50th Anniversary of Palach's Death Marked With New Immolation

A man set himself on fire in a central Prague square on Friday, January 18, 2019, as Czechs marked the 50th anniversary of a student’s self-immolation in protest at the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring.

The unidentified man was taken to hospital after bystanders doused the flames that enveloped him in the same spot at the elevated top of historic Wenceslas Square where Jan Palach set himself ablaze in January 1969.

“According to initial information, a man born in 1964 poured an inflammable liquid on his body and set himself on fire,” Prague police said on their Twitter feed.

The immolation victim was placed in an induced coma and taken to the hospital.

Jan Palach, a student at Charles University in Prague, startled passersby by pouring a liquid over his body at about 3 P.M. on Thursday, January 16, 1969, and then setting himself ablaze. The twenty‑one‑year‑old student chose the statue of Wenceslas, the Czech hero saint, as the site of his protest in Prague. I extensively discussed this incident in the immolations chapter of The Copycat Effect, and share these details here.

The book details immolations since the Vietnam war era protests, such as by Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire. He received widespread media attention. 

Two Jumping Suicides in NYC

Clinton Towers

Two women plunged to their deaths in apparent suicides Monday, February 19, 2018, in Manhattan and Brooklyn, police said.

A 26-year-old woman jumped from the 28th floor of a 39-story Hell’s Kitchen building at 6:50 a.m.. The woman, whose name was not released, plummeted from Clinton Towers on W. 54th St. at 11th Ave. and died at the scene.
...
Security guard Richard Ababio said the woman regularly visited Clinton Towers to see her girlfriend.
“I know her very well,” Ababio, 59, said. “It’s so sad. I don’t know how some people do that.
“She was a very friendly, beautiful woman.”
Nearly 10 hours later, at 4:25 p.m., a woman in her 60s jumped to her death from a four-story building on Manhattan Ave. at Calyer St. in Greenpoint, cops said. Source.

Ufologists' Deaths: Early 2016 Edition

Mike Clelland is one of those writers who has deeper insights than most about the overlaps between UFO incidence, contemporary violence, human innocence, and relative coincidence. He has talked, for example, about the intellectual significance of such incidents after the Aurora shootings (see here).

In The Sync Book 2, Clelland ends his essay, "Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee,” with these thoughts (p. 344):

There is some unknowable facet of reality that creates synchronicity, and it has forced me to pay attention. I am impelled to follow this magic compass. I am being given clues and they are telling me to step off the well-worn path and step into the deepest part of the forest.

In 2015, his book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee (with a foreword by Richard Dolan) was published. It expands the discussion begun in The Sync Book 2, and like that book, is also worthy of your time.

In general, I find books like Clelland's are the ones that folks might wish to ponder in these times of mass shootings and hysterically reported new waves of "ufo silencers.”  The subjects seem disconnected, but I propose they are not. I am not sure there is a statistically significant surge in ufologists’ deaths, but there certainly is a new media interest in these people dying. There have been ufologists' death clusters in the past, as well, although the general public rarely remembers such moments.

So, allow me to pause in the midst of a horrible warm season of Amoklauf, and give some factual balance to the renewed tabloid sensationalistic approach to a couple recent ufo death notices. This current alleged "murder spree" of ufologists included one that probably was suicidal and another sudden death among those intrigued by ufo mysteries.

Following is my list of notable passings for the past six months. 

Is there a major increase? Probably not. Is the old black magic of synchronicity at work here? Probably yes. Is there more to learn? Definitely yes.

As Clelland and I separately are heard to remark, "Are you paying attention?"

January - July 2016 - UFO-linked Deaths

July 16, 2016 - Max Spiers, 36

Second UFO researcher dies fuelling claims of 'Men in Black' murder spree. Plus here.

