Copycat Beheadings & Hangings

Another Decapitation

Unfortunately, ISIS/ISIL has carried out another beheading. This will be the third in a short amount of time (see here). British hostage David Cawthorne Haines was allegedly beheaded on September 13th or 14th (Iraqi time), 2014.

Strange though, looking at these two photographs of the pre-beheading, it appears that Mr. Haines has exactly the same expression in the picture. Were they doctored? Or are they quick screen captures in which Mr. Haines did not move an millimeter? (There is a slight difference in the shadowing on the orange gown, apparently.) Are the hostages drugged, as some theorize? Why no facial reactions to their coming fate? It is weird.

The name Haines has two similar meanings, depending on origin:

Haines (Old English / Germanic) A dweller near the wood, forest, thicket, grove, enclosures.

Haines (Old Nordic) From the word hegn, meaning a forest clearing or hedged enclosure.

David Haines' middle name is Cawthorne. Cawthorne is a long-established surname is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is a locational name either from Cawthorn, a parish north west of Pickering in the north riding of Yorkshire where traces of Roman camps remain, or from the parish and village of Cawthorne near Barnsley in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Both places were recorded as "Caltorn" in the Domesday Book of 1086, and as "Calthorn" in Yorkshire Charters, dated 1125 to 1176. They are believed to be so-called from the Olde English pre-7th Century "cald," (= cold), with reference to the "bare, exposed position of the places," plus "thorn," "thorn-bush," thus, "the bare place of the thorn-bushes." Source.

The Copycat Effect

We don't know how many hanging deaths have occurred in the wake of Robin Williams' suicide. What we do know is that calls to suicide prevention hotlines are at an all-time high after the Williams' self-death, and it follows that probable suicide attempts are up. It may be months before we know if the rate of suicide after Williams' suicide actually increased.

All we can do now is note how the media keeps posting hanging suicides.

Take 14-year-old Lizzie Lowe, who was found on Wednesday night, September 10, 2014. Lizzie, a pupil at Pars Wood High School in East Didsbury, UK was found hanged in Fletcher Moss Park in Didsbury, Manchester around 11.15pm, according to the British media.

On the same day, September 10th, the American media announced that former professional wrestler Sean Haire, who went by the stage name of Sean O’Haire, had died at the age of 43 of what is being ruled a suicide. A suicide by hanging.

I wrote about Simon Battle already, but there have been others (see here).

We will continue to hear more about hanging suicides in the near future.

Sioux City Alert for September 14th?

Okay, someone seems to be reading the synchromystic literature about Tridents - or me - and there is a new video that is intriguing. Not that I might consider any of the connections valid, but they are interesting and a great amount of work went into these links. The trident at Dealey Plaza is apparent, and this video is a good reminder of that.

What are we to make of this business about a "false flag" operation in Sioux City? I'm not sure about the false flag part, but maybe something is going to happen in Iowa today - something sinister?

The Sergeant Floyd Monument, a 100-foot obelisk, marks the final resting-place of Sergeant Charles Floyd, Jr. Photo by G.R. Lindblade, Courtesy of the Sioux City Public Museum. See details from Enki King, below, in "comments."

Ooops, what did I just read in the morning news?

Hillary Clinton will be at the 37th Harkin Steak Fry in Indianola, Iowa, today, September 14, 2014. Indianola is about 225 miles from Sioux City. I wonder if Clinton is flying in via Sioux City? (See here.)

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Trident Alert: Watch August 24

Update: Poseidon has thrust his Trident! Aug 24. BREAKING NEWS: Northern California has been rocked by a 6.1 earthquake!!!

Poseidon, whose weapon of choice, is the trident, is the "God of the Sea," but also the "Earth-Shaker," the one who causes earthquakes.

Posted on August 20, 2014:

Sunday, August 24, 2014, is worthy of your attention. As you know, if you are a frequent reader here, tridents have been in the news of late, associated with deaths, disasters, and destructive dramas. The weekend date overlaps with a prominent trident event. (Update: Please see "Synchromystic Symposium: The Meaning of Tridents" to read what over 20 theorists think about the symbolism of these trident "coincidences.")

August 24th links directly to a frequently noted trident, for that date is Independence Day or Den' Nezalezhnosti, celebrating the independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union in 1991.

The state coat of arms of Ukraine (Ukrainian: Державний Герб України) or commonly the Tryzub (Ukrainian: Тризуб, “trident”) is the national coat of arms of Ukraine, featuring the same colors found on the Ukrainian flag; a blue shield with a gold trident. It represents the triune God on earth and in heaven. Source.

