Aurora CO Theater Massacre

[seemslikeadream]

FWIW, I was in pre-med for 2 and a half years, made straight A's, and it started to drive me a little crazy. No exaggeration. It's the reason I stopped and never went back to that stuff.

As far as Colorado, it's always attracted eccentric people. All the way back to the first white folks that adopted it, anyway. I lived there for years and researched quite a bit of its history while I was there. Place is as haunted as fuck, too. In the mountains there are many pockets of deep power, both positive and negative. I had a lot of strange experiences there.

Nordic, this is very true; it IS haunted as fuck...and the air force academy is on one of those really strange spots. I don't know, maybe he is the lone crazy shooter, but i really don't like the way the media is hyping for 'more security at theaters'. Maybe the media spin is the conspiracy, but i still have a really bad feeling about this.

Yes. Colorado is haunted by something. I do not know what it is. I know I always feel at a deep unease when I go back. Something just doesn't add up when I go back there. And again, I do not know what it is. . .

Third Bridge

Native Americans are massacred at Sand Creek, Colorado

On this day in 1864, peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians are massacred by a band of Colonel John Chivington's Colorado volunteers at Sand Creek, Colorado.

The causes of the Sand Creek massacre were rooted in the long conflict for control of the Great Plains of eastern Colorado. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 guaranteed ownership of the area north of the Arkansas River to the Nebraska border to the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. However, by the end of the decade, waves of Euro-American miners flooded across the region in search of gold in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, placing extreme pressure on the resources of the arid plains. By 1861, tensions between new settlers and Native Americans were rising. On February 8 of that year, a Cheyenne delegation, headed by Chief Black Kettle, along with some Arapahoe leaders, accepted a new settlement with the Federal government. The Native Americans ceded most of their land but secured a 600-square mile reservation and annuity payments. The delegation reasoned that continued hostilities would jeopardize their bargaining power. In the decentralized political world of the tribes, Black Kettle and his fellow delegates represented only part of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes. Many did not accept this new agreement, called the Treaty of Fort Wise.

The new reservation and Federal payments proved unable to sustain the tribes. During the Civil War, tensions again rose and sporadic violence broke out between Anglos and Native Americans. In June 1864, John Evans, governor of the territory of Colorado, attempted to isolate recalcitrant Native Americans by inviting "friendly Indians" to camp near military forts and receive provisions and protection. He also called for volunteers to fill the military void left when most of the regular army troops in Colorado were sent to other areas during the Civil War. In August 1864, Evans met with Black Kettle and several other chiefs to forge a new peace, and all parties left satisfied. Black Kettle moved his band to Fort Lyon, Colorado, where the commanding officer encouraged him to hunt near Sand Creek. In what can only be considered an act of treachery, Chivington moved his troops to the plains, and on November 29, they attacked the unsuspecting Native Americans, scattering men, women, and children and hunting them down. The casualties reflect the one-sided nature of the fight. Nine of Chivington's men were killed; 148 of Black Kettle's followers were slaughtered, more than half of them women and children. The Colorado volunteers returned and killed the wounded, mutilated the bodies, and set fire to the village.

The atrocities committed by the soldiers were initially praised, but then condemned as the circumstances of the massacre emerged. Chivington resigned from the military and aborted his budding political career. Black Kettle survived and continued his peace efforts. In 1865, his followers accepted a new reservation in Indian Territory.

The Hungate Massacre

On June 11, 1864, an Indian raiding party believed to be
Arapahos attacked and brutally murdered a young family
on the Issac Van Wormer ranch near Box Elder Creek
(vicinity of present-day Elizabeth, Colorado). A small
posse of ranchers, freighters and soldiers searching for
Indian cattle thieves soon discovered the hideously
mutilated bodies of Van Wormer’s ranch hand, Nathan
Hungate, his wife Ellen, and two daughters, Laura (age
two), and Florence (five months). Hungate's body was
mutilated and scalped, Ellen had been raped before she
was stabbed repeatedly and scalped, and the children
were nearly decapitated. Van Wormer, who was away
from the ranch at the time, undoubtedly escaped a
similar fate.

