"When does a fantasized crime become an actual crime?"

"A federal prosecutor, Randall W. Jackson, told jurors that [New York City police officer Gilberto Valle] had been plotting real crimes to kill actual victims, while Officer Valle’s lawyer, Julia L. Gatto, contended that he had merely been living out deviant fantasies in Internet chat rooms, with no intention of carrying them out."

One outside expert, Joseph V. DeMarco, an Internet lawyer and former head of the cybercrime unit in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, said in a recent interview that beyond its sensationalism, the Valle case highlighted the fact that there were “dark corners” of the Internet “where a whole range of illegal and immoral conduct takes place, and the general public has only a vague and fleeting knowledge that these places exist.”



He noted that the Internet, as a medium of expression and communication, also made it possible for people with interests as benign as stamp collecting or as grisly as cannibalism to find and validate one another in community forums.

“If you were someone mildly interested in cannibalism 30 years ago, it was really hard to find someone in real space to find common cause with,” Mr. DeMarco noted. “Whereas online, it’s much easier to find those people, and I think when you have these communities forming, validating each other, encouraging each other, it’s not far-fetched to think that some people in that community who otherwise might not be pushed beyond certain lines might be.”...

Ms. Gatto, Officer Valle’s lawyer, said in her opening statement that if the jurors had been scared by what the prosecution had described, “who could blame you?” The allegations were shocking and gruesome, she said, “the stuff that horror movies are made of. They share something else in common with horror movies,” she added. “It’s pure fiction. It’s pretend. It’s scary make-believe.”

Ms. Gatto suggested that the stakes for Officer Valle, who has been charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, went far beyond his case. She said cases like his test “bedrock principles, the freedom to think, the freedom to say, the freedom to write even the darkest thoughts from our human imagination.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Nonapod said: "Real space? The term meatspace is often used as a silly antonym to the cyberspace, but this gives it a whole new meaning."

"At worst, this is someone who has sexual fantasies...There is no actual crossing the line from fantasy to reality."

Says the lawyer for Gilberto Valle, the NY police officer arrested for kidnapping conspiracy. He "created a document on his computer, calling it a blueprint for 'Abducting and Cooking.'"

“I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus,” he wrote to a co-conspirator in one electronic communication recovered by law enforcement authorities. “Cook her over a low heat, keep her alive as long as possible.”

When the co-conspirator asked how big the officer’s oven was, Officer Valle replied, “Big enough to fit one of these girls if I folded their legs.”

Eaten by pigs.

"His dentures and pieces of his body were found by a family member in the pig enclosure, but the rest of his remains had been consumed."

ADDED: Puts "Charlotte's Web" in a different light, doesn't it?



IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

Wouldn't want the bacon from that pig.

Must the pigs be destroyed and not used for meat now? This is a subtle cannibalism question that has never occurred to me before.

Can we slaughter these pigs and use the meat?
	No, it's too close to cannibalism to eat meat from an animal that's eaten human.
	Of course! This has nothing to do with cannibalism. Slaughter and eat without compunction.
	It's okay, but only if the consumer is informed that this meat came from pigs that ate a man.
	Feed them something else for X months, and then the meat will be useable.
pollcode.com free polls

"I got the idea spontaneously.... I'm a man of science, I have a very high IQ."

"I thought, I'll get rid of it.... I have the ability to solve problems in a second."

Said the professor, explaining his thinking after he cut off his wife's lip, when he realized doctors might be able to sew it back on. She'd told him she wanted a divorce. He ate the lip.

Another naked cannibal...

... in Florida.

It's the third case of flesh-biting in Florida similar to the Miami incident in as many weeks. On Saturday, Giovanni Martinez allegedly bit into the arm of a hospital nurse and threatened to eat hospital staff's faces off "like that guy in Miami."

"Victim of Canadian porn star cannibal is Chinese gay lover as police reveal 'murderer' is on the run in France... dressed as a woman."

A Daily Mail headline. Are you having trouble keeping your cannibals in the news straight? (No pun intended!) I mean there's the porn-related-gay-Chinese-on-the-lam-transvestite guy...

