I did five posts on the Virginia Tech slaughter. It was hard to do less. At no time did I post the picture of the evil little runt. On the contrary, I depicted the event with empty shell casings and for the runt, I chose a picture of a cockroach. That is what he deserved.The media CHOse otherwise. NBC is an absolute disgrace. The arrogant fools decided silly old Imus had to go for a parody on rap music lyrics and Cho had to be given what he wanted and died for: eternal infamy. Excuse me for spitting.
Cho ...
ReplyDeleteIsmail Axe ...
As a TV star, got way more than 15 minutes of fame.
doug had mentioned that even without NBC he'd have made it to Youtube, etc. I must disagree.
Those videos could have been buried, sequestered from the public. Then there'd be no copies to air.
Some folk say that there is nothing that cho did that could be imitated, by a copy cat. Some people are really stupid, too.
NBC and FOX both played into cho's madness, promoted it and laid the groundwork for the next episode.
Are we alone is our disgust, for the Media and their excusers, no, not this time:
ReplyDeleteToo Much Tolerance
By Patrick Buchanan
Cho Seung Hui did not live the life he wanted. But on Monday, on the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech, Cho ended his life the way he wanted. And because of those two hours of slaughter and suicide, Cho attained the immortality he craved.
He carried out the killings -- and we of the media did the rest.
A month from now, few Americans will remember who his victims were. But, decades from now, millions will recognize Cho's face. When it pops up on a TV screen anywhere in America, they will ask, "Isn't that the Korean kid who shot all those people down at Virginia Tech?"
Cho is now up there with Lee Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. By documenting on videotape his rage, resentment and hatred of those he saw as persecuting him, and mailing it to NBC, Cho ensured the world would hear, in his words, why he did what he did. He ensured that we would see him as he saw himself, an implacable two-gun avenger of the injustices done to him.
Cho wanted to be certain his story would be told, and heard by America, in his own words. He succeeded. And out there in America, other loners, unable to connect or communicate, nursing grievances and grudges unknown, seeing a future not worth living, are going to look on the blaze of hideous glory with which Cho went out and say to themselves, better such an end than continuing on with this hateful life that I am leading to nowhere. ..."
Arrogence of Power feeds the fires.
No, you misread my post, Rat:
ReplyDeleteDoug said...
NBC is uniquely responsible, also, since once they ran it, there was no way the world would not see it, even if the MSM refused:
You-Tube, and etc.
Thu Apr 19, 11:53:00 PM EDT
At any rate, THEY are responsible and THEY got the ratings.
Dennis Miller and I have not seen it in order not to fulfill his last request.
(and not have visions of the evil punk)
Cho was a Senior English Major with People Skills in the Minus Zone.
ReplyDeleteHe saw the arc of his Profession in English as clearly as he saw his plan for Mayhem.
(Gee, I know all that w/o seeing the enhanced by MSM "Manifesto")
Need to know, Indeed!
Krauthammer
ReplyDeletePolitico columnist Ben Smith has brought attention to a speech that Barack Obama made in Milwaukee just hours after the massacre. It must be heard to be believed. After deploring and expressing grief about the shootings, he continues (my transcription): "I hope that it causes us to reflect a little bit more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms. . . . There's also another kind of violence . . . it's not necessarily physical violence."
What kinds does he have in mind? First, "Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women [of Rutgers]. . . . For them to be degraded . . . that's a form of violence. It may be quiet. It may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn." Good to know that Don Imus's "violence" does not quite rise to the level of Cho's.
Second, outsourcing. Yes, outsourcing: "the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country."
Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur -- accusing America of conducting "foreign policy as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there." Is Obama, who proudly opposed overthrowing the premier mass murderer of our time, Saddam Hussein, suggesting an invasion of Sudan?
Who knows. This whole exercise in defining violence down to include shock-jock taunts and outsourcing would normally be mere intellectual slovenliness. Doing so in the shadow of the murder of 32 innocents still unburied is tasteless, bordering on the sacrilegious.
Perhaps in the spirit of Obama's much-heralded post-ideological politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder.
At BC, Allen lectured me that airing the "Manifesto" was required to keep horrors like the many JFK Theories from happening.
ReplyDeleteNeed to know, you know.
I surrendered under hostile fire.
Edwards and the Arrogance of the Entitled - Richard Reeves,
ReplyDeleteA sense of entitlement is a creeping mold on the American dream. Poor boys can make a lot of money -- Edwards as a trial lawyer, Corzine as an investment banker -- buy a public title and act like a separate breed, members of our own unofficial House of Lords, or American monarchs. Maybe we didn't learn that much in 1776.
Smart boys can do the same thing. Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank after showing his military genius in trying to conquer Iraq, is not a rich man. But he is at least as big a fool as the rest of the entitled. In his case, if you follow these things, he arranged a $195,000-a-year salary plus consulting fees for his girlfriend by having her shifted from the bank, which has conflict-of-interest regulations, to the State Department, where she is making more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
So it goes. These are the new best and the brightest.
