From the Gateway Arch to the Khyber Pass Gateway

The Gateway to the Khyber Pass, at Peshawar, is an archway to a mountain pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pass was an integral part of the ancient Silk Road and throughout history, it has been an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia and a strategic military location. It also lies at the end of the Grand Trunk Road.

The heart of Khyber Pakhtonkhwa was initially termed “Pushpapura” and means "the city of flora." Peshawar is sited on the boundary of South Asia and Central Asia and become the business center of South Asia. Peshawar is also known as “The City of Frontier” because the city that link the Afghanistan and Pakistan through the Khyber Pass. Peshawar is the commercial center of the Pakistan based, in part, on their connection to its unique food industry and home of textile, silk, carpets and other items.

From the Gateway Arch to the Khyber Pass Gateway, the thread of destruction of human life continues. We living in times of violence.

The Taliban stormed a military-run school in northwest Pakistan, gunning down and killing at least 141 people -- most of them children -- in one of the bloodiest attacks in the country's history.

The Army Public School is located at Warsak Road near Cantonment, Peshawar, which is part of Army Public Schools & Colleges System that runs 146 schools in Pakistan.

The attack began at around noon when seven gunmen, dressed in uniforms of the Pakistani Frontier Corps, entered the school from the back through a cemetery adjacent to the school, after scaling its walls. Before entering the school the gunmen set fire to vehicles, then indiscriminately opened fire with automatic weapons in the central auditorium of the school, where children were gathered for a school function.

The Pakistani Taliban killed 141 people, including 132 children, in an attack on an army run school in Peshawar, a city in the country’s north-west. The attack was the deadliest in Pakistan’s history.

All of the militants in the school attack in northwest Pakistan have been killed, a Peshawar police official says.

Pakistan’s Major General Asim Bajwa says there were seven militants, all wearing suicide jackets, and that several special forces soldiers were wounded in the fighting.

“The terrorists used a ladder to cross the school walls from the graveyard behind the school. The terrorists and the Pakistani army fought in the administrative block of the school.”

He says 960 students and staff were saved in the rescue operation, and that 121 children were wounded during the attack.

This is a short overview of similar attacks in Pakistan.

16 December 2014: Taliban attack on school in Peshawar leaves at least 135 people dead, most of them children

22 September 2013: Militants linked to the Taliban kill at least 80 people at a church in Peshawar, in one of the worst attacks on Christians

10 January 2013: Militant bombers target the Hazara Shia Muslim minority in the city of Quetta, killing 120 at a snooker hall and on a street

28 May 2010: Gunmen attack two mosques of the minority Ahmadi Islamic sect in Lahore, killing more than 80 people

18 October 2007: Twin bomb attack at a rally for Benazir Bhutto in Karachi leaves at least 130 dead. Unclear if Taliban behind attack.

Peshawar is situated in a large valley near the eastern end of the Khyber

Pass.

In 2002, Osama bin Laden slipped into Pakistan. He then lived in at least

five different places including Peshawar before finally settling down in

Abbottabad in 2005. It was there where he was eventually killed by US Navy

SEALs in a covert raid begun on May 1, 2011. The official death date for

Osama bin Laden is given as May 2, 2011.

The operation, code named Zero Dark Thirty, and used as the title of a

famed film on the event, was defined as "a military term for 30 minutes

after midnight, and it refers also to the darkness and secrecy that

cloaked the entire decade-long mission."

The raid was completed shortly after 1am local time when he was shot once

in the chest and once in the head by a Navy Seal who announced, "For God

and country Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo," because Geronimo was the

code-name given to the al-Qaeda leader.

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Bloody Valentine's Day?

It is a full moon on February 14, 2014, from Albania to Sochi, from Alaska to Xinjiang. May everyone be safe on this Bloody Friday.

I have low expectations for humans on February 14th. The love and romance associated with Valentine's Day seem to turn into killings of different varieties. It is as if, of all the days during the year, this one brings forth the most tension for a few individuals.

Extend this to what has been occurring with homicidal-suicidal feelings recently, and the outcomes are tragic. School shootings, domestic violence in murder-suicide clusters, workplace violence, and more. Are mall shootings, church killings, terrorist attacks, and new domestic murder-suicides in our near future? Does Valentine's Day have an international reach? Will violence visit global locations on February 14th?

On February 14, 2008, six people were dead due to a Northern Illinois University shooting, including the gunman. There were 22 casualties in all.

Yesterday, I received a call from a reporter based in Montreal for the Globe and Mail newspaper. He discussed with me, as he described them, "a recent series of multiple murders involving rage-filled men killing their lovers or ex-lovers and their loved-ones. Three cases involving a total of about 10 deaths, in the space of about 2 weeks." 

