PTSD And Homicidal Behavior
Benjamin Colton Barnes
Many commenters on CNN’s website believe this article unfairly conflates PTSD and homicidal behavior. What do you think?
A man opens fire in a national park, killing a ranger who was attempting to stop him after he blew through a vehicle checkpoint.A second man is suspected in the stabbing deaths of four homeless men in Southern California.
Both men, U.S. military veterans, served in Iraq — and both, according to authorities and those who knew them, returned home changed men after their combat service.
A coincidence — two recent high-profile cases? Or a sign of an increase in hostile behavior as U.S. troops complete their withdrawal from Iraq, similar to that seen when U.S. troops returned home from the Vietnam War?
“You’re going to see this more and more over the next 10 years,” said Shad Meshad, founder of the National Veterans Foundation, who has been working with veterans since 1970. “… There’s…
Timing Of Serial Killers’ Murders Follows Math Formula
At least some serial killers’ murder sprees mirror the wax-and-wane pattern of naturally occurring phenomena including earthquakes, avalanches, and epileptic seizures, suggesting that their attacks can be anticipated and have an involuntary, biological cause. It’s somehow more chilling to know that serial killing is a predictable, “natural” process. MSNBC writes:
Researchers have discovered that the seemingly erratic behavior of the “Rostov Ripper,” a prolific serial killer active in the 1980s, conformed to the same mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes and many other sporadic events. The finding suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill.
Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, electrical engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles, modeled the behavior of Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome murderer who took the lives of 53 people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he went just three days.…
The Bible’s Eight Goriest Passages
And this is a text that people use to teach their children morality? Via Cracked, eight bible stories that compete with the worst horror novels and slasher movies in terms of grotesque, over-the-top violence, including the impaling of Haman on a 75-foot spike, the serving of John the Baptist’s head on a platter at a banquet, Herod being eaten alive by worms as Godly punishment, a lake of blood filled by crushing masses of people inside a giant wine press, and the dismembering of a prostitute:
“When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, ‘Get up; let’s go.’ But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home.…
Clean-Shaven, Severed Leg Washes Ashore In St. Petersburg, Florida
The beachfront find raises a host of questions. Why shave your leg if it’s going to be cut off? Or, why shave a severed leg if you’re going to toss it into the ocean? For what it’s worth, this area also saw multiple brutal attacks by people who believed themselves to be vampires in 2011. The Tampa Bay Times reports:
Police continued a search for clues Wednesday in a mystery that began Tuesday morning when Canadian tourists found a severed human leg behind a waterfront home. The leg washed ashore near the Bay Vista Recreation Center. Police believe it was in the water for a day or two. They believe it was a right leg that may have belonged to an overweight white female who was dismembered.
Two marine units on Wednesday searched waters from Tierra Verde to the Tropical Shores area, said St. Petersburg police spokesman Mike Puetz. Officers did not find any…
Cosmic Cycles of Violence: John Lennon and Dimebag Darrell Gunned Down on December 8
Courtesy of Brandt Hardin
From RockStarMartyr.net:
Pantera’s furious music was propelled by guitarist Darrell Abbott’s maniacal claws ripping across a Washburn fretboard. The music was aggression distilled, warfare on vinyl, the hellish harmonics of testosterone-pumped teenagers smashing beer bottles and crucifixes, the pentatonic expression of sociopathic sexual impulse turned loose on loose pussy, power chords and possession, amplifiers and alcohol, whammy bars and whimsical youth. Pantera was pissed. And yet, no one remembers the jolly Dimebag Darrell being particularly pissed in day-to-day life. Not nearly as pissed as John Lennon was, anyway.
