…and probably never will.   Mother Jones tweeted just now (as I am typing this…):

In 2010, nearly 6x more women were killed by husbands, boyfriends, and exes w/ guns than by armed male strangers.

Yes.   And what do you think this means?

Good for them!

Danish Papers Reprint Muhammad Cartoon

(AP) Denmark’s leading newspapers on Wednesday reprinted a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked deadly rioting in Muslim countries two years ago.

The papers said they wanted to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after Tuesday’s arrest in western Denmark of three people accused of plotting to kill the man who drew the cartoon, which shows Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

The drawing by Kurt Westergaard and 11 other cartoons depicting Muhammad enraged Muslims two years ago when they appeared in a range of Western newspapers.

It’s worth remembering that the cartoons in question barely got noticed until a Lebanese-born Muslim living in Denmark, Ahmad Akkari, began waving them around the middle east, in a dossier into which he’d inserted a number of cartoons that the Danes didn’t print, including one that portrayed Muhammad as a pedophile, and a photograph of a Danish man wearing a pig mask, taken during a Danish pig calling contest, that Akkari had re-captioned as being a photo taken of a Dane mocking Muhammad as a pig.

Akkari’s activities in the middle east arguably helped get the Danish embassy in Lebanon burned down.  When Israel later began attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon Akkari decided the Danes weren’t such bad folks after all and he hot-footed it back to the nation he helped rouse passions against, via his Danish residency and passport. Nice guy.

The sweet irony of angry mobs rioting and burning down embassies over a bunch of cartoons depicting Islam as a violent fanatical religion was, of course, lost on the protesters.  That kind of thing will reliably go past zealots of any faith, or none.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article up about The Watchmen On The Walls…

Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.

Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.

"The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened," says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.

While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.

I’ll say it’s dangerous.  Scott Lively, one of the group’s founders, is also the author of The Pink Triangle…a Holocaust revisionist book that argues that the Nazis were basically a homosexual movement and that rather then being among the victims of the Holocaust, homosexuals were the primary instigators of it.  Consider that Lively is now preaching this message to Slavs in what was the eastern Soviet bloc at one time…a people who suffered a staggering loss of life at the hands of the Nazis during world war two…

Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: "We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved."

The camera was on and Lively knew it.  There is no way on God’s green earth Lively doesn’t know the impact his message that the Nazis were homosexuals and homosexuals are all basically Nazis has on this particular group of people.  He knows Exactly what he’s doing.  He has never publicly condemned the killing of Satender Singh by a group of young Slav men in Sacramento.  There’s a reason for that.

I haven’t been following the Michael Vick dog fighting story all that much, partly because it’s one of those miserable stories that I just don’t want to get very emotionally involved in.  There are tons of those going across my news ticker every day and after I’ve read the latest from President Dispshit’s Excellent Iraq Adventure, and More Anti-Gay Crap From The Haters, I’ve usually had enough news for one day.  And partly, it’s because I’ve become inured to news articles about pro athletes behaving badly.  I should be willing to summon up more outrage but I can’t.  The standards of conduct in professional sports have been going into the gutter for decades now.

But this, from over at Daily KOS…really gave me pause…

Arianna’s ‘progressive’ celebrity pals have recently posted a slew of editorials defending the electrocution, hanging, gang rape, drowning, starvation, and systematic torture of dogs. Their reasoning? Well, through the lens of their sophistical primitivism, they seem to think it’s just plain irrational to feel anything for ‘lesser mammals’. Some have even gone so far to suggest that Vick’s crimes are some sort of appropriate karmic balance to the silliness of people putting sweaters on their dogs.

