Category: Mayhem

You’re all set — your bags were packed long ago, there’s a dozen solid gold coins stashed inside your belt and a pistol strapped round your waist.

There’s no need to say goodbye to the wife and children as they’re already waiting for you 6,000 miles away in New Zealand, having slipped off quietly at the first whiff of global catastrophe.

Now, they’re making themselves comfortable in that fortress home you’ve spent years preparing. They’ve got store-loads of food and enough guns and ammunition to start World War III – which might, anyway, have begun by the time you arrive.

The high-powered motorbike you’ve never used is waiting outside to whisk you to the private airport where your plane sits waiting.

A helicopter-ride at the other end, pull up the drawbridge — yes, you have one — and you’re ready to wait, for years if necessary, for civilisation to return.

Never mind the warnings about stocking up on vegetables after awful weather has ravaged the Mediterranean farming belt. Some of America’s richest people are spending billions quietly preparing for a global Apocalypse.

The world of Doomsday survivalists or ‘Preppers’ — those preparing themselves for total social collapse — is usually associated with wild-eyed eco-beardies hiding in the woods.

But the existence of a very different group of Preppers was laid bare by a political row in New Zealand this week. 

Attracted by a remote First World country that has the potential to be self-sufficient and is on no one’s list of nuclear targets, the super-rich kings of Silicon Valley and Wall Street are buying up vast tracts of its land — in anticipation of the day when they may need to live there.

The controversy has revealed the extraordinary precautions being taken by the mega- rich to ensure that WTSHTF — a crude survivalist acronym for ‘when the **** hits the fan’ — they and their loved ones will be safe and comfortable.

What the catastrophe will precisely be remains unclear, but possibilities include a devastating asteroid impact, giant earthquake, nuclear war, civil war, pandemic, zombie invasion and the Second Coming.

Tellingly, the geeks of Silicon Valley appear to be most worried that it will be a struggle between rich and poor in a world economy turned upside down by new technology — with them as the main targets.

The row in New Zealand involves scores of mega-rich Americans but has specifically centred on Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of the internet payment system PayPal and an early investor in Facebook.

Thiel, a libertarian supporter of Donald Trump, paid $10million for a 477-acre lakeside estate in the country’s beautiful but isolated Southern Alps, which provided much of the staggering landscape in the Lord Of the Rings and Hobbit films.

Amid a public outcry over the invasion of U.S. internet and finance billionaires, the New Zealand government has released papers detailing the ‘exceptional circumstances’ under which the American tycoon was quietly given a New Zealand passport.

Peter Thiel (pictured, centre) is a big supporter of Donald Trump but he has an insurance plan if it all goes pear-shaped, having bought a 477-acre estate in New Zealand

It is difficult to understand how this complied with the rules, including one that insists foreigners must live there for three years beforehand.

Mr Thiel has gushed about his ‘great pride’ in his new citizenship and how he has ‘found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future’.

Perhaps what he really meant was exposed, after one of his Silicon Valley chums, the venture capitalist Sam Altman, revealed that, at the first sign of global disaster, he and Thiel would fly to New Zealand.

Other uber-rich Americans who have recently bought homes there include the billionaire hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson and the Hollywood film director James Cameron.

Local estate agents say their U.S. clients rarely intend to live in New Zealand, but cite reasons for their purchases such as the toxic presidential election and the spate of mass shootings in America.

In the first ten months of last year, foreigners — mainly Australians and Americans — bought nearly 1,400 square miles of land there, more than four times what they bought in the same period the previous year.

When they’re not buying up land abroad (Chile is also popular as it has low taxes, a good climate and good air links), rich survivalists like to swap tips on private Facebook groups or at regular dinners.

Popular subjects range from buying internet currencies such as Bitcoin, as protection against a central banking meltdown, to which foreign countries are most likely to hand them a passport and so the chance to relocate there in a crisis.

Some have planned for every eventuality. Steve Huffman, the 33-year-old co-founder of the internet discussion forum Reddit, which is valued at $600 million, is one of several Silicon Valley barons who has had laser surgery to correct poor eyesight.

If society collapses, he reasons perversely, getting hold of new spectacles might be a challenge. Ammunition could run out, too.

