Piece Of Art

Let's all calm down a bit. The media and governmental hysteria that is being whipped up in the talk of bird flu becoming an international pandemic is all too familiar. First, how about setting aside the illogical statements coming from the Bush administration. They are feeding into the media frenzy by saying they are set to call out the military, declare quarantines, and close the borders, when it is well-known that this does not stop bird flu (hey, birds fly, remember). So, catch your breath, and compare the bird flu predictions of global mass deaths to recent media scares of a similar nature. In The Copycat Effect , I wrote: In the summer of 2002, the West Nile virus was declared a great danger to Americans. As it developed, however, only a small number of people died (54), but as the Christian Science Monitor noted, “One would think from media reports that Americans are suffering the plague.” During the spring and summer of 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Disease, the “SARS ...

We've heard about them in Japan. Now the media is reporting on what they are calling "the first internet suicide pact" discovered in the United Kingdom. And the method the couple used was directly copied from recent Asian pacts. The bodies of Christopher Aston, 25, and Maria Williams, 42, were found in a car in Greenwich Peninsula Park, near the Millenium Dome in southeast London, at 7 p.m. on February 23, 2005. Aston, a Ph. D. student who grew up in the street next to Penny Lane in Liverpool, and the unemployed Williams, a former private detective and convicted fraudster who used the name Sanchez, poisoned themselves with fumes from burning barbecue charcoal, according to the report of the inquest . They died two days after making contact for the first time on a chatroom dedicated to discussions about suicide. The Guardian 's Ian Cobain reported , "Mr Aston and Ms Williams were found together in her red BMW, parked outside a branch of the TK Maxx store, a pla...

On Saturday evening, October 1, 2005, University of Colorado student, 21-year-old Joel Henry Hinrichs III of Colorado Springs, killed himself with a bomb. He was sitting near the university's Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman, which at the time was filled with more than 84,000 football fans. The game between the Oklahoma Sooners and Kansas State was undisturbed. The explosion only killed Hinrichs, who was sitting on a park bench outside Cross Hall, a university science building, just west of the stadium. "He was a very intelligent, very private individual who somehow lost the confidence that his life would be a good one. Obviously, every parent believes their son is a good kid, and I certainly believed that about mine," said his father, Joel Henry Hinrichs Jr., according to reporter AP Jeff Latzke. Hinrichs' father also noted he did not think his son had even one friend. Was the younger Hinrichs an al Qaeda wannabe, just like Charles Bishop, who flew into a Tampa...