COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Shooter's Father commits suicide, Mother in hospital with overdose


Rumor of attempted suicide by Cho's parents spreads: Radio Korea

Rumor spread that parents of Cho Seung-hui attempted to commit suicide, according to Los Angeles-based Radio Korea.
Cho's father slashed his wrist to death immediately after he learned of his son's killings at 8 p.m. last night, local time, according to residents living near Cho's parents' house.

Cho's mother also attempted to kill herself by taking toxic drug. She was quickly transported to the hospital, but is listed in critical condition now according to the report.

Radio Korea also reported that it was widely speculated that his parents severed all contacts with neighbors after having received the news, leading to another rumor that they were visiting Korea at the time of the incident.

Cho's parents had already attempted to kill themselves before police approached their house according to an unconfirmed source.


34 comments:

  1. If true that's sad. The sins of the sons aren't supposed to stick to the parents, the sins of the parents aren't supposed to stick to the kids. Or shouldn't, in a better world. But one can understand how they must feel. An impossible position to be in.

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  2. At the news conference this afternoon, the spokeswoman for the State denied the suicide rumor.

    Whether this report is pre or post that news conference ...

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  3. BAGHDAD (Associated Press) -- Police in Ramadi uncovered 17 decomposing corpses buried beneath two schoolyards in a district that until recently was under the control of al-Qaida fighters. At least 85 people were killed or found dead across the country Tuesday.

    Proportionality, which we used to hear with regards Israels' losses, when compared to the US.

    Those 85 Iraqi would be proportionatly equal to 1,020 in the US.

    Reconciliation seems to be farther and farther away.

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  4. I had heard that he had pledged not to break any more buttons on men's business shirts.

    She had promised to not make any more kimchee.

    Rumors. What are we going to do?

    We'll turn it over to the Department of Peace and Nonviolence.

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  5. A boy and his dog..a fable but true.

    The boy was distressed. Why? Read about the dork.

    The food that has caused poor Korea a lot of notoriety, even though it is by far not the only nation to eat dog. I’m not even going to touch the politics of eating dog right now. Believe me, I will in the future.

    If you have trouble with it, do what King Baeksu does and call it dork. We call cow meat beef and pig meat pork, we might as well call dog meat dork.


    The boy was caught eating a burrito Chihuahua in the VT cafeteria. The other kids laughed not knowing a dog eating Korean is a normal Korean. This made him bitter.

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  6. WOW BOB-L

    no canine cause and effect there

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  7. Dog's not that bad, with a good chianti.

    A lot better than cat or monkey, to say the least. Not many stray animals of any species running around Korea.

    Eat some kimchee, drink some soju, and in the morning you will stink to high heaven.
    About the time the Company hits the one mile mark on the morning run, you don't want to be next to a Katusa, not if fresh air is important to you.

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  8. There is no truth to the rumor that the perps body will be burned at a Homecoming bonfire rally.


    However hot dogs have been banned from campus.

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  9. Yeah Desert Rat we use to call the gooks with dogs vegitarians.

    I shouldn't say gook, I meant Vietnamese.

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  10. When I first got to Korea, I noticed the women had a certain air about them. After I had been there a few days, eating and drinking with them each night, I no longer noticed.

    When I got back to the States, after my year tour, I flew into Phoenix, it was maybe 110 degrees. My brother picked me up at the airport and we climbed into his truck. The A/C blasting on high, we drove maybe a block when he looked at me and then opened all the windows.

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  11. Very interesting and very encouraging. The skeptics win the debate on Global Warming. Listen to the unedited (92 min) NPR broadcast, here:

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9082151

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  12. Too bad the kid wasn't third generation:
    His folks would be on Ophra setting up a Million Dollar Book Deal.

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  13. Mat,
    Could you please edit it for me?
    I really am in no mood to be shocked by foul language, and the like.

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  14. Allen wins the Hyperbole Award for the day!

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  15. Refering to our Beloved Rat, and fellow nutso's:
    "Perhaps, like past great plagues, the insanity will burn itself, self-destructively out, leaving the reconstruction of society to the immune and inoculated survivors. To the theses of Dr. Sanity and Mr. Whittle, it is just such deep-seated, self-loathing hatred that is destroying American, indeed Western, culture. And like Zombies, the infected are impervious to all attempts at remediation."
    ---
    As always, read the whole thing, at BC!

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  16. Brenda Ekwurzel, climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says:

    1.4 degrees F means everything to our fragile Earth although it doesn't mean much to us.

