UPDATE: Gunman Shot and Killed After Hostage Standoff at Discovery Channel Building
A man known for protesting the Discovery Channel's environmental programming stormed the network's Maryland headquarters carrying a handgun on Wednesday, holding three people hostage for hours until he was shot and killed by police, according to authorities.
He entered the building in Silver Spring around 1 p.m. and appeared to have a bomb strapped to his chest, police said. After hours of negotiations, the Montgomery County Police Department announced just before 5 p.m. that they had set off smoke bombs, allowing sharp-shooters to take the gunman down. All hostages escaped safely.
...Police sources have reportedly said that Lee previously protested outside the building, where he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in February 2008, according to court records.
Police reports indicate he paid homeless people to join his protest and carry signs outside the building. He gave one individual $1,000 for what he considered a prize winning essay.
At one point, a crowd of more than 100 people gathered around Lee, who referred to money as "just trash" and began throwing fistfuls of it into the air.
At the trial, Lee reportedly said he began working to save the planet after being laid off from his job in San Diego. He said he was inspired by "Ishmael," a novel by environmentalist Daniel Quinn and by former Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
Thomas Leonard, Lee's brother-in-law, told Fox News that Lee became a "darker type of character" after some deaths in the family and said he believed Lee was capable of killing.
Leonard described Lee as "talented but misguided" and said his "spirit took a nose-dive" in recent months.
"He's been very hurtful to loved ones who have tried to help him over the years," Leonard said.
I think it's possible, even likely, that Lee wanted to die. Holding a gun to a hostage and threatening to kill him is a sure way to get police to use lethal force.
I think he was on a suicide mission. In Lee's twisted mind, he may have thought he'd be considered a martyr for the cause.
I suppose some environmental extremists will award him that status.
Thankfully, all the hostages were rescued unharmed.
______________
As the hostage situation at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, continues to play out, more is being learned about the man behind the terror.
TMZ has posted the hostage-taker's manifesto.
The guy is an environmental extremist. He has a big problem with procreation.
Among his demands:
1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!
2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.
3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!
4. Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??
5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)
6. Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don't build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!
His rambling goes on and on.
He rants about war and violence, yet he's using violent tactics himself. Lee is obviously a very disturbed individual.
Hopefully, the guy will be satisfied with the attention he's getting and not use the gun or explosives to harm anyone.
Does Lee represent all global warming proponents and environmental activists? Of course not.
Are they responsible for Lee's actions? Absolutely not.
More:
Who Is James Lee?
James J. Lee, 43, has run a one-man protest against the Discovery Channel. He is the man who has been named as the suspect who is believed to have taken at least one hostage at the company's suburban Washington, D.C. headquarters.__________________
He operates the Web site savetheplanetprotest.com. The site contains a list of demands for changes at the channel.
It starts with the line, "The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:"
Lee has also conducted protests outside of the Discovery Channel headquarters building in Silver Spring, Md. and was reportedly arrested in February 2008 in connection with a week-long protest he had planned for February 15-23, 2008.
...James Lee has a MySpace page. He says that he's 5'11" tall and from Hawaii. He described himself as an atheist who did not want children in his profile.
His last post at 10:06 AM Jan 22, 2008 said, "Lee says: It's time for REVOLUTION!!!"
James Jay Lee's title sequence for his proposed Discovery Channel show, Race to Save the Planet.
Video.
8 comments:
He's making good points. Human population will grow until it collapses, one way or the other. Trying to reach out for people to understand this is a noble cause, but it won't help. It's in our nature to breed and it's destructive to both the human population in the long run, and the environment around us.
Maybe I'm selfish, but I wonder how he thinks that people as a group will get behind a program that involves them spending the rest of their lives working to save other species (a good idea, if impractical for most people) while ensuring the extinction of their own (a bad idea, from a biological perspective).
Do I think we should aim for Zero Population Growth? Yes, of course, we have an insupportable population using current methods, especially considering that very few people in the "First World" are going to say, "Hey, I wanna subsist on a 1200-1600 calorie diet, eat no meat (yes I know that some people are vegetarian/vegan for many reasons - not my point) and work myself to death in an increasingly collapsing society so that animals can retake the world and resume killing each other as normal!"
Boy, where do I sign up for that?
Black Rose,
I just arrived from Thailand a few weeks ago and after being surrounded by mostly thin to normal body types, my eyes took some time to adjust to the many obese people in America. If not obese, significantly overweight. They are EVERYWHERE. From the looks of things here, a 1200-1600 calorie diet would not hurt many people! While I do not condone what this guy did by any means, I agree with the one theme of his manifesto. The system in place now is not working for us.
The Evolution Will Not be Televised: A Green Anarchist Reply to James J. Lee
Yesterday an unusual story arose out of the usual static emanating from the news media. A middle-aged man stormed the Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland, USA and took hostages. A standoff ensued between the man and police, ending when the police killed the man, Jason J. Lee. Not long after the situation was brought to a head, Lee's manifesto came out. Evidently Lee held some very singular views regarding civilization, and demanded the Discovery Channel air programming elaborating his views.
Lee has already been stuck with the dismissive label of insanity by those who wield unseemly degrees of control over common discourse—the very capitalist media he targeted. Doubtless Lee was possessed of an unstable psychology. In the coming days the capitalist news media will thoroughly flesh out his psychological profile, and use this as an excuse to avoid examining his odd philosophy. Soon the news cycle will move on to some other events and Lee will leave the common consciousness as quickly as he appeared.