---
DC Makes the Elites and Royals of England look like Paupers.
Truth beats censorship.
ReplyDeleteI'm not afraid of anything Cho said or any pictures of him.
I don't trust the MSM or anyone else who says that for "my own good" I can't hear the whole truth, only their censored version.
The faster the selfish and nihilistic Cho fades from our collective consciousness the better.
ReplyDeleteHumanity is not advanced by the Cho's of the world, and the sorry spectacles they foist upon us.
Cho should have channeled his anger and his pain into something other than death and terror. But cowards usually don't.
I feel for the family members of those killed at V Tech, and I hope the wounded recover, and that all can eventually move on from the tragedy there.
As for Cho, I hope that as he lies in the cold earth he finds the nothingness he so desperately sought in life. He truly deserves it.
Those are all the words that this pathetic loser will ever get out of me, and as far as I am concerned he no longer exists.
No one here has advocated censorship, far from it. What has been called for was civic responsibility.
ReplyDeleteThe publics' "right to know" would have been served by transcripts.
Transcripts would not have been "good TV', though.
They also would not fulfilled cho's dreams of fame.
Gotta fulfill them dreams of fame.
ReplyDeleteIf it fulfills the dreams of ratings.
---
Bar Commentary and Discussion Material!
Like Father...
ReplyDeleteApple/Tree...
"The festering bad blood between movie-star exes Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger erupted Thursday when an angry phone message from Baldwin to his daughter was made public.
On the recording, Baldwin can be heard berating his 11-year-old, Ireland, "You are a rude, thoughtless little pig."
That threatswatch piece returns US to "post Plan A", doug.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the "Plan" if the Surge is a success, come August?
But whether it is or not, the outcome will remain the same. Iraq filled with Iraqis.
If Mr Bush cannot declare the US mission in Iraq a success, the GOP will see an electoral rout similar to 1974, come 2008. It will most likely lose the Presidental election, since Ohio is lost to them.
If Iraq is central to the War on Teror then a US presence there is all important. Mr Bush could change the debate, change the narrative, by declaring success, and starting the transition to a truely soverign Iraq.
Develop a schedule, in concert with Mr Maliki that would have US remain in Iraq through 2010. Then the Dems would have to argue against success, not allowing them to define thenew Mission or judge the results of the previous efforts as failure, which Mr Reid has and is doing.
Ghost Yacht
ReplyDeletePirates....or, Aliens?
Herr Wu Wei...
ReplyDeleteTruth beats censorship
I believe he is correct.
Psychological statistics place the number of treatable psycho's running our streets in the hundreds of thousands. Every so often one goes off with the predictible outcome.
Luby's massacre was a mass killing in Killeen, Texas,when George Hennard entered a Luby's Cafeteria and shot and killed 23 people, wounded 20 and then commited suicide by shooting himself.
Now Cho is TOP GUN. They'll be others.
DR's dictum of "situational awareness" is keystone to our collective safety in todays world.
We know Cho's story now, how a system of bad laws allowed him to roam free until the meltdown.
I couldn't identify George Hennard's picture today if my life depended on it but I'm positive it was all over the electronic and print media. Sequestering the public from the pictures, the story, the horror won't stop the next psycho killer. They're inside the wire in great numbers.
Hell, even mosques are manufacturing them en mass right now.
But even Cho could not have run up his tally if the students had started throwing items at him and someone had had the moxie to take advantage of that to tackle him ..the other students would certainly have then helped take him down.
Pirates would have ate the food & stolen the boat.
ReplyDeleteGuess that leaves the aliens, as prime suspects.
Yup, Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, and the high school too has a day off today--locked down, from shooting threats.
ReplyDeleteMight have been 'greys' Rat, or 'reptilians' you just never know. There is even a kind of alien know as the 'nordic'--can't tell them apart from folks like me. Who do you trust?
There were lockdowns in schools in ten States because of copycat threats BEFORE the Cho propganda was released.
ReplyDeleteI got a campaign solicitation from John Edwards Hair Cut Club Fund.
ReplyDeleteWhat shoud I do with it?
Requests start at the $200 level for a trim and rise to $1000US for a full metrosexual workup. At that level of donation I get a refrigerator magnet with his picture. Not even a lock of hair..oh the horror.
So many tough decisions to make.
And the signifigance of that is, what, wu?
ReplyDeleteProof that the embers glowed red hot, even before the media threw gasoline on them?
By all means get that magnet, Aquariaum, it might scare folks away from your fridge and you might save some money in the long run.
ReplyDeleteAnd the Real Threat of the Day
ReplyDeleteWhat a world we are living in now.
I'm not a psychologist but some of the video games these kids play, starting at birth just might have an effect on them. Just a hunch.
ReplyDeleteAnd then we hear about the laws now on the books that prevent parents from knowing about their children's grades, sexual habits, etc....it's nuts. How do these legislators get into office?
