Colorado theater shooting, TV media news porn and us

Curiously in an abstract sense, not so in the actuality of today's despicable cable and TV news porn cycles, this media continues to pile on today's outrage, treating it like a 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. This is today's major story, but not all that different from tomorrow's or the one the following day except for the shrillness and wall-to-wall nature of the coverage.

One take-away from the Dark Knight theater shooting's cable TV media coverage is the utter lack of morality and classic journalism values that plagues us as a society. This partially accounts for the inability of this nation, and the world, to deal effectively with catastrophic issues such as climate change, economic depression, politics and war, to name but a ghastly few.

As we are wont to do in this ever-moving age of communications advancement, I've addressed a few other issues related to the theater shooting on my Twitter feed and Facebook page.

For example at my site, https://twitter.com/AhHa_RSF :

Ah-Ha Ranch Santa Fe ‏@AhHa_RSF

#theatershooting #aurora #breakingnews @cnn We say APPROPRIATE COVERAGE ONLY. This is major story among MANY. DON'T NEWS PORN FOR RATINGS.

Ah-Ha Ranch Santa Fe ‏@AhHa_RSF

#theatershooting #aurora HEY @CNN AND ALL NEWS PORN: You're so media concerned with victims? How many people died in Syria or Congo today?

Ah-Ha Ranch Santa Fe ‏@AhHa_RSF

#theaterkilling #aurora Dark Knight mass murder horrible, but TV, cable covering it wall-to-wall like 9/11 amounts to news porn for ratings.

Ah-Ha Ranch Santa Fe ‏@AhHa_RSF

#theaterkilling #aurora Easy to cover, everything blown out of proportion. As sad in its media way as the killings. Ratings glee for TV.

  As well, I took to Facebook and received affirmative responses. However, these are my friends after all for a reason. I suspect though many others share their thoughts, and mine.

• Portia Caroline Jacobs So hard on news junkies like us! It'll be like this for a week at least. What are we going to do? News starvation.5 hours ago · Like
  Cara Davis Completely agree.
• Rachel Davis Actually, I have to hear about as much about Syria every day as we are about this. But Mark would say that all we are hearing about Syria is lies anyway, so maybe that doesn't count.

This all addresses the larger issue that we will stuff into the back story pack for future reference; how our society is poorly served by many areas of the media and how a site like Allvoices can cut through the official garbage of advertising-based greed-driven new coverage of events that greatly harm our society.

Ed Murrow and company in the 1950s would not have had, for example, negative political ads, entertainment and drug commercials regularly interrupt the breaking news. However, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, local TV stations et al were doing it with the theater shooting ad nauseam.

A disgrace to be sure, but we all will move on and the media certainly will as this becomes that. For all the breathless ah-ha news porn coverage of the moment, the media will move on as fast as a squirrel with a nut.

Not to pile on, but I do have a personal eye for details pertaining to this story. As a matter of fact, I edited several newspapers in the Torrey Highlands area of San Diego where alleged (we have to say that, but...) gunman James Holmes lived until college.

                           (Photo: Media news porn at Holmes' Torrey Highlands home, Friday, July 20, 2012.)

In fact, I regularly drove by his house, a detail I only know now because dozens of news porn media reps are camped outside that house. It's in a very upper middle-class suburb inhabited by extremely well educated and upwardly mobile San Diego residents.

As depressingly usual in today's America where very few people talk, or act, straight, the developers and real estate people dubbed the neighborhood Torrey Highlands, to associate the area with the tony Pacific Coast neighborhoods. However, the area is set in rolling hills about 20 miles from the La Jolla coast. It does, however, have beautiful scenery, easy living and a legitimate calling card as part of the Poway Unified School District, one of the best public school districts in California.

What immediately struck me about Holmes, the neighborhood and the incident, was the apple pie upscale suburban sprawl that framed each component. Let me digress briefly and then explain.

Firstly, I've spent a great deal of time in Denver as well and also recognized that Aurora area for what it is, a gritty, working class area about as far from Denver's downtown core as Torrey Highlands is from downtown San Diego. However, that's not the connection that came to mind.

No, I immediately thought about Denver's other mass shooting: Columbine. That took place in a Denver suburb exactly like Torrey Highlands; the same houses, the same economic class, same everything pretty much except for scenery and maybe rooting for the Broncos instead of the Chargers. Holmes is only a few years older than the Columbine shooters. The victims at the midnight Batman showing were predominantly young as well.

Just as I drove around Torrey Highlands all the time, I drove around unincorporated Jefferson County where Columbine was located a lot. There is a spiritual and intellectual blandness in these places. The kids are from great families. They go to great schools. Yet, something is missing.

There's not a lot to do. It's stifling. They hang out at shopping malls and skateparks. They're bright. They're bored. They're missing a certain something just as our society, as a whole, is missing something. Heart, soul, something.