The horrified and angry freighters brought the ravaged
Hungate bodies to Denver and displayed them in the
center of town, sending a shock wave across the
Colorado Territory. Although the Sand Creek Massacre
was the culmination of settlers’ anger over many other
larger Indian raids after the Hungate murders, this
specific incident became a focal point of Governor
Evans’ argument that the Indians had initiated a full-scale
war against the citizens of the Plains territories.

THE DANCE OF DEATH
A strange belief swept through the Indians tribes. I guess it came out of sheer desperation. A Paiute called Wovoka told them to dance the GHOST DANCE and their dead ancestor would rise and come to their defence. That would banish the white man from America. The result was that the tribes became hostile and aggressive but did not banish the white man.
It came to a head at Wounded Knee in Dakota 1890. The Seventh Cavalry trying to disarm a band of Sioux and their Chief Big Foot. The result was 200 dead mostly women and children which was the end. 1890 the frontier was officially declared closed and America's white man's land stretched from coast to coast.

WE SHALL LIVE AGAIN


Ghost Dance

The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. . . . The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hour


When all is ready, the leaders walk out to the dance place,
and facing inward, join hands so as to form a small circle. Then, without moving from their places they sing the opening song, according to previous agreement, in a soft undertone. having sung it through once they raise their voices to their full strength and repeat it, this time slowly circling around in the dance



Mooney then made several unillustrated comments about the number of repetitions of the song based on the circumference of the circle, about the Indians' innate ability to "keep the blanket in place," the lack of any accompaniment with rattle, drum or other instrument, rest periods. In the final paragraphs of this section, Mooney gave a brief discussion of the "Crow Dance"
Within the last few years the southern Arapaho and Cheyenne have developed an ancillary dance called the "crow dance," which is performed in the afternoon as a preliminary to the regular Ghost dance at night. As it is no part of the original Ghost dance and is confined to these two tribes, it deserves no extended notice in this connection. . . . Hypnotism and trances form an essential feature of this as of the Ghost Dance proper.


Mooney ended this chapter with an extended discussion and illustration of the "Hypnotic Process." This was illustrated with the plate "Praying":

[DrVolin]

So not only is the person of interest missing, but so is the room mate? And a navy person? And the victims were in crypto and IT Security? And the father runs a DARPA project on neural nets? And the grandfather was a LTCol who commanded a Nike battery and then taught high school? And the kid and the person of interest were both in neuroscience? The plot thickens doesn't begin to cover it.

[Twyla LaSarc]

@ Twyla

While the clown may be the trickster, etc, when I watched The Dark Knight, I got the distinct impression that the Joker wasn't really the "agent of chaos" he claimed to be. His joker persona was just a mask, similar to the Batman persona as a mask for Bruce Wayne. So, who is the Joker underneath the mask?

Having read my share of ancient mythology studies, it seems to me that chaos is assimilated to nature, specifically the jungle, as represented by deities like Tiamat. Then, the civilizing god, such as Marduk, comes, slays Tiamat, and makes civilization from the raw materials derived from her carcass. Chaos is neither good nor evil, it is perhaps, ambivalent, both creating and destroying with a great degree of randomness. The randomness and the destructiveness aspect are what make agents of order so fearful of it. They work so hard to build something, and then chaotic principles, seemingly inevitably, destroy what they have built.
But it doesn't seem that chaos likes conscious, willing agents. It is more a force of nature, and less people consciously acting out principles of chaos. Individual life-forms are inherently orderly, in my opinion, since they have to maintain a certain order to survive.

Often times, the newspapers will try to turn a criminal or a serial killer into an "agent of chaos," but if you examine their life story, you invariably find, if they can be categorized as "sane," that when they commit crimes or atrocities, there are traced to easily determined causes, such as a reaction to being disempowered, or wanting something tantalizingly out of reach and being frustrated at not being able to obtain it. Their crimes are a byproduct of our social structure, and not necessarily part of some mysterious, esoteric force at work.

