'He decided to fight with the pastor instead of repent'

'I'm turning five years old and — um — I have to go to kindergarten tomorrow'

The solution lies in a balanced approach to immigration

All three cases have now resulted in a wash of charges

'These things are not up for debate'

Books Dissecting The Dark Descent Hints, Whispers, and Local Legends: “Mackintosh Willy” by Ramsey Campbell What we don’t know, and don’t speak about, can come back to haunt us. By Sam Reader | Published on December 3, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. David Hartwell’s introduction to this story calls Ramsey Campbell “one of horror’s greatest stylists,” and it’s difficult to disagree with (especially given that he’s commented on these articles in the past). Starting out in a more Lovecraftian vein of cosmic horror, Campbell developed his own deeply unnerving style that took the existing strain of cosmic horror and combined it with a sense of place gained from his surroundings, bringing in elements of folk horror, gothic horror, social drama, modern settings, and suburban gothic to rival King. “Mackintosh Willy” is a strong example of this synthesis, using the basic components of a gothic ghost story—a sinister haunted location, a local legend, repressed trauma and fear, obsession, and two twisted acts driven by these emotions—to craft a suburban gothic horror story that reminds the reader that what’s left unexplained and unrevealed is sometimes more important than what’s laid out in perfect detail on the page.  The red brick shelter by the reflecting pool in Newsham Park is home to Mackintosh Willy, a local transient who curls up in the corner at twilight and chases the local children when they get too close to his territory. Nothing is known about Willy beyond that, as even the name given to him is taken from the graffiti in his shelter. Over time, he becomes a local legend, a test of courage for the boys in the neighborhood where he lays his head. When Willy is discovered dead and his corpse is later desecrated (possibly by a young man named Mark), his legend only grows over the years, with his terrifying, obsessive presence haunting both the shelter and Mark. For while Willy’s mortal life might have ended on one rainy summer day, both his status as a local monster and his revenge on Mark are only just beginning.  It isn’t that the central terror of “Mackintosh Willy” is unexplained that makes it so horrifying, but rather that the explanation is organic. Suburbia (or in this case, the quasi-suburbia beyond the city center of Liverpool) isn’t a place of well-defined explanations or legends, something that makes many suburban gothic stories (as modern ones have a tendency to lean on exposition) an exercise in frustration. People don’t like to talk about the unpleasant events that go on around them, especially around adolescents, who make up the central cast of Campbell’s story. There are a half-dozen things Willy could be, from a subconscious manifestation of the kids’ fears of unhoused people living in the pond shelter to a revenant specter, but none of them are really confirmed. It’s not even fully confirmed what happened between Mark and Willy’s corpse—Mark apparently did something awful, possibly involving putting out Willy’s eyes (although it’s never fully clear what happened, and the narrative only hints at who was responsible). Nothing is directly spelled out other than Willy’s death, his haunting the park shelter, and whatever Mark did having a significant impact on both Mark himself and the legend surrounding Willy. It allows the imagination to fill in the blanks around Mark and Willy, with the legends surrounding them growing stronger with each retelling. Traumatic or disturbing events in suburbs and small towns are often left unmentioned or shrouded in shadow, their legend only growing with time; whatever horrible things happened around Willy and Mark are too terrible to talk about, and the repression creates an unnerving mystery, ending in Willy’s revenant haunting the shelter at the park. With so much of the