Behind the lead Beatle’s circular granny glasses and tireless promotion of peace burned a fury unmatched by most metal enthusiasts. Lennon was pissed at his parents, pissed at his bandmates, pissed at his stay-at-home wife, pissed at Her Majesty the Queen, pissed at America’s war machine, pissed at the world for not giving peace a chance. Lennon was fucking hostile. But…
How Patriarchy and Rape Culture Hurt Men
Via the SAFER Blog:
I’ve often found myself trying to explain to people that rape culture and patriarchy aren’t just bad for women. If you draw attention to a form of violence that is primarily aimed at women by men, and a form of social oppression that is intended to provide men with dominance over women, a lot of people will think you must be hostile to men, or want to take something away from men. Nothing could be further from the truth. Patriarchy and rape culture are clearly more harmful to women, but they also cause men great harm, and I engage in anti-violence work to help men as much as I do to help women or anyone else. Here’s why:
The patriarchal “ideal” of male toughness and invulnerability creates the following problems for men:
- Men are often expected to endure hazardous conditions, with the attitude that any expression of fear is a sign…
Woman Pepper Sprays Shoppers To Get Xbox
NBC Los Angeles reports on some Black Friday action. Over the past two months, in our society, pepper spraying anyone, anytime to get what you want has become completely normalized:
A customer shot pepper spray at other customers at a busy Northridge Wal-Mart store late Thursday night, causing minor injuries to at least 10 people who had been waiting hours for Black Friday savings, according to Los Angeles firefighters and a police lieutenant. The Associated Press later reported 20 injuries.
A witness told NBC4 that the incident started as people waited in line for the new Xbox 360. The witness said a woman with two children in tow became upset with the way people were pushing in line. The witness said she pulled out pepper spray and sprayed the other people in line.
It appeared only one person would need to be transported to a hospital for treatment.
British Man Kills Wife For Breaking His Star Wars Toys
I usually tune people out when they complain about how the population is becoming infantilized. However, case in point — a 30-year-old British man murdered his wife after finding she had smashed his Darth Vader action figures and then “ran sobbing to his mother who lived nearby,” reports the Mirror:
A Star Wars fan was yesterday jailed for life after murdering his wife in an alleged revenge attack for smashing up his cherished toy collection.
Rickie La-Touche, 30, told a court that his Thai wife Pornpilai Srisroy, 28, had damaged his precious Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker memorabilia. He later suffocated her during a row and then ran sobbing to his mother who lived nearby.
La-Touche later told police his wife had smashed up his Star Wars collection as part of a campaign to “make his life hell”. He also claimed he “flipped” when she threatened to leave him to go back to…
Man Assaults Wife For Not ‘Liking’ His Facebook Status
Violence stemming from the inevitable confusion over marital duties in the internet age, via Yahoo! News:
A 36-year-old Texas man has pleaded not guilty to battery charges after allegedly attacking his estranged wife for failing to “Like” a status update he posted to Facebook.
Benito Apolinar had posted an update to his Facebook page about the anniversary of his mother’s death. Angry that the post had elicited no response from his wife of 15 years, he confronted her after dropping off their children at her home in Carlsbad, New Mexico on Tuesday.
“That’s amazing everyone ‘Likes’ my status but you, you’re my wife. You should be the first one to ‘Like’ my status,” he allegedly told her before punching her in the cheek and pulling her hair.
Making Everyday Objects Deadly: The Art of the Shiv
I’ve also heard them called shanks, the word itself, “shiv” or “shank,” intuitively sounds like their intended use, further relayed with these photos from this article by William Drenttel in Design Observer:
A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner’s closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They’re primitive, too — like outsider art, but produced deep on the inside.
The individual parts that make up a shiv tend to be everyday objects, innocent things furtively reconstituted as lethal weapons. Each design choice is essential, but what’s particularly notable is that shivs, at their core, are not so much evocations of minimalism as they are symbols of survivalism. A shiv is all about masked utility: it’s an innocuous object with improbably toxic intent (whether used to attack others or to protect oneself…)
Church Mass Moves Italian Man To Tear Out Both Of His Eyes
The Bible’s Gospel of St. Matthew quotes Jesus telling his disciples: ‘If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.’
A case of literal biblical interpretation gone gruesomely awry. If God spoke to you and told you to do this, would you? NBC New York writes:
An Italian man tore both of his eyes out in the middle of the priest’s homily at a church near Pisa, according to reports.
Fellow parishioners watched in horror as Aldo Bianchini, 46, used his bare hands to pull out both eyeballs. Bianchini later told surgeons, who were unable to save his vision, he heard voices that told him to do it.
