The quote above is a statement by John Underhill, former managing director at the firm where Andy Case used to work, before he killed his two daughters, his wife and himself.

Original French text:

C’est la communauté entière que le sacrifice protège de sa propre violence, c’est la communauté entière qu’il détourne vers des victimes qui lui sont extérieures. Le sacrifice polarise sur la victime des germes de dissension partout répandus et il les dissipe en leur proposant un assouvissement partiel. (éd. Bernard Grasset, coll. Hschette Littérature / Pluriel, Paris, [1972]1998, p. 18

Consider this for example. It doesn’t really matter (for what’s at stake here) if it’s true or not. What matter is that some people find it necessary to see McChrystal resignation as a sacrifice and are representing that belief by their talkings and writings:

Respected conservative Toby Harden of the UK Telegraph notes: “the way Obama fired McChrystal was choreographed to humiliate the general and bolster the President’s credentials as a macho man. So much for ‘no drama Obama.’ The manner of the firing came dangerously close to putting political theatre and image-burnishing above the conduct of a war.” Mortified, dishonored, ruined? I think not. General McChrystal may no longer be commanding the troops in Afghanistan, but his act of valor may very well have won the war here at home. Army General Stanley McChrystal may have taken a bullet, but crawling through the trenches on his belly the wounded patriot managed to set off a warning flare alerting America it is presently under presidential siege. (American Thinker: “McChrystal’s sacrifice?” by Jeannie DeAngelis, June 24th, 2010)

Previously on Skandalon : Rene Girard, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal

“John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biologist and entrepreneur, most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome[1] and for his role in creating the first synthetic cell in 2010.[2] Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research and the J. Craig Venter Institute, now working at the latter to create synthetic biological organisms and to document genetic diversity in the world’s oceans. He was listed on Time Magazine’s 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.” (wikipedia)

Just to keep things in perspective:

“Some other scientists said that aside from assembling a large piece of DNA, Dr. Venter has not broken new ground. “To my mind Craig has somewhat overplayed the importance of this,” said David Baltimore, a geneticist at Caltech. He described the result as “a technical tour de force,” a matter of scale rather than a scientific breakthrough.

“He has not created life, only mimicked it,” Dr. Baltimore said.

Dr. Venter’s approach “is not necessarily on the path” to produce useful microorganisms, said George Church, a genome researcher at Harvard Medical School. Leroy Hood, of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, described Dr. Venter’s report as “glitzy” but said lower-level genes and networks had to be understood first before it would be worth trying to design whole organisms from scratch.

In 2002 Eckard Wimmer, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, synthesized the genome of the polio virus. The genome constructed a live polio virus that infected and killed mice. Dr. Venter’s work on the bacterium is similar in principle, except that the polio virus genome is only 7,500 units in length, and the bacteria’s genome is more than 100 times longer.”” (The New York Times)

Here are some more excerpts from Fabrice Tourre’s email:

“The SEC’s complaint only included Tourre referring to himself as “fabulous Fab” and talking about “standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

“When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: “Well, what if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”) it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight… It’s a little like Frankenstein turning against his own investor ;)”

Fabrice Tourre

” is a London-based Executive Director at Goldman Sachs who was charged by the SEC on 16 April 2010 in a $1 billion landmark fraud case.” (wikipedia)

You may remember Jerome Kerviel’s case.