Steve Huffman (left), co-founder of Reddit, has had laser surgery because he does not want to rely on post-apocalyptic opticians, while Oracle founder Larry Ellison (right) is readying an escape hatch in Hawaii

Steve Huffman (left), co-founder of Reddit, has had laser surgery because he does not want to rely on post-apocalyptic opticians, while Oracle founder Larry Ellison (right) is readying an escape hatch in Hawaii

Marvin Liao, a former senior executive at web giant Yahoo, has taken classes in archery and has amassed a small arsenal of other non-firearm weapons to protect his wife and daughter.

Survivalists have their own set of acronyms, including WROL (Without Rule Of Law) and LIA (Little Ice Age). (Some of them worry that the latter has just started).

They also have secret buzzphrases. ‘Saying you’re “buying a house in New Zealand” is kind of a wink, wink — say no more,’ Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist told the New Yorker magazine.

‘Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like: “Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.” ’

These brothers in paranoia don’t necessarily agree on how to survive the approaching cataclysm. Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook product manager, bought five wooded acres on an island off America’s north Pacific coast.

For this refuge, he brought in solar panels, power generators and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

He chose the spot because it’s far from cities — but not completely remote, as ‘one guy alone’ couldn’t hope to stand up to a ‘roving mob’. One would need to set up a ‘local militia’ with others, he says. And when you have your hundred or so acres of land, what do you put there?

Post-apocalypse design for the money-no-object brigade tends to involve creating a home with a huge bomb-proof basement. The home must be self-contained, not only ‘off the grid’ (with its own power and water supplies), but with tanks for raising tilapia — a hardy, fast-growing fish — to eat, and facilities in which to grow vegetables hydroponically without soil.

Naturally, property developers are eagerly capitalising on such concerns. The Survival Condo Project, a former underground nuclear missile silo in Kansas, has been converted into a 15- storey luxury apartment complex with a pool, gym, classroom and a miniature hospital.

It also has ground-level security cameras, electric fences, an on-site armoury, a sniper post and even a prison cell in which to put unwanted visitors. Instead of windows, giant LED screens show live pictures of the prairie above.

Its creators, who’ve sold all 14 of the $3m homes and are developing a string of new sites, say it can sustain 70 people indefinitely. That is, as long as they can put up with living in what a visitor compared to a well-furnished submarine — silent and rather oppressive.

Project boss Larry Hall says he gets more phone inquiries every time North Korea tests a bomb.

His team promise to send a Pit-Bull VX armoured truck to collect a resident from within a 400-mile radius of the silo.

Others prefer to put their own plans in place. Reddit founder Huffman says he realised a motorbike would be a necessity after watching the disaster film Deep Impact, in which people try to flee a tsunami caused by a comet-strike, clogging the streets so cars are brought to a standstill.

All this panic among the super-rich begs an obvious question: what do they know that the rest of us don’t?

Certainly, preparing for the Apocalypse has been a multi-billion dollar business for many years.

Polls have shown around 22 per cent of Americans believe the world will ‘end’ in their lifetime. Many right-wingers were convinced that Barack Obama would start a civil war by trying to seize citizens’ guns.

Now, there’s the unpredictable Donald Trump to disturb their dreams. More than 13,000 Americans registered to buy a home in New Zealand — 17 times the usual rate — in the week after he was elected president.

There are TV shows about so-called preppers, a survivalist radio network and disaster readiness conventions. There are estate agents dedicated to the task, scouting out easily defendable properties, and even ‘Doomsday dating’ sites such as Survivalist Singles (motto: ‘You don’t have to face the future alone’).

But why are the country’s most privileged people, protected by immense wealth, quite so in fear?

For it is believed that at least 50 per cent of Silicon Valley billionaires have taken out so-called ‘apocalypse insurance’ by finding a refuge at home or abroad. Reluctant to admit the truth, they often describe it as a holiday home, so it’s difficult to know whether or not Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg bought a 750-acre estate in Hawaii ‘just in case’.

Similarly, his fellow tech billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who has not only bought 98 per cent of Hawaii’s sixth largest island, Lanai, but — handily — its own airline.

Of course there is the possibility that these fretting tech wizards’ prescience is justified. For many have made their fortunes out of predicting mankind’s dependence on digital gadgets and so we should respect their Doomsday hunches. Survivalists say the first signs of crisis often appear on internet chat forums, as they reportedly did before the 2008 financial crash.