    Doug, were you the one who gave that empty coconut her pineapple diploma?

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  17. I like stewed rat, with a little Budweiser to wash it down:)

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  18. The idea of American exceptionalism is defined, sometimes, as an example of the new world improving on the old. In the patriotic rhetoric of the republic, it offers us "the last best hope of mankind".

    But that itching trigger finger reminds us of something dark at America's heart, a self-loathing to match all the justified pride. And it is a trait of which some Americans simply refuse to be rid.

    Mankind's best hope, I think, is that one dysfunctional nation is not our last best hope.


    Fetish with Firearms

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  19. I don't feel I'm obsessed with guns. Still have the .22 from age 12, a shotgun, and a rifle I never use. No one I know around here is obsessed with guns. It seems to me it's always the lowest common denomenators in society that affect the debate. The law abiding at danger of getting punished for the acts of the minority.

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  20. Portrait of a Pervert as a Young Man

    Since some animals are more equal than others, especially if they are pervert psychos, nothing could be done to insure order in the madhouse.
    ---
    "Lucinda Roy, an English professor, said Mr. Cho’s writing, laced with anger, profanity and violence, concerned several faculty members. In 2005, she sent examples to the campus police, the campus counseling service and other officials. All were worried, but little could be done, she said.

    Ms. Roy said she would offer to go with Mr. Cho to counseling, just to talk. “But he wouldn’t say yes, and unfortunately I couldn’t force him to do it,” she said.

    Students were also alarmed that Mr. Cho was taking inappropriate pictures of women under desks, she said.
    "

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  21. I would not expect someone of your sensitivities, Mat, coarsened by the eons, to be attuned to the fragile balance of Ms Brenda Ekwurzel's mental state, and the precarious and precious nature of the ecosphere of her spaceship, Earth.

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  22. Even Jane Goodall was a Peach, long ago.

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  23. Hope Rufus enjoys the Bock Guys Faggie Voice.
    (it comes out when he's had a couple)

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  24. Claims by global warming alarmists that "the debate is over" took a significant hit on March 14 when an audience at a prestigious New York debating society declared three prominent climate realists the winners in a debate on climate change science against three prominent global warming alarmists.

    ...

    Supporting the proposition that global warming is not a crisis were Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London; and author Michael Crichton, a Harvard-trained medical doctor who has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and an instructor at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    ...

    Lindzen opened the debate by noting the Earth's climate is never static and the planet is always either warming or cooling. Accordingly, he observed, the Earth's recent moderate warming is not unusual or alarming in and of itself.


    New York Debate

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  25. "He said investigators did not know there was a shooter loose on campus in the interval between the two shootings because the first could have been a murder-suicide. "
    ---
    ...quite a trick w/o a weapon.

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  26. Pat Buckley, RIP
    Richard Brookhiser

    Our first meeting was not auspicious. I was invited, as an associate editor, to the National Review Christmas party in 1977. Not knowing what to wear, but thinking it ought to be fancy, I put on the old tails that I had bought to sing in the Yale Glee Club, and carried a cane that a girlfriend had given me. In the foyer of 73 E. 73rd, Mrs. Buckley — not yet, to me, Pat, by a long chalk — asked if I was hurt in some way?

    “No,” I said, “it is an affectation.”

    “Well,” she said, “will you please leave your affectation in the hall.”

    The pitch of her voice: bemused, alert, and demanding alertness of you if, knowing that she was beautiful, and rich, and married to a famous clever husband, you should ever assume that that alone defined her. Many years later, another guest, not a callow youth but the mayor of New York, sat next to her at the dinner table, giving his short billionaire know-it-all opinions of everything, in this case the effects of second hand smoke.
    She blew a puff in his face, and drawled,
    “Mr. Mayor, may I smoke in my own house?”

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  27. Our metro DC community is heavily populated by Hokies, VT parents, and longtime friends of current students. A former HS classmate of my daughter's was shot, though not critically injured; none of her friends there was victim of the rampage.

    Last night I had dinner with my daughter, who attends college in Richmond. A radiant young woman. There can be no loss, I think, greater than that of one's own child. None I can imagine.

    I have frequently thought of the parents of young soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and, however different the circumstances apart from the violent nature of death, the thought is much the same as
    for the parents of the Virginia Tech students: No grief more profound than that of a mother and father.

    God bless the living, and embrace the lost.

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  28. So what's the prognosis, Doug? Pineapple juice with lots kewLaid will cure the fever?

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