If you’re like me, you probably find it hard to believe that these views are being seriously considered among our ‘allies’ in the so-called ‘Progressive Blogosphere’, but check it out for yourself:

Lawrence O’ Donnell’s "What’s Wrong with Killing Dogs?"
Earl Ofari Hutchison’s "America’s Wildly Overblown Vick Hysteria"
Peggy Drexler’s "There’s a Fury in Canine Nation"

Huh?  Is Lawrence O’ Donnell seriously asking what’s wrong with what Michael Vick did?  Because if he is I hope the rest of his family is keeping an eye on him.  My understanding is that torturing animals is a Really Bad Sign that there’s something deeply, profoundly, sociopathically wrong inside a person’s head.  It’s something you really need to pay attention to.

I acknowledge the vegan’s retort that if you’re willing to kill animals and eat them you might as well be willing to torture them too.  I don’t find those things to be on the same psychological plane.  If I’m cruel to animals because I eat meat, then it’s a cruel world that can have my body back after I’m dead to nourish itself.  That’s in my will.  But I don’t think our flesh and blood life is essentially cruel.  It just Is.

I won’t argue that modern factory farming isn’t an abomination, let alone cruel.  I won’t argue that a lot of people who call themselves sportsmen just enjoy killing something for the sake of killing it, without a moment’s pause to reflect on how they’re just as much a part of the circle of life on earth as their food.  A human who is thoughtlessly cruel to animals has no brakes and needs to learn a thing or two about sympathy.  But a human who makes a sport out of watching animals suffer, whether they actually die or not, is dangerous.  If O’Donnell can’t figure out what the fuss is over electrocuting, hanging, drowning, starving, and sexually abusing small animals and calling that a sport, I recommend he give the matter some quality thought time, before he turns his back on the wrong person.

Oh…and before he looses his own conscience.  Over at KOS, Stroszek makes clear what the problem here is…

So yes, O’Donnell is right in his point that there is no ‘natural law’ that protects dogs, just as much as there is no natural law that protects humans. What drives people to react with disgust and horror at any immoral act is simply COMPASSION, which, sadly, seems to be more exception than ‘law’ in a society that, in just a few short years, has produced Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Prison, "Shock & Awe", and yes, Michael Vick.

We’re swimming in a cesspool of Might Makes Right here, and you need to understand that there’s no bottom to it.  We need to take a longer, closer look at where all the excuses our culture makes now for the prerogative of power are leading us.  The Greed Is Good, Power Is It’s Own Reason credo of the last couple decades has made us indifferent to cruelty.  It’s just part of the background noise in George Bush’s America.  We start viewing sadism as a normal part of our environment too, and I don’t think there is a road back from there.

It’s like fussing with a wound that hasn’t even begun to heal, but humans are like that.  One of the hardest things to teach a kid is to leave it alone when it starts hurting again…

So the killer sent a package to at least one of the big TV networks.  I’m actually surprised he didn’t post it all on YouTube or MySpace, but he may have thought that would have given him up too soon.  I’ve only seen a few very brief clips so far, but one thing that that leapt out at me was how completely deranged he seemed.  I’ve seen anger, I’ve seen fanatical hate, I’ve seen bitterness.  I’ve had a gun pointed right at my head, saw killing rage in the face behind the iron sights, heard it in his voice (it was a road rage incident…obviously he didn’t actually shoot me…).  I can half close my eyes and still see and hear it.  It seems bizarre to think of it as sane, and yet I realize now it was sane, completely sane, compared to what I saw as Cho Seung-Hui vented for a few minutes about rich people and trust funds and debauchery. 

I keep hearing the word "disturbed" here.  Let me say it: he was crazy.  It’s not just our rational mind, but all the evolutionary baggage our brains have accumulated over the eons that make us human.  I’ve seen human rage.  I’ve seen human hate.  What I saw in that brief excerpt NBC showed us was chillingly grotesque…like a face blasted apart and sewn back together by something that had never seen a human face before and didn’t know quite where to put things.  There were pieces missing from him inside…deeper more ancient things then those higher emotions of compassion and empathy.  Things from the bedrock of our mammal souls.  Maybe older still.  And what was there wasn’t enough to make any sense when it came to making a person out of it.  I’ve no idea if his personality had decayed that much before he sat down to make that video.  But if it was anything near I can see why he was scaring the hell out of people long before he did what he did.  The face chills you, not because of it’s anger and rage, but because it is missing something, some subtle thing you can’t quite put your finger on, but which leaps out at you for its not being there.

