Skip to content →

Tag: crime

Published September 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Cannibalism is part of the great cultural legacies of our species. In times past, for instance, we would eat our honoured dead to gain their wisdom. In medieval times, too, it was believed that memories were stored in the cerebrospinal fluid. Sadly, it seems that memory cannot be transferred biochemically — which is just as well, otherwise Stephen Hawking would have had to get his wheelchair equipped with BEN HUR-style spikes and a turbo option.

The Sacrament of one of our more popular cults is based upon the concept of transubstantiation: that the piece of bread that the priest pops in your mouth (and if you’re lucky that’s all he’ll pop in your mouth) transforms, within your gut, into the flesh of the son of God. This is magic cannibalism, as it is understood that the son of God manifests on Earth in human form. (I cannot deny that I’d be more interested if it somehow turned into God Meat. Religion has always been a disappointment to me.)

Over the centuries, these ideas have naturally mutated through the “Chinese Whispers” effect. There was a period, for instance, where communities in northern Italy decided that, if the Church essentially condoned Jesus meat in their belly, then human meat in general must be fair game. This led to a Papal edict banning cannibalism, due to the number of good Catholics in that region getting fat and sassy on a diet of anything in shoes.

Said edict was in fact only modified in recent years, following a planeload of Roman Catholics getting stranded somewhere foul and reduced to eating their dead to survive, and then realising that gnawing weakly on corpses would get them excommunicated. The redrafted law now states that chewing humans is acceptable when the only other option is death, because eschewing the chewing would be tantamount to suicide, and that’s a cardinal sin.

This obviously applies only to exceptional circumstances: eating your dad because Marks & Spencers was closed for the bank holiday is still an economy single to Hell.

(from a piece written for WIRED UK in May 2010)

Comments closed

Murder Is A Quality Of Life Issue

Published September 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Whenever I think about murderers, I think about Mogo. Mogo was a peasant farmer in Kenya, a little under a hundred years ago. Peasant farmers worked for a landowner, but were allowed to build huts and graze whatever livestock they owned on the landowner’s grounds. And what I think about is Mogo’s very bad day. This was the day he was summoned to the landowner’s residence and told that he was fired. Because he was a wizard.

This was the rumour that had become the bane of Mogo’s life on the farm. People thought he was a wizard. People wouldn’t talk to him, because he was a wizard. They wouldn’t give him food, because he was a wizard. And, finally, his very presence was causing such ructions on the farm that he was fired for being a wizard.

So Mogo went back to the huts, gathered his few possessions, picked up a spear, went to the hut of the first person who’d accused him of being a wizard, and killed him. He killed his wife, who wouldn’t sleep with him because he was a wizard, and he killed his daughter, who withheld food from him because he was a fucking wizard, and he killed nine other people who wouldn’t bloody shut up about his being a wizard.

The massacre was noticed, of course, and the landowner sent for the police, accompanying them to the huts. There, they found Mogo readying his livestock for travel away from the farm. On being asked whether he might possibly have killed some people, Mogo cheerfully lead the little troupe to each of the bodies, and then turned to the landowner and demanded the wages he was owed before being on his way.

What Mogo did was to take ultimate action to improve his quality of life. This is at the root of murder. We kill people to make our own lives better. We kill them because they are obstacles to our desires, because they make us unhappy, because they burden us, or because they keep calling us fucking wizards. Murder increases happiness.

Notes for a talk at Studio-X, NYC, November 2013

CONNECTED:

Comments closed

Published September 17, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Dozens of members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement have reportedly been injured after handheld pagers they use to communicate exploded.
Comments closed

3aug24

Published August 3, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Pictured: today’s garden work.

🌐

OPERATIONS: there is NO SIGNAL in the garden. It’s basically the 1970s out there, currently – continuing local network issues. Briefly organising delivery schedules for artists, publishers and myself and adding pending production deals to the boards
STATUS: Inbox 99, 7hrs 46mins sleep, sleeping heart rate of 64 (this is a note to self), readiness score of 86 which means I should be able to dig up some trees as well as cutting and lopping some back, and I will likely deprecate these details from STATUS next week

READING: EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD, Richard Brody.
THINKING ABOUT: from the Godard book:

I remember Godard asking me, for a scene of a car arriving at a railway crossing: “I only want the sound of the match.” Ordinarily, one would have put the sound of the car in motion and then braking, the character reaching for his cigarette then lighting it. This practice lent the voices and the discrete sound effects a peculiar intimacy, as if, like Bruno, the viewer were experiencing not a moment in full but a particular, keen, and pointed detail as Bruno remembers it.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.

