“If you can dream it, you can do it”

Walt Disney originally said that. Now it’s used as a concept motivational speakers & self help gurus use.

But to use it for another purpose, this is a good way to look at gaming: imagine you’re having a dream…

You can dream some really weird and random stuff and it’s not necessarily stuff you’ve experienced first (second or third) hand. It can be things you’ve merely imagined, seen in film or TV or it can be totally random things that come from seemingly no concious memory or thought.

The brain is a powerful thing. It can trick you into believing things are real when they’re not. We’ve all been jumpy in the dark sometimes when there’s nothing there. We know there’s nothing there but it’s our imagination playing tricks on us.

During a dream our imagination is relatively unchecked by concious thought and left to run wild. Where do the weird things that you dream of come from?

In your dreams you say & do things that:

1. you wish you could do in real life;
2. things you would never do in real life and;
3. are actually impossible in real life.

Dreaming of weird stuff isn’t an indication of personality defect or mental illness, just of an active & healthy imagination.

Let’s say last night you dreamt about something dark and ‘bad’, for example (because it’s relevant to the video game discussion) murdering people or being murdered yourself. This is no more ‘real’ in the physical world than having a bunch of animated pixels do things on a screen to another bunch of animated pixels with a weapon, but which is, in fact, just another bunch of animated pixels.

If anything, dreaming yourself killing someone is much more powerful; it personalises the experience to you, places you ‘in’ the situation and it’s from your own eyes you see everything. The person doing the killing IS ‘you’. There’s no mouse, no joypad, no monitor and no bunches of animated pixels.

What you’re doing is, in your perception of reality at that time, actually ‘happening’. Things that are stressful are so ‘real’ to your mind that they cause your physical self to react to them. Ever woken up breathing fast, or sat bolt upright? Ever woke up sweating and anxious after a particularly unpleasent dream? I know I’ve done all of those things.

When you wake you may be freaked out but quickly console yourself by saying:

“Phew, it was only a dream!”

Now transpose that to the world of video game;

“Phew, it’s only a game!”

That is instantly the same distance you put between your actual physical self and your character or avatar self in video games.

To go back to that phrase I mentioned at the start of the piece;

“If you dream it, you can do it”

That phrase is a very empowering concept when used in the context of motivation and ambition but it becomes much more sinister if we use it in the context of your dreams (or even your concious thoughts). Just think now about the worst nightmare or the darkest, most disturbing dream you’ve ever had. Well, if you can dream it, you can do it!

If we all (or just some of us) actually did the things we dreamt of doing there’d be a lot of headlines about people who dreamt about killing or stealing or flying. Those headlines would then probably demonise dreams and the usual knee-jerk-reacting ‘concerned’ parents & politicians would come out of the woodwork to latch onto the lastest scapegoat calling for a blanket ban on all dreams and acts of imagination.

Now, the people who claim to copy the things they see in video games (or in movies). I believe these people are disturbed and look for something to pin their acts on, a non-personal reason why they themselves were inspired or in some way had reduced responsibility for what they’ve done. If the person doesn’t try to pin it on something then the media certainly will after they discover a Marilyn Manson album in their house or a copy of GTA IV in the XBox.

“I/He did it because I/He saw it in a game and (he thought) it looked like fun”

Well, that person was surely just as likely to be triggered into doing that by a vivid dream then, or a vision, or a voice in their head then? If all it took to trigger an act of violence in real life was the thought of it or seeing an obviously fake violent act in a movie or game then let’s face it, that person was already disturbed and receptive to the smallest trigger of any kind if that’s all it took.

It’s also quite sick that we seek to place blame for these issues on the most convenient scapegoat. To actually go to the root cause would mean asking questions that people don’t want to know the answers to, aren’t interested in asking or aren’t prepared to address in the first place.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a rampage at the Columbine high school ten years ago and that was widely claimed to be the fault of Marilyn Manson’s music and desensitisation to violence through movies and video games.

Well, yes, they did listen to Marilyn Manson and yes, they did play the violent video games of their time (like Doom), but what they didn’t report was that the FBI published a report five years later saying:

“Harris was a clinical psychopath and Klebold was depressive. They also  believed the plan was masterminded by Harris, who they thought had a messianic-level superiority complex and hoped to illustrate his massive superiority to the world.”

(taken from the Columbine Massacre wikipedia page)

They were also reportedly mercilessly bullied for being freaks by the school jock community, had rumours of homosexuality spread about them around the school (and published in the school newspaper). They were completely isolated and treated as social outcasts within a school system that either didn’t know about what went on inside it’s own walls or turned a blind eye to the behaviour.

So, when we see the whole picture the issue is far wider than what we were presented with. And, when you take into account their reported mental health issues and social expulsion and taunting doesn’t that raise some very difficult but important questions about the society we all live in?

Should it really be such a surprise when people are taken to their breaking point and ’snap’, so to speak? How much could anyone take in the face of such treatment and mental health problems?

It also says an awful lot about American gun culture.

When school kids get bullied and get to the point where they’ve had enough, usually it’s a fist fight in the playground or it gets reported to a teacher. When kids can have such easy access to assault weaponary that they use it to kill other people there’s something very wrong with a society that allows it’s citizens to own military-grade weaponary. And furthermore, when all these factors are overlooked and people instead blame a video game? That’s simply insulting to everyone’s intelligence.

So, what do we do? Ban mental illness, bullying, dreams, visions and voices in people’s heads? Good luck with that.

Would you still try to claim they did it because of a video game after seeing that evidence?

By asking the wider questions about why someone snaps and kills people in real life leads us to see a litany of failures within society, healthcare, schools, government and, perhaps most importantly; parents.

Blaming things on video games is a smoke screen, just like blaming things on movies…

To be continued… Part 3 up soon.

True good, true evil: it’s the same thing. It’s all relative to the observer. There is no right or wrong. It’s all relative to the observer. Nothing is real, only nature. Only NATURAL SELECTION.

Deum Patrem omnipotentem, fratres charissimi, supplices deprecemur,

I’ve watched you dumb fucking shits, I see right fucking through you. You think you’re on the same level as me? I’m higher than you, you fucking dumb shits. I’m a different fucking species.

There was the child. Perhaps he had a minor deformity. He was on the smaller side. He was different. Was there any room for difference in your system? Did your church allow it?

ut hos famulos suos bene + dicere dignetur in officium Exorcistarum: ut sint spirituales imperatores,

I’m self aware. I have perfect fucking self-awareness. I hate the goddamn world, too many fuckers in it. I’ve been watching you. I know how you assholes think and act, all talk and no action. Bravery is always an accident. You’re all fucking stupid.

At school every day, head down in the hallway. Pushed into the lockers. Pushed into the lockers. Maybe he was smaller than they were. But maybe the anger grew. It’s all relative to the observer.

ad abjiciendos dæmones de corporibus obsessis,

None of you are worthy of shit unless I say you are. I feel like GOD and I wish I was. I wish I was. I would wipe out the whole fucking human race. All the fucking retards, drug addicts, cripples, all of them. They aren’t worthy. NATURAL SELECTION. Kill all fat, retarded, crippled, stupid, dumb, ignorant, worthless people of this world. Mercy doesn’t exist. Only my  double barrel 12ga. shotgun, perfect for April.

Head down in the hallway. Head down in gym class. They threw the ball in his face in gym class. They all did. They all threw the ball in his face in gym class. Pushed into the lockers. Deformed chest heaving. The anger grew. I live there. I live in that anger.

cum omni nequitia eorum multiformi.