I pointed out that Valentine's Day could be a day to watch out for and warn about in his article. Unfortunately, the reporter Les Perreaux felt the story won't get published until the weekend due to the fact there just had been a new murder-suicide, on Thursday, February 13th.

This topic hits close to home for me, and I've always acknowledged that. 

My book, The Copycat Effect, is dedicated to my maternal grandmother (pictured above), who died in a Valentine's Day murder-suicide.

I penned that dedication this way:

For Nellie Gray,

The grandmother I never knew,
as she was killed during a murder-suicide
on Valentine’s Day, 1940.

In my book I wrote an entire section entitled the "Significant of Dates," and began with one special example, St. Valentine's Day. I reprint below what you will find in my book about February 14th, from pages 246-247:

Dates are important, anniversary events especially so. Suicides, murder-suicides, murders tend to clump around dates of loss for at-risk victims.

One such date is one that most people assume should be associated with happy feelings, but it is not. That is Valentine’s Day. For many people, it’s a day that speaks more to emptiness and loss than to joy and love.

One cultural event seems to point to this feeling: the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” of February 14, 1929, in Chicago. On this day the alleged henchman of gangster “Scarface” Al Capone murdered seven members of the George “Bugs” Moran gang in a North Clark Street garage. Colorful names, a memorable day, the windy city, a grand crime, and huge headlines have made this event enormously “infamous” in history. Books and movies have fueled the copycat effect of this date.

A year after “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” Ben Hecht...authoredScarface(1930), which was made into a Howard Hughes produced, Howard Hawks directed movie (1932) about the North Clark Street killings. Hughes supposedly asked that Scarfacebe "realistic, as exciting, as grisly as possible." Censors blocked Scarfacefor two years before Hawks got it to theaters.

How does culture make a 1929 event into currency for a future generation? Through the movies and other media, of course. Some Like It Hot(1959) had Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis playing two Chicago musicians who witnessed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and are forced to cross-dress as women in order to hide from Al Capone. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre(1967) starring Jason Robards portrays the event in docudrama style.

But beyond fiction, real murders and murder-suicides have also been linked to the specific Valentine’s Day 1929 gangland murders. The gangland and other ripples from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre certainly demonstrate an awareness of the twilight language of the event.

The individual most often identified as the organizer of the Moran gang killings was Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, one of Capone's most trusted men. McGurn (whose real name was James DeMora), an expert with the Tommy gun who had an “eye for the ladies,” especially for blonde women, was killed on the eve of Valentine’s Day, 1936. A nickel was put in McGurn's right hand and, next to his body the killers left a humorous valentine card.

Sometimes personal histories reinforce the negative Valentine’s Day link. My grandmother was killed by her second husband on Valentine’s Day, 1940, in Illinois, in a murder-suicide, as my future mother, a 12 old girl, looked on in horror. The copycat effect sometimes hits close to home.

During the 1980s, St. Valentine’s Day was a focus of teen suicide clusters around the United States, and many families felt the impact of the day.

Earlier in the book, I described a teen suicide cluster in Peekskill, New York. I mentioned on February 4, 1984, Robert DeLaValliere, 13, hanged himself in Depew Park, and then I wrote:

Did another teen then imitate DeLaValliere? Ten days after his suicide, 14‑year‑old Justin Spoonhour picked a tree in back of his home and hanged himself. Spoonhour lived in Putnam Valley, five miles north of where DeLaValliere died. His mother graphically described in a People magazine article how she found her boy. "I turned my light on and saw Justin hanging from a tree,” she wrote. "His eyes and mouth were open, and his tongue was swollen and protruding." As we have noted, this was Valentine’s Day in Peekskill.

Elsewhere in The Copycat Effect, Valentine's Day figures as a touchstone for understanding the context of violence in which we find ourselves. I noted:

In 2002, National Review online editor Jonah Goldberg, a conservative, commented on liberal Senator Patrick Moynihan’s 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down,” to make some points about the media’s normalizing of terrorism. Goldberg’s and Moynihan’s insights apply here, in understanding how the media makes “celebrities” of events, which then serve as cultural icons that are held up for emulation by followers. In this way, copycats are produced. Calling the essay “one of the most influential articles of the last decade,” Goldberg notes that “Moynihan argued that deviancy - crime, mental illness, out-of-wedlock births, etc. -- had become so rampant, had so thoroughly soaked into the culture, that we simply had to redefine the abnormal as normal to cope.”

