What happened to Timothy Ferguson should be of much more concern to us than any threat artificial intelligence might pose to our freedoms.
I once had the privilege of studying with German filmmaker Harun Farocki. He described how difficult it had been to watch — in the days when filmmaking was confined to expensive analog reels — as military personnel around the world, but particularly in the “western democracies” gained access to the latest technology and the funding necessary to make films.
And then watch them use it for what they used it for.
While artists struggled to get even a few minutes in the can.
The situation has not been improved by globalization and digitization.
The use of digital audio-video technology and cloud servers to initiate the torture, starvation, and ultimately murder of Timothy Ferguson in Michigan is probably the worst crime committed on American soil in the past few centuries. That it was accompanied by a show trial in which the promotion of a no-doubt well-meaning, (if somewhat naive), police detective was lauded, is the proverbial smoking gun.
He moved up the ranks to Lieutenant, immediately after he declined to investigate the whereabouts of the servers on which the snuff films are stored. Jury questions attempting to shed light on this utterly disturbing fact during the trial were summarily dismissed by the judge.
The news coverage? Radio silence. Crickets. I’m not going to do the corporate media’s job for them. Particularly not since the court docket scheduling coincidentally timed itself so that the trial of Timothy’s mother and brother would air online right before Christmas.
The message could not be clearer if Dickens had written it himself. Somewhere there probably is a South Park episode about snuff films made of starving, emotionally abused children by mentally ill members of their own families and released just before a holiday formerly known as Christian.
In future, I’m not going to post this type of story anywhere on this publication except in the “rants” section which will not go to subscriber inboxes.
But Timothy Ferguson deserves a front page, in-your-inbox placement, horrific as the timing may be. It seems like the least we can do, to actually pay attention to this defenseless child and what was done to him, in the big picture, in the same context that was used against him, on the unholy servers of the unmighty internet.
Not to further crucify him, but rather to shed light on the larger circumstances of his death, and to become more alert to the wolves that stalk our airwaves. To pour water on this fire and put it right out, right away.
In the sparse commentary I found online, there was one person who knew Timothy Ferguson personally when he lived in Oklahoma who posted “we will never forget you.”
From this and other nuggets of information out there, it appears that before going into captivity in Michigan, Timothy Ferguson was a really nice, cute, healthy kid growing up in middle America and just trying to get a foothold in normal adult life despite the disadvantages he was born into. He never got that chance, and that is on us, collectively, unfortunately.
Citizen commentators, (surprisingly few of them) took their outrage to the posting boards of various forums. You can find these in the usual places such as Reddit, Youtube etc. Nearly all posters anonymized their names. This, combined with the bizarre details of the case and the near-total media blackout, almost leaves me wondering if this $?!t even happened.
But we know it did. Traces of Timothy Ferguson’s real life remain in photographs and 2 live-stream videos his brother Paul made of family events, in which Timothy’s voice is heard off-screen.
From these social medial clips, the online comments, and the surprisingly meagre results yielded by search engines, we can piece together some biographical information provable enough to call fact:
Shanda had 5 children, 4 with her first husband and the 5th with her second husband, Adam Vander Ark. Shanda’s first 4 children were removed from her and her first husband, Eric Ferguson in around 2009 or 10. It seems they were initially all placed in foster care.
Eventually, Paul and Timothy were returned to the custody of Eric Ferguson, who then sent them to live with Shanda — according to Shanda’s claims on the witness stand —as late as the pandemic of 2020. The internet implies that Shanda and Adam had been living in Michigan since 2015, around the corner from Adam’s parents. Shanda and Adam had a child whose identity the trial courts seem to be trying to protect, (which will be impossible unless he changes his name, but let’s just call him child 5, as a nod to guiltlessness of the innocent).
Adam Vander Ark has a Flickr page. Adam Vander Ark was an excellent photographer. Adam took many, many pictures, first of Timothy, then of the child that Shanda conceived and bore him shortly before or after the move to Michigan.
On his Flickr Photo page, started back in 2006, Adam describes himself as “a wheelchair bound man with a passion for photography and sports, always looking for something to shoot”.