Yeah that’s right fuckers, yesterday we fired our firearms. Perfect fucking testing. A pump action 12ga. shotgun, a 9mm carbine, 250 9mm rounds, 15 12ga slugs, 40 shotgun shells, 2 switch blade knives, and total of 4 – 10 round clips for the carbine. We have GUNS, you stupid fucking shits. We’ve  fucking got them, you sons of bitches. Oh, it’s all over now.

No car from the parents. No freedom. No sex. No care. No understanding. No familiarity. Head down in the hallway. Unrequited erection in gym class. Ball in the face. Pushed into the lockers. I live there, I grow strong in that anger.

Per Unigenitum Filium suum Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum :

I have these fantasies of taking someone and just fucking them strong and hard. Smooth legs, large breasts, I want to overpower them, to rip off their pants and eat them out and fuck them hard. I want to be surrounded by flesh. I can be nice and charming, I can tell them what they want to hear, and then fuck them til they rip apart in my hands. I have these fantasies. Like I saw on TV. Some guy was kidnapped and tortured. I want to do that. I want to rip open some weak little freshman’s throat with my teeth. I want to gut them with my bare hands, rip out their fucking heart lungs and spine. Show them who’s GOD. Hear their fucking bones snap. I have these fantasies.

And the Doctors, with the wrong medication. Maybe it flooded the brain with serotonin. And what then? Did your sports teams allow a different boy to exist in peace? Did your church allow a different boy to exist in peace? Pushed into the lockers, ball to the face, no sex, no freedom, no response, no life. I live there. I grow there.

qui cum eo vivit & regnat in unitate Spiritus sancti Deus,

It’s April now and we’re ready. It’s going to be hell on earth. We’re going to waste as many people as possible. I just want to destroy. I want to destroy as much as possible. My life is about this. This is my goal and it’s finally here. I hate all you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. I didn’t alienate myself, you little fucking shits. You had my phone number, I asked if I could come along. But no, don’t let the funny-looking kid come along. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore though, because you’re all going to fucking die. DIE.

I grew strong enough. I walked tall. The cafeteria. The library. I walked tall. You bred me, you nourished me. I walked tall and strong. That’s the thing. You push hard enough, and you just keep pushing. What happens? Shall I tell you? True good, true evil, it’s all the same thing. It’s all relative to the observer. NATURAL SELECTION. Keep pushing me, and my recoil is brutal.

per omnia sæcula sæculorum.  Amen.

In an article inspired by “What does Ray Nagin, Diane Downs and Richard Reid have in common?”, I decided to write what Lori Drew, Osama bin Laden, and Adolf Hitler have in common. If you are thinking that I am lumping all of them together, which they all have been subjected too, especially with Lori Drew. You are wrong. Well, no one is going to argue that Drew, Bin Laden, and Hitler are the most reviled figures in history and are rightfully regarded as public enemies. Let’s review who they are and their evil misdeeds.

Lori Drew, husband Curt, daughter Sarah, and Ashley Grills harassed a girl to suicide by using MySpace in Fall of 2006. Bin Laden masterminded the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks on the East Coast of America in 2001. Hitler was the leader of Nazis Germany from 1933 to 1945, which started World War II and Holocaust.

On the surface, what they did are dramatically different. One girl died from suicide after being mentally tortured; 3,000 people died on live television and many more could die from the toxic dust and smoke; 30 million died in genocide and left Eurasia in shambles. Beyond that, Drew, Bin Laden, and Hitler have a lot in common. What is it? They feel that they are being victimized and persecuted by imagined enemies. They are addicted to victimhood and maintain that feeling to assert dominance and control other people, by bullying, mass murder, terrorism, or genocide. They always see themselves as victims and blame the victim for their problems.

Recall the Secret Service study they conducted on school shooters after the Columbine Massacre. There was no one clear profile of a so called typical profile of a school shooter. However, they found that 71 percent of school shooters felt a sense of persecution. Few of them were actually bullied, contrary to popular beliefs. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold saw themselves as victims, when in fact they were bullies themselves with a laundry list of discipline problems and brushes with the law. Quite frankly, after the Columbine Massacre, I took great offense at the way the media portrayed Harris and Klebold as victims of bullying. This is the same mantra used after Columbine, 9/11, Seung-Hui Cho, Steven Kazmierczak, and Nidal Hasan. The media plays “blame the victim” game because the attackers were tormented. All the victims killed had no connection to the perpetrators.

One can say that Harris and Klebold were bullies because bullies bully because they feel they are being bullied themselves and have to lash out. They bully to feel “good” about themselves. Yes, it is generally true that bullies do not have any lack of self-esteem. They have high self-esteem, but having high self-esteem does not translate into success. In fact, high self-esteem is dangerous because people do not have to will to change. They are happy and content with their life as it is. People with higher self-esteem are more likely to be addicted to alcohol and drugs and commit crime. Ask any person who remembers the bully, chances are they will say they ended up as either drug addicts, in prison, or dead.

Lori Drew posed as “Josh Evans” to see if Megan Meier was talking bad about Sarah after Megan allegedly called Sarah a “ugly Lesbian”. Drew was motivated by protecting her daughter from bullies. The Drews were described as over involved and pushy parents, especially in regards with Sarah, which made people feel resentful. The Drews are a classic “helicopter parent”. Also, Lori Drew was described as sociable and clingy to a point of annoying. She was considered an outcast in her neighborhood. Drew wanted to snoop and teach Megan a lesson for not being friends and bullying Sarah. Drew scapegoated her for all problems in life because Sarah was not happy and was no longer a friend. Compounding it, Drew was upset that Megan was losing weight faster than Sarah and she bad mouthed her for that. Drew viewed herself and family as being repeatedly victimized by Megan. The Drews and Ashley Grills would later send ugly messages that called her “fat” and “whore” to Meier and she committed suicide on October 16, 2006. The case would be revealed a year later by Steve Pokin, which would make her one of the most hated persons in years.

The Megan Meier case is reminiscent of Gertrude Baniszewski, who was enraged after Sylvia Likens accused her daughter Paula and Stephanie of being prostitutes. Baniszewski felt the sense that Likens was persecuting her and her family and she needed to stop it at all cost. Baniszewski got her children and neighborhood children to torture Likens to death to teach her a lesson. Also, she wanted to protect her and her daughter’s reputation and tried to portray themselves as “virtuous” and “clean” and attended a fundamentalist church. In reality, Stephanie and Gertrude were sexually promiscuous and had a child out of wedlock. Baniszewski was often subjected to abuse at her live-in boyfriend and constantly felt victimized over and over and Likens pushed her over the edge. Baniszewski thought torturing Likens would be an act of redemption.

Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, was behind the horrid September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks in New York, Arlington, and Shanksville. Four airplanes were hijacked by terrorists and they attacked the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a failed one near Shanksville. The attack leveled the World Trade Center and left the Pentagon burning. 3,000 people died in the terrorist attack on live television, mostly from the collapse of the towers. Bin Laden was partly motivated by how Saudi Arabia allowed America to use the land to attack Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1990. He blames America for that, despite the fact that the Saudi Royal Family allowed and they could of denied that access to America. Bin Laden sees America and the West as being oppressive to Muslims and supporting Israel. He views Muslims as victims of “Western Imperialism” and “Islamophobia”. Bin Laden sees Palestinians being oppressed and victimized by the Jews, who are helped by America. This is despite the fact that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is more political than religious.

Bin Laden believes that suicide bombers are courageous and should be employed to teach America and the West a lesson. Also, Bin Laden encourages that Muslims protect fellow Muslims from America and the West by engaging in Jihad or “Holy War”. Also, where Bin Laden is from, they have a revenge culture because the climate is desert, which is dry. Dry climate makes bodies decay less and people are more likely to remember.