I don’t think they’re going to find the why of this in anything in his history or his environment.  A trigger, perhaps.  Perhaps not.  This is a clinical case.  He was crazy.  I strongly doubt now that it has anything to do with anything that might have been said or done to him.  In addition to the video he left a paper manifesto, with photos and writing.  One glimpse of a page of densely packed text, no paragraph breaks, just one long string of words for line after line filling the entire page, was enough.  I’m no professional but I’ve seen that before in case study after case study, and in the graphic art of the mad, which I have studied with interest.  And…something I saw first hand…

I once worked for a private psychiatric hospital.  I was a stock clerk.  My job was to keep the office supplies and custom printed forms flowing to the various units, most of which only dealt with mildly disturbed folks.  But one, the Intensive Care Unit, had double doors you had to be buzzed through.  I made my deliveries there only just to the inside door, where one of the staff would take my things and hand me a list for the following week.  One day while I was doing that, I saw a young girl who had just been brought to them.  She was laying on her back on a sofa in a room just next to the door and I could see her clearly.  She couldn’t have been more then 20.  Young, strikingly beautiful.  Her face was set in a serene, peaceful, fixed stare at the ceiling.  Her elbows were at her sides, forearms up, her hands and fingers extended, the palms facing the ceiling almost as if she was pushing it away.  She was talking in a low, utterly calm monotonal drone.  Something like this…

remembering sank shadows echoed in water reflected gained in light realized remembered effort grounded in reputation in secure secure remember programmed joy of momentum needs energy remember the well placed expansive classrooms bringing forth eyes to ponder glass light thrown up into sky remember remember remember reframe embrace renew fever strives to purge soul light and sky remember imbalance pursuing sickness and wonder together in wonder wonder wonder wonder aware awareness gave transcendent sight casts forth water fire cast cast cast cast cast

Like that.  I’ll never forget it.  I wanted to quit my job then and there because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing and having to know because I was seeing it, how tenuous the grip the human identity really has inside of us.  What is a soul?

You hear it called the ravings of lunatics, but until you’ve actually witnessed it you might assume that’s something like a politican or a fundamentalist preacher babbling on and on about something that nobody but them actually cares about.  But no…it’s more like a brain just dumping its contents onto the table like it’s barfing.  That’s what I saw in that video, and even more, in the page of his manafesto.  It was a brain dump.

Cho Seung-Hui, I believe now, was crazy.  Not crazy angry.  Not crazy with hate or crazy with rage against…whoever.  Just crazy.  In the literal sense.  We throw that word around so much that it’s practically become meaningless I suppose.  But there it is.  The Abyss.  The unraveling of the human identity inside of a person.  That’s not excusing or trivializing what he did to 32 school kids who still had their lives ahead of them, and I’m not trying to dehumanize him.  Cho was certainly human.  He had that rational mind, was able to think and plan, was able to consider death and what would happen after he was dead.  He was calculating and methodical as only a human being can be.  But a very sick one.  He was mad. 

First really good post reflecting on the on the violence at VA Tech I’ve seen so far, and it comes by way of Andrew Sullivan…

Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:

Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society.

Yes.  Yes!  But Sullivan doesn’t get it…

So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.

But it wasn’t random.  There’s a sense you get, merely from the phraseology "crime of passion" that it was a spur of the moment unthinking, instant of madness kind of thing and mostly domestic violence isn’t that at all.  It certainly wasn’t in this case.  He chained the doors shut so the kids inside couldn’t get out.  He brought along two guns and plenty of ammo.  It was cold and brutal and calculating. 

