratching or piercing the victim with the bone, which could cause death via infection if the bone has been coated in filthy substances, as is often the case. Some Kurdaitchas killed more directly, albeit still stealthily, by crafting a long, thin, sharp lance from a kangaroo bone, sneaking up on a sleeping victim and driving it through the nape of their neck and into the chest where it pierces the heart. When the bone is removed, the tiny flap of skin is pushed back in place so that the wound doesn’t bleed and can barely even be seen.

In 2004, Australian PM John Howard was the recipient of a politically-oriented bone-pointing curse. The Wikipedia article rather snarkily remarks “As of 2017, John Howard is still alive”, which is a kind of douchey thing to mention. Congratulations, outsider, you sure taught those idiots a lesson about how ridiculous and wrong their beliefs are! That’ll teach them, for… uh… daring to preserve and recontextualize their culture’s history and traditions despite centuries of European colonialist oppression? Go team The West!

Quick update in re: hollow Earth theories

In my last entry, I mentioned the hollow-earth theory of the Koreshan religious group, who argued that we live on the inner surface of a hollow planet which has ‘outer’ space in the middle. I was picturing that and I got to wondering how gravity would work inside a hollow planet.

What strikes me as the common-sense answer is that because gravity pulls matter to matter, near the inner surface you’d be pulled ‘down’, meaning ‘against’ that surface (so that you’d walk with your feet pointing ‘out’ and your head pointed ‘in’, toward the middle of the empty space, just like all good Koreshans do (and also possibly Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov‘s dinosaurs?)) If you were to jump in a rocket ship and propel yourself ‘up’ off the inner surface, the effect of gravity would get less and less until you reached the exact centre of the sphere, at which point the equidistant gravitational forces surrounding you would all cancel each other out and leave you floating, weightless. If you moved too far one way or the other, you’d be in for a long fall and a sudden splat. That makes sense, right?

Wrong! As it turns out, if you should happen to be on the left ‘side’ of the cavity (with the shell on your left) the nearness of that part of the shell would indeed result in a stronger gravitational pull to your left- but you would, of course, have more of the shell to your right side. The gravity associated with that matter is weaker, but there’s more of it, to the extent that it completely and exactly cancels out the gravity on your left, and you’d neither crash to the inside of the shell nor drift off to attain perfect, harmonious equilibrium in the exact centre of the planet. You’d just bounce around like an idiot. The net gravitational field of every point within the cavity of a sufficiently massive (and uniform) hollow shell is exactly zero.

Pretty bizarre, eh?

(The link above does a good job of dumbing this down for regular schmucks like me, but if you have the kind of advanced intellect that can comprehend high-level mathematics, the idea is called shell theorem, and that Wikipedia article has what I’m told is called a “derivation” that proves it. This derivation, according to a few physics forums I’ve visited, is apparently so clear and transparent and idiot-proof that even the most knuckle-dragging, bungling, backwoods physicists and mathematicians can readily make sense of it.)

Friday Foofaraw: April 14, 2017 – Why the Earth is Flat and Also Bigfoot Exists, Too

Happy Good Friday, y’all, the day that celebrates the improbable feat of derring-do attributed to a certain Jewish fellow Who died and then somehow was still not dead and also still isn’t. You probably heard recently that Shaq apparently believes the world is flat. I’m here this week to explain why he is perhaps not a raving lunatic for saying such a thing, and to offer my support for all well-meaning spectacular and incredible claims, be they religious or secular in nature.

Upon learning of Shaq’s adherence to the flat earth theory, the internet immediately erupted into hysterics, with most people landing somewhere between mockery and indignant reproach. While some were satisfied with simply lambasting this professional athlete for being an idiot, others leapt into the fray clad in their science-armour, these brave, stalwart heroes of empiricism, gallantly defending against overwhelming odds the embattled belief that the fucking world is round. WE KNOW THE WORLD IS ROUND.