Adolf Hitler took advantage of Germans’ desperation from the Great Depression. It was after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh punishment on Germany. They had to pay huge reparations. They had to print a lot of money, which led to hyperinflation during the Great Depression. Hitler blamed Jews for all of Germany’s problems from hyperinflation to Treaty of Versailles. Hitler saw Jews as backstabbers and traitors out to destroy the Germans. He viewed Germans and Germany as victims of “Jewish” control and it had to be stopped. Hitler believed that Jews “raped” Germany during and after World War I. Hitler is voted in the 1933 election and rose to power on the guise of “hope” and “change”.

Hitler wanted to protect the Germans from the Jews by passing laws that discriminated against Jews. Hitler wanted to teach Jews a lesson in every way possible. By the time World War II starts, Jews were rounded up and sent off to death camps to be killed. Hitler also went after Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witness, and disabled people because he saw them as undesirable. In the end, 30 million people died and Eurasia was left a total mess with 80 million killed in World War II. Nearly 70 percent of the European Jews were wiped out.

Many genocidal maniacs are paranoid and obsessed with protecting people. They use their persecution complex to impose their tyranny on the people. Joseph Stalin was another paranoid psychopath like Hitler. He went after anyone who were enemies of the state. Stalin viewed the state and himself as being victimized by dissidents. He had those infamous show trials, caused famines that killed 7 million Ukrainians, and many untold number of people would be sent off to Gulags in Siberia to a life time of hard labor and death.

Another example of a dictator with a sense of constant victimization is Saddam Hussein. He believed in protecting the Arab people from the Persians. Hussein viewed Arabs as victims of “Persian” cultural imperialism. He invaded Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution because he was afraid of Shiites would spread their influence, which he saw it as Persian cultural imperialism. The 1980 Iran-Iraq War had Arabs of all religious background, Muslim and Christian, because they saw Persians as the common enemy worthy of destruction. When Hussein was executed in late 2006, his last words were “Down with Persians”, a testament to his hatred towards Persians.

Cult leaders are often paranoid and use that paranoia to maintain control on their followers. Cult leaders feel victimized. Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and Fred Phelps come to mind. Jones was an avowed communist and Stalinist and felt that the CIA was spying on him and People’s Temple. They would later flee to Guyana to establish Jonestown. Than Congressman Leo Ryan came to investigate that followers were held against their will. Jone’s men attack Ryan’s convoy and from their 909 people die from mass suicide and murder. Manson was paranoid about a race war called “Helter Skelter”. Manson’s cult went on a brutal killing spree that killed actress Sharon Tate and LaBianca couple in 1969. Phelps is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. They are notorious for picketing funerals and hating homosexuals. He always talks about how his so-called church is being persecuted and that picketing funerals is a way to stop the persecution. Phelps is clearly a closeted homosexual with serious issues of self hate. It is probable that Phelps might have illegitimate children because Shirley Phelps-Roper has an illegitimate son named Samuel.

Many so-called civil rights leaders, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are very paranoid of racism and bigotry against Blacks and are addicted to victimhood. Victimhood becomes part of them. Any slighting that Blacks are subjected too will put them in the spotlight. In many ways, Jackson and Sharpton are addicted to victimhood. They feel that Blacks are denied equal access whether it is education or a job. In reality, Jackson and Sharpton are racists themselves and have expressed bigotry. Jackson called New York “Hymie Town” because of its largest Jewish population. Jackson is part of another underlying problem, anti-Semitism. A sad irony because Jews helped Blacks in the Civil Rights Movement.

What does this all mean? Feeling the sense of persecution and victim blaming are recurring theme among evil people. Does paranoia and feeling the sense of persecution lead to evil and violence. Not always. It is healthy to have some paranoia. It makes us human. It is common that we are all paranoid to some extent. We don’t like it when people talk bad about us. Who does? Of course we do not get so consumed with it to a point that it drives us to feel victimized. We all have felt victimized at some point. There are other factors as well to consider. Paranoid is a sign of a personality disorder, which is the hallmark of a psychopath.

The constant state of paranoia and feeling victimized day in day out and it becomes part of them. That is unhealthy and dangerous. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Jim Jones, and Lori Drew come to mind. Also, their paranoia was mixed with anti-social, narcissism, and deviance, which is a dangerous mix. Hitler, Stalin, Jones, and Drew are considered psychopaths. However, feeling victimized and psychopathy need not to be the case. Bin Laden who lacks any psychopathic behavior is very focused on one thing. A psychopath usually lacks focus, which would be a bad thing for terrorist, especially in an organized one like Al-Qaeda.

Being paranoid and feeling victimized are not a bad thing in healthy doses. For some, being paranoid and feeling victimized is an addiction that can turn deadly. The very thing they fear and hate becomes them. Just look at Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Jim Jones, Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold, Jesse Jackson, and Lori Drew. They constantly felt victimized and needed to protect the very thing they feared and hated. It became them. In some cases, it turned deadly.

Check out this amazing UK Times article. (H/T ECM)

First, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold:

“Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

[...]As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes? It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

And Pekka-Eric Auvinen:

Before he embarked on his shooting spree, Auvinen posted a lengthy apologia on the internet. Styling himself a “social Darwinist”, he said that natural selection appeared not to be working any more — had maybe even gone into reverse. He had noticed that “stupid, weak-minded people reproduce faster than intelligent, strong-minded ones”. The gene pool was sure to deteriorate if society continued to guarantee the survival of the second-rate. He had pondered what to do about this problem. He understood that life was just a meaningless coincidence, the outcome of a long series of random mutations, so there might not be much point in doing anything at all. But eventually he had decided he would do his bit by becoming a natural selector, aping the pitiless indifference of nature.

Auvinen left a special plea for his motivation to be taken seriously and for the world not merely to write him off as a psychopath, or to blame cult movies, computer games, television or heavy metal music, before concluding: “No mercy for the scum of the Earth! Humanity is overrated. It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”

The article continues:

One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

Darwin himself thought that his theory warranted racism and genocide:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed “savages”. Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla”. He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. “Looking to the world at no very distant date,” he wrote to a friend in 1881, “what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

Convinced that the various races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary highway, and that two races could be fairly described as more or less evolved even when both had a track record of cultural achievement, Darwin insisted that natural selection explained why the Europeans had been able to see off serial invasions by the Ottoman Turks. Some of today’s Turks understandably resent being designated as genetically second-rate, which perhaps explains why the editor of Turkey’s most popular science magazine was instructed by his proprietor to cancel a special edition celebrating Darwin’s anniversary.

[...]Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man could “only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him”. Darwinian ideas, eugenics and its ugly sister, eugenic euthanasia, were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions. Indeed, so convinced were the staff of the clinic at Kaufbeuren-Irsee in Bavaria that they were acting rationally that, even after Germany’s surrender in 1945, they carried on killing handicapped people under the American occupation, until a US officer led a squad of GIs to the hospital and ordered them to desist.

The modern pro-abortion movement is rooted in the thought of Darwinian eugenicists like Margaret Sanger, who was quite explicit about weeding out the poor, the “unfit” and “inferior” races. Many people on the secular left believe that some people are not fit to live, and that these people should be weeded out by force. For example, Obama’s science czar advocates controlling the reproduction of undesirable people and that born babies are not human beings.

After you finish reading the UK Times article, check out this post over at Uncommon Descent. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

When we teach our children that their existence is an ultimately meaningless accident and that morals are arbitrary byproducts of random genetic fluctuations and mechanical necessity, should we be surprised that they place a lower value on human life than someone who is taught that all humans have inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God?