“Moynihan's most famous example was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre,” noted Goldberg. “That event was a major turning point in American history, credited with helping to convince Americans to abandon prohibition…The actual details? Four gangsters murdered seven gangsters. In the early 1990s, Moynihan noted, Los Angeles suffered from the equivalent of one St. Valentine's Day Massacre every weekend. And, of course, we can say much the same about suicide bombings in Israel.”

The above passages are from my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines, a work the American media does not wish you to buy or read. In Canada, intriguingly, they are more open to research findings and the lessons learned.

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Black Friday's Dark News

Black Friday's first victim: Jdimytai Damour

The 2011 Honda Civic of Black Friday's latest victim: Patrick Henry Boyd.

Some have asked, "Why is there a concentration of attention on 'bad news' on this blog?".

Fair enough.

The simple answer is that social science on the twilight language is done more easily through tracking violent events in the media, as those are noted more routinely.

In The Copycat Effect: How The Media and Popular Culture Trigger The Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004), I document how this attitude is dealt to us as "death sells."

While it would be wonderful to track daily events and changes in terms of positive behaviors, that is rather difficult. The copycat effect, for example, is working all the time, whether in milder forms such as people copying "fads" like hula hoops, buying the same color of cars or shooting victims in schools.

The media gets more involved with acts of violence, because, if it bleeds, it leads is a truth of modern news.

So, here we are, the day after Thanksgiving 2013, in the USA. It is Black Friday, which is named for businesses going into the "black" (turning a profit) in revenue. The death is rising, and even the English are following the history of "worst clashes."

The day's name - Black Friday - originated in Philadelphia, where it first was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. Use of the term started before 1961 and began to see broader use outside Philadelphia around 1975.

In reality, in recent years, it has become capitalism's version of "Devil's Night," chiefly associated with the serious vandalism and arson seen in Detroit, Michigan from the 1970s to the 1990s. Violence has been frequent news byproduct of reports on Black Fridays, since 2006, and the media appears to be enjoying detailing every fight, shooting, or near riots on Black Fridays.

Black Friday 2008 seemed especially dangerous. A New York Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour died after 2000 bargain hunters broke down the doors to the store, pushing him to the ground. The 34-year-old male employee was pronounced dead an hour after shoppers breached the doors to the shopping center at 77 Green Acres Road, Valley Stream, Long Island. On the same day, two people were fatally shot during an altercation at a Toys "R" Us, Desert Crossing Shopping Center at 72314 Highway 111, in Palm Desert, California.

This year, here's the rundown, thus far, as noted by the Black Friday Death Count:

2013 Teen returning home from Black Friday shopping fell asleep at wheel, killed in wreck

The wreck happened at 7:24 a.m. on South Point Road near Tucker Road, in front of Jim's Grocery. The driver, 19-year-old Patrick Henry Boyd, of 6915 Treebark Lane, Clover, South Carolina, died in the wreck. Boyd's 2011 Honda Accord struck a sign at 1901 South Point Road.

2013 Man Stabbed During Black Friday Event at Carlsbad Mall

A man was hospitalized after being stabbed, just after 12:30 a.m., police received a report of a stabbing at the Westfield Plaza Camino Real mall located at 2525 El Camino Real. An 18-year-old man, who they identified as Javier Covarrubias, stabbed the man in the stomach, and then fled the scene on foot with another suspect towards the Movie Max Theater at the mall. He was arrested; the other man vanished.

Click the links, below, for more details on each incident:
2013 Newport, Arkansas Walmart employee injured during Black Friday sales
2013 NBPD confirm woman trampled at Wal-Mart
2013 Scenes of chaos during chain store's Black Friday sales in Ireland
2013 Several injured in Black Friday-related shooting outside Kohl's in Illinois
2013 Black Friday: Virginia Man Stabbed In Walmart Parking Lot Over Space
2013 Rialto Walmart brawl sends one police officer to hospital
2013 Shopper carrying TV home from Target shot in Las Vegas

More collections of Black Friday's Dark News (2013 edition) can be found here, here, and here. Heck, you can just follow it on the Drudge Report too, for the next few hours.

(H/T to Enki & JWC.)

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Capitol Hill Violence: Miriam, Biblical Sister of Aaron

Washington D.C. has been hit by another shooting incident that captured the media's attention. The US Navy Yard shooting left 12 dead and the gunman, Aaron Alexis.

Today something more bizarre occurred.