Luka Magnotta, who is suspected of cannibalism, flew from Canada to France a day after placing gruesome footage of the murder on the internet.

Flew? Vampire or zombie? You decide. Anyway, there's that one. There's the naked-in-broad-daylight face-eater. That's Rudy Eugene, not on the lam. Shot dead by the police. And then there's the other one:

Authorities say Alex Kinyua, 21, admitted using a knife to kill and carve up Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, before eating his heart and parts of his brain....

In February, Kinyua posted a question on Facebook, asking fellow students at historically black colleges and universities if they were "strong enough to endure ritual HBCU mass human sacrifices around the country and still be able to function as human beings?"

He referred to the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech and "other past university killings around the country" and warned "ethnic cleansing is the policy, strategy and tactics that will affect you, directly or indirectly in the coming months"....

I wonder if the sane people who engage in racial politics bear some responsibility for the paranoia that arises in weak minds? In fact, I wonder if the people who delight in japing about a zombie uprising bear some responsibility for the crazy people who actually do try to eat brains?

I'm thinking back to the clumsy efforts to assign blame for the Tucson massacre. Some people are insane. But why do they act out their insanity in the particular way that they do? What signals do they pick up and distort? You can't really blame the sane people who talk and distort and lie about things as they operate more or less competently in this place called reality that most of us inhabit. And yet... why are we hearing so much about cannibals these days?

ADDED: I crossed out "Chinese" in the first paragraph of this post. The headline had a few too many words in it for me to absorb. The victim was Chinese, not the cannibal.

Ronald Poppo, the cannibal's victim, the faceless man.

Video shows 3 bicyclists pedal past the naked cannibal attack. The attack goes on for 18 minutes.

I don't blame the bicyclists for not stopping to help. It would be heroic to stop, but getting away and calling 911 is all that is morally required. Do you disagree? I would not even stop long enough to figure out who was the one that needed help. Now, if the bicyclists casually observed the scene and moved on, that would be wrong.

There's also now an answer to the question I had: Why was the victim naked? The attacker, Rudy Eugene "pulls Poppo from the shade, strips off his pants and pummels him. He hunches over Poppo and appears to lie on top of him."

And here's an article about Poppo, whose sister thought he'd died years ago.

“I tried to reach him, and I just thought he killed himself,” she said. "We really thought he was no longer on this Earth."

So here was this poor, lost man. Before the attack, the word "faceless" could have been used figuratively to describe him. Now, having literally lost his face, he is famous. His face, in old photographs, is on the front page of the newspapers. What strange paradoxes. Lying in the street, with no one to care about him, he was suddenly "pull[ed]... from the shade" and into the bright light. He suffered a horrible attack, but before the attack, no one cared about him or gave him any thought at all. Now, everyone cares intensely about him. We want to know how he came to be lying there that day, how he suffered, whether he can be saved. The doctors and the nurses will lavish medical care upon him.

He lost nearly 80% of his face on Saturday when Rudy Eugene, 31, chomped away at his nose, eyes and face. He also lost one eye when it was gouged out, police said.

“He had his face eaten down to his goatee,” said Sgt. Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police. “The forehead was just bone. No nose, no mouth.”

The beard was not eaten. The crazed cannibal maintained possession of the sane person's distaste for hair? Perhaps when Poppo wandered the streets, that beard marked him as a homeless man, and outsider. And then the beard preserved a part of his face.

Antoinette remembered her sibling as “a very intelligent boy.”

“My mother always sent him to private schools, and I really don’t understand what happened,” Antoinette said....

He was remembered as a “nice guy” by his fellow classmates at Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious city school from which he graduated in 1964.

Stuyvesant isn't a private school, so it's hard to make sense of what the sister said. Maybe just that the place was exclusive. You have to do well on a difficult test to get in.

“The sad reality is there are many brilliant people who become schizophrenic and end up on the streets,” said a Stuyvesant classmate, Felix Freshwater, who became a pioneering plastic surgeon in Miami.

Now 65, Poppo used to sleep on a cardboard box across the street from the crime scene, often listening to a small radio, a homeless man named Andrew told the Daily News.

“He didn’t mess with anyone, and he seemed like a very educated man,” Andrew said.