By parents who have abdicated their responsibility toward raising their children and want the state to be responsible for the minors actions. And we wonder why we are now seeing studies that show that chidren, young adults have self esteem that is off the charts, when in reality they have done nothing of note.
Barkeep, make mine a double.
I'll have a double too. Got to go, take care.
ReplyDeletebobalharb,
ReplyDeleteI don't think we will have to wait ten years for a nuclear detonation.
A dirty bomb could go off tomorrow on Wall Street of near the WH.
Do you have any radiation resistent crops in mind to plant?
> if the students had started throwing items at him
ReplyDeleteThat's what I wonder too, could the students have stopped him. The early stories make the students sound almost like sheep, but after reading stories like this one, I'm not sure.
Wash. Post on Shooting
For example, a veteran tried to stop the killer and was shot down:
There was more carnage in the hallway. Kevin Granata had heard the commotion in his third-floor office and ran downstairs. He was a military veteran, very protective of his students. He was gunned down trying to confront the shooter.
Students did show courage, for example, blocking a door with their bodies, even when the killer was shooting through it.
They would have used a heavy table, but there were none, and the desks weren't strong enough.
Soon the gunman tried to get back in. The three students pressed against the door with their arms and legs, straining with their lives at stake. Unable to budge the door, the gunman shot through it four times. Splinters flew from the thick wood. The gunman turned away, again. There were more pops, but each one a bit farther away as he moved down the hall.
And another classroom held a table even when bullets were coming through the door:
There was a heavy rectangular table in the class, and he and two other students pushed it against the door. No sooner had they fixed it in place than someone pushed hard from the outside. It was the gunman. He forced it open about six inches, but no farther. Petkowicz and his classmates pushed back, not letting up. The gunman fired two shots through the door. One hit the lectern and sent wood scraps and metal flying.
Some of the classes were small, with only 10 or 13 students. The killer came in firing with both guns.
Celebrating Islamo-Fascism Awareness Day
ReplyDeleteSomewhat misleading headline but this is progress
Thank you David Horowitz
Exposing Radical Islam
Here's a point to ponder next time you talk to your friendly securities broker.
ReplyDeleteYou are not barred from obtaining a General Securities 7 license and dealing with other peoples money because of current or prior mental illness.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that struck me about the presentation of the Cho footage was the bleeping of the swear words and blurring of the mouth lest one read his lips to hear such a naughty word. Here is a guy railing into a camera who shot all those folks and they are concerned about his swear words. I guess the FCC would fine them for that.
ReplyDeleteBriefly back to the previous thread.
ReplyDeleteBush may have at one time exhibited some conservative tribal markings but I believe he's allowed his born again self to overload his senses in preceiving the real world.
He's still tougher than Carter who was a full blown pussy but with all respect to being born again, if your POTUS you need to leave that in the closet for 4 or 8 years and deal with the shit.
I feared we were in trouble when he talked of gazing into Vladimirs eyes and seeing all sweetness and light.
Sure he got all the sign offs on invading Iraq only to hand out candy to the enemy and allow the ROE's to get our guys and gals killed. I doubt if Barry Golwater in his '64 vintage would have acted like that.
Too bad he did't have Edwards Hair.
ReplyDeleteAnd Magnets.
Least we'd have something.
But he and Karen and the Girls did manage to get the Muzzie's to love us by being kind and gentle w/them, bending deeply, and showing our respect for the ROP.
ReplyDeleteHey Rat!
ReplyDeleteCould we get a stockholder's suit against Budweiser for wasting all that money on Advertising, since TV exposure has no effect on behavior?
""This was out-and-out murder," Ridge said. "This was a horribly, horribly deranged young man." "
ReplyDelete---
Good to know, Tom.
(I thot he might raise the red flags for old tyme's sake)
Herr Wu Wei,
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for filling me in on a big lacuna in my knowledge of how the victims reacted.
I was unaware that many had tried to subdue Cho only to fall. Those who fell distinguished themselves and I am happy and proud to know there are still Spartans living among us. And PossumTater wants a thighbone.
I am confident of one thing. If a shooter entered the Elephant Bar with evil on his mind, well, he'd just die.
You just know that somewhere right now a t-shirt manufacturer is pressing out the double gun frontal of Cho.
ReplyDeleteState College Builds Muslim Prayer Facility
ReplyDeleteWednesday, April 18, 2007
A public college president who banned Christmas displays to avoid entanglement with any religion and assure separation of church and state will spend taxpayer dollars to construct facilities for Muslim students to pray.
The president of Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Phil Davis, announced a costly plan to install foot-washing facilities for Muslim students so their feet will be clean during prayer sessions. This clearly contradicts the school’s supposedly strict policy of not promoting religion or favoring one religion over another.
The hypocrisy among officials at the public institution was exposed by a newspaper columnist who pointed out that, where Christianity is concerned, the school goes to great lengths to avoid any hint of support for the church. In fact, a coffee cart playing Christmas music was immediately banned from the campus last December.
