OVO

1982 (age 16): I find Factsheet Five and by way of that magazine I find Kerry Thornley. By way of Kerry and Factsheet Five I find many anarchist periodicals and pen pals.  Anarchism seems smart, strong, right.  Looking back, I used the word to describe what I liked and wanted and what was ‘mine.’  It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual, or you can’t tell me what to do, or something in between.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I think that these ideas are so good that the only reason they aren’t in practice now everywhere is that they haven’t been tried.  Or perhaps tried just right.  Or perhaps the ideas aren’t widely distributed, and if people only knew about anarchism they would sign on.

1987: I find an anarchist poster on the campus of the University of Tennessee and by way of the poster I find The Alternative, an anarchist group in Knoxville.  We talk and do things, but anarchism does not flow out from us like a river.  And while we’re all on the same team against a much larger and more powerful team, we certainly do bicker.

1987: I published Letter from the Graveyard Shift by Gerry Reith in my zine OVO. Early questioning

1988-1989: I attend anarchist events in many cities.  I meet with anarchists in the South and on the East Coast.  I am a guest lecturer on anarchism at the University of Tennessee.  The same imp of the perverse that led me to read about anarchism pricks up his ears when he hears a friend say how concerned he is that another friend is reading Ayn Rand.  Not that the friend is signing on as a true believer, but that the books themselves are wicked.  Noted.

1991: I write “Anarchist: Think for Yourself,” published in the book Anarchy and the End of History.  A high point in nine years of letters, essays and art published in anarchist magazines around the world. Factsheet Five continues to create contacts for me, including an unsolicited letter from George Walford in England.  I correspond with George until his death in 1994.

1992 (age 26): I move to Portland, Oregon and find radical bookstore Laughing Horse Books.  Make a friend who volunteers there.

1993: From a letter by George Walford: “You remark the scarcity of ‘real live human being stories’ in anarchist literature. Very perceptive. But it’s not an accident. Anarchism is not about people as we meet them, it’s about abstruse principles and theories (and, even more, about the resistance these encounter). The real human stories appear in the literature at the other end of the range, in the popular romances, thrillers, love-songs and — perhaps most of all — in tabloid newspaper stories, which go to extreme lengths to personalise (humanise) political events.  Your own view of anarchism has it that people should be free to do what they want. The overwhelming majority of those who have encountered anarchism have shown very clearly that they do not want to do what anarchists want them to do. They prefer to do what they are doing now. We have no reason to expect the others, when they meet anarchism, to respond differently. Can your anarchism accept this? Or do you feel bound to impose (however gently and rationally) your ideas of what it is good for them to do? The dilemma of orthodox anarchism cannot be escaped by ‘practical living anarchy’ within present society. We cannot live without taking part in society, paying taxes and supporting capitalism by our consumption, and orthodox anarchism condemns all of this. The attempt to live the anarchist life is a living demonstration of the arid, empty, abstract unreality of orthodox anarchism; it cannot be put into practice, it is virtually nothing but theory.”

1994: My friend from Laughing Horse Books and I attend a meeting.  The meeting is made up of people who want to start an anarchist bookstore in Portland.  The bookstore is to be called 223.  I offer to help write the mission statement, including a definition of anarchism. Not trying to define a thing into existence, not trying to exclude, not trying to control, just trying to clarify our goals and means and provide a base to start from.  Having a definition of anarchism is discouraged, as it will be divisive and we all know what we mean anyway.  Anarchism is smart, strong, right.  I notice that in twelve years of being around anarchists, most of us are under thirty.  Where are the older anarchists in a movement that started in the 19th Century?  And what has anarchism done… ever?  I work on a definition for myself, looking for the first time with any degree of seriousness into the history and accomplishments of anarchism for source material.

1994: From a letter by George Walford, responding to my essay in Anarchy and the End of History: “I have to say one or two things about the content. You ask one of the crucial questions: ‘if anarchy is so great, how come we’re not all anarchists?’ You ask it, but you don’t answer it, sliding off into discussing whether individuals can live as anarchists — also important, and certainly connected, but not the same question. Your omission is not surprising, for that question cannot be answered within the orthodox anarchism which your article accepts. The position is in fact even worse for anarchism than that sounds, because that is only half the problem, the other half being that some people, few but enough to form a movement, have become anarchists. A differential explanation is needed, and significant, enduring, social distinctions between groups of people orthodox anarchism cannot accept. Third (this one we’ve had before), your first new para on p.128, the one beginning: ‘Just as …’ in which you blame the personal inadequacies of individual anarchists for the failure of anarchy. This does not stand up any better than blaming individual supporters of capitalism for the failures of that system. In each case the failure is sufficiently constant and widespread to indicate a structural source, something built into the position. The only way to get past that sort of difficulty is to move on to another position. Examples of anarchist successes will be springing to your mind, but if you examine them you will find that (so far as they are successes in any field other than theory and argument) they are not distinctively anarchist. This of course links up with the first problem raised above. They both arise because orthodox anarchism, far from being “so great” is extremely limited. Not only can anarchy not be practiced under the state, it can’t even be thought out as an independent social system, in any concrete way, without running into contradictions that, appearing in practice, would wreck the new world.”