So, I guess I don't believe the Joker when he says he's an "agent of chaos," anymore than I would believe Batman if he says that he's an "agent of order," which I don't believe he ever does in the films. The Joker acts like a brilliant insurgent general, moving his troops around like pieces on a chess-board, and outmaneuvering his enemies at almost every turn. This is a far cry from the chaos principle embodied by the Invisibles, who don't have a strict hiearchy, but constantly rotate leadership positions, and who constantly question their own motives for similar actions. He also displays a post-doctoral level understanding of human psychology, to the extent that rather than merely theorizing, he actually knows how to manipulate people, and he actually manipulates people into murdering each other, as well as turning Dent evil. That requires an "order" level of planning.

The fact that Nolan, who made Memento, put this into his film, deliberately, suggests that he may be trying to communicate a deeper meaning.

Good observation about the Invisibles. Love those books. That is true chaos.

I guess I was talking about the tawdry simulacrum that passes for chaos these days and plays on certain dark and slippery archetypes for expression.

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

I am reading conflicting reports as to how the gunman got in the theatre. First I heard that someone answered their cell phone, got up and left via the exit, Holmes uses his foot to stop the door from completely closing. Secondly, this cell phone person holds the door open for him, then leaves. Thirdly, Holmes kicks the door in. Which is it?

Every theatre I've been in, the emergency doors have no door handles on the outside, can only be opened from the inside. I seriously doubt Holmes could have kicked in the door with just one kick. Maybe he ran at it, MAYBE that could have kicked the door in. If the first two scenarios are true, who is the cell phone person? The first scenario sounds like someone had good timing and got out of there just in time. Or it was his signal to open the door. In the second scenario, it clearly implies an accomplice.

[Twyla LaSarc]

it may be the stress and overall situation were just too much, I knew a pre-med kid back in the late 80s who wound up getting bad grades, and he couldn't handle it, everything up to that point had been pushing so hard, the failure was just too much to take, he took his own life in the dorm bathroom, all hushed up of course. I wonder how many pre-meds suicide each year? Now-a-days, it's even worse, this fellow probably devoted EVERYTHING his whole life to become a super-doctor achievotron unit. It's so demanding. He did very well, up to a point. Then it looked like everything was doomed, he and/or his family were likely looking at huge debts, with no job prospects anymore, even if they'd had the money, getting back into the program would not have been easy. Rather than deal with it and find a plan B, he went berserk. Would like to know his funding source, was he on loans or was his family footing the bills? Are all those guns and ammo sitting on dad's credit card right now?

some comment from someone who knew him said he'd been working at McDonnalds to "pay for college" well, more likely dad made him get a job while waiting for admission, or he was on his own and needed some income while waiting on loans to come through. How this was all financed will tell a lot.

Could just be he found the program to be MUCH harder than what he was used to, or "something" or someone else happened, but this was also likely his first time far from family.

The premed training fucks with your head. You are taught to dehumanize everything. All is about evolutionary pressures, and the results. It takes the beauty out of everything in life. This is difficult to handle. You start looking at every living organism around you simply as the result of millions of years of evolutionary pressures, just so much organized meat. I couldn't even rub my dog's belly without thinking of everything just inside the skin, and why it was there, and how it ended up where it did. I remember one time looking down at my own feet in the shower, and getting completely freaked out by them. One day in Algebra class, looking at my fellow students as non-human, they were organisms, and I was seeing them as an alien from another planet might.

I couldn't even look at a tree as just a beautiful tree. It was a thing, a biological machine, a collection of tubes and cells and functions.

Everything starts looking like an ant. Even yourself. You could squash it and kill it, and what would it matter? In the world they train you to behold, there is no love, no morals, no spirit, no beauty.

I guess that's why I had a job as a simulated patient for a few years. Gotta train the kids to see us as humans again. Cold humans in need of warm hands and draping.

My first 'religious experience' occurred while watching Cosmos and lying with my head on the family dog. IIRC, Sagan began to describe cellular processes beginning with pulse/heartbeat and describing cellular function, etc deeper and deeper into the body and I was entranced and 'inside' the body of my dog observing these wonders. I saw the tubes, organs, functions,etc limned by love and vibrant being- it was indescribable and ecstatic.