story left a mystery, it’s hard to fully see Mark as deserving of the hideous fate visited upon him. Mark doesn’t seem at any point like a bad person. If anything, when he leaves the neighborhood gang, they immediately turn to shoplifting and get caught immediately. Mark is even described as generous, although standoffish and deathly afraid of Willy’s shelter. When pushed to examine it or go near it, Mark reacts the way a trauma survivor would as much as he does out of guilt or fear. Ben’s insistence that “Willy used to chase Mark around and around the pool,” with Mark lashing out verbally when Ben recalls the memory feels less like embarrassment at cowardice, and more like Ben was deliberately poking a raw nerve, especially if Mark had become upset enough by Willy “chasing” him to do something that clearly left him both terrified of the shelter where Willy’s ghost resides and horrified at what he’d done. The savagery of Mark’s desecration also points towards some form of trauma, as it’s only after Willy finally dies that Mark feels confident enough to approach him—at which point he assaults the corpse, putting out Willy’s eyes and covering them with bottle caps, as if trying to conquer his fear and trauma once and for all. There’s also the slightest insinuation of homophobia, as if Willy singled out Mark to chase specifically because of a feeling he had about the boy, or something Mark might have felt about Willy, coupled with the brutal way Mark finally desecrates Willy’s body.  The obsession angle also feeds back into the legend of Willy. His power over Mark and the complete omission of details surrounding his death make him seem even more shadowy than when he was a “creature of the night” who chased boys who ventured too close to his shelter. There’s even a sinister aspect to his legend that grows after his death, with the graffiti on the shelter referencing his death and desecration, and his corner of the shelter being shadowed in perpetual darkness. Most of his posthumous mumblings also have to do with his ocular trauma, as if that binds him to both the boy who discovered his body and the boy who mutilated his corpse. As his legend grows, the shelter by the pool becomes more and more unnerving, growing from a curiosity to the locus for a tangled knot of legends surrounding his death, Mark’s trauma, and the eventual collision of the two in Mark’s own drowning by Willy’s ghost. Even after the narrator moves away, the shelter still exerts a hold on him when he visits home for the holidays, Willy’s power still very much in play. What makes a “Mackintosh Willy” a great suburban gothic ghost story is the convergence of these things—the lack of details and exposition due to the suppression of things That Just Aren’t Talked About, the repression of Mark’s emotions as he refuses to admit what happened to him, the already legendary status of Willy as a “creature of the night” haunting the shelter before his death, the unresolved trauma, and the ultimate demise of Mark all grow the power of the revenant shade in the shelter. Even the narration itself plays into this, as it’s a recollection of a young man who grew up in the same town and has his own thoughts on the local legends and events around him. That shadowy, semi-nostalgic memory of Willy’s haunted shelter and the mystery surrounding its occupant in life and death invites the reader’s imagination to try to sketch in the details and fill in the disturbing blanks. It’s in those blanks where the true power and horror of this story resides. And now to turn it over to you: Does the lack of exposition aid or hinder the horror in “Mackintosh Willy”? What really happened—did Mark actually murder Willy, or did he lash out and desecrate his corpse? Am I gonna get roasted in my own comments thread by the author of the short story? And please join us in two weeks as we explore “The Jolly Corner,” a classic work of psychological horror by the legendary Henry James.[end-mark] The post Hints, Whispers, and Local Legends: “Mackintosh Willy” by Ramsey Campbell appeared first on Reactor.