Bless you, Shade of Galileo!! For a moment there I nearly forgot what shape planets are! Thank God you’re here to drop your “SCIENCE” on me!

Shaq later clarified: “I’m joking, you idiots!” Given the reaction, though, I think people are really missing the point on this whole thing. Sometimes when people make claims like this (whether they admit it’s a joke or not, which, for the record, it almost always is) they’re going for something a little more subtle. I think, particularly in the case of flat earth theorists, the point is to highlight the necessity of challenging received wisdom. The flat earth idea is great for this because it highlights a palpable manner in which our lived experience clashes with what we’re told. Everybody tells us the earth is round, but dammit, it fucking feels flat. Shaq states this eloquently.

So, listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this shit is flat to me. I’m just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me. I do not go up and down at a 360 degree angle.

If you take him seriously there, he sounds like an insane moron. But just before that, he said:

Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind — what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school, first thing they teach us is, ‘Oh, Columbus discovered America,’ but when he got there, there were some fair-skinned people with the long hair smoking on the peace pipes. So, what does that tell you? Columbus didn’t discover America.

His stereotypes aside, he has a point. Columbus didn’t discover America. People were already living there. Yet generations of schoolchildren were and still are being taught that ‘fact’. I think Shaq is very cleverly and subtly using the flat earth idea as an ideological weapon against the whole concept of received wisdom, or at least the uncritical acceptance of said wisdom. He’s effectively saying “If you can invent history, if you can just make shit up and tell us it’s real and expect us to believe it despite all evidence to the contrary, then what if I say I believe the world is flat? How will you refute me without being a hypocrite?” It’s worth noting in this context that a staggering number of people still think the same reprehensible tyrant Columbus ‘proved’ the world was round; this is flatly not correct but people still believe it, and why? Some idiot taught them that in school.

The same point was made by another NBA flat-earther, Kyrie Irving, a few weeks before Shaq’s big reveal:

I think people should do their own research, man. Then, hopefully, they’ll either back my belief or throw it in the water, but I think it’s interesting for people to find out on their own. I’ve seen a lot of things that my educational system said was real and turned out to be completely fake. I don’t mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts and what I believe.

The importance of galling people into giving a shit about the truth becomes paramount when we look at the current political climate, for obvious reasons. The constant stream of bald-faced lies oozing out of the White House is only possible because the American populace no longer really gives a shit about whether things are true or not. In a climate like that, saying in public that you believe in something that everybody 100% absolutely knows for sure is bullshit is a great way, maybe even the only way of making people notice again and pay attention to truth’s inherent superiority over falsehood.

I’ll give you another example. Maybe you noticed that Bigfoot has been on the rise lately. There’s Bigfoot documentaries all over Netflix, the show “Finding Bigfoot” is on its eighth season, there’s popular Bigfoot people on Youtube and Twitter. And the International Bigfoot Conference is bigger and better than ever.

Mostly just mentioned them so I could show their logo, which is just so, so awesome.

Bigfoot as a theory is generally regarded by most people as pretty dumb, maybe not quite as dumb as flat earth theory, but still pretty dumb. So why the sudden uptick in Bigfoot shit over the past few years? I’ve noticed that it seems to coincide pretty closely with the public debate over climate change and climate change denial. I think the Bigfoot people are doing a sort of ecological version of the same sort of thing Shaq is doing with flat earth; they’re saying “if you can simply deny that this horrible natural catastrophe is happening, when mountains of evidence prove its existence, you’re essentially saying that empirical evidence itself, as a means of verifying truth, is irrelevant. If we grant that, why can’t I say that Bigfoot is real? There’s no evidence, but as far as you’re concerned, evidence doesn’t matter. So how will you criticize my stance without revealing yourself as a hypocrite?”

That’s what I think is going on, anyway, but maybe I’m being a little too cerebral about it. Let me know what you think.

