Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee

It's about 4:30pm EST as of this writing, and I'm watching the news coverage unfold of a man named James Jay Lee who has hijacked the Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, MD.

Lee apparently has a history of protesting outside the Discovery Channel's headquarters, and was arrested in 2008 for throwing money at people coming and going out of the offices. His website, now taken down, featured a rambling, incoherent, childishly written manifesto full of caps-lock and exclamation points. The upshot of his "argument" is that there are too many human beings in the world, and mass depopulation is in order to save the planet. His self-proclaimed mission is, quote, "stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies" and he demands that the Discovery Channel start airing programming that supports his position.

Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen. For Mr. Lee to believe he could make a cable network start generating programming espousing his beliefs by holding hostages in their own offices, well, that's the apex of stupidity. Did he see movies like Airheads and King of Comedy and mistakenly come to think that one could really do something like that in the real world? Evidently he did.

This monumental ignorance seems at direct odds with his manifesto's reference to lofty concepts like Malthusian Theory and the "New Tribalist Movement" embodied in the works of Daniel Quinn. The conspiracy theorist in me finds something about this whole incident just not jibing. There's a cognitive dissonance even within Lee's manifesto itself, which seems to me to be the work of two different people - the differing writing styles and education levels can clearly be seen contrasting one another when one looks at the text analytically.

I'll be very interested to see what happens next with this James Lee guy, and what we learn about him. Something about all this stinks to high heaven.

(His myspace page lists Star Trek's Captain James. T. Kirk as being his hero. Somehow, I don't think this cowardly bit of TV terrorism would be Kirk's style. Maybe Lee, in his muddled thinking, believed he was employing some sort of heroic subterfuge or sabotage (or as Shatner would say, "sab-a-taaaaage") in the vein of The Corbomite Manuever or The Enterprise Mission.)