July 7, 2016 - Gaurav Tiwari, 32

Claims UFO investigators are being killed by 'men in black' after latest 'mystery death'

June 19, 2016 - Anton Yelchin, 27

Star Trek's New Chekov Has Been Taken

May 21, 2016 - Nick Menza, 51

UFO-Interested, Megadeth's Nick Menza, 51, Dies Suddenly

March 31, 2016 - Trevor Constable, 90

"Space Critters" Ufologist Trevor James Constable Has Died

March 29, 2016 - Albert K. Bender, 94

The Man Who First Saw "The Men in Black" Dies

February 4, 2016 - Edgar Mitchell, 85

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Believer of Roswell UFO Incident, Dies

You might also wish to read:

From 2009, Dick Hall Has Died, Lou Gentile Too

From 2012, Synchromystic Men In Black

From 2014, Third UFO Researcher to Die In A Week

From 2014, Are You Still Alive? UFO Deaths, Revisited

From 2014, June 24: Ufologists' Deaths

From 2014, Old Ufologist Replies to Young Ufologists 

From 2015, 33: The Rebirth of Pan

See all "UFO obit" results.

You're Fired or You're Dead? Reality TV Suicides

There is an angry reality television star running for President named Donald Trump.  Americans are beginning to wake up to this state of affairs. What are people thinking? Mr. Trump is well-known for his publicized abrasive personality.

There is an ugly little secret about reality television ~ from the design of the interactions to the hosts' external outbursts to the reactions of the viewership. All of this can be felt as extreme abuse to the people receiving the interactions. Some folks even kill themselves due to this supposedly acceptable use of force, threats, intimidation, and displays of aggressively dominating others. Suicides result from bullying, and in the test tube of reality television, it does happens.

Take the case of Charlotte Dawson, a New Zealand–Australian television personality. In 2012, she appeared as one of the "celebrity" contestants, raising money for her chosen charity, on the second season of The Celebrity Apprentice Australia. In 2012, Dawson was admitted to St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney after attempting to kill herself due to a much publicized battle with Twitter trolls and cyberbullying related to her television persona.

On February 22, 2014, Dawson died by suicide in her Woolloomooloo, New South Wales, Australia home. A real estate agent found her body when he arrived to inspect the property ahead of its auction. Police were called and confirmed her death at 11:18 am; there were no suspicious circumstances to the death. Toxicology reports state that she had overdosed on a drug, Baclofen, which, is mostly used to help muscle spasming in multiple sclerosis. Her friends were reported to be concerned when she did not update her Twitter or Instagram accounts in the previous 19 hours.

How common is this?

On February 28, 2016, reporter Dana Schuster wrote an article, "Dying for fame: 21 reality stars committed suicide in a decade." Please note, until I added her to the following list, Charlotte Dawson was not on this accounting. 

How many more reality television "celebrities" have died by suicide? 

Here is Schuster compilation, plus my addition of Dawson.

Reality TV Star Suicides: 22

2016: Alexa "Lex" McAllister, "The Bachelor" (prescription pill overdose)

 

2015: Mark Constantino (above), "Ghost Adventures" (shot his co-star wife, then himself)

2015: Anthony Riley, "The Voice" (hanged himself)

2014: Simone Battle, "The X-Factor" (hanged herself)

2014: Charlotte Dawson, “Celebrity Apprentice,” (Baclofen overdose)

2013: Gia Allemand, "The Bachelor" (hanged herself)

2013: Mindy McCready, "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew" (shot herself)

2013: Mark Balelo, "Storage Wars" (carbon monoxide poisoning)

2013: Joshua Marks, "MasterChef" (shot himself)

2011: Russell Armstrong, "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" (hanged himself)

2011: Wesley Durden, "Next Great Baker" (shot himself)

2010: Joseph Cerniglia, "Kitchen Nightmares" (jumped off George Washington Bridge)

In 2007, Gordon Ramsay ripped apart struggling New Jersey chef Joseph Cerniglia on “Kitchen Nightmares,” screaming: “Your business is about to f - - king swim down the Hudson.” Three years later, Cerniglia jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Source.