Are you having a bad hair day? Believe it or not, your hair could be trying to tell you something about your health. Our hair is a reflection of our overall health and can indicate underlying health conditions or nutritional deficiencies. From hair loss to changes in hair texture, each strand can provide clues to our well-being. In this article, we'll explore what your hair says about your health... Source

One of the top domestic policy challenges facing the incoming Trump administration is the fundamental reform of federal public health agencies. President Donald Trump and his new team can draw upon a treasure trove of congressional findings. For example, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations (a panel of the Energy and Commerce Committee) has recently released a remarkable report on the Biden-Harris administration’s $900 million public relations campaign to sell its scientifically defective COVID-19 policies. We_Can_Do_This_NIH_PR_Campaign_Report_PUBLIC_82616d81ebDownload No congressional panel, however, has done more to shine the light on these problems than the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio. Subcommittee members have made commendable efforts to examine systemic failures over the past two years, and their investigations have also unveiled a troubling resistance on the part of federal officials to accept accountability for their actions, thus highlighting the need for serious institutional reforms. The Select Committee has done just that. According to The Heritage Foundation’s nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19, chaired by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, the recent pandemic was responsible for an estimated 28 million global “excess deaths,” including those of more than 1.1 million Americans, while inflicting devastating social and educational disruptions. THF COVID commish reportDownload Beyond that, as the commission reported, America incurred a total economic cost of more than $18 trillion. Likewise, Heritage analysts also identified 13 specific areas where the federal government failed the American people—from mixed messaging on masking, to misleading information on vaccines and mandates—while outlining a framework for public health reform. The Urgency of Early Warning During the pandemic subcommittee’s Nov. 14 hearing, Wenstrup emphasized America’s need to beef up our capacity to get ahead of emerging pandemic threats by deploying U.S. personnel abroad to detect and quickly neutralize health threats at their source. “This isn’t just about public health,” Wenstrup noted, “it’s a national security imperative.” Delays can be deadly, and our public health agencies must be ready to act quickly to save American lives. Commenting on the subcommittee’s extensive hearings on the communist Chinese origins of COVID-19, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, remarked: “It was necessary to investigate origins because that’s how we prepare for the next pandemic.” Going forward, the congresswoman, a physician, made it clear that the incoming Trump administration will need to ensure that our future defenses will require a stronger focus on lab safety and the adoption of more rigorous and ethical research practices, especially governing any future gain-of-function viral experiments that is taxpayer funded.   The good news is that the United States is already taking steps to bolster global security by expanding partnerships with other countries to facilitate surveillance and testing. Indeed, Wenstrup’s major recommendation, as a matter of national security, mirrors a key proposal of Heritage’s Commission on China and COVID-19: “The President should facilitate a public-private partnership centered around biothreat detection. The President should also attempt to globalize this network with the help of trusted allies and partners.” Counterproductive Vaccine Policy During the hearing, Wenstrup also called attention to the erosion of the patient-doctor relationship during the pandemic, evidenced by the backlash from the administration’s attempt to impose unprecedented federal vaccine mandates. Vaccines are not and cannot be a blunt instrument. The risk-benefit calculation of the COVID-19 vaccines varied, depending on the age and medical condition of the recipients. The vaccine mandates were thus utterly inappropriate. As Wenstrup noted, “Your doctor, who knows you, should have been the primary partner on health and medical decisions. Instead, politicians, with no medical background, imposed mandates to follow or be fired.”   In a similar vein, Miller-Meeks emphasized that the CDC should be held accountable for the growth of vaccine hesitancy, a serious problem traceable to the agency’s failures to communicate to the public clearly and correctly about the risks and benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines. During the hearing, she asked Dr. Henry Walke of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whether the agency’s “forceful guidance” and lack of transparency about potential adverse effects, such as the concerning incidence of myocarditis (heart inflammation) in young men, contributed to public distrust. In response, Walke in an attempt to make the CDC’s actions milder, insisted that COVID-19 vaccines underwent rigorous safety monitoring. For the congresswoman, that was an insufficient answer: “The purpose of vaccines is to confer immunity. So, what is the CDC doing on vaccine hesitancy?” The CDC, she said, should have given America’s doctors the green light to guide their patients, rather than promote an unprecedented mandate. Beyond the dangerous growth of vaccine hesitancy, the federal government’s top-down COVID-19 mandates proved costly. Thousands of military personnel were dismissed, and many other Americans lost jobs or suffered discrimination because of their unwillingness to take the new vaccines. Supply Chain Vulnerabilities During the hearing, the problem of supply chain vulnerabilities also took center stage. For example, the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile of medical equipment and supplies was clearly insufficient, and the nation quickly ran out of vital materials. In the event of the next national medical emergency, the nation will need an ample supply of such items as respirators, gloves and face masks, surgical gowns, and goggles, as well as antibiotics and antiviral therapeutics. The CDC had failed to maintain an adequate level, as Heritage Foundation analysts reported almost two years ago—and this problem spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations.     During the hearing, Dr. Hilary Marston, chief medical officer of the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged weaknesses in producing critical supplies like sterile injectables, explaining that razor-thin profit margins hinder preparedness: “[T]he ability to have buffer stocks—all of these things cost money.” She emphasized that federal officials need to monitor demand spikes and respond rapidly, but of course, a process for doing that should have been in place before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), among others, has noted that such a process for engaging manufacturers to respond quickly during a pandemic had not been developed.    In light of this deficiency, Wenstrup has proposed a “manufacturing reserve corps” to bolster the U.S. response to future emergencies. Under his proposal, federal officials would create a network of private companies ready to scale up production of critical supplies in a national medical emergency. The aim of such a program would be to avoid the chaos of early COVID-19 shortages. To improve the public health response to a future pandemic, the incoming Trump administration has a heavy lift. As Wenstrup aptly noted, protecting public health requires the capacity to take strong and effective measures, but at the same time these measures must coexist with preservation of personal freedom and should strengthen, not weaken, public trust. Public health officials must go beyond empty reassurances of their commitment to the public interest. Similarly, Congress must recognize that polite oversight alone is insufficient. Instead, it must implement tough structural reforms that ensure accountability, transparency, and an unwavering dedication to science—independent of political influence. The post Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Lessons Learned and the Path Forward appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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