Piece Of Art

Bank of America, Tampa, Florida, 2002. Sam Vaknin, Ph.D., in the Global Politician on September 26, 2005, wrote, "the September atrocities [of 9/11] provoked a wave of copycats and renewed awareness of such risks." Pirelli Tower, Milan, Italy, 2002. Mentioning the January 2002-Tampa and April 2002-Milan incidents I wrote about in my "Planes into Buildings" chapter of The Copycat Effect (2004), Vaknin also cited another one: "At the beginning of May 2002, an Indian air force jet crashed into a bank building in northwestern India. Eight died in the ensuing fire." It all began with the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. World Trade Center Complex; image of replica by InFocusTech (10% of sales to the American Red Cross) . Could a copycat event occur at the world's other twin towers in the future?  Petronas Towers are located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Image of replica by InFocusTech. Were you aware there have been other possible and actual small-planes-int...

Late in November 2008, Showtime TV began screening the recent movie, Chapter 27 . I suppose it is being shown now because its broadcast is tied to the anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon on December 8th. Timing is everything. The movie has many intriguing moments. First some background. Chapter 27 is an independent film depicting the murder of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman, starring Jared Leto and Lindsay Lohan. It was written and directed by J. P. Schaefer. Although it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, it did not make it to a release in theaters in the USA until March 2008. It came and went quickly, as they say, because it was a box office failure. It retains its "made for television" docudrama feel, and so, perhaps, it is more fitting I saw it on cable. The film's title refers to Mark David Chapman's alleged obsession with J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye . The title implies that Chapman's killing of...

Few realize that the massacre at Jonestown is related to the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, and to the murders of others more obviously linked to the People's Temple cult. In the following excerpt from The Copycat Effect , the ripples from this 30 year old tragedy are examined and these dots are connected. George Moscone, Jim Jones, and Walter Mondale (above). Jonestown One of the most discussed modern mass suicides occurred in the unique setting of Jonestown, Guyana. Jonestown in the early 1970s was little more than a nine‑hundred acre island cut out of the thick South American rainforest. It was there that the Reverend James Warren “Jim” Jones relocated his People's Temple from the San Francisco area. Allegations were first published in the Guyana Daily Mirror that Jonestown was a “concentration camp” in which Jones’s flock were given psychotropic drugs, sexually abused, sleep deprived, and forced to work 18 hour days. Former members told of drills, called...