Administrators have a vastly different attitude toward Islam, however, and actually go out of their way to accommodate the school’s 500 Muslim students. College officials have worked closely with local Muslim leaders to ensure the prayer needs of the campus Muslims are adequately addressed. In fact, the Muslim Accommodations Task Force http://www.msa-national.org/, which describes itself as the oldest and most influential religious organization in America, is guiding them with the foot-washing plan.
The effort has led some to accuse President Davis of adopting a bend-over for Islam management philosophy. Jawa Report calls him a politically correct leftist ideologue of the highest order who should be flushed from any position in academia.
My comment: Shiara laws won't be far behind.
Yeah, Kevin Granata should have been given a lot more press.
ReplyDeleteJust as Heroic as the old guy, and younger, w/family.
---
Gonzo:
"The report says nothing about me with regard to management or policy differences," McKay said in an interview last week. "Counterterrorism was our No. 1 priority, and I put an enormous amount of my personal time into it." He added, "If there were performance issues of any kind, they didn't tell me about it, and to this day I'm unaware of any."
"This is a huge loss," said Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle's chief of police. "I've worked with a lot of U.S. attorneys in my time and John is absolutely at the top of the ladder, not only on issues of terrorism but on law enforcement in general. I can tell you that if they're saying John's dismissal was performance related ... I find that almost inconceivable." Kerlikowske noted that McKay had crucial perspective, having served as a White House fellow at the FBI. "He knew how tough the barriers could be between law enforcement agencies, and he really helped break down those walls with information sharing."
---
So the Clintonistas all stayed when it was time to fire them, and the Good Guys get whacked at an inappropriate time, w/o good reason.
Aquarium:
ReplyDeleteThe Keepers of the University Madhouses are as destructive as Cho, but for Millions, not scores.
Maybe we'll beat the Muslims by shocking them to death when we become the first Nation to Volunteer, and pay for, our own submission.
Jack Dunphy, LAPD, at NRO:
ReplyDelete---
"Yes, Brian Williams assured us, they informed the FBI and the Virginia state police about what they had received, and they dutifully turned over the materials to FBI agents, but not before they made the copies they’ve been running in an almost continuous loop since they first put it on the air Wednesday night. “We’re allowing him to be heard in a limited way,” Williams told viewers, “because it advances, maybe, our understanding of why 32 people were killed along the way during one day, the last day of his life.”
Thus in nobility is cloaked NBC’s mercenary decision to air the killer’s tape, providing him in death that which was denied him in life: attention, power, and even sympathy. I haven’t bothered to search for them, but in America today one need not read them to know there are websites where even now can be found expressions of sympathy for a man whose 32 victims have yet to be buried. Sad to say, but had the killer not committed suicide and instead been captured and imprisoned, he would have received fan mail and even marriage proposals in tomorrow’s mail and in every day’s thereafter for years to come.
I don’t blame people for watching the killer’s tape, but they should acknowledge that in doing so they are not being “informed” or “educated” or otherwise advancing some lofty intellectual pursuit, but are instead satisfying their lurid curiosity. The killer’s tape is pornography; it’s okay to watch it, just don’t tell me you’re interested in the plot."
Ismail Ax: The Shooter Was Another 'Son of Sacrifice'
ReplyDeleteFirst it was Johnny Muhammad, now it was Cho Sueng Hui aka Ismail Ax. Precisely how many mass shooters have to turn out to have adopted Muslim names before we get it? Islam has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society. I'm not talking about people who grew up as Muslims, confident and secure in their faith, good fathers, sons and neighbors. I'm talking about the angry, malignant, narcissist loners who want to reject their community utterly, to throw off their 'slave name' and represent the downtrodden of the earth by shooting their friends and neighbors.
This morning I read that the Virginia Tech shooter died with the name Ismail Ax written in red ink on his arm. The mainstream press doesn't seem to have a clue as to what this might mean. To quote Indiana Jones, "Didn't any of you guys go to Sunday School?"
The story starts with a man named Abraham. He is the father of the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians. He was born in Iraq, the son of a wealthy idol manufacturer. He came to believe that there was only one true God and, according to tradition, took up his ax and destroyed his father's idols.
Eventually he left Iraq and moved to what is now known as Israel. He had a son with his concubine whom she named Ishmael. The Muslim world prefers the Arabic spelling of the name: Ismail. Eventually Abraham had a son by his rightful wife and named the son Isaac. Ishmael and his mother were disinherited and sent out into what is now Saudi Arabia. Isaac became the heir.
Eventually, God decided to test Abraham by telling him to kill his son, Isaac. Abraham took up the knife, but God stopped him at the last moment. Isaac lived and eventually became a man of great wealth. Ishmael became a desert warrior chieftain.
The Jews are the descendants of Isaac, the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael.
In the 7th Century, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, re-wrote the story, claiming that Ismail was the true faithful descendant of Abraham and that it was he, not Isaac, who God told Abraham to sacrifice. Ismail was the one saved. For Muslims, Ismail (not Isaac) was the true 'Son of Sacrifice.' In the original version of the story, Abraham used a knife, in some of the later Muslim versions, he used an Ax.
