Congressional Baseball Shooting

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Congressional Baseball Shooting

The Drudge page today says it all:

 

If you want a news report, you can take your pick, but here's the Daily Mail: Congress baseball gunman was a Trump-hating Bernie supporter: Hero cops kill white Illinois man, 66, who opened fire on Republican lawmakers on the President's birthday, leaving five injured

In short, a disgruntled Bernie supporter and avid Trump hater, James Hodgkinson, somehow found out where members of Congress would be without many people around and without much security. He decided to shoot as many Republicans as he could. Fortunately, lefties are not good shots, so he only wounded several victims, including House Whip Steve Scalise. Hodgkinson was the only one killed.

I believe this guy was a Manchurian Candidate created by the fake news of today. His Facebook page is now down and he's being scrubbed off the Internet (except for news stories), but Rush Limbaugh mentioned that his writings appeared similar to a CNN 10 member panel on the Trump Russia collusion conspiracy.

People like him believe the mainstream news is giving them the facts. They don't understand why the news they are fed over months doesn't result in won elections or actual imprisonments for corruption or things like that. How can it be, they wonder, that Donald Trump is still in office? He should have been impeached by now.

And all the fake news does is keep making up crap and presenting it in such a manner, it takes the frustrations of these misguided souls and twists them so hard with anxiety, a seething rage develops in them over time.

I don't believe this guy is the only one out there ready and able to do this kind of thing.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

22 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Congressional Baseball Shooting

The Drudge page today says it all:

 

If you want a news report, you can take your pick, but here's the Daily Mail: Congress baseball gunman was a Trump-hating Bernie supporter: Hero cops kill white Illinois man, 66, who opened fire on Republican lawmakers on the President's birthday, leaving five injured

In short, a disgruntled Bernie supporter and avid Trump hater, James Hodgkinson, somehow found out where members of Congress would be without many people around and without much security. He decided to shoot as many Republicans as he could. Fortunately, lefties are not good shots, so he only wounded several victims, including House Whip Steve Scalise. Hodgkinson was the only one killed.

I believe this guy was a Manchurian Candidate created by the fake news of today. His Facebook page is now down and he's being scrubbed off the Internet (except for news stories), but Rush Limbaugh mentioned that his writings appeared similar to a CNN 10 member panel on the Trump Russia collusion conspiracy.

People like him believe the mainstream news is giving them the facts. They don't understand why the news they are fed over months doesn't result in won elections or actual imprisonments for corruption or things like that. How can it be, they wonder, that Donald Trump is still in office? He should have been impeached by now.

And all the fake news does is keep making up crap and presenting it in such a manner, it takes the frustrations of these misguided souls and twists them so hard with anxiety, a seething rage develops in them over time.

I don't believe this guy is the only one out there ready and able to do this kind of thing.

Michael

How do we know the shooter's state of mind?  On what evidence.  If he was killed   he could not have told anyone why he took shots.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

4 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

How do we know the shooter's state of mind?  On what evidence.  If he was killed   he could not have told anyone why he took shots.

Bob,

Behavioral science and its victims is not in your wheelhouse. Neither is how propaganda works.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

47 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Bob,

Behavioral science and its victims is not in your wheelhouse. Neither is how propaganda works.

Michael

Even so, my questions are kosher.

[Brant Gaede]

24 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Even so, my questions are kosher.

You are not the rabbi on this type of subject.

--Brant

so they aren't

Michael, however, was speculating--and as such did a good job: now we wait for more info

the country is close to civil war IMHO

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

You are not the rabbi on this type of subject.

--Brant

so they aren't

Michael, however, was speculating--and as such did a good job: now we wait for more info

the country is close to civil war IMHO

My procedure is evidence first then speculate based on the evidence afterward.   Facts rule.  Suppositions sometimes help  but sometimes they don't.  

[Brant Gaede]

24 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

My procedure is evidence first then speculate based on the evidence afterward.   Facts rule.  Suppositions sometimes help  but sometimes they don't.  

Facts second means creating a structure usable for searching out facts from the many, many that might be available. Doesn't work, put up another structure.

You have discarded all suppositions including the ones that sometimes help.

You are treating "facts" reactively. Judges and juries at trial best use your technique.

--Brant

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

If anyone wants to look into the abyss, here's a peek (from The Federalist):

Progressive Media Personalities Agree: Those Republicans Deserved To Get Shot
A shooter targeted Republican lawmakers playing baseball on Wednesday, and several progressive media personalities declared the Republicans deserved it.