Very sad.  I hope it's some consolation to the poor man that, after all these years, people do care about him. Here are some more details about medical treatment. The injuries are not life threatening, but the human mouth is full of germs, so the worst danger is infection:

[R]ebuilding of Poppo's face would happen in stages after doctors try to keep his wounds clean, salvage viable tissue and determine a plan for skin grafts. Protecting his remaining eye and maintaining an airway are priorities.

To keep the wounds clean, doctors use grafts of the patient's skin, cadaver skin or synthetic skin to cover the exposed bone or cartilage, said Dr. Blane Shatkin, a plastic surgeon and director of the wound healing center at Memorial Hospital Pembroke in South Florida....

"You would not just take this guy to the OR for a face transplant — you really have to go in a staged fashion. You save what you can and use what you have available first, don't burn any bridges and move forward slowly," Shatkin said. "And you have to see what he wants."

Psychological care is important to the recovery, and patients need to participate in the decision-making process, said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He performed a facial transplant on a Connecticut woman who was mauled by a friend's pet chimpanzee in 2009.

"I think the patient has to be able to cope with the injury and the trauma and needs to figure out what has happened. It often takes them weeks to understand what has happened," Pomahac said.

They have a man who hasn't coped with ordinary life, but he had his survival-level life on the streets for 30 years. In that, he's not much like the chimpanzee victim, abruptly thrown from ordinary life into abnormal life.

Everybody's talking about cannibalism.

I'm just checking the front page over at USAToday, and I'm struck by the top entry on the "most popular" list:

"Police: Woman killed her infant, ate part of brain." Has the country gone mad? More of this bath salts, the new LSD business? No, it's a story from 2009, revived because... Well, I'm promoting it now, and if you clicked on it, you're pumping its popularity.

With "bath salts" — "the new LSD" — there have been 3 or 4 cases in Miami like the naked cannibal.

According to Armando Aguilar, head of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police:

[H]e said the people have all taken their clothing off, been extremely violent with what seemed to be super-human strength, even using their jaws as weapons....

In many of the cases, [emergency room Dr. Paul] Adams said the person’s temperature has risen to an extremely high level, they’ve become very aggressive, with logic and the ability to feel pain lost in their reactions. Some have used their jaws as a weapon during attacks.

Dr. Adams said the patients were in a state of delirium.

“Extremely strong, I took care of a 150 pound individual who you would have thought he was 250 pounds,” Dr. Adams said. “It took six security officers to restrain the individual.”

"I lived my whole life in New York and never experienced something this crazy."

Absurd statement from a man who witnessed a naked man biting off chunks of another naked man's face, swallowing the flesh, and growling and continuing face feast after he was shot by police. 

Now, what is it about New York City that makes people think that everything happens there and they'll be seeing all manner of bizarre activity to the point where it would occur to that man to comment that, despite living his whole life in New York City, he's never seen anything at that level of insanity?

Police gun down a man who is — quite obviously! — unarmed.

It's obvious, because he is naked. They gun him down, because he his eating the face off another man, who is also naked. They continue shooting until the man is dead because one shot doen't stop him from devouring the other man's face.

Investigators believe the victim may have been homeless and laying down when the crazed man pounced.

But why was the victim naked?

ADDED: "And the guy was like tearing him to pieces with his mouth, so I told him, 'Get off!'... You know it's like the guy just kept eating the other guy away like ripping his skin.... Police officer came over, told him several times to get off and a police officer climbed over the divider and got in front of him and said, 'Get off!' And told him several times and the guy just stood his head up like that with a piece of flesh in his mouth and growled."

"A man who beheaded and cannibalized a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus in Canada..."

"... won his bid to leave the grounds of the mental hospital where he is being kept, a criminal review board ruled Thursday."

The board said the passes should only be granted if Li's treatment team believes his condition is stable and that it would be "appropriate and safe for him to leave the locked ward." He will have to be escorted at all times by a staff member and a security officer.

The crime occurred only 4 years ago.

Radical Locavore.