[...]There are three and only three options.

1.  We can continue to fill our children’s heads with standard Darwinian theory (which Dennett rightly calls “universal acid”), understanding that at least some of them are going to put two and two together and realize that the acid has eaten through all ethical principles – and act accordingly.

2.  We can try to come up with a secular noble lie.  “OK kids.  You might have noticed that one of the implications of what I just taught you is that your lives are ultimately meaningless and all morals are arbitrary, but you must never act as if that is true because [fill in the noble lie of your choice, such as “morality is firmly grounded on societal norms or our ability to empathize with others”].

3.  We can teach our children the truth – that the universe reveals a wondrous ordered complexity that can only be accounted for by the existence of a super-intelligence acting purposefully.  And one of the implications of that conclusion is that God exists, and, reasoning further, He has established an objective system of morality that binds us all, and therefore the moral imperatives you feel so strongly are not just an epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical states of your brain.

This reminds me of the essay “Men Without Chests” in C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”. Lewis writes that moral relativists undermine objective morality, which cannot be grounded rationally by atheism, and yet they are surprised when people actually act as though moral relativism is true.

The good news is that Darwinism is false. The bad news is taxpayer money from working parents is funneled into politicized government-run schools that teach children that Darwinism is true. High taxes ensure that parents are kept away from their children, since they must both work to pay for the government-run schools. The left’s opposition to stay-at-home mothers and fathers, (e.g., sex education, abortion, unilateral divorce, same-sex marriage, subsidies for single motherhood, etc.),  ensures that the government-run schools have more influence on children than the parents do.

The Jew, Dylan Klebold, wanted to “shoot the Christian girls in the head.” [INCOG]

The Mother of Hate Crime Hoaxes Continues

CofCC.org News Team, by Kyle Rogers

The media continues to shamelessly insult the memory of the Columbine victims by falsifying information about the killers.

Jew Master Mind, Dylan Klebold

After the horrific Columbine Killings, the media immediately engaged in shameless falsifications of the facts. The left-wing media wanted to exploit the horror for their own purpose. First to vilify firearms, and secondly to vilify people that the media doesn’t like.

The media claimed that the Columbine killers were “racists,” “white supremacists,” and “neo-nazis.” These are terms that left-wing newspapers heap on people they disagree with. However, in this case the media used these terms to falsely associate the Columbine Killers with everyone else whom they had previously denounced with the same terminology.

We soon found out that nothing could be further from the truth. One of the killers, Klebold, was from a practicing Jewish family. However the fact that Klebold is Jewish does not stop the media fabricators. A brand new Reuters articles that came out just the other day claims that Klebold was a “Jewish Neo-Nazi.” The Reuters article contained other fabrications as well.

Columbine killer Harris stated on his website that he wanted to “rip the arms off racists, and Neo Nazis.”

Blood-crazed Jew and his twisted cohort committed suicide after killing 13 innocent Gentiles. [INCOG]

Eric Harris may have been a Jew, too, or had his head twisted into utter hate for his own kind by Jew prescribed drugs and influences.

The pair also wore makeup and held hands in school. In their own writings they described themselves as “anti-racists” and that they “hate racists.”

Some media outlets falsely reported that the date of the massacre was set to commemorate WACO. Other falsely reported that the date was to commemorate Hitler’s Birthday. The actual reason for picking the date was that it was the date their favorite band was set to break up. The bands is KMFDF, which is an acronym for “no mercy for the masses” in German. The band sings violent, nihilistic lyrics, and is most definitely left-wing.

In fact, in 1995 KMFDF singer/songwriter Konietzko stated “It’s pretty obvious that KMFDF is a very left-wing band.”

KMFDF was also the favorite band of the recent school shooter in Finland.

So the Columbine killers exhibited homosexual behavior, listened to violent left-wing music, and in their own writing said they “hate racists.” This has not slowed down the media from making false and outlandish claims.

The two were members of a clique at school that called themselves the “trench coat mafia.” The group was widely identified as homosexuals by other students.

Gentile victims of the Columbine Jew massacre.

Years after the killings, more details came out about the so-called “basement tapes” held by the Sheriffs Department. The killers made several video and audio recordings of themselves. In their own words, the killers hated Christians and women in particular. While excerpts from the tapes can be found online, the complete tapes were sealed by a judge for twenty years. The pair make comments on the tapes that Hollywood directors would fight over who got to make a movie about them.

They expressed a desire to kill “Christian God Loving Whores.” Klebold said “I am glad we killed Christ” and Dylan says “I will shoot the Christian girls in the head.”

The so-called “mainstream” media never mentions that the primary target of the Columbine Killers were “Christians” and secondly “Christian women.” They never mention the obvious homosexual overtones in their behavior and motivations

SOURCE

Crazed Jew Targets Christians at Columbine

…Klebold’s mother, Susan (nee Yassenoff), was a shul-trained Jewess who attended a synagogue named Temple Israel in Columbus, Ohio, where her grandfather, Leo Yassenoff, a construction magnate, built the Jewish Community Centre that bears his name.

For a comprehensive assessment of Klebold’s personality go to: Dylan Klebold Personality

Eric Harris was from New York and transferred to Colorado two years before the massacre. Harris was evidently on an anti-depressant at the time of the killings, and some of his victims were callously shot without mercy at point-blank range.

Harris was dating a Jewess named Sarah Davis and ran a pro-Jewish Website that let him vent his spleen about persecution of Jews, and other issues of race, politics, and religion, and his diary said his mother was Jewish.

A personality profile for Eric Harris, based on his journal entries and inter-personal communications, indicates that his behavioural patterns were consistent with a “malignant narcissism… (with) pathological narcissism, antisocial features, paranoid traits, and unconstrained aggression.”

Some say the killers’ plan was to use dozens of bombs to cause carnage on a vast scale and to then flee the country to the sanctuary of the Talmudic state of Israel. This sounds plausible, because if any of the bombs in the cafeteria had detonated properly the blast could have caused extensive structural damage to the school and resulted in hundreds of casualties.

It’s also plausible because Jews and their accomplices who have killed Gentiles abroad are often lightly prosecuted or get a reprieve in Israel; and they’re very rarely extradited to face judicial proceedings, primarily because the Talmud commends rather condemns Jews who kill Gentiles and actually commands Jews to perpetrate crimes of that sort whenever possible…

To quote the Jews’ most authoritative sacred literature, the Talmud:

‘Take the life of the kliphoth [egos or souls of the "evil beasts" of non-Jews] and kill them, and you will please God the same as one who offers incense to Him’ (Sepher Or Israel 177b).

Read more here…

“The idea that Dylan picked the date of the killings because it wasHitler’s birthday, that’s ridiculous,” Michael Moore said. “People don’t realize the Klebolds are Jewish. That would not have been Dylan’s reasoning.”

Mastermind of the Columbine Massacre

Inspired by the hate crime called the “holocaust” — the gift that keeps on giving

Link to the Christian Party article

Jews forced school officials to remove these crosses put up on school property in remembrance of the dead (because Jews just can’t have Christian symbols on ”public property”). Can you believe the utter Jew bull to force the issue after something like this?

See what they did to four Christian GIRLS KILLED by utter JEW Rage.

Did Islamophobia Cause Fort Hood Massacre?
Get Ready to Scream!
thelastcrusade.org

Major Nidal Malik Hasan was a victim of Islamophobia, according to members of his family.

One cousin told the Associated Press that Major Hasan had been battling racial harassment because of his “Middle Eastern ethnicity.” The harassment, we are told, came from his fellow officers who failed to understand that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

The cousin added that the harassed Hasan had been opposed to an imminent deployment overseas, describing it as his “worst nightmare,” since he would be called upon to do battle against his Muslim brothers.