Yishan Wong, another Silicon Valley multi-millionaire who has had eye surgery in readiness for a world without opticians, argues that techie types see risk in a clear-headed way. An apocalypse may be a remote possibility but, if you have money to burn, it’s ‘logical’ to take out insurance, he says.

A less flattering theory is that they’re simply bored nerds who long for adventure and fantasise about a future in which they’ll be a woman-magnet cross between apocalyptic hero Mad Max and environmentally friendly chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

 

Thousands protest against Romanian government’s emergency decree

A New York architect told me he was hired by a senior partner at the bank Goldman Sachs to build a post-Apocalypse house far outside the city. His client wanted it to be a rallying point for local people, gathering — of course — to fall into line under his leadership.

Certainly, Reddit founder Mr Huffman claims he’s ‘a pretty good leader’ who ‘will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave’ if civilisation falls to pieces.

For these great Silicon Valley egalitarians fear that if society collapses, vengeful mobs will look for the super-rich. And, in particular, for the tech wizards whose robots and artificial intelligence systems are taking humans’ jobs.

A critic might ask why, if they’re so alarmed by a battle between rich and poor, they don’t stop wasting their billions on stockpiling armouries and islands and spend it helping the less fortunate?

But then what sort of red-blooded tech king wants to sign a cheque to charity when they could splash out on helicopters, Ducati motorbikes and an assault rifle for every family member?

It’s easy to laugh at the obscenely rich finding grotesque new ways to waste their money. But it’s undeniably disconcerting when it’s the lords of our digital age.

After all, everyone in Silicon Valley claims they want to save the world, not run away from it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4190322/Tech-billionaires-building-boltholes-New-Zealand.html

The 2002 edition of Zen at War was followed by Zen War Stories, which further explores the intimate relationship between Japanese institutional Buddhism and militarism during World War II.

A hacker is selling hundreds of thousands of accounts that were allegedly used by police and federal agents on a hacked law enforcement forum. The database being sold in the dark web contains over 715,000 user accounts. The breached site, PoliceOne, is a news site and community reportedly used by verified police officers and investigators to discuss specialist topics.

Using this account information, “criminals may be able to access ‘private messages and posts,’ the hacker who goes by the handle Berkut” told Motherboard.

PoliceOne.com is the #1 resource for up-to-the-minute law enforcement information online. More than 500,000 police professionals nationwide are registered PoliceOne members and trust us to provide them with the most timely, accurate and useful information available anywhere.

Berkut’s listing in the dark web marketplace claims that the forum was hacked in 2015 when this police data was stolen. “Emails from NSA, DHS, FBI and other law enforcement agencies as well as other US government agencies” is included in this database which is currently going for $400. The data includes usernames, email addresses, dates of birth, other forum data, and passwords stored in MD5, an encryption algorithm that is now considered relatively easier to crack.

The hacker responsible for the breach claimed that he breached the site using an exploit for vBulletin, a software widely known for its easily exploitable vulnerabilities, that has been leveraged in a number of forum breaches.

PoliceOne has confirmed the breach and is currently investigating the claim of stolen data. The site released the following statement:

We have confirmed the credibility of a purported breach of the PoliceOne forums in which hackers were potentially able to obtain usernames, emails and hashed passwords for a portion of our members. While we have not yet verified the claim, we are taking immediate steps to secure user accounts and our forums, which are currently offline while we investigate and gather more information.

While we store only limited user data and no payment information, we take any breach of data extremely seriously and are working aggressively to resolve the matter. We will be notifying potentially-affected users as a matter of priority and requiring them to change their passwords.

source: http://wccftech.com/hacker-selling-police-accounts-dark-web/

Last week, we brought you the trailer (below) for Flying Lotus’s directorial debut, Kuso, which I noted was pretty much the most batshit thing I’ve seen in my life! To recap:

Kuso goes deep and vividly into the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that hits L.A. But that’s just where the fever dream movie from Steve Ellison and Brainfeeder Films starts. The lift-off is the real ride. Along with the Funkadelic leader [George Clinton], Kuso also stars comedian Hannibal Buress plus Iesha Coston, Zack Fox, The Buttress, and Tim Heidecker.

Apparently, Kuso isn’t just batshit. According to Variety, crowds abandoned the film in droves not long after it launched its midnight screening at Sundance this morning, it may just be the most disgusting movie ever made. The industry trade gives a description of some the film’s most shocking moments, but be warned: If you decide to read, you will be bombarded with seriously grotesque imagery.