A Bizarro cartoon, arrived at via the Wikipedia article "Self-cannibalism," which I found seconds after speculating out loud "I wonder if anyone has ever gotten so hungry they've eaten parts of their own body?," which arose out of a conversation with Meade, who was talking about military training for survival behind enemy lines. For example:

Trainees are taught that when stranded in the field, they should eat what they can find, which can include turtles, snakes, insects and other things normally considered unappetizing. The training helps them overcome their food aversions.

... [A] running joke is that "food is a crutch" because survival school teaches soldiers how to overcome physical stress like hunger by using mental strength.

A Special Forces captain swallows a worm to the delight of his fellow trainees. Asked what it tasted like, the captain said, "Dirt. And kind of like a worm. Kind of fishy. Kind of fishy. "

You can imagine why we were talking about that. Just reabsorbing and digesting the classic Obama text: "I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."

I was saying: Isn't it interesting that he spoke of the texture, but not the taste? I was going to riff in the direction of portraying Obama as coolly Spock-like — missing one of the 5 senses, but then I veered toward literary analysis. It's a neatly compressed comic line: tough... tougher... crunchy. He sticks with the textures because it's funny to struggle through the tough sequence — tough, tougher — and then get — not what comes next grammatically: toughest — but crunchy! because — ha ha — we all know, whether we eat them or not, that insects are crunchy. In those few words,
you laugh and you're there inside the immediacy of what the small boy experienced. Once there, you can imagine the flood of sensation and emotion for yourself. The author restrains himself. He doesn't bother us with descriptions of how he felt. You've had enough. You've had dog-tough, snake-tougher, grasshopper-crunchy. You were there, eating it too, because you were a boy with a father and what would that be like?

Anyway, I love that there's a Wikipedia article for so many quite specific things that suddenly pop into your head. From the "Self-cannibalism" article:

As a natural occurrence: A certain amount of self-cannibalism occurs unwillingly, as the body consumes dead cells from the tongue and cheeks...

As a disorder or symptom thereof: Fingernail-biting that develops into fingernail-eating is a form of pica, although many do not consider nail biting as a true form of cannibalism....

Who are the true cannibals?

As a choice: Some people will engage in self-cannibalism as an extreme form of body modification, for example eating their own skin. Others will drink their own blood, a practice called autovampirism, but sucking blood from wounds is generally not seen to be cannibalism. Placentophagy may be a form of self-cannibalism. On January 13, 2007, Chilean artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party for his most intimate friends. The main meal was agnolotti pasta, which was topped with a meatball made from the artist's own fat, removed in the previous year in a liposuction operation.

Citations omitted. And I'll spare you the "As a crime" section, which is really unpleasant. The "Cultural references" list is extensive (and suggests that if you can think up anything gross, there are numerous storytellers who've already gone there):

King Erysichthon from Greek mythology ate himself in insatiable hunger, given him, as a punishment, by Demeter.

In an Arthurian tale, King Agrestes of Camelot goes mad after massacring the Christian disciples of Josephus within his city, and eats his own hands.

Stephen King's short story "Survivor Type", about a man trapped on a small island.

King's shipwreck survivor is a heroin smuggler, and the heroin helps him get through the food prep.  There's more on the "Cultural references" list. I won't repeat it all, but it ends with "Radical Locavore."

"I'm willing to lead but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals...."

"Frankly, Marianne and I could use a break."

Who said it?

"Most vegetarians look so much like the food they eat that they can be classified as cannibals."

Finley Peter Dunne, quoted in "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present."

Meade just read that out loud to me, and it caused me to do a search for the word "cannibals" in the book I had open in Kindle, Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse." I was delighted to find that old Kurt had used the word in his delightful collection of stories, and the line is even one that other readers — 3 to be precise — have highlighted. (Kindle lets you see other people's highlighting.)

But he faced the problem that complicates the lives of cannibals — namely: that a single victim cannot be used over and over.

The "he" is not, of course, a cannibal, just a man with a problem that cannibals have, the need to look for more victims.