1994: I define anarchism as the belief it is possible and desirable to maintain the world’s population at the current standard of living without government and without a period of transition from the present to an anarchist world.  The moment I put the definition on paper, I ask myself if that is what I believe and I answer myself no I do not.  Thus I am not an anarchist.  I go to my anarchist friends to see if they can find an error in my thinking – they run away from that conversation, and my doubts are not lessened for it.

1994: I read extensively in the works of George Walford and his peers.  The idea of the ‘mass rationality assumption’ hits home.  People project their values on others, and this includes intellectuals.  Intellectuals think that most people would prefer to solve problems with intellect, and most people are capable of solving problems with intellect.  Neither are true.  Intellect and reason aren’t forbidden to most people, they just aren’t valued as much as convention and passion.  Assuming otherwise is what keeps intellectuals in the political minority.

1995: One of George Walford’s best critics, David McDonagh, writes me.  David proceeds to poke holes in my thinking from that point onward.  Looking into what David considers good thinking, I am introduced to the works of Sir Karl Popper.  Popper’s book Conjectures and Refutations causes the bottom to drop out of everything I knew about science, rationality, history and politics.  What a rotten foundation it was. David also directs me to “The Impossibility of Economic Calculation under Socialism” by David Steele.  This essay kicks the chair out from under socialist economics.  I start reading about economics.  What a fool I’d been, thinking I’d understood it before.

1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there.  Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works.  Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist.  But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention.  It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.

2001 (age 35): September 11th.  I’m at work at a homeless shelter.  The base nature of much of humanity stops being abstract and my appreciation for individuals who are basically decent increases.  The idea that we can all just get along stops scratching on its coffin lid.  The need for having hard men on the payroll to keep away other hard men makes sense.  I support the State, the army, the police as better than the alternative.

2005: The imp of the perverse continues to slip books into my hand, emboldened by the importance I place on reading one’s critics gained by my reading of Popper.  Nothing seems more important than finding critics who will point out errors in my thinking – friends who think like I do never will. I read extensively about right wing politics and pay more attention to mainstream politics.   All houses poxed long ago.  That being said, when a fact or idea rings true I don’t turn up my nose if the source is otherwise unpleasant.

2010: What am I now?  I try to be a good person and keep out of harm’s way.  I hammer at the chains of religion and theocracy.  My atheist efforts are small, but I’ve seen small changes from them and that is satisfying.  I think humanity’s best hope is the open society described by Sir Karl Popper.  I lean towards the free market and small government and the sovereignty of the individual, but I don’t see these as flawless or always appropriate.  Whatever I am, I’m definitely not an anarchist.

I have raised my happiness set point (among other things) [...]. Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process. It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that’s not your thing. In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important. The steps in more detail:

1. I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier. Being unhappy was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous. [...]
2. I re-labeled my moods, so that identifying them in the moment prompted the right actions. When a given point on the unhappy-happy spectrum – let’s call it “2″ on a scale of 1 to 10 – was labeled “normal” or “set point”, then when I was feeling “2″, I didn’t assume that meant anything; that was the default state. That left me feeling “2″ a lot of the time, and when things went wrong, I dipped lower, and I waited for things outside of myself to go right before I went higher. The problem was that “2″ was not a good place to be spending most of my time. [...]
3. I treated my own mood as manageable. Thinking of it as a thing that attacked me with no rhyme or reason – treating a bout of depression like a cold – didn’t just cost me the opportunity to fight it, but also made the entire situation seem more out-of-control and hopeless. [...]

Article continues, at the always remarkable Less Wrong.

On 2 March 1982, author Philip K. Dick died.  It was in 1982 that a friend recommended I read Valis, which I enjoyed enough to read all the rest of PKD’s books.  Eventually I collected around 70 titles by and about PKD.  This was after the film Blade Runner but before Total Recall, which started a wave of interest in his work.  Most of the PKD books I had were first editions I’d bought for next to nothing.