The first known archeological and historical evidence of this symbol can be found on the seals of the Rurik dynasty. It was stamped on the gold and silver coins issued by Prince Volodymer the Great (980–1015). Source.

Guess who has just been deployed to Ferguson, Missouri?

Asymmetric Solutions USA (note the trident) - see link below in comments

A large number of deadly historical events have been traditionally tied to August 24th. They include:

27 BC – 476 AD – The date of the first of the three Mundus patet, a harvest feast involving the dead, is celebrated during the Roman Empire.
79 AD – Mount Vesuvius erupts. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae are buried in volcanic ash.
410 – The Visigoths under king Alaric I begin to pillage Rome.
455 – The Vandals, led by king Genseric, begin to plunder Rome.

1185 – Sack of Thessalonica by the Normans.
1349 – Six thousand Jews are killed in Mainz after being blamed for the bubonic plague.
1391 – Jews are massacred in Palma de Mallorca.
1482 – The town and castle of Berwick upon Tweed is captured from Scotland by an English army.
1516 – The Ottoman Empire under Selim I defeats the Mamluk Sultanate and captures present-day Syria at the Battle of Marj Dabiq.
1814 – British troops invade Washington, D.C. and during the Burning of Washington the White House, the Capitol and many other buildings are set ablaze.
1816 – The Treaty of St. Louis is signed by Ninian Edwards, William Clark, and Auguste Chouteau for the United States and representatives of the Council of Three Fires (united tribes of Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi) in St. Louis, Missouri. (Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri are in the news during August, 2014; see here.)

1821 – The Treaty of Córdoba is signed in Córdoba, now in Veracruz, Mexico, concluding the Mexican War of Independence from Spain. (The recent deaths of relatives of Pope Francis occurred near Córdoba, on August 19, 2014; see here.)

1929 – Second day of two-day Hebron massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots: Arab attacks on the Jewish community in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, resulting in the death of 65-68 Jews and the remaining Jews being forced to leave the city. (The new 2014 conflicts in Gaza appear to directly stem from the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens; their bodies were found in Hebron; see here.)

1954 – Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, president of Brazil, commits suicide and is succeeded by João Café Filho. (A Brazilian presidential candidate died in a plane crash on August 13, 2014; see here.)

2004 – Eighty-nine passengers die after two airliners explode at around 23:00 after flying out of Domodedovo International Airport, near Moscow. The explosions are caused by suicide bombers (reportedly female) from the Russian Republic of Chechnya. (Shades of the downing of MH17? See here.)

Will August 24, 2014, bring forth new significant deaths, a volcanic eruption, towns invaded & occupied, cities burned, assassinations, suicides, and terrorist attacks? Will tridents be in the mix, in some fashion, symbolically or literally? Red dawns and Auroras? Only time will tell. In the meantime, be safe.

++++

Afterword: August 21, 2014

August 24th is also the Christian Feast Day, in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, for Bartholomew. Bartholomew is the Son of Ptolemy, and Ptolemy means "Son of War." For more on this name/date game, please see Chris Savia's "The Synchromysticism of Seth MacFarlane," posted August 21, 2014. He also talks of the rumblings in Iceland there. Also, Todd Campbell pointed out to me today that Goro, in his "Horus of the Horizon," is pointing an event horizon on August 24th, as well.

Finally, for those assuming that my focus is all negative, let me share a bit of background. Carl Jung was interested in the use and interplay of synchronicity in its application of probabilistic predictions, and those that most often appealed to him in support of his concept of acausality. If we can predict disasters, especially ones produced by humans, and prevent them, then Jung's thoughts can be reframed as he saw them, positively. Predicting what are seen as "negative" events may be an easy target for overt criticism, but these media-driven, recognizable moments are exactly the kinds of predictions that I consider to be possible. Prevention work is often misunderstood.

The instrument of destruction mostly under study, and the behaviors predicted, are of and from the humans, not the stars. It is Homo sapiens who are the ones responding to the anniversaries, remembrances, and independence days on their human internal clocks, tied to their current calendar.

Wars, invasions, cities in turmoil, suicides, murders, crashes, and more, ah, rest with the human factor, not an astronomical one. The so-called "anniversary syndrome" is strong in these primates, my fellows. This is based on an annual accounting in a contemporary landscape, dear friends. So it is and so it shall be.

Now if that volcano in Iceland goes off over the weekend, we'll just have to write that off to one of Carl Jung's "coincidences," correct?