As a palate cleanser, I’d like to point you to something that’s kind of the reverse of the flat earth theory. This is the theory proposed by the wacky late-19^th century religious group, Koreshanity. According to their cosmology, the earth is indeed round, but it’s hollow, and we live on the inside. The sun and stars and all that we see in the sky are contained in the middle of the sphere and we live on its inner surface, whereas outside the sphere there is nothing at all, or as Cyrus Teed (aka Koresh) put it, “Inside the shell there is life, outside a void.”

There’s a lot we don’t know, and a lot of what we think we know isn’t real. Reason, open-mindedness, and compassion are. Let’s use them whenever we can. Have a good weekend.

Special Feature: Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov, the Omnipresent Ten-Year-Old Internet Prophet

Welcome, friends. What I’ve got for you today is really bizarre, and what’s more, it will literally change your life. Only slightly, mind, but not necessarily for the better. Consider that before you move on.

This won’t be a full four-part project like I normally do, but it also can’t be condensed into a Friday Foofaraw, because it is a singular phenomenon that really deserves some close attention on its own merits. It’s something I can practically guarantee you’ve never heard of before, but which you will not be able to stop noticing once you know what to look for and where to find it. Prepare yourself, gentle reader, because you’re about to learn the story of Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov, the most famous pre-teen prophet you’ve never heard of.

Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov, fondly known to his family as Slava, was a boy from the town of Yurga in the Kemerovo region of Russia. He is, however, most famously associated with the small city of Chebarkul, where, tragically, he died of leukemia in 1993, at the age of ten. His life was short, but highly significant. To the Russian Orthodox church, he was at best an imaginative boy whose flights of fancy were greatly overblown by his grieving parents and interpreted as mystical visions; at worst, he was himself possessed by a demon, or something even more sinister. But to his followers, young Slava is a saint, or perhaps an angel, or perhaps something even beyond that.

Slava was, in many ways, a product of the ‘indigo child’ movement, which had filtered to Russia through mass media around the same time that it was fashionable in certain circles in the English-speaking world. Russia seized upon the idea, and Slava was one of many children his age who were touted to have some mysterious abilities far beyond typical human nature. However, where these special talents of indigo children are typically thought to arise from some metaphysical energy or psychic power, Slava, both during his life and after his death, was conceived of as a specifically religious figure.

The stories about Slava derive principally from his mother, who wrote several books about him, and a woman named Lydia Emelyanov, an early advocate of the indigo-children phenomena in Russia, who wrote two more. Aside from being “remarkably kind, obedient, intelligent, pious, [and] devout”, Slava was said to have the gift of mystical healing. People came from all around to receive his healing; one of his patients supposedly claimed that he treated her by gazing at her from a distance, and that “from my head something seemed to come off in the form of thin strings.”

Slava’s healing ability apparently transcended his death; when pictures of sick children are placed on his old chair, the children are miraculously healed. At the small shrine set up around his memorial, the earth over his grave must be constantly replenished; pilgrims remove it bit by bit, to mix with water and apply as a curative lotion. Small marble stones, routinely spread over the grave, also vanish. They are ‘infused’ in water and can cure many ailments. One claim comes from a fellow who decided to tie a little buzz on to celebrate his birthday, before suddenly being called in to work. A bottle of water infused with the marble stones from Slava’s grave sobered him up instantly (or, one presumes, that is at least what he told his boss.)

If you’ve only got time to visit one child’s grave after a Russian bender, well friend, make it this one!

The marble stones are important; Slava specifically asked for them to be scattered over his grave. Why? Well, marble, because it is a living being with a pulse, frightens away aliens, which are really demons.

…wait, what?!

This is where it starts getting really odd. Faith healing is one thing; we could argue about its efficacy (if we really wanted to, which I don’t at the moment) but we can all agree that it’s pretty standard protocol for saints and holy people. But Slava was more than that. He was a seer and a prophet, and the stuff he saw and prophesied was bonkers.