There will be other cases.

The one question I want to know is: how in hell did Hodgkinson know about the low security with members of congress at the baseball practise? How did he know that?

This is organized. It has to be more than a lucky guess. Where did Hodgkinson get that information? Who gave it to him?

I'm sure security and law enforcement are now on it, but they have a hard job to do right now. If this is organized, there are a lot more guys like this out there. And it might be deep state, too.

Here's how the deep state would do it since they are experts in this crap. They would identify soft targets in the same manner a hypnotist identifies who is susceptible to hypnosis in the audience during the opening banter where he messes with audience members. The he calls the susceptible ones on stage.

In like manner, the deep state identifies people who are susceptible to suggestions to become violent. In Hodgkinson's case, great indicators of susceptibility were all over his social media writings and in his behavior during his constant volunteer work for Bernie. So, if this was the deep state, they got someone formatted to look like a Bernie fanatic, then got him close to Hodgkinson. Maybe become pals. After that, it would only be a matter of nudging him and feeding him interesting information like where low security exists among members of Congress.

I bet this is the case and I bet these deep state assholes have folks targeted like that in every political persuasion, even in the alt right, hell even in libertarians.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here's some more speculation. But I think it is plausible.

The gist is this was hit on Scalise because he is working on anti-pedophile legislation and getting close to getting it passed. The elite pedo ring is serious business and it is more than plausible they would try to protect themselves this way. There's quite a body count around the issue of anti-pedophile efforts. And they know, once it starts cracking open, all kinds of rich and powerful are going down as they rat on each other.

Now, further speculation from me. If this is what happened and if it was the deep state that did the hit, I'm almost sure Hodgkinson had no idea. He was already super-pissed and ready to rock and roll against President Trump and the Republicans. Using folks like him is a perfect plan for deniability.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Too much speculation.

A pro with a rifle would have done a hell of a lot more damage--fatal damage.

And he'd have got away.

--Brant

with Bob on this one, Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

A pro with a rifle would have done a hell of a lot more damage--fatal damage.

And he'd have got away.

Brant,

That's a hell of a supposition seeing that the entire law enforcement apparatus is now run by President Trump (except for the deep state dudes and some Obama holdovers near the top).

If I wanted to stay in the shadows, I would make damn sure investigations were of other people and they were plausible. I would not want Homeland Security, the FBI, and God knows who else looking for a pro. The best way to make sure all that fire power is aimed elsewhere is to have an actual person from elsewhere do the crime.

The weakness in this is, as you mentioned, you have to deal with an amateur. And as I mentioned, lots of low-level lefties like to mouth off as machos, but they can't shoot. Especially under the kind of duress Hodgkinson put himself in. Most won't even do NRA shooting classes.  

I stand with my speculations, but I admit they are speculations. What I mean is that I will not dismiss them as impossible, or even implausible, but I acknowledge there needs to be a lot more evidence for this to go beyond speculation.

This comes from trying to think like a bad guy. And if I can come up with that speculation, imagine what trained spooks in the deep state can come up with.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

They couldn't even kill Castro.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

They couldn't even kill Castro.

Brant,

That was too soon after WWII for this thing to grow into the monster it is. Also, technology was not then what it is now, especially communications, surveillance and weaponry technology.

Here's an overview of how I think about this. There is a divide in the globalized world (in most of humanity, actually), but it is a divide of mentality in relation to other human beings. You have the ruling class mentality and you have the regular producer mentality. (I won't deal with slackers, the crazies, etc., here because they are irrelevant to what ensues.)

People within the ruling class mentality are not part of a secret group out to run the world. Their attempt to do this is out in the open, but it's not an organization like a political party or even Bilderberg. It's a set of beliefs and principles these people adhere to. Here are a few of them:

• They are more intelligent than the rest of humanity.
• They are inherently superior to the rest of humanity.
• Once among them, the biggest sin is to expose one of them to the rest of humanity for any moral wrongdoing.
• The rest of humanity can be experimented on, slaughtered in wars, etc., by them without guilt because the rest of humanity is not comprised of people of value anyway.
• Their ruling business model is mixing corrupt government influence with corporations or nonprofits.
• There are no more wars of conquest that will be won, instead wars are to be as endless as possible for maximum profit.
• Any scam against the regular producer mentality folks is permitted so long as it involves government corruption in some form and comes with a public facade of altruistic public service.

This is off the top of my head and I could go on and on because I have been studying these jerks for some time.