As for that Finley Peter Dunne quote, Meade said it puts a different spin on the old saying "You are what you eat." If you are what you eat, you're a cannibal. That seems like something that's been said before, but the closest I get, Googling that, is somebody at Yahoo Answers asking "If you are what you eat then are Cannibals the only True Humans?" Before answering that yourself — assuming you feel so inclined — please read Michel de Montaigne's "On Cannibals":

I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of such a deed, but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own. I think it is more barbaric to eat a man alive than to eat him dead, to tear apart through torture and pain a living body which can still feel, or to burn it alive by bits, to let it be gnawed and chewed by dogs or pigs (as we have no only read, but seen, in recent times, not against old enemies but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and--what is worse--under the pretext of piety and religion.  Better to roast and eat him after he is dead.

Recent times... in 1580.

Man arrested for "biting off a man's eyebrow during a fight, chewing it and spitting it out."

He spit it out? Well, there was hair in it.

"When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot."

News from half a century ago trickles out. The boy was one of 45 million deaths in Mao's Great Leap Forward. Another death was the father himself, who died one week later — of grief, as people who lived through that time, perceived it.

Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party...

As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another....

One police investigation from Feb. 25, 1960, details some 50 cases in Yaohejia village in Gansu: “Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother. Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.”

The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

Via Instapundit, who writes:

Socialism starves. Capitalism enriches. It’s been proven over and over again. But remember: Communism is about “human dignity.”...

"18 Signs That America Is Rotting Right In Front Of Our Eyes."

Pravda headline, a little too close to the truth to be funny.

Once upon a time, the American people worked feverishly to construct beautiful, shining communities from coast to coast. But now we get to watch those communities literally crumble and decay in slow motion. Nothing lasts forever...

Also in Pravda:

A restaurant in Germany has been conducting an advertising campaign for people to donate body parts which will be transformed into delicious dishes at a new restaurant called Flime.... [T]he donors will be considered “members” of a new dining cult. The “members” will declare themselves willing to donate “any part of their body” while the resulting hospital costs will be borne by the restaurant which is looking for “an open-minded surgeon.”

"A French prisoner accused of killing and devouring part of his cellmate's lung ripped out the organ and started his grisly snack while the victim was still alive."

It's Nicholas Cocaign, the world's worst cellmate.

After the argument [over the toilet] escalated to blows, the real-life Hannibal Lecter allegedly butchered his cellmate, carved out his victim's lung - mistaking it for the heart - and fried up part of the organ with onions on a makeshift grill before eating it....

The case has drawn scrutiny to the entire French penal system. It comes on the heels of last week's ruling by a tribunal in favor of 38 inmates and former inmates who sued over inhumane conditions at the same Rouen jail where Baudry was killed. The court ordered the French government to pay $430 to $21,500 dollars to each plaintiff, Agence France-Presse reported.

Cocaign himself testified Monday that the murder was a cry for help - and not just from the victim.

Cocaign said he warned prison officials that he was capable of violence, begging to be transferred for psychiatric treatment as he served time for several rapes, among other crimes.

"No one was listening to me," Cocaign told the court, according to the AFP. "I made several appeals for help, saying I was a man capable of being dangerous. I took action, and then they took me seriously."

The French government actually is responsible for the murder because...
	A loud argument was not stopped before it escalated to violence.
	A man who needed psychiatric treatment was instead housed with other prisoners.
	They allowed cooking equipment and ingredients in the cell.
	"Butchered"? "Carved"? They let him have a weapon!
	France doesn't have the death penalty.
pollcode.com free polls

A few more details here. The weapon allowed in the cell was a pair of scissors. Cocaign was not in prison for murdering anyone. He was only facing a charge of armed robbery charges. There were onions, olive oil, salt and pepper on a portable camping stove in the cell. Cocaign "initially claimed that he was fascinated by the 'inner workings of Baudry's personality' and 'wanted to take his soul', he later admitted that he was 'curious to see what he tastes like.'"

"If I Ate Lab-Grown Human Tissue or Organs, Would I Be Considered a Cannibal?"

I'm adding this to my list of moral questions about things nobody wants to do.

Questions:

1. What else can we put on that list?

2. If you bite your cuticles or the inside of your mouth and keep chewing and swallowing, are you a cannibal?

3. Why does it matter whether a particular word — such as "cannibal" — applies to something, when the real question is whether something is right or wrong?