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Mass Shootings Are About Suicides

One major issue not being explored in all of the talk of guns is the clear evidence that the school shootings, the workplace shootings, the theater shootings, and all of the other forms of mass killings hitting the news are really all about suicides.  

Some suicidologists find that almost 100% of school shooters are suicidal. And what is the easiest metaphor for most people to understand about the way to prevent suicides - and approach school shootings? If you are a parent and you are told that your child is suicidal, what is the first thing you do: Remove the guns, knives, and other dangerous weapons from being available to the impulsive, the angry, the mentally unstable, the vulnerable suicidal/homicidal individuals, which they might use to kill themselves and others. 

Why don't we think more globally about that regarding the suicidal people shooting up schools, malls, workplaces, and theaters?

Homicides are sometimes referred to as suicides turned outward, suicides as homicides turned inward. Sigmund Freud, despite his fall from grace during the rise of feminism in the 1970s and the notion that some of his theories are sexist and outdated, had some interesting insights that inform any examination of the interplay between murder and suicide. His conceptualization of suicide was as the murder of one’s self. Freud’s granddaughter, non-Freudian feminist Sophie Freud, Ph. D., whom I studied under at Simmons College, said it well in her appropriately named “The baby and the bathwater: Some thoughts on Freud as postmodernist,” in The Journal of Contemporary Human Services (1998). She observed that Freud’s extensive work on the unconscious, however flawed, helped students of psychology to see that “surfaces mirror only one aspect of human motives, and that each visible aspect of human behavior carries within it, its very opposite.”
            Exploring the thin line between homicide and suicide, the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger — founder along with his father, of the well-known Menninger Clinic and author of Man Against Himself (1938) — extended Freud’s thoughts on suicide as “murder of the self.” Menninger would write: “Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.”
            Menninger, in his Man Against Nature, formulated what has become known as the “Menninger triad” for looking more deeply into suicidal thoughts and behavior. He found that suicidal individuals may share three aspects: (1) they wish to die (suicide), (2) they wish to kill (homicide), and (3) they wish to be killed (victim-precipitated homicide, or more commonly known today by the confusing terms, “suicide by cop” or “blue suicide”). This is best illustrated in cases of murder-suicide.
            Murder-suicides in the 1970s-1980s were regarded as a form of domestic violence, as this was a period of heightened gender-based awareness. For example, women committing murder-suicide tend to kill their children and then themselves. Men tend to murder their spouses or partners, and then complete their own suicides. As Patricia Easteal demonstrated in her 1993 study, Killing the Beloved, one third of spousal homicides in the U.S. and Canada end in suicide. Today, murder-suicides are no longer seen as being one-dimensional, as just about domestic violence. They are examined in terms of dominance, politics, and the result of triggering the suicidal-homicidal confusion in the impulsive, despondent, depressed, and angry individual. ~ The Copycat Effect, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Suicide clusters of the 1980s would be replaced by the school shootings of the 1990s, almost all conducted by suicidal male youth.

One of the earliest modern school shootings began a pattern that would be repeated over and over again. On February 19, 1997, at Bethel Regional High School in Bethel, Alaska, which had been a hotspot of suicide clusters a decade earlier, a school shooting occurred. When student Evan Ramsey, 16, was feeling suicidal in 1997, he went to two 14-year-old friends and asked them what he should do. The boys said that if he was going to kill himself, he should take some people with him. On February 19th, Ramsey did just that, killing a star athlete, Joshua Palacios, and wounding two others, with a 12-guage shotgun. Then Ramsey went to the administration office and shot and killed the principal, Ronald Edwards.

In the 21st century, a realization these mass shootings are about suicides, which present themselves first as homicides, would be a helpful realignment of examining the epidemic in which we find ourselves.

            

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Nightingale Suicides and Defenestrations

"How very little can be done under the spirit of fear." 

~ Florence Nightingale

It is well-known that the British woman Florence Nightingale (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910) was the founder of modern nursing.

Few today realize that Nightingale was also a celebrated English statistician, and a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics. She refined the newly invented visual form of showing statistics, the pie chart (invented by William Playfair in 1801), into her polar area diagram, or what is today occasionally called the Nightingale rose diagram. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb." She was constantly looking for linkages, and her work in mortality rates and sanitation, whether among Crimean War soldiers in field hospitals or of rural peasants in India, won her praise.

