Posts filed under ‘Terror’
Let’s Make This Unnamed Man More Famous Than James Holmes
Yes, people like James Holmes are in this world but so are people like this:
71 People Shot, 12 Dead — the Drudge Report Laughs
It’s just a movie folks, nothing serious, nothing to see here. Move along:
Tea Partiers, neocons and the radical right “media” take their cues from the Drudge Report. This is their take on what happened. As in, meh.
There Will Be More Mass Murders
I so agree with this:
Like everyone, and I’d say especially like every parent, I am of course saddened and horrified by the latest mass shooting-murder. My sympathies to all.
And of course the additional sad, horrifying, and appalling point is the shared American knowledge that, beyond any doubt, this will happen again, and that it will happen in America many, many times before it occurs anywhere else.
Recently I visited the site of the “Port Arthur Massacre,” in Tasmania, where in 1996 a disturbed young man shot and killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. The site is a kind of national shrine; afterwards, Australia tightened up its gun laws, and there has been nothing remotely comparable in all the years since.
[...]
I agree with the Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta about the inevitable pattern of public reaction to these events. But I find my own thoughts most precisely matched by Adam Gopnik‘s on the New Yorker’s site today. He says:
The truth is made worse by the reality that no one–really no one–anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life….
The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country–Canada, Norway, Britain–has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do–as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue.There will be more of these; we absolutely know it; we also know that we will not change the circumstances that allow such episodes to recur. I am an optimist about most things, but not about this. Everyone around the world understands this reality too. It is the kind of thing that makes them consider America dangerous, and mad.
(My emphasis.)
As long as we Americans are unwilling to have a serious discussion about gun control, we will suffer through these mass murders until the end of time.
Let’s get used to it.
Tear Gas, Body Armor — It’s all For Sale on the Internet
Take a little tour around this site — KeepShooting.com — and you’ll find tear gas, body armor,
(Image via KeepShooting.com)
stun guns, batons. Everything you’d need to prepare — like James Holmes did — for a massacre at a movie theater.
Trailer Attached to Batman Movie Pulled — Shows Massacre at Movie Theater
Per BusinessInsider:
This morning, Warner Brothers pulled the trailer for upcoming film “Gangster Squad” from screenings of “The Dark Knight Rises,” which debuted in theaters last night.
According to Deadline, Warner Bros. held a meeting this morning to deliberate on whether or not to pull the trailer.
The decision comes after news of the Century Theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which, so far, has left as many as 12 dead and tens more wounded.
[...]
The scene in question features a men shooting people in a movie theater.
Picture of James Holmes
Per TheDenverChannel, this is a picture of James Holmes, the monster who did the shooting at the premiere of the Batman movie earlier this morning in Aurora, Colorado:
(Image via TheDenverChannel)
NRA Ignores Batman Theater Massacre — Begins Day With “Good Morning, Shooters!”
The American Rifleman “is an official journal of the National Rifle Association, providing the latest in shooting news and firearms reviews.”
Seems to me the shooting early this morning in Aurora, Colorado at the Batman movie premiere would qualify as “shooting news,” but apparently not. This is the American Rifleman’s official morning tweet:
Good morning shooters? Oblivious. Coldhearted. Cruel. Cruel to those who lost loved ones or who were themselves injured. Just stunning.
James Holmes — the Batman Movie Shooter — Dropped out of Med School Last Month
Just got this tweet from my local newspaper:
Obama Pulls Attack Ads in Wake of Batman Massacre
This is classy:
(Image via CNN)
President at campaign stop in Florida right now on “senseless” tragedy. Unites America, he says. Victims’ dreams “not yet fulfilled.” ”If there’s anything to take from this tragedy it’s that life is precious.” Yet no mention of easy access to guns. “My daughters go to the movies. What if they had been in that theater? Michelle and I will hug our daughters tightly.” Obama thanks crowd for their support but will cut it short. “There will be other days for politics. This a day for reflection.” His campaign has asked TV affiliates to pull all of his attack ads, no word yet on GOP going along.
Blood Bank Asking for Donations After Batman Movie Massacre
I’m hearing on the local news (I live about 30 miles from where the Batman movie massacre took place earlier this morning) that Bonfils Blood Center
in Denver is asking people to donate blood because their blood supply has been depleted treating the shooting victims.
Ugh. Horrible.
Batman Massacre in Colorado
Rest in peace, Jessica Ghawi. Jessica was killed early this morning in the massacre at the Batman movie premiere in Aurora, Colorado.