Comments closed

citizens of the Reich

Published April 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

www.dw.com – German far-right coup plot trial to begin

The first of three trials linked to a far-right coup plot begins in Germany on Monday, with the defendants accused of preparing to commit high treason and belonging to a terrorist organization.

All the suspects, part of the so-called “Reichsbürger” movement, were allegedly plotting to overthrow the German government. The Reichsbürger, or “citizens of the Reich,” reject Germany’s post-war state, claiming it was installed and controlled by the Allied powers who won World War II.

April 28, 2024 at 07:44PM

Comments closed

Published April 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia is reportage of the sort that shrinking foreign news budgets have made scarce. It is the story of the Wa, a people who once proudly collected the heads of their enemies, and who came to preside over one of the world’s most important narco-states in their homelands in the mountains of Burma. The author describes the culture of the Wa, who kept both the British and the Burmese military junta at bay, as being that of the “warrior-farmer, an anarchist who did as he or she pleased”.

https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/heroin/pugpig_index.html

Comments closed

Incaprettamento

Published April 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

A team of archaeologists affiliated with several institutions in France and one in Germany has found that ritualized human sacrifice was common across Europe during the Neolithic.

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });

As they report in the journal Science Advances, the group studied the remains of three women found in a tomb in France who appeared to have been ritually brutalized sometime between 4000 and 3500 BCE and compared the remains with others like them found at sites in Europe.

The work began with the study of the remains of three women found in a tomb in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux—two of the bodies showed the women were buried in unusual positions, one on her back with her legs bent upward, the other in a prone position with her neck on the torso of the other woman—characteristics associated with incaprettamento, a murder technique used by organized criminals as a means of intimidation in modern times.

Comments closed

We’re working out how to solve crimes in space—the final frontier of forensic science

Published March 8, 2024 by Warren Ellis

We’re working out how to solve crimes in space—the final frontier of forensic science

“As humanity’s footprint expands beyond the familiar terrains of Earth to the moon and possibly beyond, an intriguing new field emerges from the final frontier: astroforensics.

“This discipline, still in its infancy, is propelled by the inevitability of human nature. Space presents a unique and harsh environment for forensic investigations. Settings that present altered gravity, cosmic radiation, extremes in temperature, and the need for oxygen-providing climate systems provide a few examples of the unearthly variables that are faced by future explorers.

“Unlike Earth, where gravity, a constant force, shapes many aspects of our reality, the significant reduction of gravity in space introduces novel challenges in understanding how evidence behaves. This shift is crucial for forensic sciences like bloodstain pattern analysis, which relies heavily on gravitational effects to determine the circumstances under which blood stains are formed.”

March 08, 2024 at 04:49PM

Comments closed

Dark Fleets

Published February 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Less diligent registries are helping to fuel the growth of a “dark fleet”—some 1,400 vessels, according to the Atlantic Council, a think-tank—that operates with little regulatory oversight. They are mostly oil tankers that engage in subterfuge to hide where they are and the origin of their cargo in order to evade sanctions on Russian crude oil. Ownership is often opaque. Mr Meade estimates that 12% of the global tanker fleet is now dark. He notes that Gabon’s registry, now comprising 140 vessels, is the fastest-growing in the world thanks largely to the reflagging of Russian tankers.

An expanding dark fleet poses a danger to itself and other vessels. Dark ships tend to be old and less well maintained, and some may be uninsured. Practices such as turning off or “spoofing” location devices are a danger to other ships. Swapping oil cargoes at sea to obscure their origins poses the danger of a spillage. Mr Meade foresees a worse calamity of a large “dark fleet” tanker sinking in an environmentally sensitive area, with no accountability.

Comments closed

Arts And Crimes

Published February 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

In 1967 Japan Air Lines issued this box set of leaflets which informed on all aspects of life in Japan.

Erin L. Thompson has one of the more unusual job titles in the art world and academia.

As a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Thompson uses her law degree and a PhD in art history—both from Columbia University—to teach and report on looted antiquities, art forgery techniques, museum thefts, repatriation efforts, art made by Guantánamo Bay detainees, collections of human remains, and, most recently, the melting of notable Civil War monuments.

Meet Robert Pickton – a demented serial killer who fed his victims to pigs.

A monster who claimed he was disappointed with himself that he had only killed forty-nine and did not “make the big five-O.”

Latter saved for reference: not sure if this is the crime scene I was thinking of, but I have something similar lodged in my memory. Awful thing.

Comments closed