Before that happens, I have decided to seize the moment and compare the theory and actions of James Lee to those of Green Anarchism. Though clearly the work of a troubled, desperate and erratic mind, Lee's manifesto raises many important points too often excluded in common discourse. His manifesto bears many similarities to Green Anarchist thought, yet is obviously uninformed by the rich theoretical tradition that has developed within the Green Anarchist milieu in the past few decades. In this essay I will attempt to demonstrate that, though Lee's personal views do not appear to have been coherently processed in his own mind, that they are but one manifestation of a trend which is quickly growing in ranks. I call this trend the anti-civilization movement.
What is the Anti-civilization movement?
Broadly speaking we can say that as long as civilization has existed there have been those that have opposed it. So-called “primitive” societies have always resisted falling under the yoke of civilization from the forgotten tribes of Mesopotamia, to the native peoples of North America and Africa, to the least remaining primitive societies in deepest Amazonia and Papua New Guinea. civilization has destroyed the ancient, earth-based traditions of countless societies and replaced them with a monotonous, unsustainable and oppressive system. civilization has denuded the Earth of vast forests in its ever-increasing desire for more agricultural land and has enslaved humans, animals and plants in the process.
Slaves and primitives are not the only ones to have rebelled against civilization. The privileged classes of civilized societies have also had their rebels, including: Henry David Thoreau, Edward Carpenter, Ralph Borsodi and Sigmund Freud. Among Europeans of the era of colonization the trope of the “noble savage” became popular, due mostly to reports of the uncivilized ways of life of native Americans. The first hand accounts of the colonization of the United States are full of mentions of whites and blacks that willingly left civilized life to go live with the indians. Even today anthropologists and others feel the urge to “go native.”
As the anti-civilization tendency has built momentum in recent decades three distinct threads of anti-civilization thought have emerged. The first is that of Daniel Quinn, whose philosophy James Lee embraced. The second is the wilderness protection theory and practice of Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front and other similar groups and individuals. The third is that of the Green Anarchists. Each of these approaches the problem of civilization in different ways.
Daniel Quinn
Quinn is the least radical of the three tendencies. His proposals for overcoming civilization are vague and piecemeal. His non-fiction book Beyond Civilization outlines in the most detail his concept of the New Tribal Revolution. This Revolution would be brought about by “occupational tribalism,” something like a hybrid of small business and circus troupe. These tribes would be semi-self-sufficient, exchanging goods and services with one another. An original concept, but it seems unlikely to truly challenge capitalism, let alone civilization. Quinn can be described as a reformist. The violent actions that took place at the Discovery Channel are surely not ones he would endorse. Curiously, Lee referred only specifically to a passage from Quinn's novel My Ishmael:
One: The revolution won't take place all at once. It's not going to be any sort of coup d'etat like the French or Russian revolutions.
Two: It will be achieved incrementally, by people working off each other's ideas. This is the great driving innovation of the Industrial Revolution.
Three: It will be led by no one. Like the Industrial Revolution, it will need no shepherd, no organizer, no spearhead, no pacesetter, no mastermind at the top; it will be too much for anyone to lead.
Four: It will not be the initiative of any political, governmental, or religious body — again, like the Industrial Revolution. Some will doubtless want to claim to be its supporters and protectors; there are always leaders ready to step forward once others have shown the way.
Five: It has no targeted end point. Why should it have an end point?
Six: It will proceed according to no plan. How on earth could there be a plan?
Seven: It will reward those who further the revolution with the coin of the revolution. In the Industrial Revolution, those who contributed much in the way of product wealth received much in the way of product wealth; in the New Tribal Revolution, those who contribute much in the way of support will receive much in the way of support.
The idea of building a resistance to civilization informed by the Industrial Revolution is paradoxical, but Quinn's ideas may possibly have some merit. Lee's desperate attempt to have these ideas disseminated failed utterly. He did not even include this quote in the text of his manifesto.
Green Anarchist Trajectories
James Lee's actions were those of a deluded and hopeless soul. His plan was ill-conceived, though his target was deserving of the scorn he placed upon it. The capitalist media is a propaganda behemoth. The vast majority of television programming is decaying human minds throughout the world, and should be stopped by any means necessary. It would be wonderful if it could be replaced by edifying, intellectually stimulating programming, but this is a very unlikely occurrence in the near term.
Anarchism emphatically rejects reformism. Classical anarchism rejects the common notions that capitalism and the State can be reformed to be more humane and less oppressive. All efforts at reform have only made the oppression more subtle and sneaky, such as the illusion of choice offered by capitalism, whether in the form of competing products or hundreds of television channels. Green anarchism rejects the notion that civilization in its entirety can be gainfully reformed. Given civilization's 6000+ year track record it is clear that it functions through intimidation, murder (whether mass wars or state murder, AKA “execution,” “capital punishment'), oppression of women and ethnic minorities, destruction of nature, homogenization of culture, psychological manipulation, and finally the industrial regimentation of all life.
The discussion of tactics in Green Anarchism has barely begun. Many favour tactics borrowed from Earth First!/ELF. Others have begun trying to mentally, spiritually and technically “rewild.” As the movement grows we will come up with a diversity of tactics for addressing the problem of civilization.
A standoff ensued between the man and police, ending when the police killed the man, Jason J. Lee.
"Jason J. Lee" was killed by police?
Who is Jason J. Lee?
I think your "essay" needs some major cleaning up.
Is this a first draft?
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