Among the books was Divine Invasions, a biography by Lawrence Sutin.  I read Divine Invasions around 1994.  A detail in this book (confirmed by Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982 by Anne Dick) inspired me to box up all my PKD books and sell them at a loss just to get them out of my house.  PKD loved to get married but didn’t like staying married.  To get one of his wives out of the way, he drugged her then had her committed to a mental hospital.  That freed him up for the next marriage.  This fact overshadowed all the enjoyment I had taken from his books.

This fact hasn’t lost its impact for me, but in 2010 I can also remember my enjoyment of his books.  What puzzles me is something that puzzles me about author H. P. Lovecraft.  Why is PKD forgiven for acts that other authors would not be forgiven for?  It isn’t hidden that PKD did this – why are forward-thinking fans accommodating to him for this while being up in arms over much less from other authors?  Readers (especially those on the left) will rail night and day against an author that uses certain words, or was once a member of a certain group, but who harmed no one.  PKD harmed someone, but, well, he’s so cosmic!

Today (25 November) was a special day in the life of Yukio Mishima.  Men, take upon your shoulders now the portable shrine…

When l was small l would watch the young men parade the portable shrine through the streets at the local shrine festival. They were intoxicated with their task, and their expressions were of an indescribable abandon, their faces averted; some of them even rested the backs of their necks against the shafts of the shrine they shouldered, so that their eyes gazed up at the heavens. And my mind was much troubled by the riddle of what it was that those eyes reflected. As to the nature of the intoxicating vision that I detected in all this violent physical stress, my imagination provided no clue. For many a month, therefore, the enigma continued to occupy my mind; it was only much later, after I had begun to learn the language of the flesh, that I undertook to help in shouldering a portable shrine, and was at last able to solve the puzzle that had plagued me since infancy. They were simply looking at the sky. In their eyes there was no vision: only the reflection of the blue and absolute skies of early autumn. Those blue skies, though, were unusual skies such as I might never see again in my life: one moment strung up high aloft, the next plunged to the depths; constantly shifting, a strange compound of lucidity and madness. I promptly set down what I had discovered in a short essay, so important did my experience seem to me. In short, I had found myself at a point where there were no grounds for doubting that the sky that my own poetic intuition had shown me, and the sky revealed to the eyes of those ordinary young men of the neighborhood, were identical. That moment for which I had been waiting so long was a blessing that the sun and the steel had conferred on me. – Mishima, Sun and Steel.

Wikipedia: Yukio Mishima.
Yukio Mishima Museum.
Wax figure of Mishima (where is it now?).
Yukokio (The Rite of Love and Death), a 1966 film by Mishima.
Mishima conducting the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony.
Eirei No Koe (Voices of the Heroic Dead), an LP by Mishima.
Justin Raimondo: Mishima – Paleocon as Samurai.
Stephen Mansfield: A Life Less Ordinary.
… and more.

OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2008.

Radley Balko, How to Get Ahead in Law:

Last June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, announced that he was dropping all charges against 44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer has the confidence to retry. Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-kindergarten day care facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals court determined that his trial attorney had been incompetent and that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence. Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children. Baran was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted in the day care sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre nationwide hysteria fed by homophobia, fears of Satanism, and a wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation techniques that critics say caused children to recount sexual incidents that never took place. In this case, prosecutor Daniel Ford, now a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court, showed the grand jury that indicted Baran an edited video interview with the children. According to court documents, the video shows several kids alleging that Baran had sexually abused them. Edited out was footage in which some of the children denied any abuse by Baran, interviewees accused other members of the day care faculty of abuse or of witnessing abuse, and, most important, interrogators asked the same questions over and over – even after repeated denials – until a child gave them an affirmative answer. Some children were even given rewards for their answers. [...] In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s alleged misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing. “In my opinion,” says Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, “ the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges. The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.” So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration, there are no plans to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for his conviction. Ford’s career trajectory indicates the backward incentive structure that prosecutors face: Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely comes with a penalty.