Nightingale's work, carrying a lantern around at night to check on the battlefield wounded in Crimea is legendary. (The Crimean peninsula is located just south of the rest of the Ukrainian seacoast and west of the Russian region of Kuban. The name Crimea takes its origin in the name of a city of Qırım (today's Stary Krym) which served as a capital of the Crimean province of the Golden Horde. Qırım is Crimean Tatar for "my hill." The ancient Greeks called Crimea Tauris (later Taurica, Ταυρική in Ancient greek), after its inhabitants, the Tauri. The Greek historian Herodotus mentions that Heracles plowed that land using a huge ox  -"Taurus" - hence the name of the land. Herodotus also refers to a nearby region called "cremni or 'the Cliffs'" which may also refer to the Crimean peninsula, notable for its cliffs along what is otherwise a flat northern coastline of the Black Sea.)

Today, Nightingale might be regarded as a sychromystic. Certainly, her name is powerful, as I shall try to demonstrate in this essay.

Florence (="flowering, in bloom") is a name due to the city in Italy where she was born. But, as is relatively well-known, Nightingale's surname has its origins in that of a bird.

The Common Nightingale or simply the Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos), also referred as the Rufous Nightingale, is a small passerine bird that was formerly classified as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, but is now more generally considered to be an Old World flycatcher, Muscicapidae. It belongs to a group of more terrestrial species, often called chats. None are found in the New World, and North Americans generally think of the name "Nightingale" in association with nursing.

But the bird is a key to understanding the underlying meaning carried in the general references associated with "Nightingale."

Wikipedia has important pieces of information that impact on this discussion:

Common Nightingales are named so because they frequently sing at night as well as during the day. The name has been used for well over 1,000 years, being highly recognizable even in its Anglo-Saxon form – "nightingale." It means "night songstress." Early writers assumed the female sang when it is in fact the male. The song is loud, with an impressive range of whistles, trills and gurgles. Its song is particularly noticeable at night because few other birds are singing. This is why its name includes "night" in several languages. Only unpaired males sing regularly at night, and nocturnal song is likely to serve to attract a mate. Singing at dawn, during the hour before sunrise, is assumed to be important in defending the bird's territory. Nightingales sing even more loudly in urban or near-urban environments, in order to overcome the background noise. The most characteristic feature of the song is a loud whistling crescendo, absent from the song of Thrush Nightingale. It has a frog-like alarm call.

The Common Nightingale is an important symbol for poets from a variety of ages, and has taken on a number of symbolic connotations. Homer evokes the Nightingale in the Odyssey, suggesting the myth of Philomela and Procne (one of whom, depending on the myth's version, is turned into a nightingale). This myth is the focus of Sophocles' tragedy, Tereus, of which only fragments remain. Ovid, too, in his Metamorphoses, includes the most popular version of this myth, imitated and altered by later poets, including Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and George Gascoigne. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" also evokes the Common Nightingale's song (and the myth of Philomela and Procne). Because of the violence associated with the myth, the nightingale's song was long interpreted as a lament.
The Common Nightingale has also been used as a symbol of poets or their poetry....Virgil compares the mourning of Orpheus to the "lament of the nightingale." Source.

"Any mortal who is infuriated by his wrongs 

and applies a medicine that is worse than the 

disease is a doctor who does not understand the trouble." 

~ Tereus by Sophocles, before 414 BCE.

So let's look at some recent intriguing deaths and their links.

I was doing research on "Nightingale," over this last week and the weekend, when the news hit last Friday (December 7th) that nurse Jacintha Saldanha had died by suicide. She was the nurse at the London's King Edward VII Hospital who initially patched a prank call to another nurse. It turned out it was from morning radio hosts in Sydney, Australia, Mel Greig and Michael Christian. They impersonated Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles to try to pry out information on the health of Prince William’s pregnant wife, Kate Middleton. Saldanha, 46, who was born in India, was found dead three days after the pranking. No method of suicide has been revealed.

Nightingale = nursing. Alright, that was a weird sync. There is more to this than meets the eye, I predict, and it has been a news story that seems certain to increase suicides, a la' the copycat effect. This real possibility is already being discussed in Australia, where a suicide alert has been issued.

What started me down this road was that on December 5th, I heard from a correspondent (Dave M) about a suicide, which seemed a little unusual.

A Serbian government statement said on Wednesday December 5, 2012, that Serbia's Ambassador to NATO, Branislav Milinkovic, 52, died by suicide by leaping from a busy parking garage platform at Brussels Airport on Tuesday night, December 4th. A diplomat who could not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media said Milinkovic suddenly jumped from the 26- to 33-foot-high (8- to 10-meter-high) platform while waiting with the Serbian delegation for foreign ministry officials due to hold talks with NATO officials. 