I am sorry Nordic. I know they are trying to steel you from futility and death in those programs, but to strip the life from it is heinous.

[peartreed]

While contemplating the unspeakable tragedy of the theater massacre, and what kind of mind might find motivation to murder innocents on that scale, I was reminded of another young man I know well who found escape from a very strict upbringing in playing violent video games, following radical rock bands and identifying openly with anarchist extremists turning protests into rampaging riots.

Apparently like the shooter, he is ironically of above-average academic intelligence and fared fairly well in scholastics despite his antisocial personal interests.

What also struck me about him was that his obsessions and fantasies about rebellion seemed more real to him than the family-enforced tight regimen of his education, religious indoctrination and upper-class social conditioning. That containment was the “game” he played while the “reality” of its rejection and rebellion became his real identity and release as he evolved away from home.

He and the shooter are apparently not alone in this extreme social escapism. Many of their generation end up converting their socially-oppressed lives into the glory of gangs, goons and gun-play in an egregious excess that defies everything precious to their parenting precepts.

They frame their lives with an imaginative display screen of their own fantasies.

Like their comic book icons of aggression, the radical rappers in their earphones and the mass-media monsters of mayhem in the headlines, they seek infamy over autonomy – their moment among the monsters of history – as a bloody signature before they return to the prison and confinement orchestrated by convention.

I suspect, like my acquaintance whose military family had later earned a living with defense contracting, the influence of corrupt militarism probably contributed to their antisocial convictions about cultural containment. But the explosion of their individual, violent vendetta is more likely a calamitous scream for a suppressed sociopath’s sick self-actualization amidst a milieu of mad entertainment media.

[barracuda]

A screen capture of the top of my Google News feed for the last twenty-four hours:



Yeah, we're not gonna glamourize this thing.

[Nordic]

I am sorry Nordic. I know they are trying to steel you from futility and death in those programs, but to strip the life from it is heinous.

Well. My take on it has always been that I was just too sensitive to deal with it. I got out of it, but many others may not and may not realize what damage is being done to them. Especially if they're under a lot of familial pressure to be Dr's. And there's a LOT of that in pre-med. Kids whose fathers are doctors tended to be quite desperate about making it into med school. They would lie, cheat, whatever it took. So a sensitive soul who can see no other alternative lest he suffer heavy father disapproval might just stick with it and take some serious damage.

To this day I wish I had been able to handle it. I think I could now, but I'm 50 and it's kinda late to start over.

So not only is the person of interest missing, but so is the room mate? And a navy person? And the victims were in crypto and IT Security? And the father runs a DARPA project on neural nets? And the grandfather was a LTCol who commanded a Nike battery and then taught high school? And the kid and the person of interest were both in neuroscience? The plot thickens doesn't begin to cover it.

Yeah NO KIDDING!!!

[alwyn]

this links back to SOTT...

iall Bradley and Joe Quinn
Sott.net
Sat, 21 Jul 2012 10:20 CDT
Print
© Karl Gehring / The Denver Post via AP
The Century 16 movie theater early on Friday morning, July 20, 2012. A 24-year-old man gave himself up to police after telling them he "possibly" had explosives in his home.
Claiming 70 victims, 12 confirmed dead and 58 injured, the mass shooting Friday at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, about 10 miles from Denver, is the worst mass shooting in US history. Cinema goers were 30 minutes into a sold-out midnight screening of the newly-released third installment of the Dark Knight Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, when someone described by witnesses as dressed "entirely in black" in full SWAT/riot gear - including gas mask, ballistic helmet, bullet-proof vest, bullet-proof leggings, throat and groin protection, and black tactical gloves - entered an emergency side exit of the theater.