Religious Tolerance, The Baran Sexual Abuse Case:

The Bernard Baran indictment appears to have many factors in common with dozens of ritual abuse cases which surfaced during the 1980s and early 1990s. Bernard is a homosexual. That has proven to be a tremendous personal liability, because of the high level of homophobia in American society. On 1983-AUG-1, Bernard Baran was hired as a teacher’s aide by the West Side Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) in Pittsfield, MA. Pittsfield is located near the extreme western border of Massachusetts, very close to the state of New York. The uncle of one of Baran’s students complained to the ECDC that he did not want a homosexual teaching his nephew. Shortly after this complaint, he and his sister-in-law called police and said that the boy had accused Baran of molesting him. On 1984-OCT-6, Baran was charged with sexually assaulting two three-year-old children at ECDC. The number of charges reached nine after most of the 160 children at the ECDC were interviewed. Baran was 19 years of age at the time. On 1985-JAN-30, he received a sentenced of 3 concurrent life terms. Because of his age and slight build, he was easy pray for other inmates. “During his first four years, he was raped and physically assaulted 30-40 times. He has suffered serious eye injuries and many broken bones. [...] In all probability, he is innocent. In fact, the criminal acts for which he was charged probably never happened. However, the children (now in their twenties) probably retain “memories” of the abuse that were implanted in their minds as a result of improper interview techniques.

Articles continue at links.  See also the Free Baran archive.  I lived in a small town as a teenager in the 1980s.  I read books, including books on taboo subjects.  I played role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.  I listened to music that wasn’t to be found on the radio.  I was very aware that a satanic panic was occurring in the United States, and that I could be caught up in it for my interests.  I could be accused of the kind of nonsense that Baran was caught up in.  I found two strategies that worked well in keeping myself safe.  Those strategies were knowing when to be public about my interests and when to be private.  Being public (including publishing OVO) meant that any argument I was a secret agent for evil would be weak.  Being private meant that what the do-gooders didn’t need to know about they never knew about.  But it was my dumb luck that the do-gooders didn’t try especially hard.  Now I’m an adult and it turns out reading those books, playing those games and listening to that music didn’t do me or anyone else any particular harm.  Turns out the good guys were the bad guys and the bad guys were innocent.  I’m the one who stuck by my guns.  The judges and therapists and police and teachers and clergy who made bank on the satanic panic are the ones who tucked tail and shuffled into an underground tunnel.   I don’t deserve any particular reward for what I did.  But were this a just world, they would be held accountable for what they did.  Bernard Baran spent half his life in prison to satisfy the blood lust of those who serve an invisible monster that lives in the sky.  And that’s one of the reasons I’m public about my interest in the withering away of religion under the twin suns of scorn and reason.

John Dolan, Lord Byron the eXile’s Patron Saint (via):

[Lord Byron] chose to be noisily “immoral” not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don’t mean “moralism” in a normative sense – God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth’s letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever. It’s one of the curiosities of English literary history that you’ll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral” poets like Wordsworth. Only the “mad, bad and dangerous” Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin’s gore” and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy’s corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.”

Wikipedia, Theo van Gogh:

Theodoor “Theo” van Gogh was a Dutch film director, film producer, columnist, author and actor. He was the great-grandson of Theo van Gogh, who was the brother of artist Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh worked with writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce the film Submission, which analyzed the treatment of women in Islam. Some claimed the film was critical of Islam. On 2 November 2004 he was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch Muslim. The last film he completed before his death, 06/05, is a fictional version of the assassination of politician Pim Fortuyn.

Wikipedia, Pim Fortuyn:

Wilhelmus Simon Petrus “Pim” Fortuyn was a charismatic Dutch politician, author, columnist, public servant, sociologist and professor who formed his own party, Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn or LPF). He was assassinated during the 2002 Dutch national election campaign by militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf, who claimed in court he had murdered Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as “scapegoats” and targeting “the weak parts of society to score points” in seeking political power.

Wikipedia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Dutch intellectual, feminist activist, writer, and politician. She is the estranged daughter of the Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh’s movie Submission led to death threats. Since van Gogh’s assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004, she has lived in seclusion under the protection of Dutch authorities. When she was eight, her family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the center of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a prominent member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in the Somalian Revolution. Shortly after she was born, her father was imprisoned due to his opposition to Somalia’s Siad Barre government. Hirsi Ali’s father had studied abroad and was opposed to female genital cutting, but while he was imprisoned, Hirsi Ali’s grandmother had the traditional procedure performed on five-year-old Hirsi Ali.

Wikipedia, Religious Views on Female Genital Cutting:

Muslim scholars have often been divided on whether it should be considered as a non-religious traditional custom, or whether it should be specifically condemned by religious authorities.