Per Variety:

“I’ll start with the footage of an erect penis being stabbed. As with most footage of an erect penis being violently gored by a long steel rod, it’s certainly unexpected. A large chunk of the audience left my screening early, when a boil-covered woman choked a man with a strap until he covered half her face with semen that looked like a muted version of Nickelodeon slime. But the walk-outs continued in a consistent stream up to the final scene. Some gross-out films are one-note, but ‘Kuso’ finds new ways to test viewers’ fortitude. Some folks stuck around after a woman chewed on concrete until her teeth disintegrated, but still peaced out when an alien creature force-yanked a fetus from another woman’s womb (accompanied by a ‘Mortal Kombat’ sound clip: ‘Get over here!’), then smoked the tiny corpse.”

Please excuse me as I try to wash these mental pictures out of my head!

Of course, this kind of terrible review could actually be seen as a good thing for Horror Freaks, who appreciate filmmakers who push envelopes to dangerous extremes. It will clearly be a mainstream flop, but I’m willing to bet Kuso will go on to amass some kind of cult following. Heck, I’ll certainly give it a view (in spite of my better judgment, perhaps!).

http://horrorfreaknews.com/kuso-deemed-grossest-movie-ever-amid-mass-walk-outs-sundance/14681

How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power

Blame it on the smartphone, the technology that is bringing internetlike tracking and surveillance into brick-and-mortar stores.

In this revealing account, Turow (Communication/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth, 2012, etc.) describes how the same online personalization made possible on your computer by cookies has reared its head in the aisles and checkouts of supermarkets and department stores, where 90 percent of all retail purchases still occur. “Tying into the always-on smartphone carried by about 70 percent of Americans,” writes the author, “merchants, brand manufacturers, and their agents are exploiting cellular signals, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, sound waves, light waves, and more to track customers and send them product messages before, during, and after their store visits.” This is the beginning of a “great transformation” in retailing: by 2028, half of all Americans are expected to have body implants that can communicate with retailers as they walk around stores, which will allow merchants to gather increasingly specific data on shoppers and redefine seller-customer relationships. In return for capturing data—generally without shoppers’ awareness—merchants offer loyalty programs, discount coupons, and other benefits. In effect, they are training consumers to “give up personal data willingly,” accept discriminations made between high- and low-value shoppers (with some getting better prices than others), and relinquish “the historical ideal of egalitarian treatment in the American marketplace.” Turow writes in a matter-of-fact manner that barely disguises his outrage at the invasiveness of the under-the-radar surveillance at Target, Wal-Mart, and elsewhere, which, he says, demands regulation and consumer education. While sometimes repetitious, his book offers invaluable insights about in-store data-gathering, including frank observations from unnamed industry sources. Most retailers, he writes, hope future generations will simply accept surveillance and tracking as part of the American shopping experience.

Valuable reading for shoppers and retailers alike.

Paul Lund was a serial womanizer, a career criminal, and a friend of the Beats. He was also, as I recently found out, the father my mom never met.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I didn’t think about any of this as a child, except knowing that it was a good idea to keep a safe distance if I’d pissed her off. My school friends called her “Don Jo.” The pertinence of the moniker only occurred to me years later, after uncovering a buried family history that spans three continents and includes a once famous criminal, an upcoming murder trial, and a part in one of the 20th Century’s most important and disturbing novels. It is a history that taught me that nurture only goes so far in explaining who a person is. Sometimes, your blood does your thinking for you.

As I got to know my mom as an adult I realized she was capable of calmly making decisions that would cause others to shudder. In 2006, when I was 23 and she was 62, we spent two months backpacking around India. It was something my parents had planned to do when they retired. Tragically, my father took permanent retirement much earlier than we had expected, so I took his place. We had a great time driving up the Himalayas and trekking for elephants in the jungles of Kerala. However, one incident in particular convinced me that she could survive pretty much anything that life could throw at her.

We were walking along a beach in north Goa during monsoon season. It was overcast and windswept. There was a rusted cargo ship wrecked on the shoreline and large waves curled vindictively in on themselves before smashing into surf.

I jumped in.

It was an act of immense stupidity. I swam among the waves for a few minutes and then decided to exit. When I got to the shore and tried to stand, my feet didn’t touch the bottom. I went under and a wave pounded me and pulled me out. I swam hard to get back in.