The Last Crusade-Did Islamophobia Cause Fort Hood Massacre?

I am glad they are bringing this stupidity up. It is the same justification that Lori Drew, Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, Osama bin Laden/September 11 Terrorist, and Hitler used.

Let’s see:
Lori Drew-Pissed that her daughter, Sarah, was not friends with Megan Meier and was taunting her, so she creates a MySpace page to harass Megan to suicide.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold-Felt they were bullied even though they were bullies themselves and attacked Columbine High School.
Seung-Hui Cho-Felt persecuted and said he would be martyrs for the downtrodden when he attacked Virginia Tech.
Osama bin Laden/September 11 Terrorists-Felt that America and the West were persecuting Muslims before they crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and field near Shanksville.
Adolf Hitler-Felt the Jews screwed Germany over and felt they had to be killed off in the Holocaust.

See a pattern here. Also, all of them are radical leftists, well not sure about Lori Drew though. Blaming the victim as usual. Excuses, excuses. We were all bullied at some point. I am sick of this garbage. Anyone who thinks that should get their head examined with a MRI and x-ray to see if you have a brain and soul.

A long time coming… read the full essay here.

Their theft had shown that under each other’s influence they could be impulsive and unscrupulous. Could they also—no matter how unbelievable it seemed—be violent?

contingencies…

And yes, he’d written a school paper about a man in a black trenchcoat who brutally murders nine students. But we’d never seen that paper. (Although it had alarmed his English teacher enough to bring it to our attention, when we asked to see the paper at a parent-teacher conference, she didn’t have it with her. Nor did she describe the contents beyond calling them “disturbing.” At the conference—where we discussed many things, including books in the curriculum, Gen X versus Gen Y learners, and the ’60s folk song “Four Strong Winds”—we agreed that she would show the paper to Dylan’s guidance counselor; if he thought it was a problem, one of them would contact me. I never heard from them.)

Easy to wonder why no one thought to bring up details of the paper but remember until Columbine, there wasn’t some obvious trenchcoated kids killing peers stereotype….  the essay might have been “run of the mill” disturbing…

I think I believed that if I loved someone as deeply as I loved him, I would know if he were in trouble. My maternal instincts would keep him safe. But I didn’t know. And my instincts weren’t enough. And the fact that I never saw tragedy coming is still almost inconceivable to me.

And that’s just it… it’s extremely complicated and no one is to blame.

I have an Op-Ed in today’s Denver Post on the essay written by the mother of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold for Oprah. It begins, “One of the most compelling questions after Columbine was, ‘Who are the parents?’ Ten years later, it remains unanswered.”

The Op-Ed is a fuller version of my thoughts on the essay by Susan Klebold for O The Oprah Magazine. While observers had to make a little leap of analysis when a few select excerpts were first released, it appears those excerpts did give a pretty good picture: There was hardly anything new in the essay. “Years later, the Klebolds seem stuck on the same script,” I write in the Op-Ed titled “Klebold may not know what she knows.”

Aside from the content of the Klebold essay, released this past week, what strikes me is how many bloggers are getting it wrong. Many of the posts I have seen buy into O magazine’s (erroneous) salesmanship that the contents of the essay – or even Klebold speaking – are new.

Otherwise, there is one key recommendation I have in the Op-Ed, although the final say will come from elsewhere.

Susan Klebold, the mother of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold, teases a key issue when she discusses suicide for The Oprah Magazine.

Klebold mentions (in the magazine ‘O’) the parallels between suicide and school shooters and indeed, many school shooters express suicidal thoughts before the shootings and/or upon being captured. The Columbine killers were different only in that they were unusually successful in carrying out their suicidal wishes.

What is the connection between suicide and homicide? I think it is one of the toughest questions in discussing school shootings. But Klebold touches on an important point – essentially an educated guess on her part – that her son Dylan did not discuss his suicidal thoughts with others because “He was accustomed to handling his own problems, and he perceived his inability to do so as a weakness.”

Handling your own problem is indeed a trademark of school shooters, I argue in my book. It’s the same as the expression “Be a sheriff in your own hearth,” a trademark of the South and West of the United States (where most school shootings occur). In those parts of the country, people have a sense of self-reliance and ‘Culture of Honor’ where they feel they have to defend themselves, especially if their honor has been violated.

That moves into the realm of homicide because school shooters feel their honor has been violated by their lowly status at school (real or perceived), and it is acceptable – even honorable – to retaliate with violence.

One other news flash is that Klebold indicates she (and I guess her husband) met privately with the parents of some of those killed at the school. I’m also guessing that she is not talking about being faced down by victims families during legal depositions. I had been told about such meetings, but never felt I had it fully confirmed.

After reading Klebold’s full essay (I’m guessing 3,000 words long) I stand by my original blog that there is little else that is substantive and new – despite what many in the media and Oprah claim.

Klebold’s essay is titled “I Will Never Know Why.” And that may be true, whatever criticisms may be leveled at the essay (and Klebold herself). But I would also argue that certain experts may be able to piece together the ‘why.’ What’s stopping them is a more forthcoming Susan Klebold.

Susan Klebold, mother of Columbine mass murderer Dylan Klebold.

“I had no inkling my son was so sick.”

Read the full essay at O online

That is the most idiotic quote from today’s idiot, one Ms. Susan Klebold, the mother of one of the two Columbine High School mass murderers, Dylan Klebold. She has finally broken her decade long silence to talk about the events of April 20, 1999 and about her deeply troubled and ultimately suicidal offspring. An upcoming issue of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine “O” will run an essay in which Ms. Klebold discusses what she knew about her son and how his actions affected her life and the lives of others.

Now, how can I be so cruel and heartless as to call a still-grieving mother an idiot? It is actually quite simple. She had NO FREAKING IDEA that her son and his best friend were powder kegs about to explode. In a portion of the essay quoted in Huffington Post today, she states, “From the writings Dylan left behind, criminal psychologists have concluded that he was depressed and suicidal” Ya think?!

How can she not have seen ANY signs? Your son starts wearing all black including long trenchcoats and you don’t notice? What did you think it was? Some bizarre fashion statement? You never just glanced in his room at the bizarrities therein? What about the GUNS? Where did he get the MONEY for the guns? Neither Klebold nor Harris worked and yet they managed to buy an ARSENAL! (UPDATE: 12-1-2009: In the interest of fairness, Klebold and Harris apparently worked at a local pizza parlor. How that paid for the number of automatic weapons they possessed, I have no idea, but it seems important to a segment of society intent on defending them and their actions.) Yet no member of the Klebold family noticed anything out of the ordinary? In what make-believe universe is this considered okay?

I know everything and everyone is different and my mom wasn’t perfect, but I’m 99 44/100th % sure that I could never have pulled something like this off. My mom was a single parent and she was busting her rear just to keep a roof over my head most of my life, but she knew where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing and this was long before cell phones. I could have lied, but she knew all my friends and lies eventually caught up with me. Mama was INVOLVED with my life.

Sadly, Dylan Klebold had parents who provided him with everything he could have dreamed of . . . except personal involvement in his life. If his mother had given him less money and more time, she would have noticed the signs of a young man in trouble. As it stands, she didn’t see anything, even after it was too late and for that kind of negligent parenting, only one word suffices — idiot.

Columbine killer’s mom: ‘No inkling’ son suicidal
By KRISTEN WYATT (AP) – 2 days ago

DENVER — The mother of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold says she has been studying suicide in the decade since the high school massacre but had no idea her son was suicidal until she read his journals after his death.