Flash forward 1,400 years: a sullen, angry young man who rages against rich people and apparently against Christians, writes a play in which a mother and son try to kill his step-father, but in the end the boy (age about 13, the age many think Ismail was when he was exiled) is murdered by the step-father with 'a deadly blow'. Father issues? Yeah, I think so.
Cho Sueng-hui cum Ismail Ax hated the American society to which he had been brought 15 years earlier. His play McBeef (a poor pun from an English Lit major on Macbeth) is one endless screed against the corruption of American culture. A cheesy re-telling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, it involves a young man abused by his step-father, a former NFL football player. The son, throws epithets at his father calling him a 'Catholic priest'. And makes derisive comments about McDonalds. It seems that none of the foundational structures of Western Civilization, Christianity, capitalism, family, are spared his rage. In other words, he really meant what he said in his last words: "you (that is us, America) made me do this."
From: Tech Central Station
"Today, we let the media do our dirty work for us. We let them “explain” the killer. We let them tell us about his “manifesto,” as if he were the love child of Karl Marx and Betty Friedan. His rantings and ragings run in an endless loop on the cable channels: bad movie dialogue, bad movie poses, bad knockoff “Voice of Doom” intonation.
ReplyDeleteWe let them “agonize” over the morality of showing it, all the while assuring us that this is part of the “healing process.” Deep down, every reporter yearns to be a screenwriter — after all, we’re both in storytelling business, aren’t we? And after the week NBC News prexy Steve Capus has had, Elysian Fields and Echo Park are probably looking better than Park Avenue right about now. "
NRO
No connection with all the other Muslim-named killers at all Aquarium.
ReplyDeleteNo Connection with the ROP.
Everything's just fine.
Just ask those in charge.
There was a hate filled Black Writer named "Ishmael Reed" back in the 70's, probly still with us.
ReplyDeleteIsmael Reed:
ReplyDelete"He is best known for his literary theory call the
"Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic," which deconstructs Judaeo Christian models through Voodoo forms, and as one of the founding figures of Multiculticrapoloa."
"Ishmael Reed, together with Toni Morrison, is one of today's pre-eminent African American literary figures"
ReplyDelete---
Whoopdee Fuckin Doo.
Voodoodoo, that is.
Podhoretz:
ReplyDeleteI have to dissent, in the strongest possible terms, from John Derbyshire's shocking posts on Virginia Tech. The notion that a human being or group of human beings holding no weapon whatever should somehow "fight back" against someone calmly executing other people right in front of their eyes is ludicrous beyond belief, irrational beyond bounds, and tasteless beyond the limits of reason.
"Why didn't anyone rush the guy?" Derb asks. Gee, I don't know. Because he was executing people? Because if you rush a guy with a gun, he shoots you in the head the way he executed the teachers in each classroom?
Derb claims proudly to be touching a "third rail" by raising something no one wants to talk about. The third rail is a metaphor for electrocution. What happened in those classrooms was no metaphor. It was a psychotic with a gun and a lot of people with no weaponry at their disposal. A few were astonishingly brave, and deserve to be considered heroes. Everybody else was just a person either in danger of being murdered, being mortally wounded, or being murdered.
In the name of old-fashioned and time-honored forms of human behavior, Derb has trampled on one of the oldest: Judge not, lest ye be judged.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete** deleted & reposted because of two spelling errors **
ReplyDeleteThe third rail that "Derb" touched was claiming he had all the answers when he really didn't have the facts. Asking the question of whether the students defended themselves is one thing. But Derb made it sound like he knew exactly what happened, and the reason students died was they didn't follow Derb's Charge of the Light Brigade defense technique of charging the gun.
> "Why didn't anyone rush the guy?" Derb asks.
The article I posted earlier shows that someone with military experience did charge the gun man, and was shot to death.
www.stripes.com/article.asp?section
ReplyDelete=104&article=52775&archive=true
U.S. soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division in a Baghdad district are “building a three-mile protective wall on the dividing line between a Sunni enclave and the surrounding Shiite neighborhood,” according to a U.S. military press release issued Wednesday.
Troops with the 407th Brigade Support Battalion began constructing the wall on April 10 and will continue work “almost nightly until the wall is complete,” the release read.
[...]
“That community [in Adhamiyah] will be completely gated and protected,” Lt. Col. Thomas Rogers, 407th Brigade Support Battalion, was quoted as saying in the release. “It’s really for the security of all the people of Adhamiyah, not just one side or the other.”
More such are planned.
"The article I posted earlier shows that someone with military experience did charge the gun man, and was shot to death."
ReplyDeleteYup.
The killer's family spoke out, apologizing. It was his sister on behalf of the family. I haven't seen the whole doc in one piece yet.
ReplyDeleteOur family is so very sorry for my brother's unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us...
We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person...
We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.