Adam favors relatively colorless images, in black and white or sepia tones — with red accents.
Most of the photos of children are actually of Timothy. There are also many photographs of baseball players and sportsmen.
Adam’s parents, the grandparents of child 5 and the step-grandparents of Timothy and Paul, live only a few blocks away from the house Timothy was killed in, in a nice big house right on the coast of Lake Michigan. Shanda went there often with her pet dogs and Paul during the pandemic, and filmed some of it for her Youtube channel. Adam’s father (Timothy’s step-grandfather) Steven J Vander Ark is a litigation attorney in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
According to Paul’s testimony in court, this is where Paul and Shanda went directly after they had finally called the police about Timothy’s death. On the drive over there, Paul said, Shanda destroyed the tape that recorded evidence in one of the cameras.
Paul was not asked about the other cameras — but the lead detective, now a Lieutenant, was:
The other cameras installed around the house, as well as the motion sensors strapped to Timothy’s body and the door of the closet he was imprisoned in, were hooked up directly to cloud servers, streaming 24-hour live footage to anyone with access from an app on their cellphone.
When jurors asked for more information, there was none. Two of the jurors’ questions were thrown out by the judge as speculative and we don’t even know what those questions were.
But you can bet that the same Saudis who fly comedians like “Fluffy” over to entertain their royalty…
…the same leaders of supposedly egalitarian regimes who keep unknown numbers of Uyghurs in concentration camps (producing the phones Shanda and Paul used to communicate how they thought, up until the day he died, that Timothy was actually faking neurological injury and the debilitating effects of starvation)…
…and the same oligarchs who successfully poison anyone who opposes them using polonium on planes…
…you know, those guys…
…you can bet (and many probably still are, using the same servers the snuff films of Timothy are stored on)…
… you can bet the whole bank…
You can BET that this is entertaining, particularly to people of a certain bent… “Look at America now,” etcetera… Once you see that, it’s pretty hard to unsee it.
And this is where the story goes even further off the rails. It’s not just that the text messages between Shanda and Paul in the days leading up to Timothy’s death (read aloud to the jury during the trial) are so bizarre, with Shanda constantly reaffirming her opinion — to the older son she had recruited to starve and “discipline” Timothy — that Timothy was actually faking illness, even when he was down to under 70 pounds and could no longer move. It is glaringly obvious in photos, texts, and testimonies from both Paul and Shanda, as well as from investigators eventually called to the murder scene, that the house was not in any way wheelchair accessible.
It is referred to as “split level” and appears to have had an entrance which led directly to: 1.) stairs going down to a lower level/half-basement and 2.) up to an upper level where the kitchen was located, complete with locks on pantry and fridge so that Timothy could be starved, but slowly, over a period of half a year.
Footage filmed by Paul from all the way back to 2020 shows a deck in the back, also accessible only by stairs — with no adaptations such as access ramps, that wheelchair user Adam Vander Ark would have needed. And not one person at the trial of Shanda Vander Ark asked about this. Why not? How are we expected to believe that Adam Vander Ark ever lived in a house like this? At first it seems like such a minor detail, one so minor, in fact, that in real life, instead of the televised replay, a jury would miss it just like those participants in the 1999 “selective attention test” missed the gorilla walking onto the basketball court.
It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Is that the effing point? That we could be so bamboozled by our own justice system that we can no longer think straight, think at all, see a gorilla on a basketball court — and then even the evidence of that gets caught on camera and sent up into “the cloud”?1
Are we faking even our perception that Adam needed a wheelchair now?! Like Timothy was faking his perception that he was being starved to death in the land of plenty?
And let’s not dare to ask if Adam’s seizure was perhaps caused, as so many seizures have been recently, by either a serious Covid infection or a serious Covid-vaccine injury.
If it ever is determined to be, we’ll probably be told it’s because he took Sino-Vac or Sputnik instead of Pfizer. Or Ivermectin instead of that balm from Gilead, Remdesiver…
Here’s a screenshot of Adam Vander Ark’s supposed obituary, where his father, the litigation attorney, asks for funding for child 5’s college education, while praising a God that apparently sheds light from above on dead lambs who rise to bleat again.