"His motives are a mystery. Three diplomats who knew Milinkovic said he did not appear distraught in the hours leading up to his death Tuesday night," reported the AP.

What happened to Milinkovic was not technically a defenestration, but the combination of a politician and the fall from a high location quickly brought to my mind some infamous defenestrations from history.

Defenestration, specifically, is the act of throwing an individual (or even something) out of a window, usually from a location above ground level. Historically, the word defenestration was used to refer to an act of political dissent or political murder or suicide.

The term originates from two incidents in history, both occurring in Prague. In 1419, seven town officials were thrown from the Town Hall, precipitating the Hussite War. In 1618, two Imperial governors and their secretary were tossed from Prague Castle, sparking the Thirty Years War. These incidents, particularly in 1618, were referred to as the Defenestrations of Prague and gave rise to the term and the concept. Source.

Self-defenestration (autodefenestration) is the act of jumping, propelling oneself, or causing oneself to fall, out of a window.
What I found interesting, as to the timing of Milinkovic's "suicide," was it came the day after Showtime's broadcast of Oliver Stone's newest episode of The Untold History of the United States on the Cold War.

Stone's program had several internal links, some of which were probably on purpose, and others may have been more synchromystic, about defenestration. (And then Branislav Milinkovic's fall occurred.)

Early in the program, Stone was discussing WWII covert operations in Ukraine. At that point in the program, in large letters, Nightingale was flashed on the screen. It was not too clear what the exact significance of the prominent lettering was, but I figured it was some kind of foreshadowing. [I looked it up later and found it was the code name of the Ukrainian Nazi elite unit Nachtigall (Nightingale) Brigade, which James Forrestal would help to smuggle to the United States after World War II.]

Later, the Oliver Stone episode told of how on March 10, 1948, the Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs Jan Masaryk (pictured above) was found dead (below), dressed in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation stated that he died suicide by jumping out of the window, although from the beginning some believed that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists, during the Czech coup. A new criminal investigation discovered and confirmed, recently, from the trajectory of Masaryk's fall and other evidence, that he was thrown out of the window. He had, indeed, suffered from a defenestration, so well-known in that part of the world.

James Vincent Forrestal (February 15, 1892 – May 22, 1949) too died by death from a window. 

Forrestal was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense. Forrestal was the man inside the government who would oversee the establishment of the CIA. And as I mentioned above, the sneaking of the Ukrainian Nazi Nachtigall (Nightingale) into America.

Stone's documentary television program spent some time telling parts of the story of Forrestal, including the bizarre tale of Forrestal's "suicide," which involved his falling from the window of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

In the early morning hours of May 22, 1949, Forrestal's body, like Jan Masaryk's, clad only in pajamas, was found on a third-floor roof below the 16th-floor kitchen across the hall from his room.

Again, with Nightingale projected on the screen, Stone, as the narrator, noted that Forrestal, right before he died, was writing down a poem from Sophocles' tragedy Ajax - and then stopped when Forrestal came to the word nightingale:

Fair Salamis, the billows’ roar,

Wander around thee yet,

And sailors gaze upon thy shore

Firm in the Ocean set.

Thy son is in a foreign clime

Where Ida feeds her countless flocks,

Far from thy dear, remembered rocks,

Worn by the waste of time–

Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save

In the dark prospect of the yawning grave....

Woe to the mother in her close of day,

Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray,

When she shall hear

Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear!

“Woe, woe!’ will be the cry–

No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail

Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale–

Some have read what Forrestal left behind as an implied suicide note. Others have considered it some kind of warning, linked to the Nazi unit he had help get into America. We may never know.

In a new form of art ("Conspiracy Theory Opera") presented to the public between 2000 and 2007, The Defenestration Trilogy, three chamber operas, were created by Evan Hause.
The three defenestrations that Hause details are those of James Forrestal (d. 1949), Frank Olson (d. 1953), an army chemist who worked for the CIA in America's early biological warfare program, and Edwin H. Armstrong (d. 1954), the inventor of F.M. All three died by relatively mysterious falls from windows.

Hause's opera about Forrestal is entitled Nightingale, a two-act performance, scored for strings at its core (with some winds, piano and percussion).

Consider this, even the life of Florence Nightingale remains a mystery. Why should we be surprised that anything linked to "nightingale" should be totally known?