Slava’s death was primarily a result of his refusal to accept a blood transfusion, based on his belief that the sins of the donor are transmitted to the patient in the blood (leaving this critical decision to a ten-year-old boy seems odd to me, but whatever.) Slava could speak to plants. He declared that it was unlawful to kill birds, because birds are involved in the creation of time, and killing them hastens the end of days. He avowed that the bowels of the earth hid gigantic subterranean spaces (undetectable to science due to a “layer of radioactive sand”) which are full of dinosaurs, mutated to massive proportions by underground nuclear weapon testing. These dinosaurs will emerge from sinkholes and lakes, and we will only be able to kill them by “going for their nerves”. Some of his visions are pretty transparently lifted from Hollywood movies; he once spoke of a short, mysterious monk who had a light on the tip of his index finger, who assisted him in leaping across a huge canyon (one presumes the monk first phoned his home monastery for permission to perform the miracle.) Slava called upon his listeners to give up drinking vodka, because it dries up your brains. He warned about the mark of the beast and the nearness of the apocalypse, in which demons (which will appear to humans as extraterrestrial aliens) will run rampant on the earth. With the dinosaurs. There are many, many more claims like this. A good run-down can be found here.

What appear to most of us as childhood flights of fancy are, to a certain group of very strange Russians, infallible truths about the present age and indisputable prophecies about the coming tribulation. And for some, Slava is even more than a prophet; when we take a look at his life, full of suffering and prophecy, granting the gift of healing to others, taking their suffering on himself, and dying too young, he begins to look an awful lot like a much more famous religious figure. This characterization (which Slava may have acknowledged himself during his lifetime) is embraced by Slava’s most eager followers, who see in him nothing less than the second coming of Christ.

But hey, really wacky metaphysical claims aren’t exactly foreign to Russia. The raskol, which formed the rift between the Orthodox church and the so-called ‘Old Believers’, spawned a massive number of truly bizarre sects, some of which are documented here. Contemporaneously, you may have heard of Vissarion, the head of a Siberian church which claims that he is Christ reincarnated (he was the focus of a Vice documentary.) You may also be familiar with Valeria Lukyanova, the so-called ‘human Barbie’, whose quest to turn herself into the world’s favourite doll has rather overshadowed the fact that she teaches astral projection and believes she’s an alien. Naturally, there’s a Vice documentary about her as well.

But what sets Slava apart from these others is something I will now demonstrate. Let’s take his claim that “vodka dries one’s brains” and pop that into a Google search:

Huh. That seems like… a lot.

How about his claim that “birds participate in time creation”?

Hmm. Uhh… hm.

Okay… well, let’s try something a little more obscure, like Slava’s idea that dinosaurs “will get out through sinkholes and lakes. To kill them, go for their nerves.”

Alright, what the hell?!

Okay, okay, but let’s try something really crazy and see how many instances we can find of his theory that the antichrist will be a “born to a 12th generation prostitute, flying, big-nailed, gloved, pale-faced, red-eyed, Satan-possessed since he’s 12 years old, homosexual man.” That’s awfully specific. Surely that’s not going to be-

ZUUHH??!!

This is why I wanted to bring little Slava to your attention today, my friends. The internet is positively crammed full of this stuff. It’s absolutely everywhere you wouldn’t think to look. What’s more, filling in the gaps between these formulaic professions of faith in the utterly insane, we find passages that seem to be freely-composed, only appearing in one or two places. This means that this isn’t the work of spam-bots; what we have here is a healthy, thriving community of faith, undergoing actual mythological and theological development as we speak, and it’s pretty much all happening deep in the comments sections of unrelated Youtube videos, in emails that get funneled straight to your junk mail (yes, yours, specifically), in the murky waters of Yahoo Answers, blasted in giant text blocks across Reddit threads you’d never read— pretty much everywhere on the internet, provided it’s the last possible place you’d be looking.

I was drawn to this story specifically because I kept seeing this shit everywhere I turned and I finally had to get to the bottom of it. Now that I know what’s going on, I find it more and more. I’ve developed kind of a sixth sense for it; everywhere there’s an obscure website with a comments section and people asking questions about religion or human health, there’s Slava. It’s completely inescapable. And it will happen to you too.