Today is the anniversary of the death of Theo van Gogh, who was murdered for a film written by Ayaan Ali and who had just finished a film on Pim Fortyun.  Two ways of problem solving are on display here.  In one, people write scripts, make films and are elected to public office.  In the other, you kill people.  One is the way of the West, and one is the way of the Muslim world.  Which way do you favor?  If you’re having trouble deciding, look at the primary evidence.  Start by watching the film Submission.  Then look at this photograph of Theo van Gogh’s body, shot multiple times, head nearly cut off, stabbed repeatedly, with Muslim prayers pinned to his chest by his murderer’s knives.  Consider whether you think scholars should have nuanced debates on the merits of forced clitoridectomies for girls or… not.  I hope these comparisons brings you mental and moral clarity.

They don’t let pussies go to the moon.

Neil Armstrong: One Badass Mother Fucker. | MetaFilter

The Dreadlock Recollections by Kerry Wendell Thornley
140 pages, 8.5 x 11, $15.00
Confession / satire by the mind-controlled assassin of John F. Kennedy.

In early November of 1963, Slim and I arrived at the little house in Harahan, Louisiana, and Brother-in-law said to me, as soon as I sat down, “Kerry, give me some ideas about assassinating John F. Kennedy.” I was more than happy to oblige; for years I had been saving up ideas about how to murder the President. I’d spoken of assassinating Kennedy to anyone who would listen to me ever since my arrival in New Orleans.

[Free] [Purchase]

OVO is a collection of new works in the public domain edited and published by Trevor Blake since 1987. New issues are in progress.

Over 37 years ago Juliane Koepcke survived a two mile free fall, landing virtually unscathed in the middle of the rainforest. But that wasn’t the end of her ordeal. She spent ten days in the juggle before finding rescue.

Yeah I’m free, free fallin’ | MetaFilter

Tales From A Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing.

I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed, by Kyria Abrahams

Today is the seventh of June, the anniversary of the death of Alan Turing.

Wikipedia: Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. Of his role in the modern computer, Time Magazine in naming Turing one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, states: “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.” [...] During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Near the end of his life Turing became interested in chemistry. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis[2] and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s. [...]

Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom and regarded as a mental illness and subject to criminal sanctions. In 1952, Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old recent acquaintance of Turing’s, helped an accomplice to break into Turing’s house, and Turing reported the crime to the police. As a result of the police investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray, and Turing and Murray were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years before. Turing was given a choice between imprisonment and probation, conditional on his undergoing hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. To avoid jail, he accepted chemical castration via estrogen hormone injections which lasted for a year. His conviction led to a removal of his security clearance and prevented him from continuing consultancy for GCHQ on cryptographic matters. At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents, possibly due to the recent exposure of the first two members of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, as KGB double agents. Turing was never accused of espionage but, as with all who had worked at Bletchley Park, could not discuss his war work.

On 8 June 1954, Turing’s cleaner found him dead; the previous day, he had died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten beside his bed. The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, but a post-mortem established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from Snow White, his favourite fairy tale.

Turing was also a world-class runner.

Alan Turing Scrapbook: His best time [for a Marathon] of 2 hours, 46 minutes, 3 seconds, was only 11 minutes slower than the winner in the 1948 Olympic Games. In a 1948 cross-country race he finished ahead of Tom Richards who was to win the silver medal in the Olympics. [...] I asked him one day why he punished himself so much in training. He told me, ” I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.” ‘

I recommend the book Alan Turing: the Enigma by Andrew Hodges to learn more about this hero of the modern age. He saved England and chose death over becoming less of a man. – Trevor.

“Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.”

The Infidels – Arthur Schopenhauer

First published Thu Nov 13, 1997; substantive revision Mon Feb 9, 2009. Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. He

Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

was assassinated 6 May 2002 Dutch national election campaign by militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf, who claimed in court he had murdered Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as “scapegoats”

Pim Fortuyn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tamara de Lempicka

Art Decadence? | MetaFilter

The Turin-born Rita Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home. [As seen in 'Death by Design.']

Italian scientist, turning 100, still works

The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Cult author JG Ballard dies at 78

Extensive

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Tonto via Toronto: The Rise and Fall of Jay Silverheels

Karl Arnstein (1887-1974) was one of the most important 20th century airship engineers and designers in Germany and the United States of America. He developed stress analysis methods that have been incorporated into airships and airplane materials. [Dymaxion World illust. 142]

Karl Arnstein – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How Peter Viereck inspired-and lost-a movement.

Life and Letters: The First Conservative: The New Yorker