Her Twitter handle was Jessica Redfield. This is her chilling final tweet:
My condolences to everyone touched by this monstrous act.
UPDATE: Presbyterians Vote Not to Divest in Some Israeli Companies
Yesterday I posted about the Presbyterian Church (the USA wing) voting to divest from some Israeli companies who are heavily involved in oppressing Palestinians.
Here’s an UPDATE: The church did not vote to divest but the vote was close. It lost, or won, depending on your perspective, by two — two — votes:
By a vote of 333 to 331, with two abstentions, the church’s General Assembly voted at its biennial meeting in Pittsburgh to toss out the divestment measure and replace it with a resolution to encourage “positive investment” in the occupied territories. The results were so close that, when posted electronically in front of the convention, they evoked a collective gasp.
Disappointing but encouraging.
This wouldn’t have happened five, ten, 20, 40 years ago. It wouldn’t even have come up for a vote.
So, times, they are ah changin’.
Will the U. S. Presbyterian Church Vote to Divest in Israeli Companies?
I have been following this fairly closely because I am totally opposed to the Israeli occupation of Palestine; more specifically, to its continued encroachment into Palestinian territory with their “settlements:”
This afternoon promises a defining moment in Pittsburgh, when the US Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly votes on whether to divest from three companies that do business in the Israeli occupation. Here are updates via Twitter and we’re liveblogging the assembly, keeping you updated on developments.
Click on the link immediately above to go to the liveblog.
I hope they vote to divest and I hope if they do, it will start a wave of divestments by universities and towns and companies everywhere. Maybe at some point the U.S. will actually cut the billions and billions it gives Israel every year if they don’t stop terrorizing and blockading Palestine.
Newt Gingrich Speaks to Terrorist Organization
This is pretty self-explanatory (oh, and don’t you love seeing Grigrich bowing!):
(Image via TalkingPointsMemo.com)
At a rally in Paris last Sunday, former Republican presidential candidate and House Speaker Newt Gingrich expressed his support for the MEK, an Iranian opposition group considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.
Gingrich disagrees with the MEK’s (an anti-Iranian regime organization) terrorist designation but the fact remains that it is. Imagine if a Democrat did this. Republicans would be peeing their pants.
New Evidence Confirms Bush Administration Blew Off bin Laden Threat
This is what a maniacal obsession with shrinking government gets you:
(Image: AP / Evan Vucci)
Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today [6-19-12] for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive.
[...]
The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.
The “War on Terror” Explained
This is it in a nutshell — what we’ve been doing for the last 12 years:
(Image via MoveOn.org)
Every time we drop a $50,000 bomb from a $700,000.000 plane on a $1 tent, we create ten more “terrorists.”
Our tax dollars at work.
Turn the tables. What would we do if our family and friends were being blown up?
How Many al Qaeda No. 2 Are There?
So, exactly how many Al Qaeda No. 2 are there? 48? 72? 325?
Abu Yahya al-Libi. (Photo: AFP)
US Strike Targets al-Qaeda No. 2
AL-QAEDA’S second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi was the target of a US drone strike that killed 15 people in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
US officials confirmed that al-Libi had been the target of the missile attack in North Waziristan on Monday, a Taliban and al-Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border, but could not say whether he had survived.
Obama — The Right Wing’s Amazing Boogyman
You know, I’m almost feeling sorry for people who believe this crap. They live in terror every minute of every day and they are living a very unhappy and skidish life:
(Image via SicklyCat.com)
The number of right-wing conspiracy theories relating to President Obama, Islam, Sharia Law, immigration, Agenda 21 and the debt seems to be growing exponentially…but finally now there is one conspiracy theory that brings them all together.
Avi Lipkin, who on speaking tours in churches and synagogues across America says he learned secret information from his wife, whom he claims is an Israel intelligence officer. On Crosstalk with Vic Eliason of VCY America, Lipkin maintained that Obama is a Saudi plant who is out to destroy Israel and the United States:
Lipkin: Obama was made a Muslim man in Indonesia by age 11. He said, ‘I’ve got health care problems, I got economic problems in America, Muslims in Egypt and Muslims in the Muslim world, be patient, I will show you when the time comes what I am going to do to Israel.’ My wife picked up other broadcasts, for example the Saudis were saying, ‘we will have a Muslim in the White House in 2008.’ The Saudis also said, ‘Obama has three tasks: task number 1 is to destroy the Shiite threat in Iran, task number 2 is to destroy the Jewish threat Israel, task number 3 is to destroy the great Christian Satan America and turn America into a Muslim country.’