Susan Klebold’s essay in next month’s issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, is the most detailed response yet from any of the parents of Columbine killers Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris. The teenagers killed 12 students and a teacher in the 1999 shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver. Twenty-one people were injured before Klebold and Harris killed themselves.

The parents have repeatedly declined to talk about the massacre. They gave depositions in a lawsuit filed by families of the victims, but a judge in 2007 sealed them for 20 years after the lawsuit was settled out of court.

Full Article

The Harrises and Klebolds have been silent since April 20, 1999. Now, Susan Klebold speaks out. Eric Harris is a psychopath, while Dylan Klebold is a conflicted avoidant. I have an extensive article about the Columbine Massacre.

High School Massacre

Harris and Klebold are evil like Fred Phelps, Lori Drew, Gertrude Baniszewski, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Adolf Hitler.

Teen t-shirt entrepreneur wins $10,000 – LA teen was chosen among 27,000 entrants in National Youth Entrepreneurship Contest for his ‘inspirational’ t-shirts.In the next year, he says, “we plan to get our shirts into events like fairs, swap meets and farmers markets. … We want to get our shirts into different stores that they can be sold at as well. We want to get someone famous to endorse it.” (NPR)

Columbine killer’s mom talks with Oprah – Dylan Klebold’s mother wrote in O Magazine that she didn’t realize her son was so disturbed. “Dylan’s participation in the massacre was impossible for me to accept until I began to connect it to his own death,” she wrote in excerpts released by the magazine in advance of Tuesday’s publication. “Once I saw his journals, it was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there. And so in order to understand what he might have been thinking, I started to learn all I could about suicide.” (LA Times)

(∆)Police fight culture of ‘no snitching’ – Durham police unable to solve crimes because witnesses are unwilling to testify, a trend which begins in schools. “If you tell and others find out, you’ll see a resistance in people talking to you and hanging out with you,” said Trevon Spence, 17, a senior at Durham’s Jordan High School. “You start to lose your friends …. Sometimes losing them is worse than getting jumped.” (N&O)

(∆)Durham starts youth magazine – UNC and Central journalism students will mentor SEEDS students to produce The Durham Community Voice, a monthly 24-page glossy paid for by The Daily Tar Heel.  ”The bottom line is let’s get ‘em off the corners and into newsrooms,” Lauterer said. “And if we can’t get ‘em into newsrooms, then let’s make a newsroom.” (Herald Sun)

Readers of Sue Klebold's essay in O Magazine can get greater context by reading Dave Cullen's Columbine.

This month’s O Magazine apparently contains an essay by Sue Klebold, mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two killers in the Columbine High School massacre.

I’ve not yet read the piece, but understand from news accounts that Klebold writes that she had no idea of the mental anguish her son was enduring-psychiatrists analyzing his journals later concluded that he was suicidal and depressed-and that she still, more than 10 years after the murders, cannot look at children without getting upset.  

One of the essay’s most haunting sections describes Klebold’s memories of her son’s last day on earth, how she wondered why he was leaving early for school, and how he left with a single word: “Bye.” 

I imagine that other parents of teenagers will relate to the tangle of thoughts Klebold relates on the morning that it turned out would unalterably change her life and the lives of so many people-not quite understanding the reason for her son’s behavior, but not wanting to push him on it so that he got off to a conflict-free start.   

Klebold apparently will not appear on Oprah’s show and will not comment further on the matter, but those seeking to learn more would do well to read Dart Fellow Dave Cullen’s Columbine. 

I wrote about the book earlier in the year, and the bestselling work is noteworthy for its argument that Klebold and Eric Harris, the other murderer, were not bullied victims.  Far from it. Rather, Harris was a psyschopath, while Klebold was, as his mother writes, indeed suicidal and depressed.

Cullen also witheringly exposes the inadequacy of the responses by adults involved with the children and local authorities to the emergency, writing poignantly about several of the people who died unnecessarily. 

Klebold’s courage in writing this essay is to be commended.  Cullen’s book provides a remarkably detailed and unflinching look from many perspectives at the largest school shooting in American history.

     Columbine– the word, the name, synonymous with school attacks. It is the first thing that we think of when we hear a news story today of violence at a school. Columbine, while not of the magnitude of 9-11 or JFK’s assassination, it is one of those things that most of us remember vivdly.

     That fatal April day was a decade ago. Ten years.

     During the ensuing years, there were the tears and memories of the families of those killed and injured at Columbine High School. But as in any tragedy, there are people that are hurting that are linked to the tragedy, but from the other side — that of those related to the perpetrator.

     So, while still refusing interviews, Dylan Klebold’s mother, Susan, hsa written an essay that will appear in Oprah Winfrey’s “O” Magazine. Mrs. Klebold shares her anguish at not having seen the pain and depression that her son was enduring. She reveals her daily pain at having to live with what her son and his friend Eric Harris did in the halls of the high school.

“For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the horror and anguish Dylan caused,” she wrote. “I cannot look at a child in a grocery store or on the street without thinking about how my son’s schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives. Dylan changed everything I believed about myself, about God, about family, and about love.”

For the news story on Susan Klebold’s essay: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091010/ap_on_re_us/us_columbine_mother_s_essay;_ylt=AtdK6mz8dtLwFmTu7.7rQ6Ss0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNkbWY2bjVzBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkxMDEwL3VzX2NvbHVtYmluZV9tb3RoZXJfc19lc3NheQRjcG9zAzUEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl9oZWFkbGluZV9saXN0BHNsawNjb2×1bWJpbmVraWw-

Susan Klebold, the mother of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold, is making news for a forthcoming column she has written for O, The Oprah Magazine.

Yet there appears to be more rewriting history than news.

The column – touted in a press release sent out by O – comes across as news because indeed the parents of both killers have said little. And it is a noteworthy development. But the news is also pumped up because even after 10 years and a spate of books on Columbine, the media can’t seem to get it right.

An AP story calls the column “the most detailed response yet from any of the parents of Columbine killers Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris.” But let’s recap. The Klebolds and Harrises did speak with police after Columbine, and summaries of those interviews have been released. The Klebolds were also interviewed for an (admittedly short) New York Times column. I’m not saying the killers’ parents have been forthcoming, but it doesn’t appear, based on the excerpts so far, that Susan Klebold is saying anything new.

It will also be interesting to see if Susan Klebold addresses some of the most intriguing things she has ever said previously, according to her interview summaries and other documents: That Dylan was fascinated with guns and explosives. Or that he was sullen, angry, disrespectful, intolerant, and isolated. The Klebolds have never fully explained those statements (made before, and the day of, Columbine). Or at least those discussions have never been made public.

Finally, Susan Klebold indicates she has been searching for answers, especially suicide. She is partially on the right track, as my book notes the suicidal links among school shooters across the country. But the Klebolds have a funny way of searching for answers. Their attorneys have at different times issued me a subpoena and said my sources’ hands should be cut off when I uncovered information.

This photograph of Benazir Bhutto by John Moore is just one of the many treats for those of us at the Dart Society reunion.

I’m here in Indianapolis for a Dart Society reunion.  

It’s a remarkable group, and I feel highly privileged to be part of the group. 

Last year I had the honor to be an Ochberg Fellow.  

The Dart Center is an organization that works to support journalists who cover issues of violence and trauma. 

The support can take many forms. 

For some journalists, it’s helping them grapple with the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from covering the unspeakable horrors that we as humans do to each other.  

For others, it’s providing resources to cover trauma and violence in humane, sensitive and informative ways that illustrate people’s capacity for resilience and survival.   