"I have lived and slept in the same bed 

with English countesses and Prussian 

farm women...no woman has excited 

passions among women more than I have." 

~ Florence Nightingale

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Season of Suicides: Of Phoenix, Fox and Paradoxes

On September 27, 2001, the Zug massacre "happened." In Zug, Switzerland, Friedrich Leibacher shot 18 citizens, killing 14 and then took his own life. Eleven years later, during the same week, things didn't look much better on the evening news.

Phoenix. 

Fox. 

Suicides.

Signs. 

Balaclava.

Lewis.

Scientology.

Anarchy.

Aurora.

James Holmes.

James Holmes.

Phoenix.

The live Fox News broadcast of the suicidal end of a car chase on September 28, 2012, perhaps was to be expected. In an autumn of atrocities following a summer of the gun, should we have seen this coming?

TVNewser carried the beginning of this news at 3:48 PM, with these words:

A man committed suicide live on Fox News a few minutes ago. FNC had been carrying a car chase in the Phoenix area and when the suspect pulled over, he ran down a dirt road, then stopped, put a gun to his head, and fell to the ground. No other national networks were carrying the chase.

Wall-to-wall coverage of car chases in California, for years, with some mainstreaming of them nationally, has always toyed with the possible tragic end of the scenarios. Car chases are a result of the copycat effect, and the danger is that televised suicide copycats could follow too.

The last two days have been especially violent, bizarre, and suicidal/parasuicidal.

On September 27, 2012, at the Stillwater (Oklahoma) Junior High School, there was the suicide of Cade Poulos, who had dressed like Two Face/Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight and the Batman comics. 

Then in the afternoon, at 4:35 PM Thursday, at Accent Signage Systems in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, an employee who was fired a few hours earlier, killed 5 [revised] people and then took his own life.

July 2012 photo shows Andrew Engeldinger. Photo: Bill Klotz.

Andrew J. Engeldinger ( = Warrior Angel Striker), 36, killed the company’s owner Reuven Rahamim, Accent’s Director of Operations John Souter, production manager Eric Rivers, and two others whose identities have not been released. Three others were hospitalized, two critically. (Update on September 29th: Death toll has risen to six; one other individual was identified, Keith Basinski, a UPS driver.)

The company is revolutionary, and the founder Reuven Rahamim (above) actually was profiled as the "Mad Scientist of Signs."

Earlier on Thursday September 27, 2012, a tragedy visited New Fairfield, Connecticut: 

A small Connecticut town was sent reeling in grief and confusion Friday after a popular fifth-grade teacher shot and killed a knife-wielding prowler in a black ski mask, only to discover it was his 15-year-old son.
No immediate charges were brought against the father, Jeffrey Giuliano, in the slaying of his son, Tyler, who was gunned down in his aunt’s driveway next door to his own home around 1 a.m. Thursday.
“It’s something out of a Hollywood script,” said John Hodge, the first selectman, or top elected official, in the town of nearly 14,000 people about 50 miles from New York city. He said he couldn’t recall another killing in his eight years on the job. (See rest of article here.)

Thursday's and Friday's incidents followed the bizarre falling (suicidal) death of Sons of Anarchy star Johnny Lewis:

Johnny Lewis' gruesome demise left many questions unanswered when the Sons of Anarchy star plummeted to his death Wednesday after allegedly killing his 81-year-old landlady.
But as more information continues to surface about Lewis—his criminal past, his custody battle over his young daughter—one particular revelation sheds an intriguing light on the troubled star: his deep ties to Scientology.
A Church of Scientology source exclusively tells E! News that the actor's father, Michael Lewis, was a high-level Scientologist and that the star was "born into the church."

Johnny Lewis, July 2010. Photo: Jerry Avenaim.

Jonathan Kendrick "Johnny" Lewis (October 29, 1983 – September 26, 2012), also credited as Johnny K. Lewis, was an American actor, best known for playing Kip "Half-Sack" Epps in the first two seasons of the FX original series Sons of Anarchy. Lewis also appeared in supporting roles in the films Underclassman, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and The Runaways. Lewis jumped from a roof into the driveway at a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, California.