Surely you’ve heard that one before. But, you may not have known that Obama will destroy America by supporting the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in order to collapse the region’s economy after the group persecutes the country’s Christians, leading to a wave of Muslim immigration to the United States. Obama will then settle the “50-100 million” Muslim immigrants on “lands confiscated by Agenda 21,” the sustainable development initiative, and bring about Sharia law in the U.S.
Amazing.
Republicans Hate That a Democratic President Killed Bin Laden
The Republicans are screaming about President Obama “politicizing” the killing of Osama bin Laden today. Meanwhile Mitt is hanging out with Rudy Giuliani, who would be nothing without Osama bin Laden and who did some substantial “politicizing” of his own:
And then there was this (without getting bin Laden):
Projection much?
About Romney, Obama and bin Laden
This, my Tweet of the Day, pretty much sums up the GOP’s current freak out about Obama and bin Laden:
Get Ready for Surface-to-Air Missiles on London Rooftops During the Olympics
My God, when a society has to go to this extent to “protect” itself, something has gone terribly wrong and it might want to take a look at what and why.
(Image via Wikipedia)
This is no joke:
London 2012: Missiles May be Placed at Residential Flats
The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.
An east London estate, where 700 people live, has received leaflets saying a “Higher Velocity Missile system” could be placed on a water tower.
A spokesman said the MoD had not yet decided whether to deploy ground based air defence systems during the event.
But estate resident Brian Whelan said firing the missiles “would shower debris across the east end of London”.
The journalist said: “At first I thought it was a hoax. I can’t see what purpose high-velocity missiles could serve over a crowded area like Tower Hamlets.
“They say they’ll only use them as a last resort, but… you’d shower debris across the east end of London by firing these missiles.”
Mr Whelan, who claims to have seen soldiers carrying a crate into the building, said his property management company put up posters and gave out the leaflets on Saturday.
He continued: “They are going to have a test run next week, putting high velocity missiles on the roof just above our apartment and on the back of it they’re stationing police and military in the tower of the building for two months.
My sense of the Olympic games is that they are designed to promote friendly competition amongst nations and to bring diverse cultures together. If the Olympic games have devolved into the need to put surface-to-air missiles on roofs, the heart and soul of the tradition is gone. Let’s be done with it.
Aside from that, It’s hard to know who’s doing the terrorizing here. The British government or some unknown entity they’re trying to protect people from.
No “Liberal Media,” Ahmadinejad Did Not Threaten To Wipe Israel Off the Map
Okay folks, let’s put this lie to bed once and for all:
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor acknowledged on Al Jazeera English (4/14/12) that Iranian leaders have never called for Israel to be “wiped” off the map.
Meridor agreed with interviewer Teymoor Nabili’s suggestion that the supposed remarks were never actually made; Iranian leaders, Meridor said,
come basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say “we’ll wipe it out,” you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed.
Hostile words, to be sure, but not the menacing threat endlessly reported in corporate U.S. media in recent years. (Iran, Israel and “wiped off the map” occur together more than 8,500 times in the Nexis news database in the last seven years.)
This has been a case of the U.S. media terrorizing its own citizens. So I’m sure we’ll be seeing corrections all over the place any minute now, you know, like all those corrections we saw after it turned out Iraq didn’t have any “weapons of mass destruction.” (Yeah, right.)
The Head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center is a (Gasp) Muslim
This is going to make some heads explode. I mean, it’s confirmation that Obama The Muslim is trying to destroy our “Christian nation!”
Further discrediting the anti-Muslim propaganda is the fact disclosed yesterday by the Washington Post that the long-serving head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center–the architect of policies which have sent countless jihadists to an early grave in drone strikes–is himself a Muslim. He converted after marrying a Muslim woman while serving abroad.
The Post quotes CIA Director David Petraeus as saying, “No officer in the agency has been more relentless, focused, or committed to the fight against al-Qaeda than has the chief of the Counterterrorism Center.” The fact that the officer in question is a Muslim should hardly be cause for comment–except to the extent that it unsettles some objectionable assumptions about where most Muslims supposedly stand in the battle against violent extremists.
A “Government Official Says…” as Fact on CNN
Oh for chrissake. It appears that CNN didn’t learn a thing from the lies we were told in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Taking the word of a “government official” without doing any independent investigation, it ran with a story today about the “terrifying new reason” why all of us should be worried about “hundreds” of Iranian-backed Hezbollah agents in the United States ready to “do us harm.”