After releasing cannisters of tear gas into the packed movie theater, he proceeded to calmly shoot members of the audience, picking off anyone who tried to escape along the aisles. Most of the movie-goers were between 15 and 25 years of age. When the gunman decided he was done, he exited the way he came, downed his weapon and gave himself up to police. A law enforcement source told CBS News the suspect was well-equipped, with one rifle, two handguns and a knife. There were also unidentified explosives found in his vehicle. He also informed them about "possible" explosives in his apartment. When Aurora police showed up at the University of Colorado medical campus address, they found his apartment rigged with trip wires, thousands of rounds of ammunition, jars full of highly flammable liquid that would explode on mixing and 30 improvised grenades. Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said "I personally have never seen anything like what the pictures show us is in there."


24 year old student James Holmes, who was studying towards a PhD in neuroscience until he apparently dropped out in June.
The chief suspect is 24-year-old James Holmes, a graduate medical student pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Colorado. He had no previous history of trouble with the law.

Colleagues and friends have been coming forward to express shock that Holmes could be responsible for the shootout. Billy Kromka worked with Holmes for three months last summer and told the New York Times, "It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to commit an atrocity like this." A former high school classmate, Keith Goodwin, called Holmes a "generally pleasant guy," and stated that "James was certainly not someone I would have ever imagined shooting somebody." Dan Kim, a 23-year-old student at University of California San Diego, called Holmes a "super-nice kid," "kinda quiet" and "really smart."

Professors have also spoken favorably of Holmes, who was an honor student and "academically, he was at the top of the top." Kelly Huffman, an assistant professor of psychology at University of California Riverside described him as "a smart and quiet guy."

How many times before have we come across this glaring inconsistency between the cold hard facts of a shooting and the real character of the chief suspect? The 'crazed lone shooter' has no history of violence, let alone psychopathic tendencies, is evidently very intelligent and has great character references from friends and colleagues. It's always possible that he was hiding a dark side, but a medical student planning such an attack with tens of thousands of dollars worth of weapons, armor and sophisticated explosives, on his own and of his own volition, takes us into the realm of the bizarre.


James Holmes apparently dyed his hair orange as part of his role-playing 'The Joker'. the psychopathic villain most recently played by deceased Australian actor Heath Ledger, who died from a drug overdose in 2008 after completing filming for the 2nd instalment of the Dark Knight Trilogy.
Colorado Movie Theater Shooting: 70 Victims The Largest Mass Shooting

Holmes was apprehended within minutes of the 12:39 a.m. shooting at his car behind the theater, where police found him in full riot gear and carrying three weapons, including a AR-15 assault rifle, which can hold upwards of 100 rounds, a Remington 12 gauge shot gun, and a .40 Glock handgun. A fourth handgun was found in the vehicle.

According to police sources, Holmes told the officers arresting him that he was "The Joker," referring to the villain in the second installment of the Batman movie trilogy, "The Dark Knight." He also warned police that he had booby-trapped his apartment, leading officers to evacuate the Aurora apartment building.

Police Chief Dan Oates said today that police and bomb squads have found a large number of explosive devices and trip wires at Holmes' apartment and have not yet decided how to proceed without setting off explosions.

At one point the shooter exited the theater only to wait outside the doors and pick off patrons as they tried to exit, witness Jennifer Seeger told "Good Afternoon America." [...]

Federal law enforcement sources tell ABC News that Holmes bought a ticket to the movie, slipped out of the theater once it began and propped open the emergency exit before gathering his weapons and gear and coming back into the theater. Once inside, he opened fire.

The FBI might be saying that now, but at least one witness described it differently, stating that he saw someone else let the gunman inside once the movie started. Here's what he told local TV station KCNC:

"As I was sitting down to get my seat, I noticed that a person came up to the front row, the front right, sat down, and as credits were going, it looked like he got a phone call. He went out toward the emergency exit doorway, which I thought was unusual to take a phone call. And it seemed like he probably pried it open, or probably did not let it latch all the way. As soon as the movie started, somebody came in, all black, gas mask, armor, and threw a gas can into the audience, and it went off, and then there were gunshots that took place."

So Holmes probably had an accomplice. That makes sense because last time we tried, you can't walk through an emergency exit from the outside without it being opened from the inside.