NBC reports:

A woman who tried to force her car through a White House security fence Thursday afternoon was shot and killed by police after a 12-block chase past the Capitol, which was locked down for a half-hour, authorities said.
The suspect — a dental hygienist with a history of mental issues, according to sources — had a 1-year-old child with her who was not hurt, police said.
One Secret Service officer was struck by the woman's car, and a Capitol Police officer was injured when he slammed into a barricade during the pursuit.
The U.S. Capitol was placed on lockdown following a car chase and shooting involving a woman who attempted to ram the White House gates.
All the shots fired came from the officers involved in the pursuit, and the woman — identified as Miriam Carey, 34, of Stamford, Conn. — did not have a gun, law-enforcement sources said.

The woman seemed to be doing the unthinkable.

The Washington Post tried to understand what had happened.

Her sister, Amy Carey, a Brooklyn nurse, was incredulous when she was reached Thursday afternoon and told what had happened outside the Capitol.
“That’s impossible. She works, she holds a job,” said Amy Carey, who confirmed that her Stamford-based sister drove a black car. She said she knew of nothing that would bring her sister to Washington. “She wouldn’t be in D.C. She was just in Connecticut two days ago, I spoke to her. . . . I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t answer any more.”

S. Hunter notes, "both Miriam and Aaron openly claimed they were being stalked by government officials."

Aaron Alexis was arrested in Seattle in 2004 for shooting out the tires on an individual's vehicle." Miriam Carey's tires had recently been slashed in an incident in Connecticut, shares correspondent Hunter.

What does the woman's name Miriam Carey mean?

Miriam is the original Hebrew form of Mary. It is used in the Old Testament, where it belongs to the elder sister of Moses and Aaron. It has long been popular among Jews, and it has been used as an English Christian name since the Protestant Reformation.

Carey is from an Irish surname which was derived from Ó Ciardha meaning "descendent of Ciardha," derived from Irish ciar "black".

A black woman in a black car with a black name attacking the White House of our first black president?

For several incidents of late, as in this one, AfricanAmericans have been the foci. 

There are no coincidences.

++++

After years of workplace shootings and "random" acts of mass violence in schools, malls, and other settings being linked to "lone nut" Caucasian males, we have entered a period of intense media attention to African-American/black individuals being involved.

June 21, 2013 ~ Lakim Faust (African-American shooter)

August 19, 2013 ~ Michael Brandon Hill (Caucasian shooter) targets African-American school, formerly named after George Washington Carver, which was renamed after Ron McNair (who went to another Carver HS)

August 30, 2013 ~ Christopher Lamont Richardson Jr. (African-American) targets Carver HS, a traditional African-American HS

September 1, 2013 ~ Daquan Breland and Daquan Wright (African-American shooters) kill African-American infant

September 4, 2013 ~ Hispanics target African-Americans, kill Joshua Broussard

September 16, 2013 ~ Aaron Alexis (African-American shooter) kills 12 (see also here)

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On the Damascus Road

Why do a few multiple news items appear to play name game tricks of their own?

On Saturday, May 18, 2013, a powerful car explosion hit the Ruken al-Deen neighborhood in Damascus, killing at least three people in the latest blast to strike the Syrian capital (population 1.7 million). The SANA news agency reported that an explosive device was planted under a car parked on Rukneddin highway near Ibn al-Nafis Hospital in Damascus, Syria. The initial death toll was put at three, and the number of injured at five.

Also on Saturday, May 18th, around 2:10 p.m. during the Hikers Parade at the Trail Days festival in Damascus, Viriginia, an annual celebration of the Appalachian Trail,  was interrupted by tragedy. 

Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2013/05/19/3494077/medical-emergency-eyed-in-va-parade.html#storylink=cpy

An elderly driver in a 1997 Cadillac plowed into the parade, injuring at least 60 people, sending a dozen to the hospital.

"In 27 years of this, we've never had anything of this magnitude, and is it our job to make sure it doesn't happen again," Damacus Mayor Jack McCrady said.

Damascus is a small town of less than 1000 people in Washington County, Virginia, United States. Damascus is the home of the annual Trail Days festival (with reportedly 20,000 people visiting). The community is known as Trail Town USA due to the convergence of four scenic trails in the town, including the Appalachian Trail, U.S. Bicycle Route 76, The Iron Mountain Trail, and the Virginia Creeper Trail.

The word Damascus means "a well-watered place."

Conversion of Saint Paul, 1542 by Michelangelo Buonarroti

At top, The Conversion of St. Paul, 1767 by Nicolas-Bernard Lepicie

In the West, Damascus is most frequently associated with the conversion incident mentioned in the New Testament of the Bible. Saint Paul was on the road to Damascus (present day Syria) when he received a vision of Jesus, and as a result accepted The Christ as the Messiah. (Some Fortean theories for what really happened have been developed in recent years.)

Ten years ago, it is intriguingly how Palestine popped up in the context of the first Israeli astronaut being killed.