Peter King (R-NY) is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Google him. I saw a lot of him during the four years I monitored Fox so-called News at the NewsHounds. He is as hawkish as they get. He doesn’t think before he speaks and he’s got a hair-trigger of a personality. Anyone who hangs around D.C. — here’s lookin’ at you Wolf — knows that and they should know better than to take anything he says at face value. The guy likes to make news and get attention by making outlandish claims. Anything he says should be verified and re-verified. He’s kind of a nut.
So, this is crazy.
I read an article four or five years ago. I can’t remember the title or the author so I can’t dig it up, but the gist of it was that one could summarize the state of the US “news” media in one sentence: “The government says, the government says, the government says.”
This is that in spades.
I had hoped we’d gone past that.
Silly me.
Georgia Wants We the People to Be Afraid and to Go the Hell Away
Last I knew, We the People own the streets (via the taxes we pay to buy and maintain them) and thus, they are free speech zones:
Some Georgia lawmakers want to make legitimate union picketing and other common protest activities felonies that not only could result in one-year jail terms but up to $10,000 in fines.
The bill, SB 469, would clamp down on free speech and workers’ rights in several ways. First, it would outlaw picketing outside the home of a CEO or other top company officials, such as rallying outside the home of a sweatshop owner.
It also would allow businesses to ask a judge to halt the protests outside of a business. If the judge orders a halt and the picketing continues, the union members or protestors from other groups could each be slapped with a $1,000 fine.
In addition, any union or organization which “continues to sponsor or assist in the prohibited activity” would be subject to $10,000 fine. Businesses which think they suffered damage from the picketing could ask for a cut of that cash.
We’re heading toward a society that looks something like this:
Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100.00:
A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
Doubtful Signs of a Criminal Case Against MF Global
Federal authorities are struggling to find evidence to support a criminal case stemming from the collapse of MF Global, even after a federal grand jury in Chicago has issued subpoenas.
Investigators, unable to find a smoking gun amid thousands of e-mails and documents, increasingly suspect that chaos and poor risk control systems prompted the disappearance of more than $1 billion in customer money, according to several people involved in the case.
(Image via.)
Iran Might Retaliate if Attacked? The Chutzapah!
What’s with countries who don’t do what we want, dammit:
House Republicans Protect Gas Industry, Arrest Director of Gasland at DC Hearing
This is horrifying. Welcome to police state USA folks:
In a stunning break with First Amendment policy on Capitol Hill, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Republicans also denied the entrance of a credentialed ABC News news team that was attempting to film the event.
Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Gasland” was taken into custody by Capitol Hill police this morning, along with his crew, after Republicans objected to their presence, according to Democratic sources present at the hearing.
[...]
“Gasland” received strong critical acclaim and takes a critical eye toward the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a process in which several tons of highly pressurized water and chemicals are injected into the ground, allowing valuable natural gas to escape.
[...]
Fox had hoped to film Wednesday’s hearing for a follow-up to “Gasland.”
Fox did not have formal Capitol Hill credentials, but such formalities are rarely enforced against high-profile journalists. … The right to a free press is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Documentary crews are almost never denied access to public meetings of elected government officials.
A separate ABC News crew, which did have official Capitol Hill credentials, was also denied access to the publichearing.
Republicans to all journalists and to America: Fuck the First Amendment. I mean seriously. This was a public hearing being held in the United States Capitol, a building owned by We the People, and the hearing was being conducted by people who We the People elected and who work for us! What the hell is going on around here?
If this isn’t a form of terrorism I don’t know what is.
Shopping at the Pentagon
Yep, it’s true. There are shops at the Pentagon. Given the nature of the corporatocracy we live in, I don’t know why I’m surprised:
America’s Most Dangerous Mall: Going Shopping at the Pentagon
Take a tour at the link above.
Here are some of the high low lights:
Chocolate Rain (of Terror)
If it has patriotic value, the Edward Marc candy shop can make something chocolatey out of it. (The Marine Corps logo? Semper Fi, fat boy.) Inexplicably, the chocolatier is one of the first things a visitor sees after coming up the escalator from the Metro entrance. This edible model of the building costs only $1.95.
The World’s Deadliest Tchotchkes
By far the most meta store in the Pentagon. From windbreakers to shot glasses to snapback baseball caps, the gift shop turns the movie version of the Pentagon — the fantasy one where it’s all war-planning, all the time — into cheesy collectables to hawk to the out-of-towners and class trips that take the daily guided tours. If only they made a sweatshirt with an image of an idle lieutenant colonel waiting to be promoted.
Filed under: We the People, Wars, Terror, Financial Crisis, Corporatocracy, Fear and Our Tax Dollars.