One of the victims was young sports blogger named Jessica Ghawi. She was sharing her excitement about the screening via Twitter right up until the moment all hell broke loose. In yet another bizarre turn of events, it turns out that Jessica nearly met an identical fate just six weeks ago. Ghawi blogged at length on 5th June about surviving the Eaton Centre mall shooting in Toronto that killed two and injured several others.


Victim: Jessica Ghawi, an aspiring TV presenter, was one of the 12 people shot dead in the massacre. She was tweeting about her excitement at seeing the film until moments before her death. She also narrowly avoided meeting a similar fate in the mall shooting in Toronto on 2 June this year.
I can't get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won't go away. I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court. An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm's way. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting.

What started off as a trip to the mall to get sushi and shop, ended up as a day that has forever changed my life. I was on a mission to eat sushi that day, and when I'm on a mission, nothing will deter me. When I arrived at the Eaton Center mall, I walked down to the food court and spotted a sushi restaurant. Instead of walking in, sitting down and enjoying sushi, I changed my mind, which is very unlike me, and decided that a greasy burger and poutine would do the trick. I rushed through my dinner. I found out after seeing a map of the scene, that minutes later a man was standing in the same spot I just ate at and opened fire in the food court full of people. Had I had sushi, I would've been in the same place where one of the victims was found.

My receipt shows my purchase was made at 6:20 pm. After that purchase I said I felt funny. It wasn't the kind of funny you feel after spending money you know you shouldn't have spent. It was almost a panicky feeling that left my chest feeling like something was missing. A feeling that was overwhelming enough to lead me to head outside in the rain to get fresh air instead of continuing back into the food court to go shopping at SportChek. The gunshots rung out at 6:23. Had I not gone outside, I would've been in the midst of gunfire.

Then there's this FBI Roll Call Release published on 17 May declaring that terrorists are "interested in attacking theaters". How about that for incredible foreknowledge? First al Qaeda and forest fires and now this. All that remains is to concoct some connection between Holmes and anything Islamic and the US media will have a field day.

© FBI
You can download the 'Roll Call Release' here.

© Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post
Trail of blood: A line of blood leads from the emergency exit of the cinema, from where someone entered the theater with the help of an accomplice from the inside. The mass shooting ended when the gunman exited by this same door, downed his firearm and surrendered to police. The car in the foreground belongs to the suspect.
Here is yet another sickening and bizarre 'coincidence'. One of the pre-movie trailers paired with Dark Knight Rises was soon-to-be-released Warner Bros movie Gangster Squad, in which there is a scene where a shootout takes place in a movie theater. So just half an hour before the real thing, the slain Aurora audience may have watched four gunmen burst through the screen and fire automatic weapons into the (fictional) audience. The Gangster Squad trailer was scheduled to be paired with 30% of all this weekend's screenings of Dark Knight Rises until Warner Bros had swapped it with an alternative trailer. Even if the Aurora audience did not see this trailer, it is still a rather startling 'coincidence'.

Dark Knight Rises itself features a villain named Bane who wears a bulletproof vest and gas mask. Trailers for the movie show explosions at public events including a football game.

Given that the details surrounding this shooting point to it being a manufactured event, and that it comes on the heels of the bombing in Bulgaria, we again come to the conclusion that there is a concerted effort being made to spread fear among the global population and thereby reinforce people's dependence on 'strong leaders' to keep them safe from an existential threat - in this case, 'terrorists' and terrorism. The true (and very present) threat to humanity however can be measured by the extent to which the people buy into this manipulation and allow it to obscure the fact that our planet is currently undergoing a major change in the form of severe 'earth changes' that may herald an approaching 'sixth extinction' against which our 'strong leaders' are powerless to protect us. In addition, it may be possible that the extent of the 'earth changes' chaos on the planet at present (and in upcoming months) can be either mitigated or exacerbated depending on whether the masses of humanity begin to wake up to what is going on around them or continue to be bamboozled by the diversionary tactics of the ruling elite."

the article raises some interesting questions...

