Piece Of Art

Hillary Rodham Clinton let the political assassination meme out of the bottle! She unconsciously or consciously said she is staying in the presidential race just in case something happens. The copycat factor is a reality underlying assassinations, and she did the unthinkable. As Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News straightforwardly wrote: "Hillary Clinton is staying in the race in the event some nut kills Barack Obama....We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul." One can be liberal or conservative, left, right, or middle, Drudge Report reader or Nation subscriber, and "get it." The outrage was widespread, and yet the only person that seemed unaware of the depth of feelings was Senator Hillary Clinton. What has been revealed in this one event speaks volumes. What was she thinking, indeed? Asked if her continuing fight for the nomination against Senator Obama hurts the Democratic party, Sen. Hillary Clinton replied to a newspaper editorial board, I don...

Sad news, indeed. A 18-year-old Connecticut man has died after apparently dousing himself with gasoline and setting fire to himself, according to a Maine Department of Public Safety statement. Two motorists found Alex Whitney, Tuesday night, May 20, 2008, sitting in the middle of Duck Pond Road in Ellsworth, Maine. A can of gasoline and a lighter were found nearby. Whitney, a student at the University of Maine in Orono, was taken for treatment to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston where he was flown by helicopter overnight. He was receiving treatment for burns on more than 60 percent of his body, before he passed away due to his injuries. The fire burned more than two acres of woods. The State Fire Marshal's Office has impounded Whitney's car, which was found nearby at the fire scene, according to McCausland. Investigators plan to examine the vehicle "to try and find out why he did this bizarre act," McCausland said. Joe Carr, director of university relations ...

This spring Fortean Times highlights "The Copycat Effect - Suicide epidemics and death pacts in the Internet age." Here's how the editors overview the contents: This month, in the wake of the recent suicides of young people from Bridgend, South Wales, Jack Sargeant wonders whether some kind of "copycat effect" might be so powerful that it could induce people to end their own lives, while Loren Coleman examines the anatomy of a suicide cluster and Chris Kimberley listens to "Gloomy Sunday", a song supposedly responsible for a rash of self-killings in pre-war Hungary and beyond. On sale from 1 May 2008 (in the UK), later elsewhere. I personally object to the cover art of the hanging images, Jack Sargeant's use of the word "successful" to describe suicides in his article, and the confusion he conveys between "suicide pacts" and "mass suicides." Those are the weak points. To actually have such an overt considering of su...

All was not truly quiet. Although no classic fatal school shooting outbreaks occurred during 2008's red zone temporal window at North American schools and universities, other events did transpire. The following is a summary of various incidents. History Revisited The media published several articles reviewing the Virginia Tech shootings of April 16, 2007. A bit less so, mentions were made of the shootings at Columbine, in which 15 people were killed, on April 20, 1999. Several news items detailed the public sections of the final report released April 17, 2008, about Finnish school shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen, seen above from a video he posted online. Auvinen shot and killed eight people and himself at a Jokela, Finland school, in November 2007. In copycat fashion, he planned the attack for months, wanting to create "massive destruction and chaos," police said. Among Auvinen's ten Web contacts was U.S. teenager Dillon Cossey, who was sentenced last year to up to s...