I got to the shallows again. Except, I hadn’t. One foot down and it was like missing a step; a step into an empty elevator shaft. The current dragged me struggling from the land. As I swam back I could see my mom stood watching. Then she turned her back on me and walked up the beach. Two things ran through my mind: It can’t be that bad because she’s causal, she’s not in a hurry; she knows I’ll be fine. And, Maybe she’s going to find some help, since the village wasn’t that far away.

I tried to stand again. Back under. I was exhausted. I laid on my back and let the waves carry me on theirs. Up and down and back and forth. They wanted to rock me to sleep.

I had a word with myself: “You either do this. Or you die. Sort your life out.”

I swam hard. Then I swam harder. Then when I thought I’d made it, I swam harder still.

Foot down. Sand. Stagger. Collapse. The relief bordered on muted ecstasy. I heaved breaths. My hands gripped wet sand.

Mom walked back and stood over me.

“Are you OK?”

“I am now.”

“You look relieved.”

“I am.”

I caught my breath. My eyes squeezed shut while my fingers compacted the sand in my palms.

I looked up at my mom.

“Why did you walk away? Were you going to find help?”

“No. Where was I going to get help from?”

My mom looked at me like I was the contemptible idiot I’d just demonstrated myself to be.

“I wasn’t going to watch you die.”

The author’s grandfather, Paul Lund.

There’s one aspect of my mom’s background that we didn’t speak about until recently, because she didn’t know of it, which lays in the mystery of “Don Josephine.” She never knew her father. He abandoned her mother in 1945 when he found out she was pregnant. My grandmother, Eileen, who died in 1959 of pneumonia when my mom was 13, dealt with the repercussions of refusing to abandon her daughter for the rest of her short life.

Orphaned into the care of a resentful stepfather, my mom buried all thoughts of her real dad, a habit that lasted for near on 60 years. I never heard her speak his name, and he was so removed from my consciousness that it never occurred to me to ask.

However, a year ago she called me in an agitated state.

“I found him. I found him,” she said.

“Found who?”

“Paul Axel Lund. My father.”

A recent interest in using the internet had led her, after giving no clue of thinking of him for years and years, to google his name.

Related: The story of William S. Burroughs’s Cat

Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, and Paul Lund eating at Dutch Tony’s Restaurant, Tangier. Photo by Allen Ginsberg via Flickr.

This is what infamous beat author William Burroughs had to say about my grandfather: “I am attenuating my relations with Lund and company. Too much of a bad thing.”

Quite a statement when you consider the man who made it shot his wife in the head during a “William Tell” party trick, afterwards saying he killed her while under the control of a “completely malevolent force.”

Burroughs and Lund met in Tangier in 1955. The city was an international free zone known for its liberal climate, skullduggerous inhabitants, and lack of extradition treaties. Lund had arrived the year before while on the run from the English police, and soon became established as a well known smuggler happy to regale his swashbuckling adventures to journalists. The city remained his home until he died of TB in 1966. The headline for his obituary in the News of World read: “The Buccaneer: He Played with Fire and His Women Loved It.”

Burroughs wrote that he “saw quite a lot of Lund and used some of his stories in Naked Lunch,” a novel that gave Jack Kerouac, who also knew my grandfather and wrote about him in “Desolate Angels,” nightmares while he was editing it. The friendship disintegrated when Lund was charged with opium smuggling in 1959. He dodged it by framing Burroughs.

Six months prior, and in unrelated circumstances, Burroughs had written to him from France with a whimsical plot that involved “pushing a little Moroccan tea in Paris.” My grandfather gave the letter to the cops and the Moroccans passed it on to the French authorities. He was free and Burroughs was arrested in Paris.

Paul Lund was a villain. So much so that author Rupert Croft-Cooke entitled his biography of him Smiling Damned Villain: The True Story of Paul Lund. His career choices included gun running for Haile Selassie, safe breaking, burglary, robbery, forgery, fraud, and smuggling. “Asked, as he entered prison for one of his sentences, what his occupation was, he said: ‘thief’ and refused to modify it,” writes Croft-Cooke. He spent time in jail in India, Egypt, Spain, Italy, and Britain.

Read: Quirky deadheads ruin William S. Burroughs’s 100th birthday party

A drawing of Paul Lund.