For still others, it’s strategizing about how to get these stories onto the pages, airwaves or screens of their news organizations. 

The fellowships are named for Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist who is perhaps best known for his research led to the coining of the phrase, “the Stockholm Syndrome.“  Frank has been one of the guiding forces behind the Dart Center since its inception. 

The group has a dizzying and humbling array of talent from Australia, England, New Zealand, Georgia and Colombia, among other countries.

Dart Fellows have covered trauma across the world, from the Oklahoma City bombings to the September 11 terrorist attacks to wars in Iraq Afghanistan, civil unrest in Haiti, the genocide in Rwanda. 

Many risk their lives to do their work.  

Last year, John Moore, a photographer who took iconic photographs of Benazir Bhutto just before and right after her assassination and who has worked in dozen of countries around the globe, told me he puts himself in these situations not because he is an adrenaline junkie, but because he knows that few, if any, other people will record these stories if he does not. 

Dart fellow cover stories in the U.S., too. 

Fellows have also written and photographed and done radio projects about domestic violence, about murder in Detroit, and about a the death of a 19-year-old Native American man named Mylo Harvey during a struggle with police.  

Among some of the many, many outstanding journalists: Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, the definitive work about the 1999 massacre of more than a dozen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

I wrote about Dave’s book earlier this year.  

There’s also Bruce Shapiro, the Center’s executive director, who wrote a very powerful essay in the mid-90s about being stabbed while at a cafe in New Haven, Connecticut.

This of course is just a small sampling of the people who belong to this global community. 

I look forward to the day’s conversations, which promise to provoke, move and inspire.

Tudo o que eu fiz foi traduzir (da melhora maneira possível) o que o sujeito escreveu. Nenhuma das palavras são minhas. Ta aí uma pessoa com quem eu não gostaria de conversar por muito tempo.

Carta de um cidadão revoltado

Miami, FL, EUA.

Eu culpo toda a própria humanidade por isso. Eu não acho que a vida valha alguma coisa hoje em dia. As pessoas vivem para fazer dinheiro e fuder. Você vai à praia e tudo o que você vê são putas e playboys (Miami, FL, EUA). Você vai ao cinema e tudo o que você vê são putas e playboys. Garotas antando praticamente nuas e dando para qualquer playboy com músculus grandes e um carrão. Porra, até mesmo a garota que cresceu comigo terminou se tornando uma puta, saindo com caras diferentes todos os dias da semana. Já fazem 2 anos desde que eu falei com ela pela última vez – e eu gostava dela.

Para ser honesto, todo mundo que cresceu comigo se tornou playboy. Ano passado eu fui visitar alguns amigos de infância no Brasil. Quando eu cheguei lá, tudo o que eu vi foi um bando de playboyzinho me chamando de “nerd” porque eu não sou atlético e porque eu não gosto de fuder com putas. Eu não sei, talvez eu seja o errado, talvez todo mundo tem que ser putas e playboys. Em um mundo onde um vídeo de duas mulheres transando enquanto comem seus próprios dejetos se tornou mais famoso do que um vídeo de um cara dando abraços de graça – um dos mais belos atos de amor e carinho humano.

Na minha opnião a humanidade foi além dos seus limites. A humanidade está se degradando, todas as boas emoções estão evaporando, brevemente desaparecendo de vez. Amo agora é um ato egoísta de uma-noite-de-duração. Felicidade agora é ficar bêbado com os amigos, dizendo como foi que você “comeu” aquela “cachorra”. Afeição é ficar olhando uma garota na boate. COmpaixão é “chutar o traseiro” de alguém porque ele ficou olhando pra seus amigos por muito tempo para você e seus amigos. Eu poderia continuar falando muito mais, mas acho que já deu para entender.

É por isso que amei o que Eric Harris e Dylan Klebol fizeram no colégio Columbine. Antes de se matarem, eles levaram quantos playboys eles puderam. O mundo precisa de pessoas como eles: o mundo precisa se livrar de todas as maçãs podres. Mas já que isso não vai acontecer, deixe que as boas maçãs, as que ainda tem bom senso, sair enquanto a humanidade entra em completo caos para depois desaparecer.

(No resto do post a versão orignal em inglês)

__________________________________________________________

I blame it all on humanity itself. I don’t think life is worth anything nowadays. People live to make money and get laid. You go to the beach and all you see are whores and douchebags (Miami, FL, USA). You go out to the movies and all you see are whores and douchebags. Girls walking nearly naked and giving it to any douchebag with big muscles and a nice car. Hell, even the girl I grew up with – and liked – ended up a whore, going out with a different guy every day of the weekend. It has been 2 years since I last talked to her.

To be honest, everyone I grew up with became a douchebag. Last year I went to see some friends whom I grew up with in Brazil. When I get there all I see are a bunch of douchebags calling me “nerd” because I don’t look athletic and because I don’t like to hook up with whores. I don’t know, maybe I’m the one who is wrong, maybe people are supposed to be douchebags and whores. In a world where a video of two girls having sex while eating their own waste becomes much more famous then a video of a guy giving away free hughes – one of the most beautiful act of love and human-bonding.

In my opinion humanity has grown over its own limits. Humanity is now desintegrating, all the good emotions are evaporating, soon to dissapear forever. Love is now a selfish act of one-night-stand. Happyness now is getting drunk with friends, telling them how you “banged” that “bitch”. Affection is the staring down a girl at the club. Compassion is “kicking” someone’s ass because he looked too long at your buddy’s night-partner. I could go on for a lot more, but I think you get it.

This is why I loved what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did at Columbine High School. Before killing themselves, they took as many “douchebags” as they could. The world needs more people like them: the world needs to get rid of all the bad apples. But since this won’t happen, let the good apples, the ones with good sense in mind, leave while humanity grows into total chaos and then, let humans be no more.

Accused cyber bully wants Internet back
Published: Aug. 6, 2009 at 4:36 P
UPI

ST. LOUIS, Aug. 6 (UPI) — A woman accused of cyber-bullying linked to a teen suicide and banned from the Internet has asked permission to go back online for a new job, legal papers say.

Lori Drew has been barred from the Internet since June 16, 2008, when she pleaded not guilty to a federal conspiracy charge and three counts of illegally accessing a protected computer.

A jury in Los Angeles deadlocked on the conspiracy charge and found Drew guilty of the three misdemeanor charges, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said.

Full Article

The most hated woman in the world wants to be back on the Internet. Well, I have news for you, the Internet and the world STILL HATES YOU. I suggest you Google your name up. It is not that hard. There is a lot of vitriol directed AT YOU. I wrote another article linking to another blog by a wonderful gentleman who used computer algorthims and determined that Lori Drew is the world’s worst person, which included Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, and Bernard Madoff, who have committed atrocious acts from killing 3,000 people, exterminating 30 million people, and scamming billions. Lori Drew is about as hated and right up there with the likes of Charles Manson, Fred Phelps, Seung-Hui Cho, and Joseph Stalin. Granted, she did not engage in mass murder or commit genocide, but is worthy of scorn like Gertrude Baniszewski or Leopold and Loeb. I don’t think her time will be long. She will get fired. Who in their right mind would hire her? That’s asking for trouble right there. Unless, she is hired by the Westboro Baptist Church, another abhorrent freaks that they are like she is.

With news of the LA Fitness Shooting near Pittsburgh there may be some links to Columbine.

The most obvious one is that the shooters – two in Columbine and one apparently in Pittsburgh – were all male. In general males are more likely to carry out such shootings. But a more telling issue is motivation.