[She said her family will cooperate fully with investigators and ] do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.
such hypocrites!!! what a double standard!!! those networks, whose only concern is R-A-T-I-N-G-S couldn't care less, if little children are watching their broadcast of the madman's multimedia manifesto. so sickening!!!! i wish people will stop watching these networks' shows and start boycotting the companies that endorse and pay multi-million worth of advertising fees to those networks. enough of the hypocrisy!!!
ReplyDeleteOr as Norman Podhoretz wrote (and Wolcott helpfully reminds) in response to Hannah Adrendt's incredulity at the lack of Jewish resistance to the Nazis:
ReplyDeleteThey did what they did, they were what they were, and each was a different man. None of it mattered in the slightest to the final result. Murderers with the power to murder descended upon a defenseless people and murdered a large part of it. What else is there to say?
"More such are planned."
ReplyDelete---
Trish,
They can use all the fencing Bush does not use on the Border.
...what would San Diegans know about whether fences work or not anyhow?
Silly people feel safer now that fewer Illegal Perps are ripping them off.
Only the Skull of Bone Knows.
Isn't Derb's point similar to what was once a post Flight 93 World?
ReplyDeleteie
Planes would not get hijacked if numerous folks act immedieately.
(and now they get sued)
Not saying I agree w/Derb about the kids, but in the future, other options to passivity should be considered.
One punk w/a gun is not Hitler's Germany.
Well, Doug, you know how it is: First things first.
ReplyDelete************************************
Pat Lang responds to the walling of ethnic communites in Baghdad:
"Mahalle," "Mukhtar," "Muhtasib." These are terms in Arabic that one should become familiar with:
"Mahalle" signifies a "quarter" of a pre-modern Islamicate city, functioning as a sub-jurisdiction underneath a city government. (It is one of several Arabic words for that.) They were often walled and had an inner social and business life as well. Such subdivisions of European cities were also common before the renaissance. Within a "mahalle" lived the self-segregated members of ethnic, guild, sectarian and tribal groups. People grouped themselves in that way because they did not trust others outside their own groups. Typically the streets on the outer edges of the "mahalle" were open at first and then were gradually encroached on by building until it was easy to put up a gate and install watchmen. Yes, I know, we have gated communities in the US.
"Mukhtar" denotes the "selectman" of a "mahalle." He is the community leader.
A "muhtasib" was an official of a "mahalle" who supervised the economic activity and markets of a "mahalle."
---------------------------------------------------------------
This kind of organization of Islamicate cities gradually disappeared in most places in the late 19th and 20th Centuries C.E. It disappeared as the colonial powers sought to impose the kind of town planning that they were familiar with and as early independent governments sought to foster a civic life centered on inter-communal loyalty and "national" identity.
Baghdad was a lot like that before 2003. There were still places in the city that were inhabited by all one thing or another but the trend was towards integration in housing and in marriage.
We are successfuly re-medievalizing Baghdad, so it would be a good idea to become familiar with the old terms. They are lurking in the back of the collective mind of the city and will be back. pl
"One punk w/a gun is not Hitler's Germany."
ReplyDeleteHow true. And yet in this indicident Mark Steyn, for one, espies an "awful corrosive passivity" that poses an "existential threat," one presumes, quite as Hitler's Germany did to European Jewry, if perhaps in slower motion. Therefor it is incumbent upon writers such as Mark Steyn to do what they can to stave off imminent disaster (if it's not too late already) by determinedly pointing out how the unburied victims of a lone psychotic were falling down on the job - 32 freshly slaughtered examples of an utterly pussified nation.
"We are successfuly re-medievalizing Baghdad, so it would be a good idea to become familiar with the old terms. They are lurking in the back of the collective mind of the city and will be back. pl "
ReplyDelete---
No matter how you slice it,
it's still a resounding victory.
Ingrid--You can always kick the crap out of your tv like I did years ago, and feel better for it too. At most, you have to deal with a couple of weeks of withdrawal. You can get all the news you need right around here.
ReplyDeleteIn reading about Ishmael Reed, I came across the name "Baracka" in Muslim lore.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should just quit wasting time screwing around and annoint Osama bin Laden as the Supreme leader of the United Americas.
Down on the farm one spunky lady Fights Back
ReplyDeletedoug,
ReplyDeleteTake a gander at the beta test of graphical advertising in a flip book. This is really pretty hot stuff.
Check out page 7/8
We're in the middle of a revolution,
Afghanistan and Iraq: Two Sunni War Theaters Evolving Into One?
ReplyDeleteMichael Scheuer
www.jamestown.org/terrorism
/news/article.
php?articleid=2373330
ReplyDeleteAsh said...
Another thing that struck me about the presentation of the Cho footage was the bleeping of the swear words and blurring of the mouth lest one read his lips to hear such a naughty word. Here is a guy railing into a camera who shot all those folks and they are concerned about his swear words. I guess the FCC would fine them for that.
We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!
Back in the early days, they'd leave messages for Saddam and stuff.