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia on mission STS-107 disintegrated during reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard. 

One who died was Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. His first name, Ilan, means "tree" in Hebrew. Ilan changed his last name from Wolferman when he joined the Israeli Air Force. On June 7, 1981, he was the youngest pilot taking part in Operation Opera, Israel's strike against Iraq's unfinished Osiraq nuclear reactor, 10 miles southeast of Baghdad.

A location often mentioned ten years ago for where the parts of the Columbia fell was Palestine, Texas. The irony of that location was not lost on many at the time, considering the fact the Columbia carried an Israeli aboard. 

Even this remarkable "coincidence" is apparent in this Wikipedia mention:

Palestine entered the news in February 2003, as one of the East Texas towns that received much of the debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, where seven astronauts were killed, including the first Israeli astronaut. Palestine is also home to the NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (renamed after the shuttle crash), which has flown 1700 high-altitude balloons for universities and research agencies. Source.

An FBI agent and a Texas Department of Public Safety officer looked over a 4-foot by 6-foot piece of the Space Shuttle Columbia that was found in the median along State Highway 155 north of Palestine, Texas on Sunday, February 2, 2003.

 

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Masks, Holmes Lexilink + List of Victims

The complete list of the victims has been released.

The Mask

Humans wear all kinds of masks: psychological ones, somatic examples, acting facades, and of course, real physical structures called "masks."

On Friday, December 14, 2012, as I noted, there occurred the "Newtown School Shooting: Killing Dawn" event.

During an interview with a Sandy Hook school parent this Saturday morning, on the television news, this woman heard that a guy dressed in all black, wearing a mask, was shooting at the school on Friday.

Then a correspondent (TP), this AM, sent an article from the UK's Globe Mail, headlined, "High school loner to cold-blooded executioner: How 'genius' honor student Adam Lanza became masked killer."

The news item noted:

Lanza is believed to have shot himself at the scene, according to the New York Times. 

He was carrying three weapons including two handguns and a rifle and was wearing a bullet-proof vest, a mask and black military gear.

Three guns were found at the scene - a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols - and a .223-caliber rifle. 

The rifle was recovered from the back of a car at the school. The two pistols were recovered from inside the school. They were legally registered to Nancy Lanza.

That article never truly followed up on their headline suggestion, for it fails to detail any description of a mask.

Update: Intriguingly, these "mask references" have been removed from the original Daily Mail article. But the "masked man" quotes remain in many sources. What's going on?

But, if Adam Lanza (Adam = English for "man," Lanza = Spanish for "spear") wore a mask, what did the mask look like?

The Holmes Lexilink

The July 20th/Aurora's alleged shooter is named James Eagan Holmes.

Today's New York Daily News had this quote:

Mother Nancy Lanza often took her kids target shooting, landscaper Dan Holmes said. 'That was a passion,' he said. 'The whole family would go together.' Her 20-year-old son Adam killed her with one of her own guns before using them to murder 20 children at the elementary school where she once worked....Holmes, who often mowed the grass at the Lanza’s sprawling Newtown home, said the doomed mom was proud of her arsenal and once showed him a “big, beautiful rifle” she had just purchased.

“She was very proud of it,” he said. “She loved her guns.” 

The Newtown Victims

Here is the complete list of victims released by the medical examiner's office (which does not include Nancy Lanza, 52, and Adam Lanza, 20). Most of those who died in the school, apparently and sadly, were killed with the .223 Remington Bushmaster (semi-automatic) rifle. New information notes that this Bushmaster was not found in Lanza's vehicle, but next to his body.

USA Today posted a gallery of photos of the victims. See here.

Children:

Charlotte Bacon, 6

Daniel Barden, 7

Olivia Engel, 6

Josephine Gay, 7

Ana Marquez-Greene, 6

Dylan Hockley, 6

Madeline Hsu, 6

Catherine Hubbard, 6

Chase Kowalski, 7

Jesse Lewis, 6

James Mattioli, 6

Grace McDonnell, 7

Emilie Parker, 6

Jack Pinto, 6

Noah Pozner, 6

Caroline Previdi, 6

Jessica Rekos, 6

Avielle Richman, 6

Benjamin Wheeler, 6

Allison Wyatt, 6

Adults:

Dawn Hochsprung, 47
Rachel Davino, 29
Anne Marie Murphy, 52
Lauren Rousseau, 30
Mary Sherlach, 56
Victoria Soto, 27

Clackamas Mask 

It will be recalled that the Clackamas mall-December 11th's alleged shooter, Jacob Tyler Roberts wore a hockey mask, also described by some as a "Jason mask."

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