We began in Phoenix (and are reminded of the "flashlight bombs" in May in Phoenix too); we shall end in Phoenix, with a developing news story:

Most of the people who saw a masked teenager wearing a sheet and armed with a grenade launcher told authorities they assumed the weapon was a fake as he pointed it at passing cars in northwest Phoenix, according to 911 calls released Thursday [September 27, 2012].
All of the callers calmly told 911 operators that a "small man" or a "kid" was pointing what looked like a bazooka, torpedo, rocket launcher, grenade launcher or a "long gun with a point at the end" at passing cars on July 28.
"I assume it's a fake. I hope so," one man told a 911 operator. "I think you guys should check it out."
"I don't know if it's real or not, but it's kind of bizarre," another male caller said. "He's wearing a dress with a torpedo on his shoulder and pointing it left and right."
"He had it pointed at me," another man said. "I got kind of freaked out."
A Phoenix man has been accused of filming his 16-year-old nephew to see how fast police would react to a mock terrorist act.
Michael D. Turley, 39, was arrested Monday [September 24, 2012], nearly two months after the bizarre film was posted to Google Inc.'s YouTube site.
In the film, the narrator whom police identified as Turley, said he wanted to see how long it took authorities to respond. The introduction to the video mentions the July 20 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., that killed 12.
"Given this event, I wanted to run a little test here in Phoenix, Arizona," Turley said on the film in a disguised voice. "I want to find out how safe I really am, and I want to know the response time of the Phoenix police department."
The police response took just over three minutes from the first call, and a helicopter and SWAT team was dispatched as backup, according to Phoenix police spokesman James Holmes.
The YouTube clip showed the teen marching back and forth at an intersection with the camouflage-colored rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. He was wearing a light-blue bedsheet and black head covering with black pants and black sneakers. The 911 callers' descriptions varied, with some saying it was a shawl, gown or dress.
"It looks like there's another kid with him videotaping him," one man told the operator. "They probably think it's funny. It's not really funny."
The first officer found Turley and the teen standing in Turley's driveway. The officer calmly told the boy to put down the weapon and Turley to put down the camera. Holmes said Turley told the officer they were just filming a movie, and the officer took down their names and left. (See rest of article, here).

Colorado = red. Aurora = dawn. Suspect shooter James Eagan (= fiery) Holmes.
Arizona = arid zone, small oak. Phoenix = fire bird. Police spokesman James Holmes.
Amazing.

The Phoenix has long been presented as a symbol of rebirth, immortality, and renewal. Is it also a symbol of the copycat effect, repeating patterns, and behavior contagion?

It has a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young Phoenix or Phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again.... The Phoenix's ability to be reborn from its own ashes implies that it is immortal, though in some stories the new Phoenix is merely the offspring of the older one....In the course of the colonization of Northern America a number of cities have received the name of Phoenix or have been associated with its symbolism. Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, was so named as it was built on the ruins of the Hohokam civilization that had existed on the site centuries before. The Phoenix became the official symbol of Atlanta, Georgia in 1888 because it was "reborn" from the ashes after it was burned down in the American Civil War. ~ Wikipedia

Two other cities that use the Phoenix as their symbol: Detroit, Michigan and Portland, Maine (where I have lived since 1983).

Locations associated with the "Phoenix" symbolism are said to have had "new dawns" (auroras) occur after terrible fires destroyed large parts of their cities.

Thanks DJ, SM, MB, AWG, AM, CS, and others.

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NFL Should Worry About Suicides Again

Now that the replacement refs are a thing of the past, the NFL should worry about the suicide of its players again. Violence had returned to the NFL in a climate without rules. But what the recent events exposed were the raw violence just under the surface of the game.

Twitter, the sports media, and talk radio were abuzz with the outrageously terrible call giving a win to the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football.

"The short version is that referees ruled that Seattle's Golden Tate caught a ball that, in fact, was clearly intercepted by the Green Bay Packers' M.D. Jennings. (The Atlantic Wire has the full story and the incredible video)," noted writer David Graham. "The officials and the National Football League ownership are at odds over retirement benefits and salary, as well as a couple more finer labor dispute points."

BTW, read "referees" as "replacement referees," that is "scabs," as in "strikebreakers."

What is incredible is that at a time when great attention was directed to how violent the sport of pro football had become due to the discovery of concussions, the NFL's ownership desire to not deal with the refs over 1/2250th of their total revenue had resulted in even more violent games.

Last weekend's games, including Monday night's battle, were showing direct evidence of the stripping bare of the basics of the game. The NFL contests were shown to be the graphically violent games that the sport had become, without proper guidance.

The most visual graphic of this was apparent during the Houston Texans' win over the Denver Broncos on Sunday, September 23rd, when Houston quarterback Matt Schaub took an illegal hit from Broncos defender Joe Mays. Schaub lost part of his earlobe on the play. (The image is at top.)