Since the wave of media coverage during the recent 10-year anniversary of Columbine some have tried to paint Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as just two normal teens. On its surface, that is clearly not the case (normal teens don’t go on shooting rampages). But the Columbine killers were also not as well-integrated into the student body as some would have you believe. They were outcasts, and maybe the most unpopular kids in the school. And the friends they did have did not diminish their outcast status, at least in their own minds.

The Columbine killers felt slighted, and wanted to take revenge for their outcast status. They felt they deserved better. The very preliminary news reports on the Pittsburgh shooting would indicate the same motivation: The alleged shooter was slighted – or felt slighted – by an ex-girlfriend and felt he had to recapture his honor. His apparent suicide, in turn, was a way of controlling his own destiny. He held the ultimate power over others, but also himself.

Jon Katz writes about Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar's journey from Boise to Chicago in Geeks.

I wrote yesterday about Columbine, Dave Cullen’s definitive work about the Columbine High School shootings.  

In his work, Cullen argues that the idea that killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold took their murderous actions was because of being bullied by jocks was one of many myths uncritically accepted and wildly promulgated by the media.  

For some people, that was not a myth, though. 

In Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho, Jon Katz fleshes out a Rolling Stone article he wrote about Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar, two self-described geeks in Boise.

Dailey and Twileger’s use of the Internet, which was arguably still in its 1.0 phase when Katz wrote the book, by itself makes for entertaining reading. Dailey consults the Web for everything he does, including where to buy, and how to tie, a tie he purchases for a job interview (He got it.). 

More germane to Columbine, though, are the excerpts of the outpouring of letters Katz received from geeks who felt themselves repeatedly bullied and brutalized by jocks, with complicit teachers turning away.  

Many of the excerpts are painful to read, especially those where the authors say they understand the rage that they attribute to Harris and Klebold as motivation for their rampage. 

Through his protagonists’ journey, Katz is making a larger point about how, essentially, now is the geeks’ moment, that the balance of power has shifted due to the ascendance of technology and the need for people with those skills. 

It’s a worthwhile read, both for his heroes’ journeys and for those who question the impact of bullying on the victims’ hearts and pysches.

Dave Cullen has written the most comprehensive account of the Columbine shootings.

Ten years later, the images from the Columbine shootings remained seared in our collective memory. 

The bloodied library floor.  The crying high school students holding each other in utter shock.  Then-President Clinton yet again denouncing the senseless violence of another school shooting-this one, the most violent and bloody in American history. 

Reporter Dave Cullen was there from the beginning.

Since then, he has followed the story with remarkable stamina, persistence, insight and commitment to the truth during the ensuing decade.  His book, Columbine, published around the shootings’ 10th anniversary, provides the most comprehensive and authoritative look available at killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, at the build up to the shootings and their ruinous aftermath, and at the elusive question of why.  

For those interested in this gruesome topic, in short, his book is necessary reading. 

Just to be clear, Cullen and I are both Dart Center Ochberg Fellows.  Named for Dr. Frank Ochberg, whose research led to the coining of the phrase, “Stockholm syndrome,” and who is a strong presence in the book, the fellowships provide a space to help journalists who cover trauma and violence deal successfully with those issues in their stories and with themselves.  Cullen and I are also both serving as judges in a journalism competition. 

Columbine is drenched in irony from the opening pages, which start not with the shootings, but the weekend before, when Principal Frank DeAngelis is urging the students to come back safely after the prom the following weekend. 

Cullen swings the storytelling pendulum back and forth throughout the work, which has two major narrative strands. The first tells about the boys’ childhoods, histories, personalities and eventual decision to carry out their gruesome plan, which also included undetonated pipe bombs, while the second details the shootings’ and their multifold and devastating consequences.   

Cullen had a difficult task as a writer.  On the one hand, he was writing about an event that was covered, as he notes, less than half an hour after the shootings started.  Columbine has been the subject of endless analysis, speculation, books, movies and even legislation.   This made it  extremely difficult to bring new information into the conversation about the shootings.  At the same time, Cullen also confronted a number of myths that sprung up quickly about the shootings.  These ranged from the idea that the killers were seeking revenge against jocks who bullied them mercilessly to the assertion that one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, told one of the boys she believed in G-d in the instant before she was killed. 

To his credit, Cullen pulls off both masterfully.  In part, this is because he sifted through tens of thousands of documents, among them files from law enforcement and the killers’ diaries.  He also immersed himself in several branches of psychology and conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews with people affected by the shootings.  

One of his major findings: far from being bullied and cowed victims members of the Trenchcoat Mafia who killed in a spontaneous moment, Eric Harris was a psychopath, while Klebold was his depressive, suicidal follower.  They wrote and talked about their plans, which were hatched more than a year in advance of the actual event.  Their goals were far larger than the biggest school shooting in history; they wanted to blow up the entire building, and tried repeatedly to do so while shooting their fellow students. 

Beyond insight into the killers’ psychological makeup, Cullen does a meticulous job of showing the failings of adults along the way to recognize and take corrective action to thwart Harris and Klebold’s deadly plan as well as, in the case of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office, attempting to cover up their misdeeds.  

In some ways, these are the most painful sections of the book to read.  

The mother of a boy who was threatened by Harris repeatedly contacted law enforcement to share her concerns.  An English teacher, after reading a particularly disturbing essay by Klebold, spoke with the boy, called his parents and notified his guidance counselor.

Nothing was done. 

Cullen blends dispassion and compassion in his description of Tom and Sue Klebold, Dylan’s parents, who have been far more publicly forthcoming than the Harrises, who have never agreed to be interviewed.  Cullen brings these same qualities to characters like Patrick Ireland, who was shot, but not killed, during the rampage, DeAngelis, who loses his marriage and much of the faculty’s backing, and the pastor whose spiritual support of the Klebolds contributed heavily to his leaving his position a year later. 

Cullen’s attention to detail is another praiseworthy aspect of the book. 

Chilling and poignant details abound on Columbine’s pages.

These include the recounting of the final words Sue Klebold exchanged with her son-he had enjoyed the steak he had at Outback Steakhouse, Harris’ favorite restaurant-to the last of the Basement Tapes the boys recorded before heading off on their fateful mission.  The book also contains a minute-by-minute recreation of the shootings, including their suicides, a description of the achingly slow rehabilitation process Ireland goes through, and Sue Klebold’s conclusion that Dylan’s actions were contrary to how she and her husband had raised him. 

These details are testament to Cullen’s intimate knowledge of his material and his considerable skill as a writer. 

Columbine is not without minor imperfections. 

While generally and cumulatively effective, the alternating narrative threads can be a bit jarring at the beginning as one is getting oriented to the work.  Cullen’s background as a daily reporter shows through in patches of jaunty prose that do not work quite as well as others. 

And the reader, at the end of the book, is left still not fully understanding why the boys took their murderous actions. 

The last point is not a criticism of Cullen’s work, but rather a reminder that understanding pure evil-whether in the form of the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, or South Africa’s apartheid regime-remains elusive.  That Cullen, after a decade of hard-spent work, is not able to arrive at a compelling and convincing answer is not an indictment of his work, but a reminder of how difficult that quest can be.

Cullen ends the book with the unveiling of the memorial close to eight years after the shootings and the release of hundreds of doves into the air.  The coming to order in the air of these birds traditionally associated with peace is a reminder that, after all, life does go on, and that a moment of tragedy, as Patrick Ireland says at one point in the book, does not define an individual, a community, or a nation’s entire life.  

That Harris and Klebold were able to carry out their horrific plans should continue to challenge us to seek to understand, to meet our children’s needs and to prevent further similar atrocities.  Columbine, the fruit of 10 years of Cullen’s life, is an authoritative account and resource to help us do that necessary work.