There are two dark and ugly shadows staring us back in the face after all this, and one of them is domestic violence and the other is the grotesque assumption that anyone who would violently attack their lover probably isn’t a threat to anyone else because…well…it was personal.  But that willingness to attack the intimate other is Just the sort of thing you need to be watching out for in people.  I keep harping on this quote from the author Mary Renault, but it keeps being a relevant insight into human behavior…

Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.

There’s almost nothing that shows us what the inner person is like, then how they treat their lover.  Yes, just about no one else on earth can hurt you quite as painfully, or as deeply, as the one you love (unless it’s your own parents).  Yes the emotional wounds a lover can inflect, particularly during a breakup, can be devastating.  Ask me how I know.  But that’s because no one else’s feelings matter to you as much.  If someone you love isn’t safe around you then who the fuck else can be?  Nobody, that’s who.

Here in Baltimore, they still remember this one…

Four-day Maryland standoff ends; captor dead, hostages unhurt

March 22, 2000

DUNDALK, Maryland — A dramatic hostage escape from a home near Baltimore, Maryland late Tuesday gave police information they needed to storm the house and safely rescue a remaining hostage. The alleged hostage taker, Joseph Palczynski, was shot dead in the raid, police said.

The standoff had dragged on for four days, and it was the time factor that police credited with ending the siege.

"Patience," said Baltimore County Police Chief Terrence Sheridan. "It was waiting for the opportunity to save three lives" that led to the end of the standoff.

That opportunity came when hostage Lynn Whitehead escaped through a window in the home where she, her boyfriend Andrew McCord and his 12-year-old son Bradley had been held since Friday. McCord then followed Whitehead out the window and both ran to safety.

"We were having a briefing when we were informed she had come out of the window," Sheridan said. He said that Whitehead and McCord told police that Palczynski was sleeping on a living room couch and that the boy was asleep on the kitchen floor.

"At this point, SWAT team officers made what’s known as a tactical entry," Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said. "They broke through a window, encountered Mr. Palczynski in the family room and shot him. They then rescued the boy."

"Joseph Palczynski is dead," Toohey said. "He was shot by Baltimore County tactical officers shortly after 11 tonight and died at 11:05 on the scene." None of the police was wounded.

Police rescued the boy, who was found asleep on the kitchen floor. None of the hostages was hurt, Sheridan said.

Palczynski was accused by police of killing four people in the Baltimore area two weeks ago while he allegedly tried to kidnap his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who later escaped.

Whitehead, who is the daughter of Lynn Whitehead, had broken up with Palczynski, recently, police said. The ex-girlfriend escaped from Palczynski at a motel, police said. Family members said she had been beaten with the butt of a rifle and sustained a broken nose, black eye and multiple bruises.

You can read more about Palczynski’s violent history here.  He killed the couple his ex was living with, Gloria Jean Shenk and her husband, George Shenk.  He killed David M. Meyers who tried to intervene while Palczynski was dragging his ex to his car.  He killed Jennifer McDonel and wounded her child during an attempted carjacking because he needed vehicle to run from the cops in.  For two weeks he terrorized the Baltimore area.  He took some relatives of his ex, including a 12 year old boy, hostage and for four days randomly shoot up the neighborhood they lived in, demanding that police let him talk to his ex (they didn’t, knowing full well that as soon as he got her on the phone he’d start shooting his hostages).  A swat team finally brought him down after one of his hostages managed to sneak a tranquilizer into his drink and he fell asleep and the adults were able to get away.  Nobody later questioned the hail of bullets he was awakened to, because for certain he would have killed the boy the instant he knew the game was up, had he the slightest shred of a chance.

To assume that nobody else but the ‘Ex’ is in danger from a violent lover is stunningly stupid on its face.  If they’re dangerous to their lover, then nobody else around them is safe either.

[Update…]  Now we’re hearing that girl he killed first in the dorms wasn’t romantically involved with him at all.  So this apparently wasn’t all brought on by a violent lover after all.  Cho seems to have simply just been mad.  As in…crazy.