These places feature vast spaces between veneer and truth. There is an emptiness of spirit, at least in my mind, that mirrors an emptiness in America, as greedy plutocratic pigs and political charlatans attempt to steal this nation, destroy the world for money or power or whatever drives evil people to do evil things. (Right now, they're winning as most of us are losing)

Everybody will draw their own conclusions about this event and pretty much everybody has an opinion about something like this. We could go on and on, but it's time to move on for me.

My final takeaway: Cable and TV news as well as many types of corporate greed-driven media have displayed their despicable 'porning' down of the news again at the very time our society more than ever needs a strong, just, credible journalism to help citizens create context and work towards better solutions to urgent problems. 

It's a shame. It's our shame. Unless we are able to correct this corrupt media and cultural environment, the future appears gray, even grim.

15th Anniversary of Heaven's Gate mass suicide at Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. March 26, 1997...

Views of Heaven's Gate:An Oral History

The largest mass suicide in U.S. history took place at a rented mansion off Camino Del Norte in March 1997. Presented here is a graphic -- viewer discretion advised -- video detailing the incident.

Following the video is a timeline of the cult's activity and it's 1997 news release detailing its plans.

Then, we present two "exit" videos -- the group made about 15 -- with members explaining their mind-sets and some of the particulars of their behaviors.

The final video presented here is one of leader Marshal Applewhite's numerous indoctrination videos.

For more information, follow the video links to additional presentations on several video sites.

This is presented in the interest of providing a partial oral historical record of one of the most disturbing chapters in recent American history as well as partially detailing the most spectacular, and disturbing, event in Rancho Santa Fe history.

Again, viewer discretion advised...

-- Editor's Note

Heaven’s Gate: A timeline

Many of the Heaven’s Gate adherents who were found dead in a Rancho Santa Fe mansion March 26, 1997, had been with the group for most of their adult lives. Their leader was Marshall Applewhite.

They were found with their bags packed. Most were neatly laid out on beds, covered with purple shrouds. They wore running shoes and matching uniforms with “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” patches. Each had a $5 bill and quarters in his or her pockets.

The Heaven’s Gate group believed that once free of their earthly bodies, they would be whisked by spaceship to a celestial paradise and a “level beyond human.” They associated the Hale-Bopp comet, which could be seen in the sky that winter, with the spacecraft they awaited. They thought it was traveling behind the comet.

The Heaven’s Gate cult had existed for more than two decades. Its recruiting drives were followed by periods spent in near hiding. In its final years, its message was spread through the Internet. Here is a timeline of the group’s history.

1972: Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, a nurse, meet at a Houston hospital. They set out on a spiritual quest and open a metaphysical bookstore.

January 1973: Applewhite and Nettles close their bookstore and set out to find their spiritual mission.

February 1973-August 1974: Applewhite and Nettles travel around the country, camping in parks and skipping out on motel-room bills.

Aug. 27, 1974: Applewhite and Nettles are arrested in Harlingen, Texas, on charges of credit-card fraud and auto theft. The charges against Nettles are dropped, but Applewhite is extradited to St. Louis and spends six months in jail.

March 1975: Applewhite and Nettles go to Ojai. Two of their recruits are a mother and her adult daughter.

April 1975: About 80 people meet at a Hollywood Hills home to hear Applewhite and Nettles. Twenty-four people from that meeting agree to meet in Gold Beach, Ore., with Applewhite and Nettles two weeks later.

May 5, 1975: The followers meet Applewhite and Nettles in Gold Beach. The leaders now call themselves Bo and Peep.

June 1975: Applewhite and Nettles abandon several followers in Sedona, Ariz.

Aug. 24, 1975: Applewhite and Nettles make a public appearance at Cañada College in Redwood City.

Sept. 14, 1975: The group meets in Waldport, Ore., expecting a spaceship to land. No spaceship shows up, but more than 30 people agree to join the group. The cult gets its first negative publicity over the fiasco.

Fall 1975: The group camps at the Colorado National Monument, waiting for a spaceship to pick up the members.

April 21, 1976: Nettles announces that the group no longer will hold public meetings. Many people leave the group during the next year. Its numbers drop from about 100 to two dozen. Nettles now calls herself Ti, while Applewhite goes by the name of Do.

June 19, 1985: Nettles dies of liver cancer.

May 27, 1993: The cult places a one-third-page ad in USA Today and once again begins recruiting members, this time using the Internet to spread its message.

June-October 1995: Heaven’s Gate members spend several months living in a compound in a remote New Mexico town.

October 1996: After living in several north San Diego County homes the year before, the cult moves into a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe.

March 26, 1997: The bodies of 39 cult members are discovered in the mansion.

May 1997: The husband of one of the dead cult members kills himself at an Encinitas motel. A member for 20 years, he had left the group in 1994. He had expressed regret that he was not with them when they died. A second former cult member who attempted death with him is revived.

February 1998: The second former cult member’s body is found in a tent in the Arizona desert, nine months after he survived the earlier suicide attempt.