Now look at political parties. The divide looks like it is between Democrats and Republicans, but the divide is actually a bit more complex. Among the ruling class mentality folks, there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. They all go to the same clubs, their kids date, they have business interests in common, etc., etc., etc. The difference is among the regular producer mentality people and it is usually of a social or religious nature (abortion, marriage, religious rights, drugs, etc., etc., etc.). The purpose of keeping this going is to keep the lower masses at each other's throats and this provides a smokescreen for the monkeyshines at the top.

Now, part of the problem with lots of people involved in something like this is that they become unruly, including ruling class mentality folks. So there have to be ways of keeping those who would stray in line. And all those cliques and power games... This is where blackmail comes in.

Entitled-thinking people are easy to seduce with some really creepy stuff, including (but not limited to) pedophilia. Obviously, someone has to do the dirty work and that's where I see the deep state enter. If you are among the ruling class mentality people, once you are guilty of tasting the fruit of their Tree of Seduction and the deep state henchmen have proof, you are owned. Nothing will happen to you unless you get careless, and even then, you have to be real careless to fall (like, say, Anthony Weiner). Otherwise, everybody protects each other. They have to, even when they don't want to, under the threat of blackmail.

Everybody makes out well if things run smoothly, including deep state spooks.

That is, except for regular producer mentality people. They get screwed over and over, but with phases of respite so they won't organize. But it's their kids dying in endless wars for profits, not the ruling class kids. It's them who are being experimented on. It's them who lose their livelihoods when slave-wage labor is found in other countries and them who lose their small businesses when the regulations are so thick, they commit infractions just by being open. And on and on.

That's the frame I look at modern politics through. This is why I am having difficulty with Kant's influence on this in another thread. And this is why I entertain conspiracy theories. After all, these elitist folks don't advertise what they do. They do posture, though. That they do.  

But look what happened when one who was coursing among the ruling class mentality folks broke away for real and was immune to blackmail. Since Trump was bribing politicians, they thought they owned him. It never occurred to them that he might own up to it in public and embrace the regular producer mentality folks. They didn't have nasty pedophilia stuff on him, but they did get him saying pussy on tape. That fizzled, so they manufactured a fake dossier where he was having prostitutes pee on a bed where Obama slept. That was sheer desperation. They were trying to manufacture a punishing blackmail reveal where nothing blackmail-worthy existed.

Now imagine their little elitist pedophile game. All it needs is one to break away in a no-holds-barred manner, sort of like the way Trump did in politics (but different due to the nature of the thing, of course). This will give courage to others who are sickened and want out. Once that happens, I believe, half of the government will fall.

With proper legislation in place against elite pedophile rings, and with en enormous amount of law enforcement folks on board with nailing their asses (you would be surprised at how many law enforcement folks like this there are and they are pissed-to-the-gills), it won't be hard to come up with that first one.

It's just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, I speculate with the normal qualifications. Will any of my speculations be right or wrong about Hodgkinson? Who knows? But I bet will will find out without having to ask for it...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On the media side of this, a comment from James Woods:

This one will sleep well tonight. #MissionAccomplished pic.twitter.com/RwnQJUmIOF

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 15, 2017

Michael

 

[BaalChatzaf]

12 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

 

You are treating "facts" reactively. Judges and juries at trial best use your technique.

--Brant

 

That they do.   In addition  all it takes is -one- contrary fact, properly established by empirical means  to bring down an entire beautiful  theory.  For example, the anomalous motion of the planet Mercury show that Newton's Theory of Gravitation*  was  false.  False, but not by much, which is why Newtonian gravitation is still useful for navigation in the Solar System  far from the Sun. 

*Newton assumed that all pairs of massive bodies exerted for force (gravitational force)  on each other proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportion to the square of the distance between them.

[BaalChatzaf]

4 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

What I mean is that I will not dismiss them as impossible, or even implausible, but I acknowledge there needs to be a lot more evidence for this to go beyond speculation.

 

Michael

Thank you.  Each of us have our own opinions and speculations.  None of us  have our own facts. Facts are parts of the real world. 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

4 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Thank you.  Each of us have our own opinions and speculations.  None of us  have our own facts. Facts are parts of the real world. 

Bob,

Why did you thank me the second time I said I was speculating and not the first time? Hmmmm?...

   

Whenever one probes the unknown, one has to speculate BEFORE one can come up with facts. It's part of the process of finding things out.

The actions of people who do bad things in the shadows as a job description are unknown to people like you and me. Maybe you don't want to know what they're doing, but I do--out here in reality and before the damage they're causing is so great, it's irreversible.

