The Evil Eye

The Human Brain is - despite decades of scientific study - a mystery. Computer Artificial Intelligence is still a major disappointment, even after 40 years of research. While computers are very good indeed at a few tasks, they are idiot savants outside a very narrow range. Pattern recognition, for example, is something that computers simply don't do well.

Which is why we call them idiot savants. Even a baby is better at recognizing faces than a computer is.

But the brain remains unintelligible to man. It finds patterns where none really exist. Martian canals, ghosts, and UFOs - all are all upwellings from that mysterious pool.

The evil eye is ancient - dating at least back to Old Testament times, and likely further back to Sumer. It's common all over the world, and even lives on - in a vestigial form - in the folk tradition of hanging horse shoes over a door. When you penetrate the anthropology wrapped around all its descriptions, it boils down to this:

People need to control the uncontrollable.

This is a Nazar Boncugu, a Turkish amulet against the evil eye. This one is quite simple - primitive, even - but some are very elaborate (and very expensive). Whether simple or ornate, it's to control the uncontrollable. Mothers in their millions buy these apotropaic charms, to protect their babies.

Mothers in the east, from humbler climes, that is. Mothers in the west - the educated, scientific, rational west - they have more sopisticated talismans to hang. But it's still the same game, protecting their babies. Trying to control the uncontrollable.

Because it's impossible that her baby could die of an infection, or that an evil man might snap and decide to go out in a blaze of CNN.


Weer'd Beard writes about someone who he approached, educated man to educated man, to convince him to lay down his mental beads and fetishes. Offered a rational discussion, with western facts and figures and logical persuasion.

MikeB responded that there was NO information that could be presented or discovered to get him to change his mind.

That was it, Mike's support for gun control is a religious one, not one of rational arguments and good-will.

You see, guns possess the evil eye. A malevolent power, a curse. Fortunately, there is a cure:

In Greece, Mexico, and other places, holy water is given to the child to drink and/or drawn on the child in the form of a cross. If the remorseful perpetrator can be made to spit into the water before the child drinks it, so much the better. In order to avoid direct accusations of having caused such a calamity, a family member may stand outside the church when the supposed perpetrator attends and ask all who pass by to spit into a cup of holy water, thus embarrassing no one.

That, and Common Sense Gun Control regulations.