“He was in a great deal of agony and he was covered in blood,” Dr. Gino Barbacci told the Daily Mail. “He said that he had used his bare hands to gouge out his eye balls after hearing voices telling him…
Woman Mauls Elderly Man In Another Gulf Coast Vampire Attack
In a brutal incident reminiscent of one in Houston three weeks ago, a wheelchair-bound Florida man taking shelter from a storm had part of his face eaten off at an abandoned Hooters restaurant by a young woman claiming to be a vampire. Someone once told me that Pensacola is one of the worst places on Earth, and I’m starting to understand why. Via ABC Action News:
A St. Petersburg man who had dozed off in his motorized wheelchair woke up to find himself being attacked by a woman, according to police. Morton Ellis, 69, said he fell asleep after parking his wheelchair on the porch of a vacant Hooters to escape the rain.
He said the woman, 22-year-old Josephine Rebecca Smith, told him she was a vampire as she bit off chunks of his face and part of his lip.
Ellis managed to fend her off and called police. Officers found Smith at…
On Bullying
Bullying is taught in schools, churches and families throughout America. Bullying is a common practice in our military training. An extremely prevalent form of this teaching is “group punishment.” One person or more breaks the rules or is accused of not carrying his or her weight; and everyone is punished for the perpetrators’ infractions or inadequacies simply because they’re in that class or unit.
This incites the group to pressure the perpetrators into working harder or altering their behavior. This form of bullying is also very common in the work place and is an encouraged form of harassment. This pressure is “bullying” and it takes many forms: Beatings, hostile behavior and threats, ostracism, and many other forms of harassment. At Columbine the victims of bullies bullied back and only after that did people speak out against bullying on a nation-wide scale.
They formed organizations to prevent and stop bullying. All of their…
In U.S., Muslims And Atheists Most Opposed To Violence
Is violence targeting civilians ever justified in the name of a worthy cause? U.S. Christians say yes, atheists and Muslims say no. Raw Story writes:
New data from polling firm Gallup shows that out of all the religious groups in the U.S., Muslims are most likely to reject violence, followed by the non-religious atheists and agnostics.
Through interviews with 2,482 Americans, Gallup found that 78 percent of Muslims believe violence which kills civilians is never justified, whereas just 38 percent of Protestant Christians and 39 percent of Catholics agreed with that sentiment. Fifty-six percent of atheists answered similarly.
The survey was designed to measure religious and non-religious attitudes toward violence 10 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Perhaps most tellingly, 92 percent of Muslims surveyed said they did not believe any Muslim in their community had sympathy toward al Qaeda terrorists.
When Gallup put the question a bit more pointedly, asking if it would…
How Long Do Severed Heads Live?
The latest science suggests that old-timey Europe’s “humane” method of execution, decapitation, is a sham — heads seem remain alive for up to a minute after being disconnected from the lower portions. And theoretically they could survive if quickly reattached to a body. Via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Imagine yourself with your head in the business end of a guillotine. I know, it’s not the most pleasant of thoughts, but the guillotine was once considered a humane way to kill someone: Just a quick slice and you’re flat-out dead. But researchers are finding that neurons, the cells that make up the brain, are active even after their blood supply is suddenly cut off. And they may show activity for longer than a minute. In an arguably not-so-humane study, Dutch scientists measured the brain activity in mice after slicing off the mice’s heads. What they saw was a quick flash of brain activity…
How ‘Experts’ Are Used in News
Charlie Brooker’s take on how news ‘experts’ are doing little more than guessing, which is more or less what we could do, in the Guardian:
I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.
Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like “madman”, “monster”, or “maniac” won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.
On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to…
Is Anders Behring Breivik A Dominionist?
Leah L. Burton writes on PoliticusUSA:
In regards to Dominionist linkages to the bloody slaughter in Norway, here are our findings so far:
a) In particular, with a video manifesto (which has been linked on YouTube until it was pulled there, and which has since shown up on LiveLeak) the shooter makes some very specific references that show he has familiarity with, and probably shares terminology with (if not overtly sharing intel with) “Christian patriot” militia groups in the US (including material that has been posted on racist and far right-wing forums in the US, use of particular catch phrases associated with the “Christian Patriot” movement in the US, and others). I’ve just spent nine hours typing up an extensive analysis of the video; he is clearly connected with religious-nationalist groups in Europe and in the US. The degree of references to material originating in the US, in fact, indicate he has…