Then I can do something about it like I did when I helped President Trump get elected.

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

4 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Whenever one probes the unknown, one has to speculate BEFORE one can come up with facts

Certainly one of the strangest things I've ever heard someone say.

[BaalChatzaf]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

 

Whenever one probes the unknown, one has to speculate BEFORE one can come up with facts. It's part of the process of finding things out.

Having good questions in mind is more important than speculation. 

However the right place for speculation is in two area:  induction and abduction.

With induction give a certain collection of facts,  one asks what general condition might they imply or suggest

With abduction one is given a certain set of effects  and one hypothesizes  toi what might be the cause of these effects.

These are the cases where speculation has a good chance of leading to some definite knowledge.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

5 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Having good questions in mind is more important than speculation.

Bob,

It's not either-or.

Speculation is akin to asking questions.

On the level of thinking about thinking (metacognition), they are practically synonyms.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

5 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Certainly one of the strangest things I've ever heard someone say.

That is certainly one of the strangest comments I've ever had on one of my posts.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here's a great explanation by Rush Limbaugh of how things work psychologically at the supporter level with fake news.

How Did Hodgkinson Get Radicalized by the Left?

Some quotes:

Quote

Nobody that ran into this nutcase thought he was a nutcase. This is what’s dangerous about it. Nobody thought he was anything other than your average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill radical leftist, which means mainstream Democrat. Read the guy’s Facebook page. Read his letters to the editor. He sounds just like any one of countless panel members on discussion panels on CNN. He could sit in for Gergen one night and they wouldn’t miss a beat. He could host Rachel Maddow’s show, and the show wouldn’t miss a beat content-wise.

In fact, everything that’s in the New York Post, the New York Times, this guy regurgitates. In his Facebook coverage and in his tweets and in his letters to the editor, this guy regurgitates everything that he reads in the Drive-By Media.

. . .

[speaking as if a Democrat:]

... are we going to endeavor to find out why Hodgkinson was so mad? Are we going to delve into that? We’re not, because this guy is gonna sound just like any other Democrat if they investigate it and do a profile of the guy. [back to Rush being Rush:] But we looked into it because we know the Drive-By Media won’t.

It wasn’t ISIS, by the way, that radicalized Hodgkinson. It wasn’t militant Islam. It wasn’t real enemies of America that made this guy so enraged. It was the hate and the fearmongering from the Democrat political media complex who have become the domestic version of ISIS. And they are just as devoted to their cult and their religion as ISIS is to theirs.

The biggest of the big lies that Hodgkinson believed is the lie that the Russians stole the election with Trump. In all this guy’s said, written about, that one, that and class warfare and the 1%, but it was the Russians tampering with the elections that set this guy off. That is why he wanted Trump destroyed, quote, unquote. “Trump should be destroyed.”

There was another media Democrat, some obscure publication, who has written that Trump should be executed once he has been convicted of treason. That Trump should be executed for what he’s done. Where are these people getting this? Where are they coming up with this degree of enraged, bordering on insane, hatred? And it’s my contention they’re being fed this every day, on Facebook, on Twitter, in the Drive-By Media, and everywhere else, and by like-minded people they sit around and talk to.

As I said yesterday, this hoax, this entire hoax of Trump colluded with the Russians is now getting people shot. And it is a nothing burger. They have dropped it. They have concluded now there was no collusion. The media’s announcing this because they’ve got something else to go to: obstruction.

Comey has said three times Trump was not a suspect. Trump did not do anything. He was not being investigated. You don’t think that made this guy mad? What do you think Hodgkinson’s reaction was when he found out that they weren’t even trying to convict Trump of this? You think that didn’t set him off? For the last six months this guy’s been told every day he soaked it up, man, he soaked it up, he chewed it up, he swallowed it, he digested it, that Trump was guilty, that Trump had stolen the election. And out of the blue one day it’s discovered that Comey has told Trump since three months ago that he was not a suspect. What do you think that did to this guy’s precariously balanced mind, particularly when it was this collusion which has so ticked him off.

. . .

Mr. Hodgkinson’s social media account, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, as noted by the New York Times, show him “as deeply committed to liberal politics and distrustful of Republican-controlled Washington. In posts, he rails against Republicans, lavishes praise upon [Mr.] Sanders … and shows a deep engagement with the churn of news coming out of Washington.” New York Times.