ReplyDeleteMuch too insensitive and UN-PC, it was decided.
Dr. Michael Welner, Schizophrenia, Rampage Killers and NBC's Decision
ReplyDeleteDr. Michael Welner is a psychiatrist experienced in the diagnosis and study of the awful psychosis of rampage killers.
He is one of the experts behind the development of The Depravity Scale, and has just published an article on schizophrenia for ABCNews.com.
The transcript is posted here, and the audio here.
And so the answer to a news organization receiving a package is, I would say well, what would you do if somebody mailed you anthrax?
Would you open it because of the media’s right to know?
Or would you send it to law enforcement authorities, because they have appropriately skilled people who can handle these things.
Well, the answer is fairly obvious. This is exactly what this is. It is a psychological warfare that has societal, catastrophic ramifications of some kind of biological agent or radioactive agent.
And responsible individuals should recognize what their skills are, and what their skills aren’t.
'Rat,
ReplyDeleteThe Horse is 5k, how much is the model?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThat's 5k a squirt, for the horse, doug.
ReplyDeleteModel could be less.
No more than that, I'd bet.
The Establishment hates it when the raw truth gets out, because then they can't control us by substituting their sanitized version instead.
ReplyDeleteWill the whole world really end if we listen to the raving of one more mad man? Are people really so weak and fragile that they will go stark raving mad from looking at a picture of this week's psycho, Seung-Hui Cho, or from hearing a few words of his rant?
In a world of violent games, snuff movies, and internet talk of killing hundreds of millions of Muslims, would there be any hope even if the Cho propaganda had been censored?
You've probably all read this; but, just in case It's all about bad haircuts, and insanity.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I didn't expect to take possession of either!
ReplyDelete...couldn't afford the upkeep.
What’s your professional response to that argument, that the cumulative effect was in fact inconsequential?
ReplyDeleteMW: My professional response is different for the two groups. For people who had poorly formed plans…mass shooting is not about the victims.
It’s not inspired by seeing people suffer.
It’s carried out by a person seeking immortality. It’s all about a person and what he wants to achieve for himself.
That person so dehumanizes the others around him that that’s what makes it easy for him to kill strangers.
But it’s a person who kills just as he would kill an ant or a bug, or destroy something needed to make an implement. And so essentially, he destroys the soul of a number of folks in order to essentially ingest it, and become that much more significant and inflated.
The only thing that was exposed to us in the early days after the shooting was the grief and suffering of people who lost loved ones.
It was only once Cho Seung Hui was exposed as a figure of intimidation and menace, and done so with such spectacular exposure, that…in intrigue and interest, that we want to know about him, that these kinds of attacks have followed.
HH: So would the next time someone mails a DVD of themselves, or still photos, or uploads of You Tube video, will you trace that back to Wednesday night?
MW: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. How can I not?
Dr. Welner has interviewed several Mass Murderers.
ReplyDeleteCredentials:
MW: I went to the University of Miami in Florida, and trained at Beth Israel Medical Center in Psychiatry here in New York, and did a fellowship in forensic psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
And when I began practice, took on a full-time practice, and then worked in correction psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan,
and have since graduated, I suppose, to being
chairman of the Forensic Panel, which is a national forensic science practice in psychiatry, toxicology, pathology, and other medical specialties.
The transcript is posted here,
and the audio here.
Close to Home
ReplyDeleteDr. Curet acknowledged that the idea was a bit disturbing at first, and said that even an audience of doctors shuddered at the video of the appendix being pulled out through the patient’s mouth.
ReplyDeleteDoctors in New York have removed a woman’s gallbladder with instruments passed through her vagina
Phil Carter, writing in Slate.
ReplyDeletePlan FUBAR:
In arguing for the current surge of combat forces to Iraq, senior administration officials say they're unwilling to consider a "Plan B" for Iraq—options in case the surge fails. Sen. John McCain echoes this sentiment, as does Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad, counseling patience while the current plan is put into action.
But defining the current surge as a "Plan A" is a dangerously dishonest move that ignores the history of the Iraq war to date. In fact, since 2003, we have run through at least six plans, none of which has succeeded. The Petraeus plan is something more akin to Plan F—truly, the last Hail Mary play in the fourth quarter. And if it fails, then we better start considering Plan G, also known as "Get out of Iraq."
[...]
Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus' plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc's resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power.
Plan F will fail if (or when) the Maliki government fails, even if it improves security. At that point, we will have run out of options, having tried every conceivable strategy for Iraq. It will then be time for Plan G: Get out.
Coming up Sunday Big French Election
ReplyDeleteTrish,
ReplyDelete"
What has disappointed me is there hasn’t been this debate on the strategy, on the policy, a regional strategy on policy, let alone an Iraq policy.
We’re debating the tactics.
The surge is a tactic. In what context is the surge?