I seriously wondered if the NFL would allow what was happening proceed until someone was paralyzed on the field or killed in a tragedy on the 23rd yardline? Luckily, on September 27th, the NFL and regular officials settled.

But remaining in the background are suicides of NFL players that continue.

Unlike former star linebacker Junior Seau, who died by suicide with a gunshot to his chest in May 2012, and former star defensive back Dave Duerson, who took his life in similar fashion in February 2011, NFL player newest suicide victim, O.J. Murdock was not thinking about leaving his brain to science. He killed himself with a shoot to the head.

Murdock, 25, sent a text message to sports writer Bill Ward -- who covered his career at Tampa's Middleton High School -- just hours before he shot himself Monday, according to the Tampa Tribune. "Hey Mr Ward, it's OJ Murdock.... I just want to thank u for everything you've done for me and my family. Can't thank you enough," the text read.
Murdock, who signed with the NFL's Tennessee Titans last year, never responded to Ward's reply sent four hours later: "Hi O.J. Thanks for those kind words. Are you recovered from the Achilles and back in camp with the (Titans)?"

A Tampa police officer found Murdock "in his car in front of Middleton High School with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound" at 8:30 a.m. on July 30, 2012. Murdock died two hours later at Tampa General Hospital.

The conflict between the refs and the NFL, the loss of games, the increasing violence of the televised play were all unfortunate. But it all hid, temporarily, the unseen violence that continues in the bodies and minds of these men who are today's modern gladiators. Their pain and concussions may have taken a back seat to what was happening out there on the grass and screen right now, but the players' deaths continued, due to the simple fact they are combatants who are entertaining audiences with violence.

Will there be more darkness and blood before the dawn?

See also:

Seau's Suicide Euphoria, published May 8, 2012.

NFL Suicides: 12 in 25 Years, published May 2, 2012.

NFL Suicides: 1942 - 2010, published September 21, 2010.

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Another Hollywood Suicide Leap: Brian Gerber

It's happened again. Hollywood has suffered another self-death.

LA Weekly has announced that Hollywood's 11th Hour producer Brian Gerber has died by suicide by propelling himself over a cliff. In many ways, the method of suicide copies Tony Scott's jump from a Hollywood area bridge a mere ten days ago.

Gerber's suicide was just confirmed in a post on his Facebook profile....
Another well-loved member of the L.A. film industry -- documentary producer and digital-tech pioneer Brian Gerber -- took his life this week by driving his car off the Angeles Crest Highway. (Ridley Scott's brother, producer Tony Scott, just jumped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge last week.)

 

According to Battalion Chief Ron Larriva of the L.A. County Fire Department, the LAPD and Sheriff's Department began searching Angeles Crest Highway for Gerber early this morning, after being informed by his family that he was distraught and thinking of running his car off a cliff in the area.

 

Around 7:30 a.m., Larriva says investigators found "a suicide note up on the rock" at mile marker 32, as well as a car that had plummeted 500 to 600 feet down the embankment into Angeles National Forest. "It must have happened late last night or early this morning," says Larriva.
Inside the vehicle was a fatally injured 41-year-old Los Angeles resident, says Sheriff's Lieutenant Angela Shepherd, although she's "not releasing any names."

Thanks Arcadia Pariah.

Filmography/IMBd/Brian Gerber

Walk & Talk - The West Wing Reunion: Behind the Scenes (short) (executive producer)

2012Walk & Talk: The West Wing Reunion (short) (executive producer)

2010Sex and the Austen Girl (TV series) (executive producer/director - 6 episodes)

Independent Lens (TV series documentary) (associate producer - 1 episode, 2010) (producer - 1 episode, 2002)

– Project Kashmir (2010) (associate producer)

– Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew (2002) (producer)

2008The Dungeon Masters (documentary) (producer)

2008Save It (short) (line producer)

2008Project Kashmir (documentary) (associate producer)

2007Sunny & Share Love You (producer)

2007/IThe 11th Hour (documentary) (producer)

2007Compañeras (documentary) (associate producer)

2006The Making of 'RockPaperScissors' (video documentary short) (producer)

2006Tell Me Do You Miss Me (documentary) (co-producer)

2006Putting the River in Reverse (documentary short) (producer)

2005I Believe to My Soul (video documentary short) (producer)

2003Briar Patch (associate producer)

2002Bug (producer)

2001Daniel Johnston: Rock (documentary short) (producer)

2000Dean Wareham: Psychobabble (short) (producer)

2000Jimmy Scott: Alone Together (short) (producer)

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