The George Washington Bridge, which spans the Hudson River, is among the most frequently chosen sites in the New York City metropolitan area for dying by suicide. In 2012, a new record 18 people threw themselves off the bridge to their deaths, with 43 suicide attempts overall. The Port Authority reports there were 16 suicides in 2013, 18 in 2014, and 18 in 2015.

Cerniglia was the second suicide from a Ramsey show. The first was chef Rachel Brown, of Dallas, who shot herself to death after an appearance on Ramsay's elimination series Hell's Kitchen in 2006.

2010: Julien Hug, "The Bachelorette" (shot himself)

2009: Ryan Jenkins, "Megan Wants a Millionaire" (hanged himself)

2008: Nathan Clutter, "Paradise Hotel" (jumped to his death)

2008: James Terrill, "Supernanny" (shot himself)

2007: Cheryl Kosewicz, "Pirate Master" (suicide in home)

2006: Rachel Brown, "Hell's Kitchen" (shot herself)

2006: Paula Goodspeed, "American Idol" (overdose) Source

2005: Najai Turpin, "The Contender" (shot himself)

2005: Melanie Bell, "Vega Elvis" unaired (jumped to her death)

2004: Kellie McGee, "Extreme Makeover" unaired (overdose)

Source.

h/t Sarah HP

If you — or someone you know — needs help, please call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you are outside of the US, please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources.

The Copycat Effect and Aircraft Suicides

Should we be on the lookout for aircraft-related copycat suicides in the wake of the news regarding the cause of Flight 9525's demise?

Behind Andreas Lubitz is the Golden Gate Bridge, known in suicidology for its power of attraction for suicide victims. (For more, see The Copycat Effect, Chapter 16: The Magnetism of Milieu and Moment.)

Andreas Lubitz, the copilot of Flight 9545, appears to have brought down the Germanwings Airbus A320 Flight 9525 on March 24, 2015. 

A short history of modern suicide-related aircraft disasters, in general, do not list the single craft crashes that occur in the wake of the larger aircraft wrecks.

September 26, 1976 – 12 fatalities
A Russian pilot stole an Antonov 2 airplane directed his aircraft into the block of flats in Novosibirsk where his divorced wife lived. (ASN Accident Description)

August 22, 1979 – 4 fatalities
A 23 year old male mechanic who had just been fired entered a hangar at Bogotá Airport, Colombia and stole a military HS-748 transport plane. He took off and crashed the plane in a residential area. (ASN Accident Description)

February 9, 1982 - 24 fatalities

Japan Airlines Flight 350 was a McDonnell Douglas DC-8-61 on a domestic scheduled passenger flight from Fukuoka, Japan, to Tokyo. The airplane crashed 9 February 1982 on approach to Haneda Airport in Tokyo Bay. Flight 350 was Japan Airlines' first crash of the 1980s. The crew consisted of 35-year-old Captain Seiji Katagiri (片桐 清二 Katagiri Seiji), 33-year-old First Officer Yoshifumi Ishikawa, and 48-year-old flight engineer Yoshimi Ozaki. The cause of the crash was traced to Katagiri's deliberate engaging of the number 2 and 3 engines' thrust-reversers in flight. The first officer and flight engineer worked to restrain him and regain control. Despite their best efforts, the DC-8's descent could not be completely checked, and it touched down in shallow water 300 meters (980 ft) short of the runway. Among the 166 passengers and eight crew, 24 died. (Source.)

December 7, 1987 - 43

Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771 was a commercial flight that crashed near Cayucos, California, United States, on December 7, 1987, as a result of a murder–suicide by one of the passengers. All 43 people on board the aircraft died, five of whom were shot to death before the plane crashed. The man who caused the crash, David Burke, was a disgruntled former employee of USAir, the parent company of PSA. The crash killed three managers and the president of Chevron USA, James R. Sylla, along with three officials of Pacific Bell, which prompted many large corporations to create or revise policies that would forbid group travel by executives on the same flight. (Source.)

