[This post was delayed from yester-day, as my hosting service had a technical failure, and it took me rather a long time to persuade them of such.]

I read

This past week it was reported that the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous claimed credit for taking offline over 40 websites used for sharing pedophilia — and for exposing the names and identifying information of more than 1500 alleged pedophiles that had been using the sites.

But the actual list is of user aliases, not of personal names.

Not only are pædophiles not being exposed here, but non-pædophiles who've had the misfortune of pædophiles' using the same aliases (by chance or from malice) are going to come under suspicion by those who think that they recognize them on this list.

Further, if agents of law enforcement were themselves working to track-down the actual legal identities of the pædophiles, their investigation has now been severely compromised, possibly fatally so.

Once again, Anonymous has done less good than they have led the gullible to believe, and have caused more damage than they have acknowledged.

In conversation last night or this morning, the Woman of Interest noted that cannibalistic killers are at elevated risk for brain disease, whence we got onto the subject of kuru.

Many people have heard or read of kuru, a form of prion disease noted amongst a people of Papua New Guinea, as a result of cannibalism, but I noted to her that there are a few twists to the story which which most people are not now unfamiliar.

The south Fore people, who were the people in question, seem to have picked-up the practice of eating the dead from a neighboring people who did so for religious reasons. But the Fore only adopted the practice, not the religion. The women were just having a little nosh as they prepared the bodies, and were sharing with the children.

An acknowledgment that kuru was caused by cannibalism — which acknowledgment later helped scientists and policy-makers to recognize how other prion diseases spread — was impeded because, in the 1970s and '80s, an anthropolgist, William Edward Arens, had with remarkable success made politically correct the denial of culturally based cannibalism. That is to say that the existence of cannibalism wasn't altogether denied, but it was claimed to be always an extraordinary act of deviance or of desperation. (On at least one occasion, Arens took a researcher to task for noting the physical evidence for cannibalism amongst a vanished people, instead of working to promote the virtues of their extinct culture.)

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on identifying the cause of kuru, was in Papua New Guinea largely for the boys. He was a child molestor.