[alwyn]

My mother was six, when she helped portray to the world what a family life was like, in the shadow of coming war in the Great Dictator, with Charlie Chaplin, and she remembers how they had to alter the end of the movie, because wwII had already started. My father was eight or nine, when the Blitzkrieg rolled across Belgium and a soldier at 12 or 13.
I tell you now from both the family lineage, and the sight that God gave me that what we are seeing now has uncannily unpleasant echos of things past. I remember, from my family tales, how first, the definitions of words were 'changed', and then the change became law, people were arrested who had not heard about the change, or had the old context for the change. Next came bullying spectacles, of hurt, blood, and guts, and people were both traumatized and threatened into calling for more security. The
'government' manufactured and bought more arms, which they then turned upon the people, and the cabalist shadow government of the arms dealers and financial wizards laughed their hellish laugh all the way to the bank. It has always been thus and so. My family remembers. And current events are starting to look an awful lot like the past ones.

[Nordic]

My mother was six, when she helped portray to the world what a family life was like, in the shadow of coming war in the Great Dictator, with Charlie Chaplin, and she remembers how they had to alter the end of the movie, because wwII had already started. My father was eight or nine, when the Blitzkrieg rolled across Belgium and a soldier at 12 or 13.
I tell you now from both the family lineage, and the sight that God gave me that what we are seeing now has uncannily unpleasant echos of things past. I remember, from my family tales, how first, the definitions of words were 'changed', and then the change became law, people were arrested who had not heard about the change, or had the old context for the change. Next came bullying spectacles, of hurt, blood, and guts, and people were both traumatized and threatened into calling for more security. The
'government' manufactured and bought more arms, which they then turned upon the people, and the cabalist shadow government of the arms dealers and financial wizards laughed their hellish laugh all the way to the bank. It has always been thus and so. My family remembers. And current events are starting to look an awful lot like the past ones.

Yes, and accordingly my views on gun ownership have changed.

Largely due to current events, and this quote:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” -- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

I'm not saying I have any guns. Because actually I don't. But it's not a bad idea.

[DrVolin]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if...-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

They would have pre-emtively blown up city blocks and burned down compounds.

[Iamwhomiam]

It's all so very sad, really. What's the point of such violence?

Please don't come to premature conclusions, cptmarginal, by claiming he is insane, though we all feel his actions were indeed mad. There is simply no evidence that he is.

"I have of course seen no evidence of this being "staged" or whatever - and have no idea of why he ended up going insane."

His acting insane in jail is just what any sane person would do to avoid responsibility for their actions.

Mr. WRex, is it legal to sell body armor to civilians, or for civilians to possess such gear? I don't believe it is in either case.

Handsome, it would not be possible to "kick-in" and emergency exit door because they all by law must open outwards, and for very good reason.

Today would have been my son's 39th birthday.

Very sad indeed.

[8bitagent]

While contemplating the unspeakable tragedy of the theater massacre, and what kind of mind might find motivation to murder innocents on that scale, I was reminded of another young man I know well who found escape from a very strict upbringing in playing violent video games, following radical rock bands and identifying openly with anarchist extremists turning protests into rampaging riots.

Apparently like the shooter, he is ironically of above-average academic intelligence and fared fairly well in scholastics despite his antisocial personal interests.

What also struck me about him was that his obsessions and fantasies about rebellion seemed more real to him than the family-enforced tight regimen of his education, religious indoctrination and upper-class social conditioning. That containment was the “game” he played while the “reality” of its rejection and rebellion became his real identity and release as he evolved away from home.

So then let's talk about the actual movie, The Dark Knight Rises. I just saw it today. In the film Bane is determined and obsessed with reshaping and completely transforming society through
chaos and brute force, often in shocking array. Unlike the Joker, he clearly says what his goals are. Bane is extremely smart, unlike how he had been portrayed previously. But there also seems to be a much more deeper agenda at play as later revealed. But in the film, the Occupy crowd is the bad guys, and the super rich/authority are the good guys.

[8bitagent]

A screen capture of the top of my Google News feed for the last twenty-four hours:



Yeah, we're not gonna glamourize this thing.

One of those men, has sure as hell killed a lot more than 12 innocent people.