Nov. 22, 1999: A county auction of Heaven’s Gate belongings raises $32,707. Some of the money pays for the auction; the rest goes to family members to help cover burial costs. Two former members who had tied up the estate in probate court eventually reach a settlement with the county and pay $2,000 for items of most significance to the cult.

HEAVEN'S GATE® "Away Team" Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space

Get Yer Newzbrief Boogie on Here: Top Chef, Torrey Pine Demise, Cheap Transit, Top Cop...

For the second year in a row, San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles asked top local professional chefs to choose their favorite San Diego chefs for our Chefs Hall of Fame. It’s a task, but one they relished because as professional chefs they understand that a great meal — like a career — is a sum of many parts.

-- SDHGL

Anyhoo, ballots were sent to culinary professionals resulting in 13 finalists and three making it to the virtual Cooperstown for cuisine Chefs Hall of Fame. To the victors go the unspoiled -- Martin Woesle of Mille Fleurs, Andrew Spurgin of Waters Fine Catering and Jeff Jackson of A.R. Valentien. 

-- Ah-Ha RSF News

From the home and garden mavens, to wit:

MARTIN WOESLE

Mille Fleurs

Mille Fleurs is synonymous both with one of the most elegant dining establishments in San Diego County and with Chef Martin Woesle, who has written menus daily for the plush Rancho Santa Fe caravansary since restaurateur Bertrand Hug assumed ownership in 1985.

Woesle, a German-born culinary artist whose muse sings in French, locally pioneered the farm-to-table concept when he insisted on daily purchases of the very finest produce from Rancho Santa Fe’s internationally recognized Chino Farm.

Fruits and vegetables with lesser pedigrees can try sneaking through Woesle’s kitchen door, but they won’t make it.

“It’s always been my philosophy to get fresh food daily,” says Woesle, who trained under Chef Eckart Witzigmann at Munich’s venerable Aubergine, and later worked at the celebrated Ma Maison in Los Angeles. “Buying small quantities means that everything is used up that day. Nothing sits around, everything always is the best.”

Today, Woesle enjoys the respect of his peers, both locally and at pinnacles of the trade like the James Beard Foundation...

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Swami's Torrey Pine hits the road next week -- Bark Beetles to blame...

 The stately Torrey Pine at Swami's has stood for some 80 years, longer than pretty much anybody still surfing through life around Encinitas.

You can thank the festering bark beetle pests for the untimely Torrey Pine at Swami's demise. Maybe if the tree had corporate sponsorship, it would survive, but this is the era of slash-and-cut government.

The tree must be killed to save the tree, according to Encinitas park and beach officials. Half-dead, with sickly branches, the tree is scheduled for removal on, or about, Thursday, Jan. 13, said Terry Smith, Encinitas park and beach supervisor.

Although permits usually are required to remove the regionally unique and protected tree, Encinitas officials said they didn't need no stinkin' permit because the tree was on city property. Therefore, once an arborist conducted an inspection and the public duly notified, Torrey pine adios, according to officials.

Not to fret, city oficials will use taxpayer money to landsape the area with non-pine trees so it looks kinda the same.

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Tired of Driving? Trains, buses go '07 retro, lowering prices to get you tickets to ride

 What the heck, time to ride local mass transit as if it were 2007.

The North County Transit District is rolling back fares on Coaster trains and the Breeze bus system to 2007 prices.

Bus fares drop by a quarter, to $1.75 on Jan. 20. Also, Coaster fares will be reduced from four zones to three zones and Coaster monthly passes will decrease as much as 22 percent, Alex Wiggins, NCTD spokesman, said.

The zone reduction helps single fare passengers too. A Coaster passenger traveling from Oceanside to Solana Beach, for example, will pay $4 one way, rather than the current $5.50.

If the program fails to attract new riders, NCTD expects to lose $125,000 in Breeze bus revenue and $380,000 in Coaster revenue, according to a staff analysis.

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Meet the new Carmel Valley Top Cop, a missive from Adrian Lee, SDPD community relations officer

“Dear Citizens of Northwestern Division,

For the past 15 months, Captain Miguel Rosario has commanded the Northwestern Division, which includes the neighborhoods of Carmel Valley, Del Mar Heights, North City, Torrey Pines Preserve, Black Mountain Ranch, Del Sur, Torrey Highlands and Sorrento Valley.

Captain Rosario has worked tirelessly by providing the very best service to the residents and workers of Northwestern Division via community meetings, advisory boards, forums and a large email tree with hundreds of residents signed on. Captain Rosario has made it his goal and mission statement, to reduce crime by building a solid relationship and partnership with the community.

“Captain Rosario is now being transferred to Southern Division to serve the community members there. (Duty calls.) His leadership will be missed, but it will be filled immediately by incoming Captain Albert Guaderrama. Captain Rosario would like to thank all of those in the community who supported him as he commanded the Northwestern Division.”

Adrian Lee, Community Relations Officer
San Diego P.D. NW Division