Now, thanks to me, you’re cursed with this hideous awareness as well, and I guarantee this little Russian boy’s sci-fi apocalypse will start appearing to you too. You don’t even have to go looking for it. Just wait and watch. Slava’s ghost will track you down.

Further Reading:

Orthodox Wiki: Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov

Good background there, and lots of links for further research, but they’re all in Russian. Copy the link and paste it to Google, then use the translation function; close enough.

If you need more, just look… anywhere.

Friday Foofaraw: March 31, 2017

I was digging around Snopes earlier today and found my way into the bizarre world of what they call ‘scarelore’: email forwards and Facebook posts which portray a certain criminal threat and offer handy tips for how to identify or avoid it. The vast majority of these are really alarmist and display a critical lack of awareness as to how actual criminals operate. This is particularly true in ‘near miss’ cases of supposed ‘human trafficking’ which are alleged to occur in big-box stores like Walmart, Target, and Ikea.

There are a ton of these, and for some reason, they seem to follow distinguishable trends; there was an upswing in 2011 and then another big one in 2015. In most of these accounts, nothing ever actually happens; the ‘victim’ (usually a mother, alone with one or more kids) simply notices someone nearby who seems to be looking at her, and proceeds to invent a surprisingly elaborate child-kidnapping scheme based on whatever people and circumstances happen to be around.

The narratives are all quite similar, and they persist despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a scrap of truth to any of them. One possible explanation for this is that people are told to be ‘on guard’ whenever they encounter an extremely vaguely defined scenario (that is, “someone acting weird in public”, which I personally observe somewhere around 99-100% of the time I go out in public) and come to believe that they have ‘narrowly avoided’ a dangerous criminal. No matter how many times people hear that this kind of thing (that is, being forcibly kidnapped in broad daylight out of an extremely busy store) is rare to the point of practically just not happening, the broad phrasing means that pretty much everybody will go through a ‘near miss’ (as defined) on, like, a monthly basis, if not more. The cumulative effect, so the theory goes, is that people wind up believing that if they’ve ‘dodged’ a Walmart kidnapping six times this week, it must really be happening to somebody somewhere. Except it isn’t.

(Human trafficking is a real thing, of course, but victims are primarily prostitutes, serious drug addicts, undocumented immigrants and the homeless (people who can drop off the grid without many questions being asked). Traffickers don’t have to risk exposure by devising intricately coordinated plots to abscond from a Target with suburban housewives.)

But enough psycho-babble. Let’s dive into the unseemly and unnecessarily-complicated world of greasy criminals who:

Offer summer jobs to people and then kidnap them when they show up for the interview

Shop near you in a Hobby Lobby and then get in the checkout line behind you but don’t speak to you or approach you in any way

Run up and inject you with an unknown, lethal poison so they can snatch your purse

Accept your freely-offered help in loading their vehicles

Leave hundred-dollar bills hanging on random people’s windshields so they can snatch you when you get out of your car to pick them up

Invite you to sniff a perfume which is actually ether, so that you’ll pass out instantly (because that’s apparently how ether works) and they can then presumably pick up your lifeless body and walk out of the store with you over their shoulder without anybody thinking to notify the authorities

Shop in an Ikea at the same time as you, and perhaps insidiously stand near an exit while doing so

Mistakenly think you have a period stain on your clothes and offer you a sweatshirt to tie around your waist

Be a child, and try to make friends with another child, while appearing nervous around the adult accompanying said child

Try to offer you a free sample of something they’re selling in the store you’re visiting

And there are many, many more. I’m not sure what the takeaway is from this, aside from a series of object lessons in the 21st century’s generalized, unfounded paranoia and fear of the other, which will eventually demolish human civilization as we increasingly come to regard every single interaction we have with strangers as an attempted crime. Enjoy your weekend!