July 13, 1994 – 1 fatality
A Russian Air Force engineer stole the aircraft at the Kubinka AFB to die by suicide. The aircraft crashed when there was no more fuel left. (ASN Accident Description)

August 21, 1994 – 44 fatalities
A Royal Air Maroc ATR-42 airplane crashed in the Atlas Mountains shortly after takeoff from Agadir, Morocco. The accident was suggested to have been caused by the captain disconnecting the autopilot and directing the aircraft to the ground deliberately. The Moroccan Pilot’s Union challenged these findings. (ASN Accident Description)

December 19, 1997 – 104 fatalities
Silk Air Flight 185, a Boeing 737 en route from Jakarta, Indonesia to Singapore, crashed in Indonesia following a rapid descent from cruising altitude. Indonesian authorities were not able to determine the cause of the accident. It has been suggested by amongst others the U.S. NTSB that the captain may have decided to die by suicide by switching off both flight recorders and intentionally putting the Boeing 737 in a dive, possibly when the first officer had left the flight deck. During 1997 the captain experienced multiple work-related difficulties, particularly during the last 6 months. Also at the time of the accident the captain was experiencing significant financial difficulties, which was disputed by the Indonesian investigators. (ASN Accident Description)

October 11, 1999 – 1 fatality
An Air Botswana captain who had been grounded for medical reasons took off in an ATR-42. He made several demands over the radio and finally stated he was going the crash the plane. He caused the plane to crash into two parked ATR-42 aircraft on the platform at Gaborone Airport, Botswana. (ASN Accident Description)

Egyptair SU-GAP Boeing 767-300 at Dusseldorf Airport. 

The aircraft crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 as Egyptair Flight 990.

October 31, 1999 – 217 fatalities
Egypt Air Flight 990, a Boeing 767, entered a rapid descent some 30 minutes after departure from New York-JFK Airport. This happened moments after the captain had left the flight deck. During the investigation it was suggested that the accident was caused by a deliberate act by the relief first officer. However, there was no conclusive evidence. The NTSB concluded that the accident was a “result of the relief first officer’s flight control inputs. The reason for the relief first officer’s actions was not determined.” The suggestions of a deliberate act were heavily disputed by Egyptian authorities. (ASN Accident Description)

September 11, 2001 - 2996 fatalities

The September 11 attacks (9/11) were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The attacks killed 2,996 people. Four passenger airliners were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists to be flown into buildings in suicide attacks. Two of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within two hours, both 110-story towers collapsed with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the WTC complex, including the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense), leading to a partial collapse in its western side. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was targeted at Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after its passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. In total, 2,996 people died in the attacks, including the 227 civilians and 19 hijackers aboard the four planes. (For more, see The Copycat Effect, Chapter 4: Planes into Buildings.)

January 5, 2002 - 1 fatality

Soon after 5:00 P.M. on Saturday, January 5, 2002, a 15-year-old named Charles J. Bishop crashed the Cessna plane he had stolen into Tampa, Florida's 42-story Bank of America building. Bishop had clearly modeled his action on the September 11th terrorists' suicide plane crashes. Bishop left a suicide note behind, saying as much, though most of the media merely paraphrased as him saying that he had "admired Osama bin Laden." (For more, see The Copycat Effect, Chapter 4: Planes into Buildings.)

April 18, 2002 - 3 fatalities

On April 18, 2002, after 5:00 P.M. local time, a man apparently acting deliberately flew at top speed into Milan's (and Italy’s) tallest skyscraper, hitting the 25th and 26th floors of the 30-story Pirelli Tower. The skyscraper dominates the skyline of Italy's financial capital, as did the Twin Towers of New York City. Italian Transport Minister Pietro Lunardi and Roberto Formigoni, the president of the region of Lombardy, both said they were convinced that Luigi Fasulo, the pilot of his powerful Rockwell Commander 112TC, had purposely died by suicide. Fasulo's son and others also felt it was a suicidal act. Besides the pilot, two women who worked in the Pirelli Tower were killed. (For more, see The Copycat Effect, Chapter 4: Planes into Buildings.)