Will he be having custody of that child then?
And while we are struggling to regain even a modicum of rational balance, to un-boggle our minds, so to speak — Shanda and Paul are convicted of first degree murder and child abuse.
By a jury of their peers, so esteemed as “the people who uphold American Justice” that the Judge makes a point of telling them that he has ordered the whole court to stand to honor them every time they enter the courtroom. The internet implies he is a newly elected judge. I am not blaming him, or anyone appointed to any role in this circus.
People are trying to do their jobs. But who is pulling the real strings? Where is the nexus of power that is allowing this to unfold with such incompetence that no one even bothers to look for the servers and take this footage down?! WHERE ARE THE CLOUD SERVERS?! Where is the HOST?!2
If this is not in some way a matter of US national security, then what is?
The prosecuting attorney, (and I do blame him a little bit, because it doesn’t take a whole law degree to know that it is at best just very uncool to suggest that the picture of Timothy starving to death, which he plans to pass around to the jury right before their lunch break, be projected onto the wall of the courtroom. Larger than life. Like footage shown to German Nazi officers in an attempt to “rehabilitate” them, or whatever that was. The judge says no. Out of respect for Timothy.
The jurors unanimously convict. Justice has been served. And justice was inevitable, it is inferred, because the type of sentence the jury chose would not have changed the outcome. The defense attorney explains this to us in an interview about how this was the worst case he ever had to deal with. All roads lead to Rome and all sentences end with life in prison for Shanda, and something similar but slightly milder, for Paul.
Jeff Bezos, however, has a brand new mega yacht.
Bought with the proceeds of all that tax evasion that keeps internal American defense and police forces chronically underfunded in the remote rural counties, the employment deserts, in which he builds his warehouse temples.
These two things, the consumerist temples and Bezos’ yacht are really not completely unrelated.
Most, if not all, of the technology used to torture Timothy, down to the “Carolina Reaper” hot sauce, was bought on Amazon.
There are so many aspects of what was done to Timothy Ferguson that are incomprehensible in their sheer horror.
But, for a hint of an explanation3, I find myself returning to Matthias Desmet’s theory of how Covid lockdowns led to collective psychosis in the western, formerly free and democratic world, that was not unlike the affliction of many populations that have fallen prey to dictatorships and then turned on each other and committed atrocities themselves.
Desmet’s explanatory formula goes as follows: First, a free-floating anxiety was created in a population using social manipulation techniques that isolated people, and simultaneously instilled fear in them. Then, just at the point where they were sufficiently unbalanced by this double-whammy-sucker-punch, a scapegoat was introduced. And, finally, with impeccable timing, the idea that by “punishing” and eliminating the scapegoat, the perpetrators could alleviate their own suffering and fear…
It’s almost impossible not to remember that, from the very beginning of the Covid crisis, the state of Michigan hosted politicians and laws that were some of the most draconian in the country.
People around the world said there would be consequences in the places where these drastic measures of control were instituted.
I don’t think any of us could imagine just how bad it might get.
Timothy Ferguson, I didn’t know you, but I will not forget you.
I will believe there is a heaven just so that you can be there, without your unrepentant and therefore unforgivable family, without the people who bought tickets to the evil circus in which you were killed.
In a front row seat for a much cleaner, better, and truly beautiful show in the afterlife. The most comfortable seat in the house. I sincerely hope.
See the original experiments done by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
At least one of the cameras mentioned in the trial was a “Teckin” (registered manufacturing {and presumably also server} address is at: 18/F, Henglu E Times Building, North 159 Pingji Avenue, Pinghu Sub-district, Longgang District, Shenzhen, China)
Read about Teckin’s privacy policy and location of servers here: https://www.teckinhome.com/pages/us-en
For what the deeper ontology of this tragedy might hint at, see Graham Greene’s short story by the same title “Hint of an Explanation” in 21 Stories: https://ia803001.us.archive.org/32/items/GrahamGreeneShorts/21%20Stories.pdf