One of my favorite passages from Smiling Damned Villain is an account of Lund’s desertion in Egypt during World War Two. After twice being mentioned in dispatches for bravery there was a lull in the fighting and he got restless. To counter the boredom he went AWOL in Cairo and settled in a warren-like slum officially off limits to Europeans.

Lund described it to Croft-Cooke: “It was full of gambling and opium dens, brothels of every kind, deserters, black marketeers, thieves, escaped POWs—every kind of villain you can imagine. Just the place to lie up quietly.”

He joined forces with three other deserters, and together they robbed a watch shop “with a very fine stock of expensive watches” while disguised as mechanics. After going on a crime spree across Cairo and Alexandria he realized that “we were too easily recognizable,” so he returned to his army unit. He avoided punishment because he was sent to fight at the battle of el Alamein.

Lund possessed qualities that made him a predator to society. Croft-Cooke highlights the ultimate manifestation of those qualities.

He writes: “Paul’s a killer, a fellow criminal of his once told me, not because he has ever committed a murder but because he obviously would do so if it seemed necessary to him.”

The point of Smiling Damned Villain, Croft-Cooke explains, is to present a “portrait” of Lund. He avoids attributing underlying psychological motivations to his subject.

“A criminologist will know that, perhaps, better than I,” he states.

I’m not a criminologist, but I was convinced after becoming acquainted with it that my grandfather’s portrait depicts a sociopath. I decided to consult criminal psychologist Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist Revised—the 20-point gold standard for diagnosing psychopaths.

Lund gets full marks for most of them, including a lack of remorse, criminal versatility, recidivism, impulsivity, and being manipulative.

Paul Lund being interviewed about smuggling outside his bar in Tangier.

As for promiscuity and having many short-term marital relationships—both things cited in Hare’s list—the book is littered with examples (my grandmother being one of them), making superficial charm—another checkbox—almost obligatory. Inevitably, his charm resulted in a scattering of babies, and after some research I managed to find one of my mother’s half-sisters living in a trailer park in the Deep South. She had a shocking revelation: her son, who has a string of criminal convictions, is facing a murder trial. She believes he inherited his grandfather’s sociopathic genes.

My cousin is awaiting judgment in a state penitentiary. But where does that leave the rest of the family? Are we simply a line of evolutionary throwbacks? A lizard-brained collective only in existence because of the marauding lifestyle of a free-loving psychopath? I can’t speak for the wiring in my cousin’s head, nor I can I speak to growing up poor in the United States—a place that makes a walk in England’s mean streets seem like a country stroll.

In 2005, scientist James Fallon PET scanned his brain for a study on Alzheimer’s. At the time he was working on another project scanning the brains of psychopaths. To his surprise, it turned out his brain matched the pathological connections found in his psychopathic subjects. After delving into his family history, Fallon discovered he came from a long line of killers.

On Motherboard: How to Spot a Psychopath on Twitter

If he had the brain of a psychopath, why was he a law-abiding family man? Fallon concluded that his parents’ unconditional love had kept him from turning into a monster. Paul Lund also had a relatively decent upbringing; his mother was a dour and distant woman who left most of the child rearing to nannies, but his family was large, affluent, and well respected. I think this is perhaps why he didn’t do anything which could be typified as criminally insane or sadistic, despite being a proper bastard.

Writer and curator Ian Francis, who gives talks on Lund, agrees he lacked morality rather than being interested in the opposite of it. I called Francis before I investigated Lund’s past to enquire if my mother should be prepared to confront a hideous truth.

“He was amoral, not evil,” he told me.

Croft-Cooke said Lund was a man “who unblinkingly and intelligently faced the abomination of reality.” I recognize that ability in my mother. She accepted that I was going to drown in India, so she made a decision that would spare her any subsidiary pain. She wasn’t going to watch me die. Savage realism can be a useful tool to possess. It’s a hostile world out there, and making choices that break social convention is often an instrument of survival.

While Paul Lund used this ambiguous quality to help himself, his daughter has used it to help the people around her, despite having a much harder upbringing than her father. For example, at age ten I was unruly in class and falling behind. I had already been asked to leave one primary school. After being called into the head’s office over yet another issue, she found a way to inspire me. She handed me The Hobbit, told me to sit in the kitchen chair, and said if I moved or made any noise she would beat me to death. I had enough sense to do as I was told. Then I began to read.

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