You can make an argument for a surge if you were going to withdraw, to cover the withdrawal, for example, or to contain, to reposition forces or to re-engage in a different way or a stronger way. And why we got caught up in the tactical debate, in my mind, is an indication that we don’t understand what we want to do. What should our Middle East policy be? What should our policy be in terms of Iraq and, and the war against the extremists out there or the conflict against extremists?
We seem to be strategically adrift, in my view."
Zinni
via Panama Ed
The Icon of our Ancestors
ReplyDeleteAt least accoring to Richard Hoagland:)
"We seem to be strategically adrift, in my view."
ReplyDeleteRoger that. Dead dog headed downstream.
I did read Zinni's remarks when Ed posted them. And like I said, Sheehan before him was giving voice to the everyday frustration and serious concern of a lot of other people. The WH lays out tactics, not strategy. But tactics are not the province of the WH and NSC. Crucially, strategy is its mandate. (And Congress can get in on the game of dictating tactics, too. The WH showed the way.)
In re: The walls going up.
The one nice thing about the Balkans is that we were not tasked with holding together Yugoslavia when it was in the process of dissolution. We arrived after dissolution was ratified and went from there.
(Never thought I'd look back on it all with any affection.)
OTOH: To oversee the partition of Iraq would be a nightmare in itself.
Rock. Hard place.
Julian Sanchez:
ReplyDeleteThere's been a fair amount of handwringing over news stations' decisions to broadcast America's Craziest Home Videos, and my first impulse is to regard it as largely moot: Cho could just as easily have uploaded his rambling screed to a dozen video-hosting sites the morning of his planned massacre, tagged only with a keyword like "Ismail Ax" that would have made it unlikely to garner any viewers initially, but guarantee that they would be found and circulated after the fact. It's probably only a matter of time before some lunatic-in-waiting does just that.
Still, insofar as TV does still guarantee a substantially larger audience, I guess I'm inclined to think that the right call would have been to sit on these. The downside to airing them, of course, is that it sends the signal that if you have a message you want to go out to millions of viewers, slaughtering a bunch of students is a sure way to do it. The putative upside is that, as Kevin Drum puts it, "they're also a key part of helping us understand one of the biggest news stories of the year." The thing is... they're really not.
If there were really insights to be gleaned from these clips—"a window into the twisted psyche of a killer" and other such headline fodder—maybe the balance of considerations would fall the other way. But what's perhaps most striking about Cho's rant is that, divorced from his horrific rampage, there's nothing at all striking about them. It's obvious in retrospect that Cho was seriously, deeply deranged. But what I see on these tapes is not so much a madman as an idiot. Chilling in hindsight, his semi-literate jeremiad against Mercedes-driving snobs who had humiliated him and "raped his soul" is ultimately the stuff of bad high school poetry. Walk into a random tenth-grade creative writing class and you'll hear the same pap from moody kids who're never going to kill anyone outside of World of Warcraft. The only real gain from airing these videos is the satisfaction of our morbid curiosity—and, as it turns out, they're not even that satisfying.
Herr Wu would rather listen to the sparks of his own neurons than the observations, opinions, and diagnoses of experts who have spent a lifetime studying the subject of these monsters, in this case a schizophrenic monster.
ReplyDeleteWhich seems more likely to approach the truth?
Mere Conjecture,
or expertise, diligence, research, interviews and observation?
Ramble on, Herr Wu.
Dr. Welner has studied and interviewed these guys Wu, and applied his extensive expertise.
ReplyDeleteYou are satisfied that your own ruminations are more valid.
Strange.
> If there were really insights to be gleaned from these clips—"a window into the twisted psyche of a killer"
ReplyDeleteThe people who were close to Cho, like his roommates, said they learned a lot from those videos. One of them said "So he can talk". Someone who had been in school with Cho for 10 years said that was the first time he ever heard Cho talk, and to have any expression on his face.
The video Cho was not only different from what his college roommates saw, but from what everyone in his entire life saw.
Cho was born with the biological problem autism, and from the very beginning he responded to it the wrong way, by being evil & violent, and by refusing to do anything about it but instead withdrawing into his own mental world.
The result was that Cho was a "Cluster A Personality Disorder", an extreme loner who is extremely paranoid, and according to studies, more often violent than the general population.
From the beginning Cho wouldn't talk to his parents, relatives, teachers, or anyone else. He is already reported with violent writings in middle school, and they are still seaching his earlier life. In early childhood, when he fought with his older sister, he was said to use "shocking violence".
So the thing is that some liberals had already started telling a story like "poor Cho", about how he had a speech defect and people picking on him caused his problem.
However, the video, along withhis ability to carefully plan the attack, shows that Cho had free will, was capable of accomplishing things (which could have included turning himself around), and was capable of communicating.
Those videos didn't glorify Cho, they condemned him. Besides being evil, they showed him to be one of the biggest losers in the history of the world, by his own choice. He never made a friend, never loved his family, and never cared about anything outside himself. His whole life was weakness and indulgence, to live in his fantasy world instead of making the painful effort to function in the real world. Cho could have talked anytime he wanted, could have lived in the world with real people -- that's what the video shows.