November 29, 2013 – 33 fatalities
LAM Flight 470 entered a rapid descent while en route between Maputo and Luanda and crashed in into the Bwabwata National Park, Namibia. Preliminary investigation results indicate that the accident was intentional. The captain made control inputs that directed the plane to the ground, shortly after the first officer had left the flight deck. All 33 passengers and crew were killed. (ASN Accident Description)

March 24, 2015 - 150 fatalities
Germanwings Airbus A320 Flight 9525, en route from Barcelona, Spain to Dusseldorf, Germany, went into a long descent before crashing into the French Alps. The co-pilot left behind in the cockpit, named as 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz, appeared to "show a desire to want to destroy" the plane. (More information, here and here.)

+++

In 2004, I wrote my book, The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines, and dedicated it to David Phillips for his groundbreaking work that had been largely ignored by most scholars up to that time.

I wrote:

In 1974, University of California at San Diego sociologist David P. Phillips coined the phrase, “The Werther Effect,” to describe the copycat phenomenon. The word “Werther” comes from a 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust. In the story, the youthful character Werther falls in love with a woman who is promised to another. Always melodramatic, Werther decides that his life cannot go on, and that his love is lost. He then dresses in boots, a blue coat, and a yellow vest, sits at his desk with an open book, and, literally at the 11th hour, shoots himself. In the years that followed, throughout Europe, so many young men shot themselves while dressed as Werther had been and seated at their writing desks with an open copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in front of them, that the book was banned in Italy, Germany, and Denmark.

Today, "The Werther Effect" is more commonly expressed publicly as "The Copycat Effect."

I also observed that sociologist David Phillips noted in 1978 that airplane accident fatalities normally increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide. Phillips found an increase in both suicides and murder-suicides following other well-publicized suicides and murder-suicides, including suicides hidden in unrecognized aircraft accidents - especially in single-plane wrecks. Phillips’s theory about a follow-on increase in plane crashes noted some “disguised suicides” followed soon after high media attention to suicides in the news.

Therefore, we should be aware that the media's present high volume of stories on Andreas Lubitz's apparent murder-suicide of 150 people on Flight 9525 probably will lead to more covert and some overt suicides by other pilots and aircraft employees. An increase in single aircraft (so-called "general aviation") crashes in the forthcoming weekend, and then in the following month, are predictable outcomes.

Citations:

Coleman, Loren. The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Phillips, David P. “Airplane Accident Fatalities Increase just After Newspaper Stories About Suicide and Murder,” Science 20, August 25, 1978.

Phillips, David P. “Airplane Accidents, Murder, and the Mass Media: Towards a Theory of Imitation and Suggestions,” Social Forces 58:4, June 1980.

Copycat Beheadings & Hangings

Another Decapitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Copycat Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sioux City Alert for September 14th?

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

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

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

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

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

Trident Alert: Watch August 24

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

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

Posted on August 20, 2014:

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

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

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

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

Guess who has just been deployed to Ferguson, Missouri?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++++

Afterword: August 21, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

Mass Shootings Are About Suicides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            

Nightingale Suicides and Defenestrations

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

~ Florence Nightingale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Any mortal who is infuriated by his wrongs 

and applies a medicine that is worse than the 

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

~ Tereus by Sophocles, before 414 BCE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair Salamis, the billows’ roar,

Wander around thee yet,

And sailors gaze upon thy shore

Firm in the Ocean set.

Thy son is in a foreign clime

Where Ida feeds her countless flocks,

Far from thy dear, remembered rocks,

Worn by the waste of time–

Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save

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

Woe to the mother in her close of day,

Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray,

When she shall hear

Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear!

“Woe, woe!’ will be the cry–

No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail

Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale–

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

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

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

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

"I have lived and slept in the same bed 

with English countesses and Prussian 

farm women...no woman has excited 

passions among women more than I have." 

~ Florence Nightingale