Recently in Killing Category

Census worker Bill Sparkman was found hanged in the backwoods of Kentucky.  He was 51.  Was Bill's death born of institutional hatred or did he die because of a misfiring consciousness?

There's a "Beaner" hate in Patchogue, New York so strong that people are being beaten and murdered -- and to comprehend the vileness of the crimes, you need to understand that "Beaner" is a derogatory term for Latinos.  The rest of the history of violence flows from that ethnic slur.

It's alarming to open up a web browser to discover you died on July 1, 2009:

The killing of Neda Agha-Soltan during the election turmoil in Iran has become an instant semiotic full of rage and mortal memeing.  Neda's bloody death mask is now the face of hope for repressed Iranian citizens looking for a way out of the morass of religious repression.

We have never been a fan of Donald Rumsfeld's bloodthirst and his self-congratulatory parades -- but the revelation this week of his purposeful injection of the Bible into United States War Policy in order to salve a contemptible Commander in Chief -- is the beginning of the melting away of the Bad Bush Policy that brought us to war in the Middle East, and Obama better get out of the way of the truth, or he'll get washed under with Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush as a co-conspirator in the torture cover up and in the unholy war against the Muslim faithful.  GQ magazine -- known more for celebrating men's style than revealing war atrocities - published the cover pages for Rumsfeld's Top Secret "Worldwide Intelligence Update" where Bible quotes were pasted over United States soldiers in action to help Bush find comfort in the blood he was letting.

This Urban Semiotic blog has been dedicated -- for the last five years or so -- to digging up and discovering the signs, images and visual imprints that coerce the city core.  After writing over 2,000 articles for you here, I can confidently share with you the American Urban Center is governed by, and dug into, two unflayable, and perpetually un-learnable, lessons in dueling images:  The Bullet and The Body.

Erik Harper, age 11, had a deal with his grandmother.  If Joseph Randolph Mays, the man living with him and his Deaf mother, and his younger brother Dakota, ever tried to really hurt them -- it was an open secret in the family that Mays was physically beating all of them -- Erik would send her an emergency text message in code: "The Sky is Blue" that meant they were in real danger and she should call 911.