Hodgkinson watched all of the politically correct cable TV shows. He watched Bill Maher. He watched Colbert. He watched Comedy Central. He watched The Daily Show. He watched MSNBC and Rachel Maddow. He ate ’em up. He swallowed ’em. He loved ’em. He absorbed everything that he heard. A friend in his hometown said, “He did not come off as a radical. He did not come off as an unstable individual. He wasn’t belligerent, he was just a kind of normal guy.”

Yeah, exactly. Normal Democrat base voter of today. That’s the problem. That’s exactly who this guy was. Hodgkinson checked all the right boxes. He was angry. He was in step with the resistance. Absent the shooting, he was a liberal in good standing. He was the ideal. He was the exact person the media and the Democrat Party wanted as supporters and voters.

Going from my frame of looking at how spiritually nasty the ruling class elite mentality folks are, I can see a tactical error they committed.

In the elite class, they harp on a propaganda lie until it has no more legs, then they simply pivot to another. For example, they ran this "Trump in collusion with Russia" lie for months and pounded it to death in the mainstream. After the Comey testimony before Congress, they didn't even say, "Oops." They simply pivoted to the "Trump obstructed justice" lie now in the news.

In the lower class (their supporters), there are people who believe the lie, hook, line and sinker. And they buy the wrapper, too, which contains a subtext that goes something like: Violence against Trump and his supporters is OK if you can get away with it. You are part of the resistance. Power to the people.

The tactical error is that the people in the upper class are thinking in meta-terms. We will try one approach, and if it doesn't work, we will try something else. And when the approach is a lie, we drop it immediately after it runs its course so it doesn't backfire. But the people in the lower class get mad about specific things, not meta things. If the lie is Trump colluded with the Russians, then goddamit, nail his ass for collusion! 

Once a lie has been abandoned by the upper class and they pivot, there are a lot of people in the lower class still pissed off about the specific lie (which they believe is true) and it takes them quite a while to catch up. Some never do.

It's this last "some never do" folks who are the problem and the tactical error. They look, walk, act, and talk just like stellar liberals. They look normal. They look and sound like productive human beings who lean left. But they are ticking time bombs who could snap in a surge of violence against Republicans or Democrats at any time after a Big Lie Pivot, depending on which way their mind cracks at the time.

They are among us now. These normal looking time bombs. They are among us. One of them could be your next door neighbor and you would never know it.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

10 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Bob,

It's not either-or.

Speculation is akin to asking questions.

On the level of thinking about thinking (metacognition), they are practically synonyms.

Michael

I take the nuance you offer.  I generally regard speculation as conclusion jumping  which is not an olympic sport  and is also hazardous to health.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 minute ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I take the nuance you offer.

Bob,

To reciprocate, I'll take a point you raised in a previous post about good questions: There are good questions and bad questions. By extension, there are good speculations and bad speculations.

To add to this thought, I don't think anybody on OL is interested in promoting bad questions or bad speculations. Not even in the weirder stuff (although we do have a Garbage Pile  ).

OL people are asking and speculating because they see things and want to try to understand them. Up to here, all one needs is to wait for facts and evidence. But if one detects danger and wants to do something about it--which some on OL want to do, one has to ask questions and speculate. 

Since OL is a philosophy forum populated by extremely intelligent people, they tend to use their best thinking when asking and speculating.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 6/15/2017 at 6:42 AM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

If I wanted to stay in the shadows, I would make damn sure investigations were of other people and they were plausible. I would not want Homeland Security, the FBI, and God knows who else looking for a pro. The best way to make sure all that fire power is aimed elsewhere is to have an actual person from elsewhere do the crime.

Starting to look like it.

From The Daily Caller:

EXCLUSIVE: Assassination List Found On James Hodgkinson’s Body

From the article:

Quote

James T. Hodgkinson, the shooter who opened fire on dozens of Republican congressmen and staffers at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, on Wednesday, had a list of Republican names in his pocket that was recovered by the FBI, The Daily Caller has learned.

The news that the shooter had a list of names suggests the shooting was not a random outburst, but instead appears to be a premeditated political assassination.

. . . 

Hodgkinson’s widow, Suzanne Hodgkinson, said Thursday afternoon that she had “no idea” he was going to carry out the murders. James told her that he was going to Washington, D.C. to “work on taxes” and “change the tax brackets,” she said.

More info is needed because even the Daily Caller is now using anonymous sources.

But if this list exists, it shows he was organized. People like this generally don't organize this kind of thing alone, nor travel on extended stays without telling their spouses something ominous. I believe the tip of the iceberg will be to see who he was in contact with before he left.

Michael